skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With respect to incompetent government, I like to share this opinion whenever possible: The US government and US state governments are incompetent due to constant gridlock. Incentives of politicians within our governments are similarly to draw out all processes since employment is not based on performance or promises kept, but is instead guaranteed for a fixed amount of time. Politicians can continually base their re-election on the fact that "the system is broken", while they themselves are doing nothing to fix it or are not able to do anything to fix it.

Having separately elected house, senate, and president is a primary source of gridlock. Each body can reject a legislative change, while none can effectively create change. The only way laws can be passed in this system is under a very rare set of conditions. When those conditions are present (government shutdown imminent, filibuster eliminated, plurality requirements reduced) you see large omnibus bills pushed through as fast as possible, without time to adequately vet the details.

From an engineering perspective, this would be like pushing a few massive commits every few years rather than making regular bug fixes as needed. As such, our laws are buggy and unmaintained. Unfortunately, this leads many to believe that regulations generally are ineffective rather than the
poor implementations of such being ineffective.

Poorly written legislation puts more pressure on the judicial system to litigate between the lines. This is an externality that is extremely expensive for every individual and company to have to deal with.

I advocate for a more parliamentary style system where politicians continued careers are based on their effectiveness and continued approval rather than fixed terms. There are plenty of ways to ensure proper checks and balances without stopping government dead in it's tracks.
Here's a real-world example: https://cloudsek.com/security-flaw-in-atlassian-products-jir...

"... cookie validity is 30 days. They only expire when the user logs out, or after 30 days."
Where does one go to find an Escrow provider? This would be really helpful for me to know the money is at least there with projects.
FYI, I am the author.

> Remember that I am not here trying to argue for the truth of the AC; I'm arguing against the author's argument.

Yep, I get that.

> The author's argument, as I read it, relies on an intuition that "choosing" an element that is not-finitely-describable is problematic.

Not quite. Choosing an element from a set where all of the members are not-finitely-describable is problematic.

> However, the mathematical meaning of "choosing", in the context of the AC, is a statement about the mathematical existence of a certain function.

Yep, I get that.

> To respond to the author's intuition requires only showing that not-finitely-describable domains are not a "problem" for the existence of functions.

No, you would have to show that defining a function on this particular set is not a problem. Note that this is not the same thing as defining a function on elements of this set. That is obviously not a problem. But defining a (non-trivial) function on the set itself is.
My app, https://easyteegolf.com/ is a niche SaaS that I built in my free time during COVID. MRR varies because I don't charge customers during the winter, but it made about $6K last year.
More build steps, more safety steps, less undocumented overtime, ballooning costs of benefits. And I would be surprised if logistics don't play a role as well. Used to be more buffer in our distribution systems for materials. In a scenario where warehouses have surplus goods sitting around, I expect it's easier to call in a favor and get an extra shipment of materials for the partially finished garage that didn't make it into the estimates.
> why companies like Intel get to keep the billions they were given

Intel wasn’t given billions. It got capital expenditure incentives. It makes sense to lay off in one group while you focus on a less labor-intensive one.
How do you feel about this example?

https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/APointAgainstTheAxiomOfChoice...
I've had the pleasure of working with Ashpreet. Highly recommend Phidata for unifying local and remote data workflows. Congrats on the HN launch!
They lost me this year. I had been a subscriber for 12 years.

Between the ads and the complete inability to let a show run more than 2 seasons unless it's a global hit... I'm no longer interested.

I've had a kid - and my viewing habits have changed. I can't always watch a show right when it drops. The reality of my life is that I have other things going on, and I rarely have 10+ hours of uninterrupted time.

But now... by the point I have time to watch a show, more often than not Netflix has already announced its cancellation, and I have zero interest in a catalog of dead shows. None. Nadda.

My take is that Netflix is hot fucking garbage at determining the quality of their own shows, and that really - they don't have the creative side down at all. It's too much focus on the stats, and timelines that are too short.

Some of the most widely watched shows in history had fairly lackluster first seasons (see: Parks & Rec, The Office, Friends). Netflix is busy killing off everything that's not a sizzle in the pan. But those flare up and burn out. They need the slow burn shows that grow into their own - and they've ruthlessly slaughtered them all because the numbers aren't great at first.
Something something Elon Musk.
But is this MORE technological? Using smartphones imparts way less tech capabilities on the user than does using PCs, and definitely doesn't push users to learning new things (how many people are discovering IDEs on their phone and learning development as a hobby?).
I was a really interested in BV's work for a while, but some of the major roadblocks you quickly run into once you start thinking about how to implement his ideas are that:

1. Whenever you zoom out of the code-level, you lose granularity and thus flexibility and power.

2. In order to gain expressiveness, you can constrain the domain, but again you lose flexibility to implement what you want and how you want.

