skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Relevant thread: https://twitter.com/cleptok/status/1611622181665923075

Ok. Let's do a short thread on Roman cement for the 3 people out there that might be interested.
You often hear that the Romans had some sort of superior and arcane knowledge on superior cement mixes that has been now lost. And still today we cannot replicate it. This is complete nonsense.
Modern day cement (and any other building material, really) is far, far superior than anything from the past. There is simply no comparison. Above everything we understand the chemical composition, interaction and quality control for consistent results.

Romans were making mortars based on volcanic ashes. There was no set recipe. Every builder had their own. Volcanic ash from Pozzuoli, crushed brick, slaked like, animal fat, hair etc. Some basic rules existed (as recorded by Vitruvius on the 10 books on Architecture).

Millions of structures were constructed these way. With the exception of a handful, most of these do not exist anymore. But why the ones that exist are still standing strong?

Usually via a simple Darwinian process. Most of these times those builders got it wrong. But in a few cases, out of luck, they got the chemistry just right. This would result in a ok-ish material, with decent properties.
Not only that. Unreinforced (without steel) concrete will not suffer any serious deterioration, with few exceptions. (Pantheon in Rome) Also the very coarse pozzolan they were using, will chemically react very very slowly producing low initial strengths Vs any modern material.

In the long term (centuries) though, it will continue gaining strength. Totally useless for the original purpose of the builders, but quite good for the few surviving buildings.

So what the latest MIT research told us? That lime in very small quantities will be "self-healing'. And this somehow is something that the Romans knew and used to create a superior cement.

This is simply not true. It is well known that lime expands (the pompous "self-healing" tag), so in very small and precise quantities it will counteract the shrinkage and cracking behaviour of cement binders. But you have to be pretty lucky to get it just right.

So not intentional. Just survivor bias in the remaining Roman cement structures. Beyond this, lime is a definite no-no for any concrete with steel in it -it corrodes it. The reason we use concrete today is precisely the embedded steel. It allows to build all modern structures.

And steel is the reason modern concrete deteriorates. It corrodes, expands and cracks the surrounding concrete. An unreinforced concrete (like the ones Romans used) with modern materials and understanding would last forever. But you wouldn't build anything worthwhile.

Final. Remember. Cement = the glue, the binder that holds everything together, activated by water. Concrete= the actual building material with binder, water, sand and stones. Mortar= only binder, sand and water (maybe small stones)
I dunno. Give an AI Internet access and it would have theoretical access to a lot of things not even obviously connected to the internet.
It works the same way at international level, A-countries vs. B-countries.
Do you have any numbers?
I'm riding a motorcycle, and know statistics about it in USA, but looks like that small plane is safer
I pay 135 bucks a month for access to a co-working space. It’s got amenities such as unlimited coffee, call booth, ping pong table, gaming console, etc. Not to mention an environment of friendly people (mostly contractors) who want to be just as productive as you. Working from “home” and on side-projects has become a breeze this way.
Fire proof safes aren't that expensive. They probably don't stop physical attack, but are good enough in semi-trusted environment and cover for two of the important risks, fire and water invasion.
How is AGI a threat to humanity exactly?
> Personal projects remain unfinished or abandoned because I’ve wanted to do things the “right” way. So I start building it the “right” way with complicated tools and processes, then raise my hands and think it’s all too much for what I want to do. It puts all sorts of things out of reach.

So true it hurts.
Start time yeah. They seem to have a lot of time later trying to come with something more time efficient in long term.
The first link cites Fingerprints of the Gods, chapter 14 as racist, but doesn't give any quotations. I haven't read any of Hancock's books, and I have far better things to do with my time (apparently, among them, browsing HN).

If he's really making clearly racist statements, it would be good to see the quotes. If one needs to read the whole chapter to see the racism in some holistic interpretation, then perhaps there's a lot of ambiguity there.

I've seen video clips of Hancock here and there, and he strikes me as a smart guy who gets a kick of fooling average people. However, none of the clips I've seen seems racist.
Thanks for the feedback! That is definitely something I am going to add. (a workspace setup like in the https://tablane.net preview)
> a persistent process makes everything much simpler ...

