skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I feel the US's response to the pandemic and the massive mistakes make it less likely.

It may be unlikely but there have been many instances where the US population becomes a victim of its own government's covert actions. The quality of response doesn't neccessarily prove anything.
China is adding solar and wind faster than many of us realise: three charts
Watering Can oppositionist denies Cloud Theory.
Yes, you are right. Within IT, that is definitely true...and creates it's own problems because devs (in the UK) often lack business skills..and the alternative is a non-dev who lacks tech skills.

But the example I gave is more prevalent within engineering generally. Engineering grads will hope to either work in banking or go directly into management scheme (GE was the premium one...when GE was big, defence is the other big one). The pay for actual engineering work (outside O&G) is very low, and only attractive because PHd work is even more exploitative.
While Quanta often has click baity headlines, it is really the only decent website for pop math and theoretical computer science.
Sorry for the run-on sentence.

Managers that do not value technical competence very often think that it is easy to acquire; that it only takes a few years of work, and / or that being able to interface with computers is a rather banal skill. This makes them grossly undervalue people that work with software / computers. Middle Managers are hence elected as buffer between them and the "peasants" (AKA "IT Guys"). Usually, these middle managers are elected right from the peasantry, and often it's the person that sticks out. This is also often the least technically competent member of the team / department.
I wasn't looking at the US website. Samsung don't have that information listed in the equivalent page for my local market.
Cool. Check the 1994 demo "Heartquake" from the spanish demogroup Iguana for an earlier realtime water simulation https://youtu.be/LLsRBbFOa3k?t=350
Lab leak involves bio-engineering because it involves gain of function research. Bio-engineering can be used in a testing setting but it could also be used to make a weapon. I highly doubt China was stupid enough to make a bioweapon and not immunize its citizens first.

The significance of getting people to investigate, and if all things are true, confirm lab leak is that it puts an impetus on the importance of controls and second is a corrective measure for all the people who colluded to suppress lab leak being discussed. I am very interested in seeing those people held accountable in very direct ways, even if they were under false impressions at the time. That starts with all the names on that infamous open letter.
My current role is an architect position where we are hands on, after I turned down two that sounds like they were like what you described. To me it's a red flag if an architect team is separate from the dev team. At a minimum I want to be embedded in the dev team during projects. (One of the places I walked away from the "opportunity" it turned out the architects rarely even talked directly to the dev team)
I agree that there are better options for long-term maintenance of large projects, but let's not act like Youtube or Instagram don't exist - both of which used Django to some (high at the beginning) degree.
Synthetic knowledge is still novel knowledge if you haven’t put the pieces together before.
This is really cool! Please consider joining forces with us at mwmbl.org, would love to incorporate some of these ideas.
I used to copy like crazy but now that I have a good job I pay for most of my software. Mainly because I like to keep my computer clean from malware. If I ever need to run something pirated because it's ridiculously expensive (like Adobe stuff or IDA pro) I run it in a VM or an isolated machine.

It's less out of an ethical sense though. Video I still pirate by the terabyte. Most of that comes from large media concerns that I don't really have much care for. The small games industry I support as much as I can on GOG.

Latvia and Bulgaria are great for torrent sites indeed, there seems to be nobody even trying to take them down unlike in western europe.
I’m so confused - do you believe publishers should be forced to only publish one, single version of a book, and continue that version in perpetuity? They are never allowed to go out of print, and never allowed to fix a typo lest they be seen pathetic? Is that it?
> why aren't experts in the field taking that evidence into account?

Money. Build your entire career around treatments for trans minors, and without them you have no career
The US isn't capable of preventing its own citizens from acquiring weapons and performing terrorist attacks with them. The idea that we'll be able to enforce controls on labs in foreign countries seems pretty far fetched given that. And as the tech advances, I suspect it will democratize like any other technology so that a lone enthusiast can design their own viruses in a home lab. I'm not particularly an optimist about what it portends.
I just want a phone that gets regular updates and security updates for 5+ years. Why give me hardware that can be repaired when the software is not supported after a few years?
What is understanding?
> Then I'd use the header key to authenticate the header. Probably using a keyed hash or HMAC to get key committent

This is already the case :)

> In my opinion file formats should have a C implementation whenever possible

Yup, I totally agree. Although I haven't written any of the code yet, I've been architecting a hypothetical implementation in my head while designing the format.
>LLMs and cryptocurrency are two completely different technologies

As mind viruses operating on human brains, they do not seem completely different technologies.
It probably just means the correct aggregate conclusion is “we don’t know, go ask China”.
Why? It’s a distinction without a difference. It is a man made pandemic whether they “made” the virus themselves or not. It is of very little consequence at this point if it was engineered or not.
Can you help me understand what rights you'd take away from others to change this situation?

