skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>there have always been other jobs that either (a) people could switch into that were still somewhat fulfilling

That may have been the case till post-WW2 economy where if the refrigerator factory you used to work at got moved to China, you could take those skills to the car factory next door, but most of the industry jobs left in the west today, that haven't been offshored or automated away, are highly specialized ones that require years of training or higher education and don't have many transferable skills between them, and there's no way you can simply switch to those jobs without that specialized training the employers with those jobs are expecting you to have. It's a lot easier these days to find yourself obsolete and unemployable.
24 Hour Fitness gyms asks for a fingerprint/thumbprint on each visit. Is this not legal?

It doesn't work well for me: I always must make multiple login attempts and inevitably an employee must intervene and approve. I miss their previous system which used a simple bar code.
Maybe, but legal systems across the world differ a lot and to get something universal is not easy at all.
How would Babel stop existing though if JavaScript keeps evolving?

Is the goal that we all are using evergreen browsers and versions of Node and thus have no need to support older runtimes?
There's no such thing as an "artificially low" minimum wage, just one that doesn't distort anything because market conditions force everyone to pay more anyway.
I also know some people who are just playing video games and doing household chores 5 hours a day while working from home, and just respond to emails throughout the day so it seems like they are working.
True, but we don't have to appoint everyone or even most positions that way. A small random element can actually help in keeping a system stable.
> Emulation is cheap but completely unrepresentative of the original experience.

Never enough, but THANK GOODNESS for emulation!

My favorite old skool computer is the IBM 704 that LISP originally ran on. This machine didn't have a visual display or anything fancy. It was the sort of thing where you'd hand in your punch cards and an operator would run your job, then give you back the program results in your mailbox or something.

When I was doing research for writing my blog posts about LISP about a year ago, it was so helpful that a turnkey SIMH environment for this machine existed, that let me run the original software and then get definite concrete answers about its behavior. There were things I was curious about, particularly its handling of the T atom (and whether that remaps to TRUE which is the true truth) that I wouldn't have been able to talk about, had the emulator not been available.
Yes, I noticed this too. I had it build a MongoDB aggregation where documents would get aggregated in hourly timeslots (compute temperature averages+hi+low for every hour). Two ways to do this: 1) convert the datetime to a YYYY-mm-dd-HH string and use it to group the documents, or 2) use a Unix timestamp and do some math on it.

I was already using 2) in some projects, so I wanted to check if it was able to do this.

It first suggested 1), then I told it to make it more efficient by avoiding strings so it gave me 2). Wow.

That was around 3-4 weeks ago. When I tried it again this week, it would only output 1) and it wasn't able to make the move to 2) anymore by telling it to not use strings. It kept using them.
Handy Search Engine for Recruiters
Wisdom from 40 years ago:

Network partitioning can completely destroy mutual consistency in the worst case, and this fact has led to a certain amount of restrictiveness, vagueness, and even nervousness in past discussions, of how it may be handled. In some environments it is desirable or necessary to permit users to continue modifying resources such as files when the network is partitioned. A network operating system would be a good example. In such environments mutual inconsistency becomes a fact of life which must be dealt with. [0]

TL;DR - you either store your data in one place, or you store it in multiple places but disallow writes when there's a network split and wait for consensus on all nodes... or you have inconsistency and you have to deal with it.

[0] Detection of Mutual Inconsistency in Distributed Systems, 1983. Great paper, fairly readable, and still relevant. https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Classes/739/Fall2018/Papers...
Tell HN: There are GPT-based bots on HN commenting sophisticated nonsense
I read this comment two hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34849057

from a first glance, it is just a comment which casually recommends some links. But none of the links really work!
I looked through the comment history, which is unsuspicious on a quick glance... but none of the links work! And some comments are also bogus. This is clearly the work of some large language model.

But why? Maybe it is just a "funny" weekend project, but it clearly crosses an ethical line (not into deeply illegal, but into deeply ...not nice?!).
Apple does limit tracking for iPhone users, across the web. They don't need to "cut a deal" with individual companies to do that.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/24/21192830/apple-safari-int...
Barbers do require months (though not years) of training, but obviously there is no reason for that to be the case.
It's hard to find solid numbers, but even assuming only 0.5% of Americans meet the criteria for a Narcissistic Personality Disorder diagnosis (https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/mental-health/narcissisti...), that's still 1,666,437 people - more than enough to fill nearly every (if not actually every, with room to spare) candidacy for every elected position in every level of American government. Solid numbers for Antisocial Personality Disorder (a.k.a. "sociopathy") are similarly hard to find, but are in all likelihood double that of NPD (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK546673/).