3. It's difficult to avoid losing the ability to express things in general ways whenever you switch to visual or physical representation of code.

4. A lot of the ideas you might have end up being more simply represented by code, and more easily manipulated by way of text and keyboard.

5. A lot of things end up just being superficial wrappers over code. Superficial in the sense that they only hide surface-level complexity (e.g., reducing the visual volume of large code blocks).

6. Catering interfaces to novices often hampers experts.

There seem to be a lot of trade-offs. I don't know if these are laws per se, but they seem difficult to break.

What interests me particularly are new ways to create general purpose programs using methods that more efficient and more intuitive, but it seems like a really difficult task bound by near-inescapable trade-offs.
Thanks, I'm not confused anymore.
It's much more easily explained as a business decision to minimize blowback but I wouldn't want to get in the way of your feelings regarding anyone that may or may not have blue hair.
As far as I'm aware, this problem (and associated 'solution') still exists on SLS, which would make sense considering that it too gets a large portion of its thrust from those giant SRBs.

Of course the proper solution would have been to not mandate the use of such large SRBs since the vibrations still make SLS near useless for launching scientific payloads. The reason for choosing Falcon Heavy for Europa Clipper instead of SLS was that on top of the rocket price difference, it'd cost $1B extra to make Clipper able to handle SLS's vibrations, Congress was insistent on Clipper launching on SLS but backed down when they informed that they'd have to spend an additional $1B on science instead of corruption.

But alas, that sort of dumb stuff is what design by Congress gets you.
Agree that it spreads FUD, but I mean it won't work as children can still trivially access banned books if they desire. The much greater threat to children's reading comes not from the particular books available in their school classroom, but from other factors: parental literacy and reading habits; literacy of child; number of books in household, literate culture of child's milieu.
joke So how long until an Amazon representative complains on HNews about Stripe locking them out of their account and not telling them why?

No seriously, I used to use Amazon Pay for years long ago when it first became available for woocommerce powered stores and I specifically stopped because I had to manually download and go through all my weekly reports and add up the fees I was paying for my business's taxes. As advanced as Amazon can be sometimes they are very dinosaur like when it comes to financial reports or taxes. It took decades for them to collect taxes from sellers. Took years for them to finally catch a couple that were scamming millions of dollars in returns out of sellers. I stopped bothering with any Amazon products because of the years of glitches, gotchas, lack of reports, lack of understanding user intent or use cases. And the thing is, Amazon Pay was great, I had a lot of customers that used it and prefered to pay that way.
I think the economics of it is basically like, Disney spends so much on creating content that Disney+ just doesn't bring in enough money to cover cost, because users get a subscription to binge / burn thru several things in a single month and then cancel their subscription.
> nix isn't well suited to just-get-it-done pragmatic attitudes

Depends on what exactly you're trying to do. I discovered nix years ago when I was trying to install a newer version of Java than was available in the Ubuntu repos, and the "nix-env" method (just using nix as a package manager without the declarative config) was the only thing that just worked with no hassle.
Are you healthy? Look back at your lifestyle on My Wellness Meter
Youre exactly right. The average new home has twice the square footage it did in the 70s. [1]

[1] https://fee.org/articles/new-homes-today-have-twice-the-squa...
> too serious

Can you clarify this? I can guess but I'm wondering what the fuller explanation is?
Yeah, this is my family. We don't have kids, but we probably wouldn't have D+ if it didn't come bundled with our Verizon bill. I don't know how everyone else is managing, but I'm suuuuuuuper burned out on superhero and star wars movies. It really feels like Disney in particular but Hollywood more generally need to branch out more and not rely so much on stamping out franchise films--they're good for an occasional flick, but there needs to be more substance on offer (if the market doesn't already agree with me on this, I suspect they will in time).
Debit card -> Add to ApplePay/ GPay -> Touch the POS -> Done. UPI is good for 3rd word as a) most merchants cant afford (wont get a POS) b) need working capital daily (as working capital loans are not available or merchants don't have a bank account).

From a customer POV, UPI with it's lower success rates, no chargeback/dispute mechanism and with higher latency (take out your phone -> unlock -> open app -> click scan QR button -> enter pass -> Look at loader for 3-10 sec) is worse than debit card set up on phone / watch.
Funny somehow France had green energy decades ago and France had low energy prices for decades. Really crazy how expensive nuclear is.

Specially now where you have Germany who spend lots on renewables using many 100s of billions to buffer the impacts of their policies. For that price they could have just transformed to nuclear.

Germany could literally have spent the same amount of money over the last 20 and next 5 years and have done what France did in the 70/80s and they would be almost 100% green by now. But nuclear is expensive of course.

