skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first time I've seen a well written critique of activist investors like Carl Icahn. He certainly scuttled any chance that Blockbuster had of succeeding. He's often right about small details when it comes to traditional companies and where to cut costs (as are many activist investors), but this story reads like he sabotaged Blockbuster when it had an actual substantial and viable chance to compete. I had not heard this story before, I always assumed Blockbuster was just too dumb to compete, but it wasn't the case at all. And, interesting if people like Hastings knew the forces at play in his competitors, and as Strategery points out, can play the long game when they know their competitors can't. Terrific article, as usual.
How can they succeed, they'll have to pay everyone?
You said it yourself, it's a PR piece. After signing a massive deal with Amazon, you want the CTO to say "yeah, our software could easily run on Azure or GCP, but Amazon just gave us a massive deal so we're sticking with AWS."

Don't take it literally.
I would argue the benefit of the personal chef isn’t in being able to obtain made food for money (that is indeed quite accessible) but in being able to have someone that can tailor food to your nutritional desires. Even in large cities, finding a reasonable variety of pre-made food that isn’t awful for your health isn’t easy.

Very fair point on everything else though.
My son and daughter get books from the school library every week. I would be so upset if our state's government stopped that.

My heart goes out to normal Floridians facing these lunatics in power, backed by a delusional mob coked up on fake news, threatening to make their kids' teachers felons if they let the kids have books.

Sounds like Afghanistan not America.
It was the old design that was an iOS-like grid of icons, not the new one.
Nix is for people who have entirely given up on the idea of system libraries. There is no system. Unless someone else has already done the work every single random bit of .c code, or whatever, you try to compile or run will require you to explicitly set the system libraries available/required to run it in a set of config files. It's like building a custom OS container for every single program you run.

For some people this is good because future shock has made relying on system libaries to run things very troublesome. So troublesome it compares to the above.
> Something like this happened in neuromancer.

Right, and Case bought betaphenethylamine instead of speed which was way harsher. That's exactly what is going to happen, some more potent drug that escapes the vaccine is going to get more popular. It's a bandaid solution that ignores the root cause (drug prohibition)
I don't think it is that complex. Who benefits from these mass layoffs? Everyone at the top benefits, and everyone at the bottom suffers.

You are spot on when it comes to impact of layoffs. If you want to destroy productivity, firing people is a sure proof way of doing that. To your point, I can't take any executive seriously if they're not self reflecting on their own failure. Mass layoffs should equal a new board in my opinion.
- Nix is a purely functional language with lazy evaluation.
- One of its types is a derivation which is basically an immutable result of some script / application / other build system ran in sandbox with exactly specified environment.
- Calling derive with same inputs generates same derivation.
- It's lazy... only when something tries to access derivation's files or other properties its build script is run.

You can use derivations as (/ to represent)
- packages
- generated configuration files / settings
- containers
- whole OS images ... e.g. I'm building raspi SD card images using Nix.
The apparent subsidies are not properly addressing their concerns. Thus, however much money it sent — it doesn't matter. How does this not address your point of "they are subsidized!!"?

Again. If the state policies prevent proper management of the resources, the money doesn't matter. It's misapplied.

The point that they don't have the resources. No, they don't have the resources to replicate what the state is doing. Parent's point is correct in that. But my point is that they don't WANT to replicate what the state is doing. It's misapplied. Thus, making the cost of the state programs irrelevant. You are assuming that everything on the budget is required to create a functional government. It's not.
Most cases defending basic freedoms involve reprehensible facts. In the US, Miranda was a burglar. Clarence Brandenburg was a KKK leader. Paul Cohen wore a t-shirt reading "FUCK THE DRAFT" at a time when such words weren't part of polite public discourse.

The only thing worse than a law against your definition of "bad" content is a law against your definition of "good" content. But that's what will be next if this law moves the Overton window.