That is: yes, politicians can absolutely all be terrible.
As a former Amazonian who has worked on vat, compliance, taxes, product compliance etc, I can tell you, really from an unbiased perspective that Amazon is doing everything they can to terminate the bad actors.

This includes the fake reviews etc. Lets say you have a charger for iphones, you cant have text for the ASIN saying for iphone, it will get delisted immediatelly, you have to say "compatible with iphone" and such.

The main weakness is how products are created, the catalogue principle, this allows some to fly under the radar for a bit sometimes.
And Amazon will not immediatelly shut down a whole sellers account, but rather target ASINs one by one.
The best way for a buyer to deal with this is to leave a sellers(not product) review and ask for a refund, you will always get the refund, Amazon always pushes liability to the sellers in order to protect the brand image and to not be exploitable.
Once theres enough of reviews and refunds, the sellers will get shut down and the funds will be held on hold, just like a banl does for credit card processors.
The cost to do business on amazon with fakes repeatedly(need new companies every time etc) is quite high, if not prohibitivelly high.
Do not suck it up, do the 2 things mentioned to keep the place tidy.
For sure. Content addressing doesn't help if the content is dynamic.
UBI will never come because we’ll always have jobs. Sure the jobs won’t pay as well, but the idea that there won’t be jobs and masses of people will be forced into the street is laughably implausible.

Why? Because the oligarchs won’t allow that to happen.

They’ll invent jobs for everyone. Low paying jobs without benefits for sure, but they’ll make sure you have a job. Simply because of the fear of a populace that has enough time and energy to be fed up with their lot.

Jobs make people busy and tired. And busy and tired people don’t rock the boat. Now they’ll say something about the luxury of human touch, or some other clap trap. But then they’ll also talk about, needing to learn the dignity of work, or giving people something to do keep people off the street. Or saying how making people work for the bare necessities in life makes them appreciate it more.

It’s the same moralizing bullshit they always say about poor people.

It’s why productivity has gone up, but wages and working hours have stayed constant.

They FEAR a population that’s screwed over and has the time to organize.
0. How does this compare to Fediverse-based solutions, such as Write.Freely for articles, Pixelfed for graphics, Mastodon or Pleroma or Misskey for microblogging? Do you plan on supporting ActivityPub for federation?

1. What are your funding plans? If you plan on being free, what sort of user data will you be selling to pay for your costs?

2a. You mention on the bottom that Sora is Forever: "We're building Sora because we need a place to showcase our content too. We're bootstrapped and in for the long run." What sort of longevity plans do you have in case your servers/your backups/your company/your team goes under?

2b. Do the users get to own their data and move it elsewhere? Is your software FOSS so that users can run their own instances?
Tell me you haven't been on the phone with a customer support person recently, without telling me you haven't been on the phone with a customer support person recently ;)
I agree with him, but this also implies there's a sustainable plan for everyone out of work going forward. I'd love a world where having a career is an active choice. Not everyone can and should work, with all the progress we've made we should try to work less and let the machines do more for us.

Unfortunately not many people can imagine a world like that so we end up chasing growth just for the sake of growth. Meanwhile the world we're supposed to share is shrinking.

For reference, 8 people own half of the so-called resources (yes I know it's not liquid) on the planet. Before covid that number was around 30.
Beyond the hype – How to use ChatGPT to create value
>Not so long ago there hardly was any text in the world and most people were illiterate. And yet plenty of humans roamed the earth.

And then at one point books started being printed in mass and suddenly the number of people roaming the earth exploded greatly... I'm not sure you're argument is as good as you make it out to be.
For electronics, I think showing is better than telling. Hence, it’s more productive for me to consume and replicate YouTubers like Carl Bugeja [https://youtube.com/@CarlBugeja], and seeing what they can practically produce with their setups. It answers the question of ‘why’ as well. Self soldering circuits are beautiful
https://njal.la/

https://www.gandi.net/en-US
I went through a similar shift, and is softened a lot of my more libertarian views when younger. I realized that the circumstances of your birth have such a huge impact on your life that it's really like there's two entirely different games being played. Or another way to look at it is the more fortunate the circumstances of your birth, the more times you can fail before you succeed. I also realized how much institutional quality matters for the structure of society as a whole on a generational scale.
Why China Didn’t Invent ChatGPT
> Fretting about it is fine if you fashion yourself a philosopher or just enjoy systematizing or worrying as a hobby. But it’s so much bigger, slower, and more abstract than you that there’s little constructive achieved in doing so.

I completely agreed with you up to this point!

You could make the same claim about global warming or war. It's similar to the argument that you shouldn't vote, because one vote never tips an election.