And of course those reactors would work for the next 80-100 years, but I guess its much better to rebuild wind turbines 4 times over during that time.

> in steel refining

Far better to use the technology the Boston Metal uses.

> in the future direction of aviation

Questionable. Either use batteries or just go with full synfuels.
It's not the DIY aspect^, it's the idea of ProPress joint sitting pressurized behind a wall for a decade.

^ I'm knowledgeable enough to do my own wiring and plumbing, but pay for licensed/bonded contractors instead. I sleep better at night and my insurance company probably does as well.
Not every immigrant is doing hard labor for minimum wage or less... Those are the exploited ones, not people hanging on HN.
This comment represents the analysis I remember understanding at the time. I was disappointed with AMD.
> //sidenote we also want to abolish all public unions (including teachers union) as public sector employees use their union to corrupt the election process in their favor screwing over the tax payer who ends up having no one in their favor in contract talks.

This sounds like trading away some freedom of association for a small group of people — ostensibly for the greater good — which isn’t very pro-liberty in my eyes. Where I live, while the taxpayers do not attend these contract talks we have the final word in that we ultimately decide to pass the school budget or not through voting.
You ask "does anyone believe this"? I decided to think about whether I believe OpenAI is "open, academic, capped-profit for a noble reason collective".

I'll list some pros/contras in no particular order:

CONTRA: I can't download ChatGPT and run it locally. Why not? Clearly they are hoarding it.

PRO: They genuinely overtrain toward responses that the model judges benefit humanity, to the point of failing at the task. I can't think of a specific example but everyone knows what I mean. It is a frustration to users and doesn't help their image. They seem to be overtraining this way out of the goodness of their hearts.

PRO: its non-profit or capped-profit structure would let it behave in the way it claims it is behaving. (By contrast, a for-profit public company in some sense has a fiduciary responsibility to maximize value for shareholders rather than benefit for humanity.)

PRO: ChatGPT is available for free and Dall-E gives some free credits.

CONTRA: Dall-E doesn't give enough free credits. It might have a longer wait time for free users but it shouldn't hard cap them at a certain number of free credits per month. For example perhaps free users could not be subject to any reasonable usage limits (a few hundred images per day should be fine) but could have to wait 1 extra minute for each one.

CON: its architecture isn't open, it doesn't share how it trained its models, it doesn't publish its datasets and parameters that would let other companies achieve the same results (reproduce their work and have their own version), its research is closed off and unavailable.

CON: the company is not directly applying AI to proactively solving social problems.

CON: (debatable) some users who are not sources of revenue have been banned. From experimentong with a chatbot (not any hard legal limits just things like exploring their sexuality with the chatbot. It's just a chatbot, it would make sense to exclude such conversations from further training data or feedback, keep male and female researchers at OpenAI from having to review unsavory conversations, or even warn or at most temporarily ban the user. An account closure is super extreme for natural forms of interaction that don't go near legal limits. It does not seem like an open company. Alternative viewpoint: on the other hand, we keep certain flamebait subjects out of HN. Perhaps having certain subjects banable is necessary for their open mission at a larger level - specifically, users will stop going there for sex since they associate it purely with productivity, similar to how we associate HN with intellectual curiosity, which is a result of very heavy moderation here and without which this place would not exist in its form?)

Overall based on the above considerations, I think that OpenAI is not "open" but if it started publishing downloadable models for anyone to run, I would feel differently.
Resolving support issues is the only one I can think of. I have seen a non-trivial amount of Stripe integrators have to resort to social media, HN or reddit to get any real response to issues like Stripe holding their balance hostage.
So the astronauts could read the numbers, but could they do anything about them? I'm guessing that it is difficult to make manual actions with any precision while being subjected to that sort of vibration. Alternatively, if there was nothing they could do at that stage, did they need to read the numbers?
You organized student strikes in the 60's because they wouldn't let you read gay-sex children's books in school?
Cool! I am a paying customer for OpenAI's APIs, very enthusiastic. I am also happy that ChatGPT will have a sustainable pay-for-use income model.

There are two good thing's about Deepmind's project: using RL it will find information sources to back up what it says, and, it will be competition for OpenAI.
I just paid $8000 to get my copper redone in PEX. After the tenth pin hole leak and lots of shark bite fixes, I am not fond of copper.
> Three months later Netflix cut prices and referred to Amazon’s assumed imminent entry to the space; Netflix’s stock slid again.

I never understood why Netflix would continue to become one of the largest AWS customers after Amazon entered the space. Will someone please enlighten me?
If you have any info on this, post it.
>6 or 7 layers in sheathing today.

What do you mean by this?
I used it at the time.

It was very ambitious, supporting a scripting language for what are now called smart contracts, and very complex payment schemes.

