skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I were to walk into someone's home or office and see this desk I would immediately make some very unflattering assumptions about that person.

Teenage Engineering has officially jumped the shark.
Android, acquisition
Productivity apps, acquisition
Maps, acquisition
YouTube, acquisition

Where’s google latest acquisition and what happened to their M&A arm?
Unfortunately this issue has multiple factors that contributed, and weakening the legislation and regulations that were put in place to avoid issues like this by the Obama administration:

"The sequence of events began a decade ago in the wake of a major uptick in derailments of trains carrying crude oil and hazardous chemicals, including a New Jersey train crash that leaked the same toxic chemical as in Ohio.

In response, the Obama administration in 2014 proposed improving safety regulations for trains carrying petroleum and other hazardous materials. However, after industry pressure, the final measure ended up narrowly focused on the transport of crude oil and exempting trains carrying many other combustible materials, including the chemical involved in this weekend’s disaster." [0]

Subsequently by the Trump Administration:

"The AAR lobbying group concurred that “the costs of the ECP rule substantially outweigh its benefits,” and claimed the mandate would cost them about $3 billion — or roughly 2 weeks of their operating revenue in a typical year. The FRA estimated the brake requirement would cost about half a billion.

Trump’s Transportation Department ultimately rescinded the brake rule in late 2017." [0]

According to federal investigators, there was a mechanical issue with a car's axle, which basically ends with a derailment. The ECP brakes may have lessened hazard by braking all the cars immediately, classifying the train as HHFT may have meant the train would be going slower than it was, I couldn't find any data about the speed the train was moving at.

This seems to be an area of bipartisan consensus, putting the interests of big business above those of the people.

[0] - https://www.levernews.com/rail-companies-blocked-safety-rule...
I think a lot of us desperately want it to be aliens because life is so dull.
Being hidden for longer than your opponent is always going to be useful, regardless of whether a human or an AI is actually flying.
And the military missed with a $500k heat seeking missile!

[0]https://www.foxnews.com/us/us-military-first-shot-unknown-oc...
We don't know what the evidence is -- it's all classified. For all we know, the government(s) know exactly what these thing are and just aren't saying.

All we can do is speculate right now, and speculating wildly unlikely phenomena for which there is almost no evidence of having happened before seems illogical.
Pure software can't actually generate mathematically-provable random numbers unless given purely random data to start with.

So pseudo removes total dependency on physical events.

Why you don't want to be dependent on physical events:

- You never know if physical events are truly random unless you test them. Your physical RNG source may be broken or compromised.

- A good strategy is to use multiple physical sources of randomness, and this can be any number of things, including modern CPUs with RDRAND (if you trust them), USB attached devices, sampling ADC noise on your sound card, timing network events, etc. Any/all of that has to be combined somehow anyway. Getting data from some of these may be slow.

- So if an operating system needs random numbers quickly, for SSL key generation, UUIDs, nonces, etc. it should use properly seeded pseduorandom numbers.
Apple came after Blackberry. Dell came after Commodore / Amiga. Facebook came after MySpace. Google came after Altavisa and Yahoo. Verizon came after AOL. Alternating Current came after Direct Current.

Microsoft Word came after WordPerfect. Chrome came after Netscape Communicator. Python came after Perl. Nintendo came after Atari.

I feel like first movers advantage is a myth.
What has "wokeness" to do with any of that?
How about this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34773513#34774984
at least the "too much money" part will probably stop soon, with social commerce + chatbots eating into search revenue
Thats some dedication, i applaud the author for keeping her kids private
I think people combine leery and wary in their mind and end up with weary, which they don't intend. I see it a lot.

In the case of the parent comment however, weary does work.
your car has libcurl on it, but not Rust.
> who do we trust less, technologists or populist politicians?

Neither. Luckily you only have to stop the technologists, since politicians are all technologically illiterate.
I don't believe that means much; getting the same response twice just means the AI drew the same conclusions from a similar prompt.
Depends on the specific religion. Just look at how many denominations/factions there are in a given faith.

