skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fire protection mess ... was a symptom.
The root cause was that the local governments (city of Berlin and state of Brandenburg) wanted to split the pie for many small to medium businesses in the region. Noble idea but hard to execute as we found out later...
So instead of giving it all to a contractor that actually knows how to build (large) airports they tried to managed it themself. Those people were unexperienced in this size of operation and it went all downhill from there.
It's a common theme with big projects: Local administration is unexperienced but tries to do it anyway and they fail or get ripped off every time. What we should have is a federal unit that just does large scale construction/engineering projects.
Just to be clear, was this some kind of conspirancy theory then?
I don’t mind using concur but there is one thing I hate about it. When you take an picture of a receipt, it used to overlay a polygon with four corners for you to crop it. Now it automatically crops it and half the time it cuts off part of the receipt. One time in 100 it falls back to the overlay so you can fix it, but usually you have to delete the image and try again. It tends to fail on similar images so you have experiment by folding the receipt and using different backgrounds until it works. Oh and each time you take a picture using the app, it requires several taps so you have to constantly switch one hand back and forth between handling receipts and tapping on dialogue boxes.
When Authorship Isn’t Enough: Lessons from CERN
But politics (ie negotiations for resources between peers) that occur between whom? With work moving "down" a layer to servers and by implication the non-allocative management of resources down a layer to the coders, there are waaaay too many managers and the allocation of resources (ie allocation of those who are now managers) is a totally different discussion - one should be giving AWS budgets to coders and saying run this division.

Now that sounds a lot like microservices / and or two pizza teams.

And the allocation of resources is much more a financier problem - in short there exists a layer of "managers" who don't manage the actual work being done, and have hierarchical control over something that is a financial non hierarchical problem.

in short managers who don't code are dinosaurs

Edit: to try and build a very simplified model of management

- allocate (scarce) resources to desirable projects [financier]

- organise resources to ensure success of project (engineer / planner)

- improve quality of resources (training, maintenance)

- something something read more Drucker

Once the work sits in software (ie search engine) then it's just coders and servers except when you want to create a new business function. And that is to all intents a VC / financier role.

I mean look at how Drucker refers to managers (bestriding the business world) to how google does (8 rules for "coaching" coders)

Google recognises the chnage I think
> get rid of the 30 year old cruft, meaning grep & friends, x servers, all that antique shit,

And replace it with what? Lacking basic tools would make it not very useful.
His slow zone traders are the only constant in civilization. Meaning, planets are unreliable destinations. You set out to trade and arrive at a medieval kingdom 500 years after a nuclear apocalypse. You set out for a meh-destination and find upon arrival a high tech civilization, that is so integrated its even eaten up the error margins, due to thinking itself infallible.

The only constant is the traders, reviving and stabilizing societies, which its why information exchange without a known listener (basically a Wikipedia radio edition) is most important for keeping a slower then light traveling galactic civilization alive.

He also has some quibs about how society is basically a attempt to overcome the flaws of the individuals psyche comprising it. That and murder AI.

He tried to explore AR in Rainbows end, but it was insubstantial. Another great man ruined by california..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge
I feel like a lot of these issues will disappear for a long time, after the switch to 64 bits:

bits max value
8 bits 255
16 bits 65_535
32 bits 4_294_967_295
64 bits 18_446_744_073_709_551_615
128 bits 340_282_366_920_938_463_463_374_607_431_768_211_455

And that applies to most things:

time stamps: 64 bits can fit hundreds of billions of years (longer than the age of the universe)
IP addresses: an address for every device, no more CGNAT, the block assignment sizes are mindboggling (/64)
DB primary keys: it's unlikely that most systems out there will need more than 18 quintillion records
coordinates: whether you're working on video game worlds, or simulations, this is probably accurate enough for floating point calculations and storage
hardware: millions of TB of RAM is also likely to be sufficient when using 64 bit OSes

I feel like once the switch is made in most places, we're all going to have a more relaxed experience for a while.

For example, currently if I try to create a game where the game engine uses 32 bit floats, then after a certain distance away from the scene root point, the physics break down a bit due to the decreasing accuracy. That's how you get the complexity of floating origin systems where you reset the camera/player back to the root point, alongside everything else relative to them, after they've moved a certain distance away. With 64 bit values, there would be no need for the complexity of such workarounds. And it's pretty much the same for computer networking (the whole NAT/CGNAT thing), dates and everything else, where you actually run into the limitation of 32 bits not being enough.
As lawyers like to say, “it depends”. Months, like, “a few”.

For someone in the situation-SWIM-my suggestions would be something like:

Document. Get criteria for “improvement”, down to nauseating detail. Meet it, and if they still fire you, well, then a lawyer will be more interesting.

This all presumes you weren’t asking for it, and it’s political opinion some way.