Which is why it's dangerous to focus on the actual content being regulated. Be upset that content -- any content -- is being regulated, because the US Bill of Rights is supposed to prohibit such laws. In a free country, there shouldn't be laws controlling what people say to each other.
We are at the point in the fentanyl epidemic where most users are specifically seeking out fentanyl or fentanyl laced drugs.
HBO / Netflix merger FTW?
Agreed. GitHub and OpenAI are the current branding. Though they did have some twitter bots go bad years ago and maybe they learned from that?
Lex Fridman has consistently failed to meet expectations.

He snags many big names and interesting topics ... and utterly mangles the result.

I'm boggled that he is as frequently recommended as he is, particularly on HN.
You open up a US dollar denominated bank account in Switzerland and keep dollars as dollars.
The whole email was just so off - I know they build up to these things, but am sure the announcement of the re-org could have waited, and could have led with the most pressing news, especially since it came in the middle of day and people had already been let go by that point.
What if countries acted more like companies?
Why bring a gun to "peaceful" protest? To protect you from the other protesters? To protect you from the cops? Seems like poor thinking on the part of the dead guy no matter which option...unless the aim was a publicity stunt.
First time hearing of Nostr - looks really nice.

From the protocol README section "The problem with SSB (Secure Scuttlebutt)" - it lists a few small things but is mostly complimentary of SSB. One of the big issues I always had with SSB is efficiency/scaling/message size/db size. Is this something Nostr addresses or considers, or is it likely to suffer from similar scaling issues with heavy use?
I think it is because their state's congressman they think is acting in their interest, while the other states' congressman are not. And they're not wrong...

Personally I also find it bizarre system where the majority vote of the other 49 states tells your state what to do, under federal law, particularly in wholly intrastate matters.
What I don't understand is how e.g. Disney+ is losing so much money. It's Disney's content, has an enormous userbase, and somehow is bleeding billions?
I navigated a cross-country road trip when I was 14. Absolutely a great way to learn about maps, traveling, time estimation.
Tornado Cash sanctions cut deep
> Why should I invest time?

It's not for everyone.

Specifically, because Nix's 'costs' are upfront (for likely future benefit), nix isn't well suited to just-get-it-done pragmatic attitudes. -- e.g. if you'd prefer to just launch VMs from the web console, over using a tool like Terraform, then Nix isn't going to be for you.

Nix isn't too difficult to use. I'd say it's 95% wonderful, 5% huge pain to deal with. (Writing new nix code can be very hard).

As to why it's worth learning:

> What makes it stand out?

Nix provides very expressive control over packages of software.

e.g. With nix, it's easy to have multiple versions of the same software running on the same system. Whereas, with package managers, if you upgrade, you aren't able to easily also keep the old version around.

Some of the use cases Nix allows are pretty neat:

- You can declare a set of development tools to be made available. So, when you load up the project, you don't have to copy-paste "apt-get install...". This is especially useful for side projects you might not touch all the time.

- There's a "nix run" command, which can act a bit like "docker, without containers": it will download the package, and run it on the host.

- NixOS makes use of Nix so that the system configuration is all declared starting from a single file. Rolling back changes to system configuration is easy, in case you accidentally misconfigure the system. -- This can be used to build container images or VM images.

- Nix can be used to declare what packages you want installed for your user, and declare the configurations for these files. This allows ensuring you have a familiar setup quickly on a new computer.

All sorts of programming involves dealing with packages.

To clarify a bit on the details: nix declares packages in a pure way, using all of its inputs (source code, compiler, library dependencies; which are themselves declared with nix), and builds these in an isolated/non-global directories. Packages are 'installed' by symlinking to where the package is placed.
Tell HN: Proton outage
Proton Mail outage
As I understand it, this would have significant negative impact on anesthesia.
I just assumed its hyperbole. In the same way I would say "I couldn't live without Diet Coke."
first place I found this was https://datagenetics.com/blog/august32013/index.html which is still a good read.
Do you symlink your config repo to /etc/nixos or something else? So far, I've just been rsyncing my config repo folder after I modify it.
For me, i use it on my Desktop because i love things being stable for my work environment. I don't want an upgrade over the weekend to cause problems come Monday morning.

