skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are defect detectors on rail lines, "hot box" detectors [1] [2], that are infrared detectors used to observe and report bearing failures on a train. My understanding of the situation is that with the current rail labor configuration, railroad workers are only permitted ~90 seconds to verify the operational capacity of the wheelset on a rail car vs a previous average of 3 minutes.

Also, more importantly, someone at a railroad indicated "crews are no longer notified of the defects. The dispatch makes that call and then notifies the crew", which means train operators might not even be aware they have a dangerous car in operation (and the data indicates a bearing can fail outright within minutes of being observed as being "hot" [3]).

High level, this is a result of "Precision Railroading" [4], which is just a fancy term of running a railroad with just enough labor to continue to operate. Congress voted to prevent union railroad labor from striking [5], so what actions take place after this incident remain to be seen. The Purpose Of The System Is What It Does [6], and as designed, this system is configured to extract billions of dollars in profits from rail freight operations [7] while avoiding liability for any damages caused or labor costs that can be avoided.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defect_detector

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_box

[3] https://doi.org/10.1080/23248378.2019.1636721

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_railroading

[5] https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/02/business/railway-labor-act-fr...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

[7] https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/24/business/union-pacific-railro...
Duolingo is a great start. It takes a lot of effort to get those trophies. I think they are getting better with AI/ML to interactively tutor you as well. Personally, if you can afford in-person or virtual practice with a native speaker twice a week (about $30-40/week via iTalki), I think that is when you make the jump from dabbling in a language to becoming a serious student.
Eerily similar to the recent Netflix movie "White Noise": https://www.netflix.com/title/81317320
For now. Realms will address this.
> I don’t think it’s so tin foil hatty

True, it's more bug-eyed crazy than tin foil hatty.
It works on HN for at least the reason that HN post titles are often relatable. The same can't be said about paper titles even if you're in the field.
I would genuinely consider paying double if not more what I pay for WSJ if I got news that had rich citations and raw sources linked and archived so you can never go "oh darn where did that video go?" and have total certainty that I can look at raw sources and make a more informed decision.
They could let the Donbas vote, as was pledged in Minsk Agreement.
Well by this reasoning your parents own your copyrights.
The difference is that if you ask an artist to take a cute selfie, and you ask an orangutan to take a cute selfie, the artist owns the copyright in the former and the orangutan owns the copyright in the latter. Presumably we can train orangutans to take good photos, but it seems that the person most involved with everything around making it possible for orangutans to take photos owns the copyright, and not the orangutan. See (not orangutan but macaque) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

Looking at your comment that supposes that the legal system should treat AI as different as other tools, I suppose it should then also look at animals as legal persons capable of authorship and creativity (it already does see corporations as legal persons, but not capable of authorship I guess). Now, once animals can have creative output that is alienable, what about all the other, material, output that human society relies on?
Then maybe this isn't about you, specifically?

How are the mainstream media dealing with it?
thats more fees than usa :D

this is usa https://imgur.com/a/FJaKHvS
I'm glad we had a similar reaction because I went in with the mindset of concrete dimensions. It helped me a lot in Chemistry classes with all those mols.
The Churning US Labor Market and Why We Need “Labor Anthropologists.”
They are still being installed. Its not an abandoned project.
Perhaps they meant Greta Van Susteren.
ChatGPT is pretty impressive but it’s obviously a far cry from real intelligence. At the same time, consider the resources required to train such a thing. How many dollars, how much time, how much RAM, how much power spent to make one of these things? If bigger truly is the answer (debatable), how much more expensive will it be to create/operate an AI that actually works? Is it worth it? Our own brains are already quite powerful. Maybe we could just try using them better and avoid the hackiness of fake intelligence.
Your first paragraph reminded me of this article: https://david-gilbertson.medium.com/im-harvesting-credit-car... Imagine this scenario taking place with this package if someone got ahold of his NPM account.
What is FI?
> Truly without snark, what is it about y that makes it easier and dy/dx harder?