1. If everyone has free speech, then people are free to criticize the speech of others.

2. If everyone has free speech, others are free to publicize the things you said.

3. If everyone has free association, others have a right not to associate with you based on your speech.
Linus from Tech Tips still pirates windows. He even has a whole video on why.

https://youtu.be/M3bezYerYxQ
Not too many things make me shake my head harder than folks who consider continue/break to be GOTO equivalents. For the reasons you eloquently said.

Additionally, far more often than not, continue/break allow you to avoid another form of complexity, bugs, and low comprehensibility: deeply nested conditionals.
Exactly this. Talk to them. At length. Take them out for walks and runs. Let them explore and sniff and meet other dogs. Let them chase a ball or a stick. Hide a treat and let them find it. Cuddle them. Oh, but wait. That requires work and involvement. Better to stick 'em in front of a screen, just like we do with kids.
Sure it's possible to have horrible spaghetti today. Just look at any pubsub architecture based system and tell me what piece of code executes after another. It's super popular, and it's GOTOs all over again, just with data instead.
Complex SQL requires knowledge about relational algebra (Cartesian products, set theory, domain relational calculus yada yada) and understanding of how RDBMS and their query planners work. At least, if performance is important to you.

I don't see this in this prompt engineering. In my limited experience (I played a few hours with Stable Diffusion and more hours with the OAI davinci-003 model), you can get good at it within a few days.
Yeah elite on pc had such a copy protection mechanism.

But they picked any word in the book, even simple ones like "the". So just entering that 20x or so would get you in.
Tony Hawk re-learning to kickflip
I'm responding to a comment suggesting that designers elect for 128 bit primitives to head off unproductive debates. Suggesting that you have a strong preprepared answer for those debates isn't really responsive to what I'm saying.
Part of the problem might be that commentators are going to want to willfully conflate intelligence "confidence" with a more pseudo science-y sounding "confidence score" that sounds like a bastard hybrid of research critique and statistics.

One wouldn't predict that to be the case with all of the scientists here. But given that it is, perhaps we can't fault the American people if they don't understand the nuance.

The truth is that "low confidence" is only meaningful in the context of COVID's origin if it is possible that a conclusion can be made with "high confidence". That doesn't seem to be possible.

Certainly not in the other direction if some agencies are concluding at this stage, even with "low confidence", that COVID was lab leaked. Further, certainly "low confidence" doesn't imply that the inverse conclusion is likely true.

The NYT's choice to over-emphasize the relatively meaningless "confidence score" is understandable given its prior investment in other views.

Rigid historical narratives have been built on less than low confidence intelligence conclusions. A conclusion is the conclusion when one has to be made regardless.

In the case of COVID, a conclusion as to its origin has to be made and yet the scientific evidence isn't likely to get better for either possibility. Short of confessions.
The idea that symbolic AI lost is uninformed. Symbolic AI essentially boils down to different kinds of modeling and constraint solving systems, which are very much in use today: linear programming, SMT solvers, datalog, etc.

Here is here symbolic AI lost: any thing where you do not have a formal criteria of correctness (or goal) cannot be handled well by symbolic AI. For example perception problems like vision, audio, robot locomotion, or natural language. It is very hard to encode such problems in terms of formal language, which in turn means symbolic AI is bad at these kind of problems. In contrast, deep learning has won because it is good at exactly these set of things. Throw a symbolic problem at a deep neural network and it fails in unexpected ways (yes, I have read neural networks that solve SAT problems, and no, a percentage accuracy is not good enough in domains where correctness is paramount).

The saying goes, anything that becomes common enough is not considered AI anymore. Symbolic AI went through that phase and we use symbolic AI systems today without realizing we are using old school AI. Deep learning is the current hype because it solves a class of problems that we couldn't solve before (not all problems). Once deep learning is common, we will stop considering it AI and move on the to the next set of problems that require novel insights.
Once a footgun shoots the feet of enough people, the problem is no longer with the people, it is with the thing that enables the footgun.
The carefree fun of youth is kinda the difference though :)

I also built a lot of stuff in Flash/AS back in the day, and even rode the wave into AIR for a while.

The OOP system, event handling with spaghetti code, and high level graphics abstractions just never bothered me. Things worked, and the nature of the beast is I didn't have to worry about maintainability so much.

Nowadays it would be different. I don't think Flash or Actionscript would be quite as fun. For out of the box engines, Unity->WebGL is far more powerful imho.

PIXI.js and any compatible spritesheet animation package gets you more than halfway there, using the same OOP scene graph paradigm, for people who really miss the Flash approach. Not the same level of IDE integration, but, still..