It was also a huge pain in the ass to integrate, and the user payment flow was wonky, with a redirect to multiple amazon branded pages to log in to amazon, then redirect back to finish the transaction.

I've not used stripe, but people who have tell me it is super easy to integrate.
How many businesses built on GPT are boiled down to bespoke prompts? I guess secured seed prompts are next feature for GPT…
This is really impressive, I tried making my own SSG in shell scripts after looking at all these bloated ways to do it and realizing "this is something I could literally do in ten minutes of bash". It works for my use case but you went WAY further with the concept, good stuff
Dear pharma, please (please, please!) make something to fight food addiction?
You likely need to take a step back, and reconsider your position. the browser you choose to use, doesn't support a feature that is required by many cyber security insurance policies.

I feel it is very likely that you have been provided with a better method to check your mail on a mobile device than in the browser on your phone.

it seems very unlikely that if your company is doing compliance that the suggested method isn't to use the outlook app itself.

So it maybe worth considering are the policies and settings ridiculous, or are you?
This is a 100% fair point and I do agree that people can be overzealous with pushing Nix. For many projects, Nix is indeed overkill, and it's worth pointing out that some tools, like pnpm, have taken important cues from Nix. In many cases good enough really _is_ good enough and saying "just install npm using Homebrew or whatever you prefer" is totally fine. But when good enough isn't good enough and teammates and would-be contributors burn an hour installing dependencies just to push a small fix, that's where Nix can really shine. Another sweet spot is larger orgs where knowing that you can run `nix develop` in any repo and get everything you need is a legit superpower.
The thing about anecdotes about schools is that you actually can find examples of a lot of bad behavior—because there are lots and lots of schools and lots and lots of teachers and sometimes those teachers are malicious or are catastrophically stupid, just like any other group of people that large.

But when you dig a little farther most of that stuff's usually handled just fine at the school or district level. There's very little justification for involving state or even county level government in addressing things like inappropriate lessons or content, because they do happen but are not an actual systemic problem because they're already dealt with by the existing, very-local systems.
I think people will bring their baggage with them ‘into their rich life’ as any major life change doesn’t really get you away from yourself. I certainly do okay staying lonely in a single house in a single city.
Sweden’s National Library Turns Page to AI to Parse Centuries of Data
Microsoft being late to the party is going to cost them a lot of money.

Google and Facebook are the clear leaders in AI and they been spending a lot of money building out their AI infrastructure over the last decade. You haven't heard much about Microsoft's investments other than them buying rights to OpenAI models. Seems like they could have saved a lot of money if they started investing years ago.

Google bought DeepMind for 400m 8 years ago. You could argue DeepMind is on the same level or above OpenAI.
I recommend to sit back and wait until the hype has subsided. Later, when the starting problems subsided and documentation has improved, it might be worth a try. Provided that ever happens.
Data Rabbit was inspired by Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle talk. One of the strengths of Clojure is the interactive coding experience you get using the REPL. Data Rabbit adds visual controls and data visualisations.

https://www.datarabbit.com/
I had severe anxiety issues I hadn't had my entire life, or actually not since the last time I had a terrible boss. They got promoted out, and magically my anxiety went away. I had not made the connection until after they left. I thought they weren't a great manager, but I didn't realize how bad they were until I was no longer under them. I felt directionless under them, they would ask me to spend more time on a project to see if I could accomplish some unlikely goal (my job is very research focused), the criticize me later for taking too long. They regularly made jokes about firing people, etc. They hated their job (being a manager) and it showed. I thought it was kind of funny at first, thought it was part of their personality, but didn't realize it was actually having a severe background effect on my sense of accomplishment in the job.

I was on medication for all this, I think there were other factors, but it was a massive relief when they were gone. I am now on a new team and killing it, later I found out the manager trash talked me behind my back, other people left as a direct result of working with them/under them, and their attitude is carried into other environments and their new role, where its highly unprofessional.
> You can build an awesome home today out of excellent materials like engineered wood, high quality OSB/ply/ZipSystem, and of course whatever you want to spend on flooring, siding, windows, etc.

Of course, there will always be different quality materials available at different prices.

But I would bet the lowest quality house with the lowest quality materials and build quality 100 years ago is much worse than the same today.

> Flooring is sad today in cheap to moderate homes.

I never understood this lament. It has never made a lick of difference to my quality of life if the hard flooring under me was tile/real wood/granite/LVT. Whether or not it is a heated floor is the only thing that has increased the utility I get from the floor.

Otherwise, the LVT I can buy at Costco gives me better utility than some fancy real wood floor. I can not give a shit about it, not spend a dime or second maintaining it, and fix it in 15 minutes. And you can change the whole look for much cheaper, and get it in whatever design/color you want.