I've had my system get "borked" on updates in the past, and Nix lets me revert very very easily. Also upgrading libraries for one App can easily be isolated from breaking other applications and etc.

It's got tons of flaws (to me), but the core idea to me is a foundation for a super stable system. I both love Nix and hate it. It's so good that myself, a large critic of the OS, still uses it.
Meh, I feel like you're taking a common expression and reading it too literally.

"I couldn't have made it to the top of the mountain without these specific hiking boots" doesn't mean it was literally impossible without that exact brand of hiking boots. It means they like the boots, it made the experience better for them, and they think the hiking boots are better than comparable ones.

I don't think the CTO is claiming that Stripe is solving a problem that would be impossible to solve without AWS. He's saying we wouldn't be as well positioned today if we had to solve the problems that AWS solves ourselves, or by relying on their not-quite-as-good competitors.
Sort of an aside question, but the article praises Hastings ability to execute:

> To say that Hastings excelled at execution is a dramatic understatement; indeed, the speed with which the company rolled out its advertising product in 2022[...] is a testament that Hastings’ imprint on the company’s ability to execute remains.

Is there a place where one could read details on what made him so great at execution?
NixOS has been my daily driver for just over a year and my impression is that it’s still all a big experiment. A promising one, but far from a polished product so try to avoid that framing.

The Nix community is doing exciting work but in the long run I wouldn’t be surprised to see another project take its place in the mainstream once the ideas have matured. The current space has much of the same chaos as projects like Oh My Zsh or Spacemacs and needs to be treated more like an active hobby.

All that considered, the core paradigm is a breath of fresh air and I can’t imagine going back to a mutable system.
Programmers, it’s time to have a family meeting about AI
If for some reason the offline google maps don't get updated and expire, you are going to be unable use them at all in a critical situation.
This is a backlash to these kind of books:

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1615866743444078593

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1613623613156098049

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1612817285676244997

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1609719090456793089/...

Please don't attack me for posting something from this Twitter account, I don't endorse them, I'm just providing an example of what the backlash is actually a response to.
The New Guy at the Office Is a Secret Super Hacker
I don't view any of those things as a meaningful moat against the other companies with AI labs.

Specifically, training data is not primarily coming from interactions with model. While with RLHF this data might become more important, it is still a very small portion.
Even so, saying something like "We really like AWS so that's what we're doubling down on" (but with more PR/flowery language) rather than "Stripe would be impossible without AWS" would have been a more balanced statement while still a giving them praise.
Similar to how many people back in the day used "csharp" instead of C# so search engines could actually find things.
NO. He asked about Nix NOT NixOS... do not conflate them together. Nix an extremely generic tool for much much much more than what you have said.
This whole thing is basically a moral panic a la 80s Satanic Panic where people thought playing DnD led to ritual murder.
It doesn't offer anything else. So, yes. "Not widely accepted" means, exactly, "usefully checked against new evidence".

If you can point to anything beyond "woohoo, new older runes" and "maybe this helps distinguish between Greek and italic origin", do.
(Posted elsewhere in the discussion, but that ended up being on a dead thread)

There is a strong movement afoot to define any material teaching about

1) consent (whether it mentions sex or not)

2) the child's own body (in ways designed to help them recognize and avoid things like sexual abuse)

3) queer issues of any kind, but especially trans issues

as pornographic, regardless of the actual content, so that they can ban it and claim they're saving the poor children from horrible, horrible sexual material.