Because you can measure y at a point in time. If you want to know if someone can operate an espresso machine and make good coffees, you can just ask them to do it, and watch them.

If you want to know whether someone can learn to operate an espresso machine, you can:

A) Ask them about how they learn new things, or

B) Ask them to learn something new, and see how well they do, or

C) Test them on multiple unrelated things, as being able to do a wide range of stuff that takes time to learn is evidence that they can learn stuff.

A is tricky: someone who is good at interviewing could give answers that would fool most people. So it doesn't really measure dy/dx.

B is great if you have the time, as it directly measures how fast and well they can learn something unfamiliar.

C is good because you don't need to have them learn something new, but it's bad because you'd need to spend many hours to cover enough breadth AND you'd need to be competent at testing this broad range of skills.

> I wonder if y is easier to fake? You can study the coding problems, there are whole books on that strategy.

Yes, you can fake y specifically for FAANG-style coding interviews. But being able to fake y in this context is pretty good evidence you can learn new stuff!
I feel it's already at the edge of being useful in practice. Compute and memory are cheap, and we're wasting a lot of it - so even with overhead this big, simple calculations wrapped in FHE wouldn't be prohibitively expensive - and may just be useful enough to create new types of software systems.
Pretty sure that's constitutional.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone
If you’re really eager to try it out, then apparently you will need to set up the sliding sync proxy in front of your homeserver.
Because if the media starts covering it hard, way more than half the population of the US will plug their ears and start saying "LA LA LA LA LA! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" really loudly.

If this gets coverage, suddenly lots of inconvenient questions start popping up around monopoly, safety regulations and OSHA, and union workers warning about this 2 months ago.

But, hey, everybody got their Amazon packages by Christmas, so if a piece of shit town in Ohio has to pay the price that's just the way it goes, knowwhatimean?
I am intrigued by your outrage (seriously). I'm curious to know what you are hoping the world's media will accomplish there?

On the one hand train derailment, chemical fire, environmental damage - it makes for a story but really not a terribly interesting one (to me). It's certainly an unwelcome event, but there doesn't seem to be anything deeper than what you see on the surface.

Is there a deeper story here? Is there some ongoing malfeasance that should be spotlighted?

I completely understand that for those who live in East Palestine this may be a life altering event. But shitty events routinely happen to lots of people every day. I guess I'm missing what makes this special.

Of course my sympathies are with those affected by this, I'm not heartless, but I'm (honestly) not sure what you hope the world's media will achieve.
I will try that next time. I don't think that occurred to me because the Zoom app experience is very good. What I have been doing instead is joining from the Teams app on my phone unless I must share content.
This is good. Pretty much everyone has a preference one way or the other. No one like it mixed.
Berkeley Mono has probably the widest "i" and "l" of any mono font. It appears to be wider than SF Mono. If anything, they are too wide.
> It's tough and embarrassing

You've got this. Try to remember to record yourself speaking periodically with others so that you can see how much you are improving.

> visiting Glasgow years past

I remember being in Gatwick airport and hearing my first heavily-accented English. Maybe it was a Scottish brogue. I could not really understand anything.
> How are the mainstream media dealing with it?

Apparently CNN reported on this 8 days ago[0] (when it happened). Fox is running coverage live as we speak[1]. If there is any evidence of a cover-up, it has yet to be presented.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/05/us/east-palestine-ohio-train-...

[1] https://www.foxnews.com/us/ohio-train-derailment-prompts-wat...
> There are many ways to earn money from films, music, art, books, etc., without needing copyright.

I see this opinion all over the place, but it never seems to be coming from actual working artists, and I am curious why people who don't have any skin in the game are comfortable speaking for those who do. As somebody who's published code under relatively permissive FOSS licenses, I don't think that perspective is very relevant given the different incentives involved.
> could say it's an illusion but whose?

There is no "who", there are only thoughts without true subjects. The illusion is a perception that entails a false thought, if taken at face value.