And the article seems to be less targeting people having fun with the concept and more that fringe minority who take such things seriously, and perhaps indirectly journalists/bloggers who prey on such people for ad revenue.

Also if there's one thing I learned over the past few years, never underestimate the ignorance of the masses. I remember reading about a lawsuit against Walmart, and the Walmart legal team released a pretty boring PR statement saying "we are looking into the complaint...blah blah blah", and the most up-voted comment was along the lines of "well you can tell how much Walmart cares about this lawsuit when they just dismiss it as a "complaint"". Never mind that "complaint" is just the correct technical legal term, you file a "complaint" with the relevant court to start a lawsuit. Not defending Walmart, but clearly a lot of people were getting spun up over nothing and reveling in it, and it isn't healthy. I imagine the Alien stuff falls into the same category, albeit less on HN than elsewhere.
White Noise had several plots over chapters. The plume scenes were a fantastic balance of hilarious and scary:

Summary: Chapter 21
Jack finds Heinrich on the roof, looking through a pair of binoculars at a distant black cloud of smoke. Heinrich informs Jack that a train car has been derailed. Later, they both return to watch the cloud. Heinrich says that the burning chemical in the air is Nyodene Derivative, or Nyodene D., a toxic substance that causes lumps in rats. The radio has already listed nausea, skin irritation, and sweaty palms as potential symptoms of exposure. Jack tries to reassure Heinrich that the smoke won’t come toward them and continues to act comfortable and indifferent. He sits down to pay the bills, even as rumors of increasing danger come in over the radio and phone. Sirens begin to blare through the neighborhood, but Jack declares that such things can’t happen in a town like theirs. New symptoms are reported on the radio, and the cloud is given a new name: the airborne toxic event. Heinrich tries to get his father to acknowledge the danger, but Jack declares that he is a college professor, not to mention the chair of a department, and can’t imagine someone like him fleeing something like an airborne toxic event. The family anxiously gathers for dinner as the air raid warnings grow closer.

https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/whitenoise/section7/

https://www.wlwt.com/article/ohio-train-derailment-white-noi...

https://twitter.com/Marfoogle/status/1625323668397256704
> Search [...] is practically unusable today

I keep seeing this sentiment around here, which confuses me because I think gsearch is better than ever. I find what I need instantly in 90% of cases, and when I don't, other engines don't really do better. Granted, I use ublock, but even with that turned off I'm not bothered by the ads. Can you provide examples of a query which gives unusable results, but Bing (or whatever) works?
Do you know the answers to these two questions, or do you think that stating them without answers will make readers assume the answers are both obvious and supportive of the case you're making?

> Don’t get me wrong

You haven't said anything to be wrong about.
I don't think they will, if only because Reddit also has plenty of "NSFW" content, and there would be a ton of pushback on adding ID verification to Reddit.
An interesting F# blog that was found for me: https://www.planetgeek.ch/
It makes killers safer, until their own weapons will be targeted at them.

I have a strong belief that the current AI weapons race could be the last one.

The world should look for a better consensus between all the species, not for a domination.
AI ethics is also big at OpenAI tbf. OpenAI actually releases major models to the public, Google looks like the IBM to their Microsoft right now.

Google has created things like TensorFlow tho, OpenAI is flashy but only time will tell if that leads to real, monetizable results
The world we need is one where AI driven weapons can continue to seek out and kill people long after their masters are dead.
> Extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding, as Avi Loeb says

In this case it doesn't. the expensive part was tracking the objects and taking one down, after that it's just recovering and studying the debris. If it's alien, it should be easy to tell.
Incumbent companies have huge advantages, and it takes a lot to dislodge them even with new technology (as in your Amazon example.) Basically they have to be unwilling to match competitors' tech over a long period of time.