If you were asking for it, improving for real might be enough.
Old men pine for their glory days. Miles Davis confessed a bittersweet nostalgia for hard bop even as he pushed himself and his collaborators into a then-uncertain jazz-rock.

The young folks who idolise them confuse that nostalgia for capital-t Truth and I think that has led to a nucleus of purism. (I say this as a reformed purist myself.) But it’s a nucleus with the tiny scale that connotes…most of the top pros in the most straightahead jazz today have diverse musical interests and ambitions.
Worth stating nevertheless as the article is about a software engineer. Not a programmer, coder or hacker.
> It's because most business schools teach business administrators to seek rent for doing nothing.

To be fair, renting out metal boxes you already own doesn't exactly sound labour-intensive.
Why would you want to abstract over tel: vs fax:? If you try to send a fax to a phone number, or call a fax from your phone, the end result is a confused human. Also, what “more strict definition” do you have in mind? Sure, MSISDNs are digits only and always include the country code, but any reasonable software dealing with phone numbers could easily parse out the extra punctuation (and possibly fill in a country code from some other data source).
In some cases (particulary with modern, faster, formulations) it can, actually projecting (powder/smoke) out of the holes but it is not usually an issue.

When it happens is because the expansion is too fast (and consumes all the water available), making the grout itself fragile, with slower formulas, after the initial setting of the grout, you should water/keep the surface wet.

It is surprisingly difficult to find actual videos of it working (most are just a set of photos) because it is very, very slow (between 6 and 48 hours, usually), here is one from one of the many producers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYAcHc9rP9o
It's inevitable because of the dynamics of civilization once countries have the means to connect and travel and destroy each other IMO. And I think it's better if a freer country tries to enact a positive change than otherwise. But again the ends may not always justify, violence shouldn't be the first obvious choice if others are available
You can’t claim us we live here
I found CGI to combine quite well with bleeding edge JavaScript 7 : async / await (compared to JS6 promises that left me confused as a JavaScript newbie).

I am more interested to know in which situations it's a bad idea to use CGI ?
Interesting, I also got a response basically identical to this one!
The article's usage of "unsafe" seems to be a bit more general than Rust's specific concept of memory safety, hence the confusion. `to_bytes()` is marked safe in Rust code, and it is memory-safe in Rust's terms: you've just asked for a memory block of arbitrary size, there is no undefined behavior. But real-world safety is a bit more general than that, and given Rust's reliance of npm-style package management with lots of dependencies these issues can be exacerbated in scale.

I don't think Hyper itself was the problem though, frameworks like Axum are where things should be fixed. Hyper is intended to be used as a low-level library, so it should allocate exactly what size the programmer requested and the responsibility of length checking should be the system programmer's burden.
Even knowing what goes on, I don't think it makes sense, so you're further than I am :)
CGI was abandoned due to performance problems, but it is surprising scalable on modern OSs, the kernel does a good job of caching the code so it's not really a full round trip to the file system and cold start on each request. Obviously you still have the overhead of an interpreter for many languages, but they also tend to do a fairly good job of caching their byte code. I absolutely wouldn't recommend it for new systems, but for a quick and dirty script it's fine.

The minute you want to do url routing and have middleware, a persistent process makes everything much simpler and keeps everything in one place. I much prefer routing inside a framework than using Mod_Rewrite.

Edit: This article covers what I was thinking of:

"Myths About CGI Scalability"

http://z505.com/cgi-bin/qkcont/qkcont.cgi?p=Myths%20About%20...

Previously discussed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32699395
I remember having one, it was pretty awesome.

I'm trying to recreate a modern one using ESP32 WIFI, LORA, eink screen, blackberry keyboard. I have all the parts, just need to start building it
This sentence is either incoherent or directly contradicted by the article that I linked to:

"Europeans have ancestry have that goes back beyond 40000 BC"

I cannot figure out what you mean, but I think you misunderstood what I wrote. The article that I linked to says that, of the European DNA that has been captured from samples from 40,000 years ago, no trace of the DNA can be found in the modern population, therefore it seems the Homo Sapiens who were alive in Europe 40,000 years ago eventually went extinct. There was a dramatic change in the DNA in human samples found from 15,000 years ago, and this DNA is found in modern populations. Therefore, the early populations of Europe were wiped out, and replaced by the new populations that arrived 15,000 years ago. It is believed that there were human populations that expanded from Anatolia and which spread across Europe 15,000 years ago. Based on the DNA evidence, this new population completely replaced earlier populations. None of the earlier populations survived, since none of their DNA is found in modern populations.

You wrote:

"otherwise your statement suggests Europeans were beamed here from an alien planet ~42k years ago"

I wrote:

"Europe was re-populated around 15,000 years ago by a group that expanded from Anatolia."