I started with PHP and never trusted persistent processes for anything.

What if your persistent process hangs or crashes for whatever reason?

Is your whole site down then, not just the part with the bug?

The only site I ever made in persistent process paradigm was in ASP.NET and it didn't cause too many problems but it was more of an app, not website, with limited number of logged in users and pretty much no anonymous/guest part.
How much senators in USA are openly atheists? Several years ago I've read it was 2. In whole USA history.
I can't blame you. I'm glad I never gave money to Facebook for an Oculus.
Good write-up. But to me this reads more like “Everything I dislike about ‘software engineering’”, and this question pops up in my mind: isn’t there some way around all this?

I know this is kind of an unpopular opinion, but I think an important reason we end up with this kind of work environment is that we have no formal division of labor into separate professions.

Compare e.g. with healthcare: I sometimes jokingly explain the situation to friends by saying imagine if there was only a single profession called “Healthcare Worker”, and every hospital had to self organize “Hunger Games”-style. Everybody is hired as a “[Junior/Medior/Senior] Healthcare Worker” and then they battle it out to decide who gets to sit in the corner office, who gets to be a doctor and who gets to clean the toilets. Often it turns out everybody does a bit of everything, otherwise it’s perceived as “unfair”.

When there is no rigid formal power structure people make up for it with “politics”. I think that’s to a large extent what’s happening, and it’s sort of consuming our lives…
High level mods/patches for console video-games
Behind the keyboard: yes! In the gym: definitely not. Every body is different, but mine desperately requires carbs to have an effective workout.
Ostrom’s Law: Property rights in the commons (2011)
I'm using https://www.newsboat.org , but not for any good reason: only because it came to hand when an HN discussion of a fork inspired me. That said, I've had no reason to look for anything better.

On an MBP, I'm using:

browser "open %u"
show-read-feeds no
auto-reload yes
reload-time 60
macro m mark-feed-read ; quit ; reload-all
macro k open ; goto-url 2 ; quit

for hourly polling; when I swap to its screen, I only ever consult 1 virtual feed:

"query:Unread Articles:unread = \"yes\""

then use either 'o' or ',k' (for HN articles, to open comments) to load whatever looks interesting into tabs (in the browser on a different screen), then ',my' to mark all as read and re-poll.
Yeah, me too. But no--it's an editor for m68k assembly, said editor runs in your browser.
Show HN: Using Key-Value Stores in Serverless Codehooks.io Applications
Tutorial for learning to use key-value databases in a codehooks.io serverless node.js app.
Affordable amount of cash in one seems most logical solution. And maybe some dress jewelry. Easy enough for burglar to grab and run away, without too much damage on anything else.
In Favor of Friction and Flexibility
I think it's a joke. Though, the truth is, having AI write security sensitive code may actually genuinely be "AGI hard". AI breakthroughs are impressive, but I don't think we really know how to prevent the "confident bullshit" problem yet, and it's not clear it will be solved in this current cycle of progress. In many cases this might be an OK problem to deal with manually, but for security code it's probably not worth trying to. So the author might not have a threat to their job security, anyway.
MegaLinter v6.18.0 Released
With major improvements about dotnet linting :)
Es wäre viel besser, wenn ich die Ergebnisse anderer Länder sehen kann!
Danke!
Question for any archaeologists or zoologists. Do seagulls using the coastal rocks to break open oysters and clams by dropping them from the air qualify as using tools? If not, what is this type of activity considered?
Many newer cars have this, adaptive cruise control. A lot of newer cars will steer a little, or shake the steering while if you are drifting out of your lane too.
Every month, I comb through previous month Downbeat, JazzTimes, and Jazzwise magazines putting together a list of albums. The trick? I do this with past years magazine though.

I recently discovered the MusicBox app; sort of a listen later. My current playlist has 62 albums, as in December, these magazines are publishing their best of lists.