In my life I've seen that happen a handful of times. When it does, it's usually due to (1) tragic management ineptitude over an extended period of time, or (2) fear of cannibalizing an existing profitable business (e.g.,: Kodak refusing to move from film to digital cameras, or the car industry being slow to re-invest away from ICE production.) I see no evidence (yet) that AI-enhanced search is going to threaten Google's core business of "displaying ads on relevant search results", so the main risk here is long-term management failure. Right now Google's management is doing everything it can to signal (to shareholders and partners) that they're going to throw every resource they have at the problem.
Time for all those libertarians in red states to speak up in outrage against banning books.
I understand your point and perhaps I'm in fierce agreement.

OTOH, things like parser combinators are much more ergonomic in Haskell than Rust.
Excel is a lot more user friendly interface for data analysis/manipulation, than a raw CSV file.
I think to start imagining what the rest of the universe might contain one has to have moved past the god delusion, which rules out a lot of people in developing countries.
I'm not sure I agree. If anything someone with experience has first-hand knowledge of the perils of buffer overflows, double frees, and other memory bugs. Sure we can go into more detail but it's a little disingenuous to act as if someone with experience writing C would not be able to fill in the blanks.
I'm looking forward to Pixel Purse and its successor G-Billfold.
Actually what I recall was one side had real pilots, but the side SG1 came in on were flying drones. They were offered a chance to fly themselves then O'Neil was disturbed to see there was a person in the other aircraft.
Sundar is perfect example of an incompetent professional CEO who exceeds at schmoozing and company politics. He's even ex-McKinsey...

Works for managing large corps through "business-as-usual" peacetimes but as soon as change & innovation is needed it's a no-go.
There is not a carcinogen in the air. They evacuated the town while they performed the controlled burn, but now the combustion products (not really carcinogens) have dispersed and it’s safe to return.
I agree. I don't know if this is true in every state, but in some this requires you to update your voter registration.
You have a shape which can be either a circle which then has a radius, or a rectangle which has width/height. The shape cannot be anything else, this is important and something you want to rely on and express in code. In C++ you can't easily do this on the language level. In Rust (albeit in a somewhat limited way) and functional languages, you can, via enums where variants can host other types.
I've done a lot of philosophizing on the nature of units and there's a bit of an interesting wriggle there. Most people think "length" and "time" are different things, such that 1m + 1s = garbage. Mathy physics people* say "Aha! They're really the same thing, just set c (the speed of light) to 1!" This, then, raises an interesting question: is there anywhere you can't do this? In other words, is there some irreducible set of dimensions by which the universe operates? I tend to think no, since the units always divide out like this article says. But then, why are lengths what they are? Why did the universe settle on this scale? What even is length, and is "this scale" just an artifact of human perception somehow?

* The same mathy physics people also do fun things like define Gaussian units where charge is proportional to fractional powers of length and mass.
The site is quick to adapt, it's what I am saying. The site has been around for a very long time.
Are people even reading the article before they comment on Hacker News with a bunch of trite culture war outrage these days?

The LGBT part is barely mentioned (one sentence of a couple paragraphs on the code of conduct), and the overall motif of this point (relatively minor in the article's context) is less "we are propping LGBT coders" and more "we attract a more diverse community because we discourage toxic assholes".
Thanks for reaching out and for your kind words!

I sent you a message on Keybase and requested connecting on LinkedIn. If you’re not active on either, my full name can be found here: https://github.com/ralmidani

Put a dot between the two parts of my name, take out the dash, and send to proton with .me at the end.
Are you part of Modi’s psy-ops team?
Ah and that means we have to build the death robot. Right.

I'd personally prefer we take the disarmament approach, but there's no money in that I guess.
That the outcome of the voting is very important to those oligarchs.