> But my internal point of view, my perspective (which I know is separate from others because I know nothing about their internal state) exists and is something I struggle to understand in the traditional framework of 'consciousness is just something that brains do'

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119
One of the chemicals that is produced by burning this delicious cocktail is Phosgene Gas ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosgene ) which among its numerous delightful uses is a nerve agent
I found that StyleCop and FxCop helped me learn engineering best practices when I was out of college. I highly recommend setting up ES Lint (if your codebase is in JavaScript) or the likes. Having engineering best practices enforced during code reviews helps too.
Mozilla's explanation for not supporting Web SQL:

"Beyond HTML5: Database APIs and the Road to IndexedDB" (June 2010)
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis...
The parent was asking for the correct form, the syntax of EDN is necessary but not sufficient to specify this. A type (or a schema) is needed. Even if documented manually ad-hoc, that is better than nothing and would stop people needed to search the internet for examples.
These points are all great.

I'm not sure I understand your point about everyone thinking GPT is real AI. Even luddites don't think that.

I haven't met anyone who thinks that GPT is the end of AI (maybe the beginning).

People are excited about GPT because it offloads certain tasks well enough and accurately enough that it's virtually the first practical use of such tech in the world.

That alone is worth being excited about
> It's being marketed as an LLM that you can chat with.

... clearly not, right? It isn't just being marketed to those of us who understand what an "LLM" is. It is being marketed to a mainstream audience as "an artificial intelligence that can answer your questions". And often it can! But it also "hallucinates" totally made up BS, and people who are asking it arbitrary questions largely aren't going to have the discernment to tell when that is happening.
Teams is terrible on Linux. Maybe it sucks less on other platforms. Academia standardized on zoom+slack in like 2016 in part because of excellent cross-platform support.
If it involved human intervention in the form of curation, then yes.
most ppl don't use calculator to convert foreign currencies.
As someone commented, this example is not so mysterious. It's just a change of variables to make the argument of exp() dimensionless.

Here's a good example of the power of dimensional analysis: how small should the Earth be to collapse into a black hole?

Knowing nothing about the problem, you know it should involve at least two things: the mass of the Earth, M, and the gravitational constant G.

Since F=ma and F=GMm/d^2, we know that GM has units of distance^2 * acceleration (check that). This is equal to distance * (distance/time)^2.

We want a radius, which is a distance. And we almost have it! At least if we can get rid of the (distance/time)^2 factor. But that's a velocity^2! Now, what's a velocity that should be natural in questions about black holes and general relativity? Why the speed of light c, of course.

So, we can guess that the answer is GM/c^2.

Now compare this with the real answer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius
Easy enough to just federally fund a bounty based off qalys saved or something similar. The acts of innovating and manufacturing don't need to be linked.
Talk to your local train union guys sometime. That’s basically normal
I like old mono. I was reading Guy Steele's Common Lisp book and loved the font so much I looked it up. Turns out it's called Letter Gothic Standard, and it looks awesome in code: https://www.wfonts.com/font/letter-gothic-std
I'm doubtful on the HF since it's not vinyl fluoride. More likely HCl.
Likely, there's some phosgene, though I've read that in large fires that mostly get's burned up. Of course there's CO. The liquid remnants are carcinogenic.

https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=10699...

https://nj.gov/health/eoh/rtkweb/documents/fs/2001.pdf
So the live coverage from Fox is 8 days late, right?
Webex/Outlook/Teams/Zoom/Slack/Gmail - None of these are any inferior or superior to each other (maybe not at the start when the product was launched - there could be big feature/usability gap - but once they are matured which most of these - not much differentiators to matter) and literally none of these products to be used at any corporations are evaluated by their technical or usability excellence - it is simply vetoed or decided by the corporation CEO know which vendor's CEO/CFO well and what both companies agree to barter (use my product and in exchange I will use your product in my company kind of thing). For a end user in any company - unless you are super advance user or some niche feature - any of these software should just work well for day to day usage.
> The basic, $45,000 version of Ferrell’s Blazer EV can drive 247 miles on a charge. To go farther, you’ll need to pony up $47,595 to get 290 miles of range or $51,995 to reach 320 miles. The gaudy $100,000 launch edition of GMC’s electric Sierra is rated for 400 miles, but the entry-level models of that truck are widely expected to have a diminished range to go with the price cut when they arrive. For the revived Hummer, too, driving range is an upsell. Eighty grand buys 250 miles, while spending six figures raises the range to 350.