As someone close said a couple of days: "I didn't realize how much time goes into this music I might not always like to listen every day".
Which shows how complex enterprise use cases can be and how valuable good SAP consultants are. With all its faults, for many large companies it's still much better and cheaper to have all processes on SAP than using dozens or hundreds of specialized (often self developed) applications. At least with SAP you always find someone who will help you, with your 20-year old in-house developed software, no one will want to touch that code again.
I am pretty sure Github also felt the heat from Gitlab. There was a time, five or six years ago, when Gitlab was way ahead with impactful features like built-in CI and project management.

It seems that thanks to its network effect and Microsoft's guidance, Github managed to retake the lead.
How about adding another audio stream to your Video files with ffmpeg? You could even automate it with a script on a cronjob or make a Jellyfin Add-on. You would first have to detect if there is already a mono or stereo stream. Then invoke something like
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v copy -c:a copy -c:a aac -rematrix_maxval 1.0 -ac 2 output.mp4
(haven't tested this and it would drop subtitles)
20 Years of Safari
To me what stands out is not what it gets wrong but how much it gets right.

We use a not super common proprietary system at work which uses a custom query language. I can ask it "In system X, could you give me a query that finds XYZ". And it not only knows what system I'm talking about, it actually gives me a working query that would take me a couple hours to figure out and that's after I've had a few days' worth of training on it. Not to mention a huge IT background. Imagine picking a non-IT person off the street and getting them up to the point of being able to do this. They'd need weeks of training in basic IT concepts to even understand what you're talking about. I find it hard to overstate how amazing it is that a generic automated system can do this.

And ChatGPT is not a one-trick pony, IT isn't the only field it knows about. Imagine being an expert on all sub-fields of IT, law, marketing, medical, etc and being able to combine all that knowledge from those fields. A human will never be able to do that. The potential is huge but like any source of information you have to verify.

But what really is scary is extrapolating this to the next step forward. And the one after that. Because from what we had before to ChatGPT has been a massive step.

I think the next step would be for it to learn and re-evaluate its model every time it gets corrected by someone (like in the linked article where it apologizes for the incorrect info). Right now it's a static model only, so the next time someone asks the original question it will give the wrong answer again. Once it can learn from this it'll improve a lot.

The big hazard there is of course people manipulating it with false information. I don't have all the answers and I'm not an AI researcher but I'm very much amazed at the progress so far. And a bit scared. If this tech keeps evolving at this speed, job stability is only a tiny drop in a tidal wave of change. But there's no point in even trying to stop it.
This is an empty dismissal.
Any widely used disk format still uses 32-bit epoch?

Somehow I thought of FAT.. but UNIX epoch does not make so much sense...
But they drive Italian too. Ho well.
I mean, what did the author expect? A really esoteric question that few people, even if they are coders, would understand or even parse and it managed to give a response that made him go "Woo! That sounds perfect.". That alone would be complete science-fiction just a couple of years ago.
It understands you in any languages, speaks really well any languages. And of course, converses. Like, no big deal.

I remember the AI bots of a decade ago. Nothing compares.

Skynet is coming.
GoDaddy Rant
Hi HN,

I tried editing a subdomain's CNAME record and it was not editable (API returned "Duplicate entry"). So I deleted that record and tried creating again. Same error. Now our old record is gone and I can't create new one. I spoke with the support and they created a record for `subdomain.example.com.example.com` instead of `subdomain.example.com` from backend (lol).
When I pointed it out, they politely said they cant do anything about it .

Now I can do nothing to revert what I did. This was a subdomain used by few people in the company so it didn't cause any major problems. But it would have been disastrous otherwise(Some of our pings are already failing).

We will be transferring the domain to another registrar ASAP.

I would recommend anyone having a GoDaddy domain to transfer to another registrar. More examples: https://old.reddit.com/r/godaddy/top/
Rant over.
Thanks! I created an issue for that bug: https://github.com/Tablane/tablane/issues/15
> apparently the conversion rate is not fixed (for a given day) but can vary on the whims of the system (RNG?).