Many different little efforts can roll up into major changes. It's worth participating! Just because your efforts won't be recognized as particularly important or special doesn't mean they're worthless.
The issue is that ICANN already wants the $8/year cost, so if they’re to make any margin at all…
I do an occasional bit of SMD work and I don't have any of those other than tweezers and a flux pen. And you definitely don't need them for TH work.

When I'm building SMD prototypes I'm usually not assembling PCBs either. It's deadbug, superglue and thin strips of 0.3mm board.
Congratulations both on being the rare example of someone anxious to err on the side of decency, and on gaining a subscriber.
I have a copy of this which I no longer need. If anyone in Australia wants it hit me up and I'll mail it to you. @johnnydecimal@hachyderm.io.

FWIW -- I know this isn't an RSI thread -- mine was 100% fixed by changing my desk. It was too high, and my classic 5-wheeled office chair was unstable. I lowered the desk to about 68cm (I'm 172cm) and bought a chair with wooden legs (Ikea, ~$80), started doing light stretches in the morning, and that fixed it for me.

I made the desk from Ikea cabinets and a $100 plain wooden door. So it's a) cheap, b) massive, and c) I can screw things in to the underside.
Concur on that - and/or a jewler's loupe with light. Cheap on amazon etc, and nice to have.
Let's consider the two quotes highlighted in the article:

> “No, I don’t think that Sydney is sentient, but for reasons that are hard to explain, I feel like I have crossed the Rubicon,” wrote Ben Thompson in his Stratechery newsletter.

> “In the light of day, I know that Sydney is not sentient [but] for a few hours Tuesday night, I felt a strange new emotion — a foreboding feeling that AI had crossed a threshold, and that the world would never be the same,” wrote Kevin Roose for The New York Times.

It goes on to describe how authors are anthropomorphizing chatbots, and talking about how the experience of chatting with these bots affects them.

None of that seems wrong or misguided in any way. It's a commentary on humanity and society, and about their own emotional reactions. As the article even admits, they make it clear that they don't think the bots are sentient. They simply think that they have reached a point where they will significantly influence humanity and society (they have "crossed the Rubicon"). And I think that's a completely fair analysis. These bots are absolutely human-like enough, useful enough, powerful enough and potentially dangerous enough, that thinking they will change things is completely reasonable.

The quoted authors are directly stating that there is nothing sentient about these chatbots. They are simply commenting on their impact on the world. So it is a bit surreal to see the article go on to claim that they "tilt us dangerously toward a false equivalence of software and sentience".

(I also believe that the author of this article is too confident in their ability to determine with such certainty whether something is "sentient" or not. But that's neither here nor there.)
Something I do love about classical recordings is how differently some conductors and orchestras might interpret a specific piece. An example:
The third movement of Debussy's Nocturnes (titled "Sirènes") is most often performed with a women's chorus. My favorite recording of this piece was performed with children's choir instead. The difference in vocal quality is marked. The children's pure vocal tone feels far more eerie and siren-esque than the harsher vibrato and warble of a female chorus.
Ironically, I have no idea who conducted/recorded this version of the piece.
Don’t wear outdoor shoes inside the house.
this summarizes a lot of thoughts I've had about my music collection. I'd love to have a relational schema for it but you can keep normalizing forever, especially once you try to normalize away "genre"
His popularity grew quite a bit after his presidential term, to be fair. I wasn’t around during his leadership so I can’t comment on what that was like. But he’s quite obviously a generous, honest, genuinely good human.
Even the hand-made watches use some mass-production techniques. Those thin gears for example are often made dozens at a time from a single block of metal that is then sliced up. Or conversely, layers of metal are pressed together and then the teeth are cut into every layer simultaneously.
Thanks for the feedback! I hope most people feel that way :)

At least for now it's pretty rough around the edges, so I'm hoping to underpromise and overdeliver
The add-on got DMCA claimed. Until the creator counter claims, they have to take it down.
https://lea.verou.me/

https://www.kottke.org/

https://chriscoyier.net/

https://seths.blog/

https://sive.rs/
"Sweeps" without the offer of reliable and private shelter are little more than pointless cruelty. "Out of sight, out of mind" is not a rational way to approach any kind of problem.

Slight tangent story: While overall I think open carry laws are not the best idea, one positive use case I've seen manifest in Texas is mutual aid groups. Usually they run unofficial soup lines and things like that, but they also started lining up conspicuously armed with rifles and body armor around a homeless camp whenever police try to "sweep" the people living there. Not making threats or pointing their weapons - behaving perfectly legally per Texas legislation and case law - just being present and offering to happily leave if the city provides a written and signed one year apartment lease to everyone in the camp, or something in that vein.