This is not a new movement; conservatives have been trying to ban queer people from any kind of public visibility for decades by claiming that their very existence is sexual, ignoring the fact that heterosexual romance and sex is being shoved into our faces constantly, often in far more blatant ways, and often in media explicitly aimed at children. They're merely redoubling their efforts now that it's becoming clear that society at large is starting to genuinely accept trans people, which they cannot abide.
The "cover your ass" strategy involves tracking 3 things:

* Estimation time to complete each project task (hopefully estimated by the person who is going to do the job. Then add 20%)

* Status of each project task (from 0% to 100%)

* Time devoted to "support interruptions" each week. Doesn't need to be super detailed - something like "week 4: 5 man-days on support tickets x1, y4 and z6"

That way at the very least you are equipped to answer the inevitable questions "why isn't feature C done?". The answer would be something like "we still need around 2 more weeks of full-time work in order to complete that task, but given the current rate of interruptions we will realistically have it ready in one month".
If I had to listen to a 2 hour podcast for a full 2 hours I couldn’t do it. Sorry to say, most people speak too slowly and this why I hated radio and a lot of television before; it’s not that they’re necessarily bad but I just don’t have the patience when I could be listening to music instead.

So I listen at between 2x and 3x with Overcast’s Smart Speed flipped on; but the upshot is I get through them a lot faster and I adjust the individual podcast speed to a level where I can still understand and process the discussion.
> What surprises me is how many podcasts are INSANELY long -- like, 2+ hours. Where do people find the time to listen?

Personally I break the podcast up. Whenever there is a guest or the host is talking about something I'm really interested in, I'll listen to the 3hr episode over the course of like 3-4 days, typically 30min to an hour per day.
Which for any western democracy in 2022/2023, is just... mind-bogglingly backwards.
OpenAI already has a model to improve factual accuracy and provide citations:

https://openai.com/blog/webgpt/

It's probably not too hard for them to tune ChatGPT and the upcoming GPT4 that way, and I think it's very likely they will do something like that in Bing.
I tend to agree with you, but destroying public education does seem to be a goal of the most vocal members of the political right wing. Moderate voices are being drowned out, and increasingly excommunicated from the Republican party.
> and will also not disarm myself to make myself more of a juicy target

Are you the president of the United States? Are you a multi-millionaire? Are you openly a member of a gang or other criminal organization?

If not, then, quite plainly, you're not a target. Period.
ChatGPT Gets a C in My Programming Machine Learning Course
I decided to see how ChatGPT could do against the assignments by writing Python in my university deep learning course. It completed 4 of 10 perfectly, and tripped up on the others.
In snapchat, you're sending messages to friends, or at the very least individuals, who you trust have not rooted their phone to log messages.

Anything put to the public internet is there forever because antisocial corporations and the few individuals who do not respect privacy can operate at scale.

Asking a normal person nicely to delete something almost always works though, especially if not deleting it is a hassle
It's important to note that particulate matter and VOCs are not equal in danger and bodily effect. For some reason people act like they are all the same. It's like saying you got liquid in your eyes: the type of liquid matters an awful lot.

In a lot of cases, the VOCs emitted when you melt plastics have "unknown" long term effects because nobody has been exposed to it in great levels for extended periods. We know some are potentially carcinogenic, but that's about it. This isn't true of candles, though. We have a pretty good idea of what candles can do to you.

Another more concerning part of 3D printing though is UFPs, which generally can't be filtered out easily by consumer grade air filters, and due to their tiny size can enter deeper nodules in the lungs. Reminds me of asbestos.

I'm no expert in any of this, but you should be worried about 3D printing fumes. The 3D printing community is going to become a long term study of the effects of microplastics imho.
Unclassified DARPA budget items for 2023 [pdf]
> Good luck assassinating a Sybiled validation node.

No need. We distribute it on an IP blocklist and carry on, just like we handle bad actors on other decentralized systems like email.

Remember that chain splits have happened before and the minority chain and those that agree with its rules and history continue on. Eth Classic is still a thing.