Assuming all the dates were set up the same, it could be that the exchange rate are "latest at creation of expense" (or just "latest") and the rates had been updated in the meantime.

I'd usually expect the exchange rate to be the rate at the date the expense was incurred but...
Wild crow visits woman daily to play games
> Everyone knows "ritual objects" means stuff without known/obvious use

How to distinguish between "for ritual use (for real)" vs. "for ritual use (nudge, nudge, wink wink)"?

Why not say "we don't know yet", instead? Like a normal person.
How is it even legal that the crackpots at Keystone abuse the name 'university'?

Surely that's prohibited in Irish law?
I think writing/understanding security specification/policy is probably AGI-hard. The notion of security is (at least in parts) pretty deeply anchored in human experience and desires.
cool, there's a brew formula and trying to run it tells me exactly what to do:

Error: no URLs configured. Please fill the file ~/.newsboat/urls with RSS feed URLs or import an OPML file.

thanks for the tip, giving it a go!
Demanding polished work is a power play designed to take options away from you
> Downside is you lose a fair amount of performance switching to 64 bit floats especially on low-end hardware

Think we'll run into a bit of a plateau eventually?

I mean, once we support 64 bit, in many domains we won't need to go much further, which means that hardware just needs to catch up. Of course, Moore's law is somewhat dead otherwise and Wirth's law is still very much alive, so that's a bit worrying, but I can feasibly imagine eventually getting to a point where 64 bit makes sense in most cases (maybe even embedded in a few decades, who knows) and that's that.
Yes good point.

In my case the IDs I want to refer to are much more specific (e.g. registration numbers or VAT numbers for businesses), it is just that referring to the registry itself is difficult.

So YES: Also in this space there is similar ambiguity -- what is really a "business", what is a "VAT number", in what way does IDs from one registry directly correspond to a concept in another registry.

But: one still needs to store and use these IDs (somehow). So my proposal is I guess to simply ignore the classification issue, but still use URNs to solve a subset of the problem.

URN already does this, e.g. by allowing use of urn:isbn: or urn:issn:, without one needing to really take a stance about when something is a book, when something is a series, whether something printed can be both. It is enough that the ISBN and ISSN registries exist and you just refer to these registries and that is all you can do.

So in your example with regions, an example could be

urn:geo:german-city-database:munchen

urn:geo:norwegian-town-database:notodden

...where "german-city-database" etc is a placeholder just for any kind of official registry.

As long as such registries exist and are recognized as somehow official and given names, that is one step.

What you discuss is then I think whether the entries in "german-city-database" and "norwegian-town-database" hold objects of the same "type". That seems like another issue.

I think URN could be useful while totally ignoring that issue. There are registries and there are IDs in registries; URN deals only with that; and the problem you raise -- knowing when IDs from a given registry can be used in a given context or not -- must be solved somewhere else.
I don't know why, but as with so many other things Jazz-y, but the sax feels like "more cowbells" to me.

That is, I overall enjoyed the tunes, but I think it would have been a much more interesting had there been greater variation beyond a "simple" sax as the main instrument.

However, I fully accept that it's just not for me. I enjoy music from a lot of different genres, from medieval music to goa trance to stoner and doom metal, but somehow Jazz has never clicked for me.
I wonder if you could emulate the mesh protocol using SDR?
Most embedded systems are 32 bit.
Yea both newlib and picolibc use 64 bit time_t now, but that doesn’t stop people from using 32 bit timestamps anyway …
Agreed - they deliver a very flexible, cost-effective, performant MCU. Downsides (to me) are toolchain and power consumption.

Has the Arduino toolchain been enough for home automation? I’ve been playing with Zephyr, but when I’ve gotten down into those gritty late-AM Saturday night programming hours, actual library support seems to be patchy, outside Arduino and Espressif toolchains.

I ended up running MicroPython on the Sonoff Dual R3 (a cheap and cheerful box about the size of a fig, controlling two separate line voltage relays) but GPIO access is really unsafe, which makes it useless for sensing, but fine for control. For everything else I use the ESP-WROOM-32, a fairly ancient dev board, and it’s highly capable, but I get the sense there are better boards for prototyping in 2023.