It's usually effective in at a minimum getting the police to buzz off, and sometimes at getting real help to these people since "casually bully and push them around" is taken away as an option.
It'd be a good thing if AI took his job.
Never understood how people could walk inside their own homes with their outdoor shoes on. Seriously one of the most bizarre things ever.
This is off topic for a thread about a dying man.

But I'll bite. There's lots of legit criticism of Chavez. However, democracy is not one. He was popular. I believe his elections were legit.

I also think it's a mistake to mix up Chavismo with the US right/left axis. Venezuela is not an extension of the United States. You can get into trouble when you mix up American political contrasts and inject them into places that work very differently. Chavez did not have anything in common with US democrats.
If you're going to look for cures for diseases in humans, you should be using human genetic and cellular models. Since running experiments on human beings is frowned upon, what with control groups and the post-experimental 'sacrifice' of the test subjects for tissue analysis and so on, what to do?

Happily, modern technology allows for development of human stem cells into a variety of cell types - even lately into complex tissues consisting of multiple cell types (2021):

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2021.7985...

> "In this review, we will emphasize the transitions from immortalized cell lines to stem cells and describe their use in combination with gut-on-chip models. These “on-chip” models are defined as three-dimensional (3D) cell cultures arranged as multiple cell layers actively perfused by microfluidics for medium exchange to enable an improved tissue formation with increased lifespan. We will highlight selected applications of these gut-on-chip models to understand gastrointestinal diseases and forthcoming strategies to investigate human gut physiology."

This looks to be superior to animal testing on multiple grounds - first, animal models don't respond to drugs and don't develop identical disease states to humans, second it's needlessly cruel to animals, particularly when there are now better approaches utilizing technology that should be capable of producing muscle, lung, heart, even brain tissue models based on human stem cells.
> The file interface is somewhat limited though

And so? The mantra says "everything is a file", not "everything is only a file". You can provide stream access to everything, and then more advanced access to some particular resources.
"Want nothing to do" undersells the hazing process that US politicians go through. Any sane and reasonable human being would be destroyed by the scrutiny that comes with public office. The process catches any flaws that someone might have, but also rules out anyone without an unusually strong ego and a lust for power. Which means all the people who might handle power appropriately are not involved.

Although yes to sortition. It'd be much better than current practices.
Tell HN: Production driven development is live broadcasting but for software
It just occured to me that it's a valid way to get instant feedback from users.

Like a TV station making a live broadcast.
FTX's Excel spreadsheet has entered the chat.
You don't need to spend that much. I mean, go for it, it sounds fun, but just getting a desk the right height (i.e. probably lower than it is now) and a stable chair solved mine. See sibling comment here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34852007
These numbers point towards a failing in the process not a failing in the people who are homeless.
If you offer someone a place to live no strings attached they’re going to take it. Once housed it’s orders of magnitude easier to treat the causes of homelessness.

Every time you complicate or add a restriction you lose people out of the system. Sounds like there are about twelve restrictions or hoops to jump through in the Portland system.

Housing first programs in Salt Lake City showed phenomenal success. Get people houses and then take care of the other things like medical care, mental health care, addiction treatment.

Know why the phenomenally successful program isn’t around anymore? Republicans pulled funding to it out of a weird and broken ideological belief. Not based on the facts of its effectiveness.

At a certain point if your ideology doesn’t allow for the value of facts it’s just broken.
I think that's a useful meme that the network learned, to create coherent stories that alleviate suffering, and it's effective, but it's not real. But it's useful because beliefs and perceptions are all we really have. It's why CBT works.

Without the language to express "thoughts" and not-self in that level of abstraction, one cannot form the thought at all that it might not be those thoughts.
Pretty much this. As much as people hate politics, its the politicians who can work thr system that are the most effective.

Image is important because thats what maintains support, but you also need to be pragmatic at the same time and do things that might lose you support because voters dont understand the trade offs.
Tech’s next great mafia? Laid-off talent
I agree, this line of rhetoric (look, the extremists agree with this, therefore it’s wrong and you’re reprehensible for even entertaining the thought) is deserving of a hall of fame in terms of logical fallacies. It’s an obviously incomplete proxy for morality, and can be weaponized to create all kinds of absurd conclusions, including new forms of extremism. However, it’s a dominant rhetorical strategy today, that many are guilty of.

I don’t know how much is deliberate short term “winning the argument” vs how much people genuinely believe it, but it’s unfortunate for the majority of people who want to discuss issues under civil conditions. The second order effects are concerning, because this leaves public debate (ironically) to extremists, narcissists and manipulators.
Even the worst customer support persons are infinitely better than the best "AI" replacements.