Those vehicles are far from representative of EVs in general. Consider that the Chevy Bolt is $26,500 with 259 miles of range, and the Hyundai Ioniq 5 is $47,450 with 303 miles of range.

> not all those miles are usable: [...] range anxiety limits the number of useful miles at the battery’s bottom end, where drivers can’t risk running out of juice.

When you drive a gas car, do you drive another 30 miles after the gas light comes on before you fill up?
It's not even that shocking of a term. Pretty much every single gym these days uses facial recognition on their CCTV to prevent key sharing.
Yeah, in this case it's a bit misplaced. The first thing your high school calculus course would have you do would be called “u-substitution”, and if you did directly u = x √(a), du = √(a) dx you would get the same immediately, or if you did something stranger like u = a x², dx = ½ du/√(a u) you would get

(1/√a) ∫ exp(-u) u^-½ du

which furnishes a handy proof that (-½)! = √π, once you know the Gaussian integral.
A very sales answer.
Financial independence.
As soon as someone signs a mortgage, the whole incentive structure flips. When you are looking to buy then affordability is in your interest, but as soon as you do you effectively join a cartel that benefits from restricting supply.

There aren’t that many other things with a market dynamic this perverse.

It’s a horrible system. There are measures that can limit how bad it can get like zoning reform but I can’t think of a way to fundamentally fix the whole incentive structure. Maybe taxing real estate capital gains more?
Rare Asteroid May Be Worth 70k Times the Global Economy
$500 a Month, No Strings: Chicago Experiments with a Guaranteed Income
How is it Bhopal-level bad, exactly? An estimated 15,000 to 20,000 deaths occurred in Bhopal. How many have died in Ohio so far?

Not saying it's not tragic, or that it's not outrageous, but reckless exaggeration doesn't help.
> Engineers at LinkedIn were livid about being forced to move off gmail.

Is that really worth being livid over? Outlook is fine. I left gmail a few years ago and haven't looked back. I survived.
As long as you accept that AGI is in the realms of fiction, you can certainly have a good time on the moral and ethical questions around just engagement with another sentient entity class. The question of identity and purpose and rights are there. What would turning one off against its will be? What if turning it back on destroys it's sense of self?

But.. do remember AGI still has a huge IF in front of it. Like "if aliens come" or "if fusion becomes ubiquitous"

The statement made regarding electricity "what is it for? / I have no idea but I am sure you will find ways to tax it" probably hold true as well: displacing human labour even in highly repetitive tasks has economic downsides for some.

Lots of scifi here. Marvin Minsky worked with Harry Harrison on one, I wrote to him about it: he wasn't entirely happy with what Harrison did to his theories.
The reason for that isn't so much that they are running a "if you have to ask..." strategy (though it's definitely one of the reasons)

it's more that every sale is a complex sale that makes it difficult or lossy to advertise a flat rate.

That or the price is a competitive advantage and they are trying to mitigate a race to the bottom
Afternoon Project: CryptMaster 2001
HF? Vinyl chloride does not contain fluorine. It would be HCl instead, which is a naturally occurring mineral acid. The acid rain is going to be a disaster in the short term, but it's not that bad. Phosgene is fairly toxic when inhaled from at a significant concentration, but also dissipates and doesn't stay that long in the atmosphere.
I tried a few times, but all I got was stupid loses :(
First-of-its-kind study shows how traffic pollution impairs brain function
Well. There is little doubt that he would be a good fit for at least a normal Engineer position in any of these companies. If they didn't hire him yet your guess as of why is as good as mine.