If football teams spend hundreds of millions of dollars on their players, what does that say about the importance of football?
I have been using a different search engine for about a year now and almost never go back to Google anymore, and when I do go back to Google it's almost always to use it as a dictionary (search: define something).
Why would they need Chainalysis? Is this just a UK thing? In US Kraken sells monero, which has limited to no chainalysis in theory; clearly it must not be a regulatory requirement.
Unlimited except when it is too much is not unlimited.

Just set a limit then instead and don't market it as unlimited.
This was the guy responsible for importing Oracle culture into Google, which has since overtaken Google Cloud, search and ads organizations.
Your second point is probably right, but in Apple's defense, they launched:

Apple M1
Apple Watch
Airpods
Their streaming service
Maybe XHTML (with XML namespaces) wasn't such a bad idea after all?
Midjourney for sure, although I feel that the real added value would come from it being able to do more specific tasks.

e.g. generate 3d models of X animating Y with this exact resolution, etc. and then choose the best ones as a starting point.

Or using this drum sample generate a load of bass tracks and then choose the best one, etc.

But yeah then it can be useful for small things where the quality isn't super-critical but otherwise might just go without art entirely - like indie games, small organisations, etc.
You can have general recursion with dependent types though. Theorem provers prohibit it because otherwise it'd render the system logically inconsistent, which is far less severe in programming than in mathematics. But I agree that a great deal of expressivity of dependent types would be lost if they're applied to systems programming, which is somewhat unfortunate.
There is the old Star Trek episode where two civilisations decided to forgo a real war for a simulated war where the computers would simulate attacks and then parlay the losses to each as a list of people who died in the attack who would then promptly commit suicide.
I see Rust as heavily influenced by ML, perhaps even descended from it loosely, just with C family syntax. This seems to be a commonly expressed view? Rust has everything ML has, pretty much. Rust's concept of ownership/RAII was first implemented in an experimental ML variant, one that didn't need garbage collection. (The first version of Rust was implemented in Ocaml, perhaps not coincidentally.) And of course, ML and Haskell are close cousins, if not siblings.
>> It appears that Google's long-standing dominance in search has not translated into meaningful innovation in recent years.

Google IMHO is still innovating, but still hasn't figured out how to turn that into product/profit. Since their P/E is under 20 they could just issue a dividend of 4 to 5 percent and people would immediately stop expecting growth from them.
I think performance simply just isn't on the radar of a big chunk of devs these days, especially self-taught ones. Front-end wise, what with the trend of using frameworks (react/vue/etc) & a billion lines of javascript downloaded from npm, it'd probably be too much of a task to even begin profiling.
Its so obvious at this point that I assume most of us are are going to be completely unsurprised when a t800 shows up on our door step to murder us.
Really is the BBC such an uncorrupt entity? A lot of NGOs in India get foreign funding to convert tribals into christianity. Everyone has an agenda. The former colonialists are not holier than thou.
Max Ganz's Redshift Combobulator
I have been working for many months on a browser-based Amazon Redshift management console.

I have a live system of the first version running, pointed at a Redshift cluster I have which contains an artificial, generated database.

If it's of interest, you can have a look and poke around and see what you find.

To prevent bots going crazy all over the site, here's the obfuscated URL, it's an IP number of an EC2 instance in us-east-1;

https://
fifty-four.
one-hundred-and-sixty-two.
fifty-eight.
one-hundred-and-twenty-seven

Note the AMI is intended to be run locally, fully firewalled (for PII), and so the SSL cert has to be self-signed - there is no domain name - so you'll need to click past the warnings the browser will give you.
Goodbye, Johns Hopkins Covid tracker
The fact remains that "survivorship bias" is a term from statistics, and OP is expanding it inappropriately.

However, if you insist on having the last word, go ahead.
Comments like this make me think that you have never worked in a domain where safety is paramount (like avionics or medical technology).

People who are developing in these domains are typically using a strict subset of c or c++ and running their programs through a process of formal verification.