I think it is more likely that the new population came from Anatolia. This is easier to believe than thinking that the new population came from an alien planet.
There are some female bodybuilders out there.

Unsure if she's Japanese though there are others:

<https://i.imgur.com/2i6HNcR.mp4>
Sorry my friend but you are now all loyal subjects of the Great Lordship of Gurgdill.
I typically stop thinking about work entirely after I clock out.

I already spent most of the day on the problem, and that exceeds my natural interest in it.
user eternityforest expressed a wish for a modern equivalent running an ESP32 or something: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30487745

Something close (& and extremely hackable) can be yours for $79 + shipping: https://shop.m5stack.com/products/face?variant=1729043762389...

It's not official yet but they're prototyping a reboot which is compatible with the current core module that has better performance and a touch screen.
Can you explain the "natural MVC" part?
And that's exactly my other gripe! :D

Those are all the same, the best programmers in the world (those in the demo scene) call themselves 'coders'. Calling yourself a 'software engineer' reeks of elitism, no matter how much time you spent at university.
Why doesn’t the wizard let me save the BitLocker key on an encrypted drive?
I also do this, works great.
That is very true! I'm quite certain decoders also play a role.

Indeed a friend of mine has a superb high quality audiophile setup. Playing vinyls sounds absolutely glorious. Playing WAV and CD sounds equally glorious. Yet for some reason playing AAC, and, more surprisingly, FLAC and ALAC, sounds terrible, which makes no sense, unless the decoders are borked.
I tried it, but the results aren't what I was hoping for. Does it take my previous question into account or are they treated independently?

Me: Hey AI Paul, what's your best life pro tip?

Paul: My best life pro tip is to always strive to learn more and never stop growing. No matter how advanced you become, there is always something new to learn and discover.

Me: That's a bit too general, can you give me some more concrete advice?

Paul: Given the context information, it is difficult to provide concrete advice without more information. However, it may be helpful to consider the various components of a programming language, such as numbers, errors, and I/O, and how they might be used by an alien civilization. Additionally, it may be useful to research existing programming languages and how they are used to gain insight into how an alien civilization might use them.
I followed everything you said until the California comment. Please explain.
Well, a substantial part of that is that it doesn't have all the information (for humans often experiences) that you have, so of course it can't come to a similar conclusion.
Really?

What is the meaning of life?
Where did the universe come from?

Some of the most interesting questions are unanswerable / don't have a correct answer.

In the field of archaeology there generally isn't the absolute 'can't know' though. Until the Rosetta stone came along we didn't know what various hieroglyphs meant. But the hypothetical existence, however remote of another Rosetta stone means we can know the answer to these various questions.
It's not the only form of bias in the post. Just looking at the first pair, he seems to be implicitly criticizing the inclusion of braille for introducing additional elements into the design? What does he expect in a hospital?

I'm not familiar with that particular hospital in Atlanta, and I think the panel could be improved. But in my experience working in hospitals, there can be really weird floor layouts that make navigation confusing in general, not just for elevators.

Hospitals also need clear communication for staff to increase response speed. If you say "Floor 3" it might be really unclear what floor on what subunit of what building you're referring to, but a color could be a clearly defined zone.

Part of what he's doing is holding up as ideal examples places whose architecture and use makes simple elevator control design possible. I think it's good to highlight elevator control design, but I have a number of issues with the way he's approaching the discussion.
Asking ChatGPT to write my security-sensitive code for me
I honestly believe this could have been achieved already, at least in my country. But opportunities to push us in that direction are avoided more often than not. Maybe the same characteristics that advanced developed nations will also be their downfall?
An AI was prompted to draw various countries as supervillains
Hi Marcus! This looks extremely interesting, would have loved to try it out, but trying to sign up / create an account always shows a "Something went wrong" message...
You seem to be confusing between loss and expenses. Salaries are expenses of the business, while loss is the fiscal bottom line every period X.
I find it kind of interesting that people frowned upon CGI because it was not efficient. And yet here we are using lambas on AWS like it’s the best invention ever
I think it's reasonable to give mild spoilers for a 30(!) year old book:

Maximum possible intelligence is a function of the speed of light. The speed of light is a local constant, not a universal one, and is a function of the amount of mass in the local area (maybe).

Thus, if you dive towards the core of the galaxy you get dumber, but if you head up and out you have the potential to get smarter. The reason we haven't all been eaten by the Borg is that, two thirds from the centre of the galaxy, the universe only supports boring, mundane, human-level intelligence, and everyone wants to get up and out, to where they can become Sufficiently Advanced.

Sidenote: Sufficiently Advanced intelligences don't seem to hang around for long, and nobody down here is quite sure what happens to them when they stop communicating.