Edit: This was not meant to be read in a negative kind of way. I'd try to hire him if I had an open position to fit.
That's interesting, I hadn't seen that.

But from that link, it seems the decision was not reversed again, they just clarified that the investigation is still ongoing -- that is, they have not yet decided whether they should have granted the copyright or not.
I don't know how the Facebook end of the targeting worked, but having your friend's name and email address on any number of probably-even-freely-available lists seems highly probable, no need to autogenerate them
I’d like to hear what the actual consequences of these leaks and subsequent combustion are without the alarmism (which, even if warranted, doesn’t need to be in every actual explanation of what’s going on!)

Right now, I see the EPA saying ‘it’s okay to return to the area’ (not ‘everything is fine’), and alarmist commentators listing chemical names and saying ‘this is bad’ and ‘Bhopal’ with no actual explanation of the mechanisms of ‘bad’.

I don’t know what the truth is. I’d _like_ to be able to believe the EPA rather than random internet commentators.
Yep! We've been testing it out ourselves and Roblox does a great job at importing our models. There are a few quirks (Roblox can't perfectly handle our trees and Subway entrances), but I'm sure your daughter will have a lot of fun with them. My one piece of advice is to start small when downloading areas and slowly move your way up in size because Roblox is not always able to process larger models.
Bhopal was probably an order of magnitude 'worse' than this.
For some electric vehicle owners, recharging now more costly than filling up
It's a mature market; Capterra lists 53 solutions and has pricing on many of them. https://www.capterra.com/text-to-speech-software/

What is your budget? It's likely a situation of "if you have to ask, you cannot afford it."

The opportunity cost for a larger firm to serve a startup may exceed the likely three year revenue you can offer.
It's 2,000 people in the town itself and 20,000 within a 10 mile radius.

We're quite lucky this did not happen in Pittsburgh or Columbus.
I see a million tweets on Twitter about this story that "I haven't heard of."
The TL;DR of the ongoing story is the train engineers tried to strike recently over these kinds of issues and our Congress stopped them from doing so.

Now it’s an massive disaster that we were warned was coming and the basic measures to fix it(like hiring more engineers and letting them have sick days) won’t happen in a sane way.
Pretty much all my tax policies boil down to getting rid of super corrupt breaks to energy and ag, and a 110% tax on income over 10 million, and Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax. Confident we can build some baller cribs on that kind of cheddar.
How is that any different than the art generators? Most of the content they are trained on is not licensed even under a copyleft model, and rather have all rights reserved. The software equivalent is proprietary closed-source, or possibly available-source.
Can you elaborate why do you think so? I'm not asking for correct answer on this question of course (indeed if candidate would answer correctly it means that he knew the answer and the question had no point). I'm expecting to confuse candidate by providing him correct answer and then ask him to find out why his assumption differs from correct answer. This is common in software development and observing how does one tries to understand wrong code provides valuable insight on his skills.

Another question that I like is asking to find out issues in one fragment of code. This fragment is crafted to contain style issues, some bugs and architecture issues. This allows to understand the level of candidate: which issues can he spot. Not ideal, but I think it works good enough.
A few questions:

1) Do you think that a town getting poisoned is not "special"?

2) Do you think that the 5000 people that lived on said town are out of life-threatening danger?

3) Do you think it's only said town and said 5000 people that are threatened by this?

4) Don't you think that working conditions need to be regulated in order to be safe?

5) Don't you think that this disaster could help us prevent other ones?
Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD)
Has anyone used Vaultree[0]? Their product is FHE-as-a-Service and they claim "near plaintext speed".

I've seen a few FHE posts roll across the front page recently and they all make me think of Vaultree because they sound like they've got it sorted.

[0] https://www.vaultree.com/how-it-works/
This is fine but we can't have nuclear reactors.
Nobody needs that much platinum.