As far as I am aware, rust has no specification to formally verify, and the formal verification tools are all out of date (because of the rapid pace of language changes) or lacking (for example Miri lacks the ability to consider all input values because it executes your code the same way as it would normally run)
Eyeballing TSA passenger volumes: https://www.tsa.gov/travel/passenger-volumes

That's not just business travelers of course but I can't believe there's been a huge spike in tourist air travel in the US in non-holiday season winter.

In-person tech events still seem to be down but that's probably sector specific.
Yes, I'm quite excited to see the new EVs coming out in the next few years. Still like my Tesla but the list of grievances grows over time.

I think they'll ultimately have to open up the charging to get federal funding, but it'll be interesting to see what happens when they do. It's definitely a massive advantage right now.
> the original area 51 conspiracy was started and propagated by the US military

Do you have a source for that? From a quick Google search it seems the US wasn't necessarily opposed to the rumors, but I can't find anything that shows it was started by the military, or actively propagated.
The rare occasion that it does work both ways
I think the internet is one giant behavioural and memory test, using search engines, various websites, news orgs to test people en-mass in secret but plain sight.
The big sell on bigscreen is you can watch the videos with friends (and their avatars) in the theater. It's a social experience first and a video player second.
i am pretty sure we will see self-driving planes (hell, all commercial jets effectively do that) before we see self-driving cars.
> unable to entertain the probability

The probability is so vanishingly tiny that there's little point to entertaining it beyond "sure, it's possible".

Keep your mind open, but not so open that your brains fall out.
Sundar was probably lied to by whoever pitched bard as demoable
That’s because the Anti-American bots and click farms are much more prevalent on Reddit. Not to mention I have a feeling a huge amount of active users are teens and repeat the same BS without checking.
AI hype train started in 2012 thanks to Alexnet winning Imagenet competition, and this paper from Google: https://www.wired.com/2012/06/google-x-neural-network/amp
I didn't even know it was written in haskell. Very cool tool that does very hairy stuff.
On your point about land mines, antipersonnel variants have actually been banned by the UN for a while now - "Anti-personnel landmines are prohibited under the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction (or Mine Ban Convention), adopted in 1997."[1] As you say, the ethics debate isn't really new.

[1] https://www.un.org/disarmament/convarms/landmines/
> I feel like first movers advantage is a myth.

Maybe. No company lives forever, at some point all of these things will be unseated. But those first movers had pretty good runs, as far as technology companies go. Maybe they aren't still #1 but if you're #1 for a decade or more, that might be as much as any one company can "win" here.
so... the obvious response to this is anti-drone drones or lasers (lasers can't be dodged by "stochastic movements")... which means things evolve into a robot war... which means we then mutually decide to simulate the war online inside computers and accept the outcome to save money on both sides... which means we end up at PVP multiplayer war... which is where it should have gone to begin with ;)
yeah I think I overstated it, they leaned into the conspiracy by hinting at it's possibility and did nothing to stop it
> The obligatory LGBTQ nonsense, “Rust has more trans and queer coders” is so tiring. Is there some 4chan-esque programming language that actually discourages queer people from using their language? In fact, is there any programming language forum that’s not friendly to “n00bs”. My guess is every language is friendly to “n00bs” in the forums and this doesn’t make Rust any more special than other languages (Note this has nothing to do with whether the language is actually easy to pick up, only whether people on forums are friendly to beginners)

I assume you're posing a rhetorical question (implying that no languages are better or worse in this regard) rather than saying you actually want a language that's intentionally unfriendly to queer people. In that case:

The relevant part in the article is quoting someone saying that because the Rust community adopted a code of conduct prohibiting harassment and took the attitude that no question is stupid it attracted more queer and trans coders and n00bs. Are you saying that you don't think it's possible that this type of code of conduct can make a forum more friendly? It doesn't seem that unreasonable (or some sort of outrage of wokeness run amock) to think that queer/trans coders are going to prefer a language where they know the community isn't going to harass them.