If you have a preferred board, do tell!
Shouldn't we just be viewing ChatGPT as a lense to view data? A more useful interface for searching and making sense of data.

If someone has reported this info in stackoverflow, it will be reported here.

Garbage in, garbage out ..
That's not necessarily better as it's sensitive to slowloris attacks, and the handler might not work with streams either, or could just read it all in memory anyway, so you're just moving the problem around.

Hell, a streaming consumer which doesn't require and check the content-length might even spin forever on CPU if a malicious client keeps sending data.
Hi, definitely interested! I couldn't find any contact information on your HN account.
Deadlines is the biggest killer of automation.
Oh ye I forgot kickbacks on CC is a thing in the US.

I even remember a colleague when I worked in California boast to me about his $10000 claim recipe and the kickback.

Since it was a 5 man startup at that point I don't think it was worth the credit risk though.

Ye well ... dunno who to blame then in the CC mess.
What makes you confident of that?
Joshimath, a gateway town to Himalayas is sinking
My blog: https://brendonbody.blog

Just a basic Jekyll template. I have had a 2 year break and recently got back into it. In that time I also forgot to renew my old .com domain and had it taken over.

Have had a few posts that previously got attention on Hacker News.
I got a pair of magnifying glasses with an LED - the kind that dermatologists use. It's great for taking splinters out of little kid fingers.
Shoes that make you walk 250% faster
Yeah, but many people have buried their money and later found it deteriorated beyond use. Make sure to use some good containers if you go that route :)
It's a solved question. Of course brain size relates to intelligence, albeit noisily. What, why do people assume that the increase in brain volume in the evolutionary record, concurrent with the increase in sophistication of material culture, doesn't set a prior for within-species effects of variance in this trait? Do we have another computational substrate besides brain contents? Would this skepticism be considered reasonable in the context of any other tissue and its quantifiable function, like muscle or bone?

This is the most up-to-date meta-analysis on the topic:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.211621

> Brain size and IQ associations yielded r = 0.24, with the strongest effects observed for more g-loaded tests and in healthy samples that generalize across participant sex and age bands.
Indeed. In Windows versions 1-3, minimized window didn’t actually go away, they were still being asked to paint themselves. Raymond Chen explains:

” Under the old model, when a window was minimized, it displayed as an icon, the icon had a particular position on the screen, and the program drew the icon in response to paint messages. (Of course, most programs deferred to DefWindowProc which just drew the icon.) In other words, the window never went away; it just changed its appearance.”

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20041028-00/?p=37...
> They use small differences like the size of audio buffers.

Fun fact, on my laptop I can hear websites who use audio APIs for fingerprinting because it causes the audio subsystem to wake up and the speakers make a small pop sound.
I get the error trying to run MNIST(:train) that modules are not callable. When I search for the error I see a link to the repo issues raising this issue but the issue itself is missing. Was it deleted rather than closed? Weird.
Those aren't nearly as cool looking although I'd still want one. Unfortunately, these kinds of devices are more expensive than they should be considering that they're marketed as toys/experimental devices. Once you go over $100, it's more cost effective to just pick up a cheap second-hand laptop instead, though they're not pocketable and certainly a lot more boring.

Also, it bugs me that the ClockworkPi seems to be RISC-V powered - they should change the name for those and fully get on the RISC-V bandwagon.
Yes, I can tell, because in the interview situation I'm sitting next to them.

And print statements are sometimes the superior choice.

This ties into my other comment that these things can be heavily subjective. As long as it gets the job done, I prefer print statements used by somebody who uses them as a sharp knife to gain understanding of what's going on over somebody just clicking buttons in a fancy UI but has no clue. (And vice versa, obviously.)
By the way, this exchange happened early December 2022.
Take an iPhone on the site and it’ll still call it unique, despite there being basically no identifying information listed in the report it gives you.