Marooned in Realtime is almost as good as the first two Zones of Thought novels, IMO: what if time travel, but only forwards?
I've been trying out developing my own diffusion models from scratch lately, to understand this approach better and to compare against similar trials I previously did with GAN. My impression from reading posts like these was that it would be relatively easy once you understand it.. with the advantage that you get a nice normal supervised MSE target to train against, instead of having to deal with the instabilities of GANs.

I have found in practice that they do not deliver on this front. The loss curve you get is often just a big thick noisy straight line, completely devoid of information about whether it's converging. And the convergence seems to be greatly dependent on model choices and the beta schedule you choose. It's not clear to me at all how to choose those things in a principled manner. Until you train for a long time, you just basically get noise, so it's hard to know when to restart an experiment or keep going. Do I need 10 steps, 100, 1000? I found that training even longer, and longer, and longer, it does get better and better, very slowly, even though this is not displayed in the loss curve, and there seems to be no indication of when the model has "converged" in any meaningful sense. My understanding of why this is the case is that due to the integrative nature of the sampling process, even tiny errors in approximating the noise add up to large divergences.

I've also tried making it conditional on vector quantization codes, and it seems to fail to use them nearly as well as VQGAN does. At least I haven't had much success doing it directly in the diffusion model. After reading more into it, I found that most diffusion-based models actually use a conditional GAN to develop a latent space and a decoder, and the diffusion model is used to generate samples in the latent space. This strikes me that the diffusion model then can never actually do better than the associated GAN's decoder, which surprised me to realize since it's usually proposed as an alternative to GAN.

So, overall I'm failing to grasp the advantages this approach really has over just using a GAN. Obviously it works fantastically for these large scale generative projects, but I don't understand why it's better, to be honest, despite having read every article out there telling me again and again the same things about how it works. E.g. DALLE-1 used VQGAN, not diffusion, and people were pretty wowed by it. I'm not sure why DALLE-2's improvements can be attributed to their change to a diffusion process, if they are still using a GAN to decode the output.

Looking for some intuition, if anyone can offer some. I understand that the nature of how it iteratively improves the image allows it to deduce large-scale and small-scale features progressively, but it seems to me that the many upscaling layers of a large GAN can do the same thing.
The tweet doesn't give the source, but a redditor[0] credits TikTok user @loubfreitas.

0. https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/105juup/results_of_...
That is why with experience one learns to ignore fashion trends until they eventually either become unavoidable, or fade away from conference talks.
FYI: from the parent comment, /whoishiring linked on /lists doesn't seem to be working.
The hatred is specifically directed at "FP" which I understand to be floating-point. Makes sense inside an OS kernel but a large majority of HPC would indeed consider this irrational.

I understand that dark silicon is helpful, but am not so sure that fixed-function HW is the way to go.
Perhaps video _de_coding is the most convincing from your list; codec generations are 5+ years, so enough time to benefit from HW.
Encoding, on the other hand, tends not to be impressive unless perhaps there is also a software component.

For the rest, programmability and deployability (can we rely on it?) is a major issue. Software has often been the limiting factor.

Another big concern is the 'hardware lottery'. The algorithms we develop and get are selected for, and tuned to, the current hardware. Perhaps this gets us 5x energy efficiency vs CPU/SIMD. But by painting ourselves ever further into the corner of dense linear algebra, which is definitely not the way that nature implements intelligence, we are missing out on far larger opportunities. For example: spiking nets or memristors have the potential to be 2 or 3 orders of magnitude better. Or actual sparsity, not the fixed-pattern thing (now that is a prime example of an irrelevent benchmark, because AFAIK algorithms haven't yet been able to use them well).

> A general purpose CPU however should specialize on unpredictable memory access.

Should it really? I think rather we should avoid such accesses whenever possible, because their energy cost now dwarfs that of computation.

> This means AVX-512 is somewhat misplaced on a CPU and probably only exists because it served Intel to create nice numbers in irrelevant benchmarks.

I have difficulty understanding how a reasonable person can come to such a conclusion.
Lemire (the author linked here) has a long series of results showing nice speedups from AVX-512. I personally have seen gains in image compression, string processing, cryptography, linear algebra, integer coding, hash tables, databases, sorting, and compression.

[Opinions are my own.]
Computers are automated by their very nature.

Everything is automated by definition. If I type five commands, that's a script that can be run again. If I click an icon or choose a menu option, that triggers automation that someone wrote.

The interesting point to consider is how specific your information processing is. My last five commands are probably useless as a script, not because it isn't automated, but because it is far too specific to what I just did and will not happen again.

What we as developers spend our time on when we want to save ourselves from doing the same thing again is generalization. We pick apart a process that already exists and parameterize it. We insert conditionals and, hopefully, error handling.

That's it. Generalization. Not automation. Anyone who uses the latter word is generally not doing it, since using the term requires something un-automated to distinguish it from which in this context is not a useful term.