Modern Eth was literally an -intentional- 51% attack to erase a hack. The majority agreed to erase that and on the main ETH network, it became so.

> No one who has bought in to the protocol. But of advantage to an entity that wants a particular protocol to fail.

Once again, we can easily detect and block nodes that are repeatedly trying to lie. It would be annoying, but so is dealing with spam. This is inevitable but manageable and without violence I may add.

> Yes, you'd get a forced split. Can you guarantee that the 51% attacker couldn't gradually hop back on and attack again?

The community could ban all of their nodes and assign higher trust to nodes that did not participate. Any fullnodes that agree they are on a fraudulent chain could agree to go back to the minority chain.

If it happened often we would get better at doing this quickly.

In short, you can temporarily disrupt the Bitcoin network with enough money, but you will never be able to stop those that wish to continue maintaining an honest history.
"banished handguns so you can no longer protect yourself..."

I think this view has been quite comprehensively debunked by now. I for one do not want to live in a country where most people have access to handguns.
Google is not constrained by GPUs here and likely will train on TPU pods anyways.
I'm not sure it matters too much from the context of the article. I took it to mean commercial = any purchased printers (vs a self build). The end results in terms of VOC's and other nastiness is going to be the same regardless as whilst 'high end' printers might be capable of higher temperatures you still print the same materials at the same temperatures regardless of printer.
HBO is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, likely one of their most valuable assets. I can't see them giving it up.
You may be right about that, but I don't think any of the bots on the main page are particuarly good examples; to really get an idea of what capabilities it has I'd recommend creating a bot, playing around a bit with the example dialogue section you can feed into it, and then having a few rounds of conversation where you aggressively probe topics and vote on several possible replies before accepting one.

I still need to check out ChatGPT I guess, if something new hasn't blown them all away by the time I get to it.
It seems weird to treat stuff that Scala must rely on but you can't write in Scala as part of the implementation, and yet not do the same for stuff Safe Rust has to rely on from Unsafe Rust.
The article actually discusses this:

“The anti-fentanyl antibodies were specific to fentanyl and a fentanyl derivative and did not cross-react with other opioids, such as morphine. That means a vaccinated person would still be able to be treated for pain relief with other opioids,” said Haile.
I like the idea of a NixOS section.
"If a law is passed the presumption under democracy is it has the assent of the majority.
"

Why would that be the presumption instead of, you know, looking at polls?
A story that is 100% B.S.
That gives you an estimate of the quantity of VOCs, but tells you nothing of their toxicity. You can have a VOC that's extremely toxic at low concentrations, and a VOC sensor would read barely above baseline.
I was thinking of "new world" when I wrote the comment. It's essentially the most "design by committee" MMO possible, and the reviews reflect the poor attempt.

Weirdly, MMOs actually fit Amazon's business model better than off the shelf games. You pay for access, like Amazon prime. I'm surprised they didn't bundle in new world into prime membership as a way of catapulting their video game unit expansion. That's much more their modus operandi; expand first and just the intense scale to force improvement over time.

https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/new-world
That would now mean buying out WarnerMedia Discovery Group which just merged, and WarnerMedia was the owner of HBO before that. AT&T was forced to divest at least.

Never the less, that would be a massive acquisition, they carry alot of debt.
Regrettably, it seems like the once great 99% invisible has passed into covering the long tail. So yes, maybe they have covered all and done their best work and don't have that many ideas for great episodes left.
There are definitely more people using Docs than Teams.

I doubt that Microsoft will allow OpenAI to train on teams data from other businesses.
Fentanyl is the leading cause of death for those aged 18 to 45 in the US. Seems pretty important to me. We can also look at the things you suggested, it's not like there's an Obesity OR Fentanyl choice here.
I would say most users now are taking the drug intentionally. I know of people who do seek out fent or fent laced drugs specifically. Its a lot cheaper to buy than heroin or any other opioid these days.
Will Chinese LLMs be much worse?