At least least I looked at it, which was years ago, and successfully ported over some old flash apps.
A significant problem is that the App Store just says "In App Purchases" on the App page.

We don't even get a list of prices and functionality of the IAPs.

In EU it is a requirement that: "When you buy goods or services in the EU, you have to be clearly informed about the total price, including all taxes and additional charges." https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/pri...

I don't think the App store currently respects this law as the advertised price is not the total price for the advertised functionality when InAppPurchases are required to unlock them.
The state machine example is definitely a very fitting use of goto, but it reminds me of another thing that seems to have become a rare skill but is very useful: flowcharting. Besides making people comfortable with goto in general, it also helps visualise control flow in ways that a lot of programmers these days don't realise, and it's unfortunate that a lot of courses seem to have omitted its teaching.

Also worth reading is "GOTO Considered Harmful Considered Harmful": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11056434

And here Microsoft provides us with lovely example of such ridiculous nesting.

That's a very memorable example, but ultimately the true cause of that monstrosity is a clearly stupid API design; this is the API for a file picker, the recommended replacement for an existing one that they wanted to deprecate. In the existing one, you fill in a structure and call a single function with a pointer to it. In its replacement, you need to call a dozen methods on an object, and check for "possible" errors on each call, even if probably 99% of them only do things like assign to a field in a now-opaque structure and can never produce an error. Then the example code must've been edited by someone with severe gotophobia. (Not all MS code is like that --- they have plenty of other example code that uses goto, e.g.: https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-driver-samples/blob/mai... ) The existing API was even extensible, since it used a structure with a size field that could differentiate between different versions and extensions, but they didn't.
> But still, having guns puts a good guard against extreme situations where the boiling frog tactic doesn't work so much - e.g. forceful installation of a communist dictatorship

Again, how exactly do you see that playing out in reality?
Yes. Very worth checking your nation's travel advisories (and maybe that of a few others - they don't always agree).

But it can be hard to piece together what's actually going on just from such advisories. They are often really generic. Canadians are currently advised to exercise "a high degree of caution" (same as for China, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia) for nearly all of Western Europe, at the moment. There's apparently a "high risk of terrorism". But it's a green light for Portugal and Spain - no extra precautions necessary. Go figure. How much risk am I actually at for terrorism in Germany vs. Portugal? Should this influence my travel decisions? I'm guessing no. They're pro forma notices.

Regional and other more specific advisories are sometimes more helpful.
Kid’s entertainment is FAR more entertaining for adults and children now than when I was a kid. Even something as sacred as Sesame Street is far better today than it was 35 years ago, and it was good 35 years ago.
If you are stuck at 24, try entering help for a hint.
Machine Measures Milliseconds Mechanically [video]
The Life-Changing Benefits of Being Boring
We also can't have a debate about defining women where even daring to ask the question brings about mobs.

As much as the absolutist "men can never become women" crowd attempts to shut down these debates there's also the equally harmful groups who say that "anyone who says they are a woman is one and even questioning that makes you a transphobe". It's easier to dismiss the former as intolerant, but the latter is becoming the (only) socially accepted opinion on places like Reddit. Which is insidious for such a contentious topic.

I personally don't see how we can solve this cultural issue without there being some very clear grey area in between.
What stops people from just exchanging the public key that is used for verification?

(Not that it matters in a world where kmspico and dazloader exist, but still)
>Previously the 'big lie' was that it was not from a lab.

Wasn't the previous news claim specifically that somebody in Wuhan ate a bat or pangolin? Until it was made public that the US was involved in funding the research.
Your “Learn more about self-hosted” link on the home page is broken. Looks cool. Might try it.
>It doesn't make sense whatsoever to receive one time payment and provide updates forever.

Duh? This is written in English but I genuinely have trouble making sense of your words. We had this for decades without subscriptions, they're called UPGRADES! You buy 1.x, or 2.x or whatever, and then when 3.x comes out new customers pay full price but existing ones get it at a much reduced price. But they can do so on their schedule, or if they don't then they don't lose anything they already have, they merely don't gain the new features. Which in turn is one of the few truly hard direct bits of incentivizing feedback, developers don't get money "by default", but must earn it each time.

I struggle to understand how suddenly it's like the entire idea of upgrades seems to have vanished. Why would a one time payment mean updates forever for free? But why would it mean subscriptions either?

Edit: Maybe if there is anyone truly to blame as the root of this evil it's Apple for being massively hostile to updates in the App Store for reasons that I will never understand either. That really sucks and probably forced subscriptions on the general population more than any other single actor. For that reason alone I really hope to see alternative stores forced on them by law.
> You don't know enough to do it fairly.

You don't know if I would do it fairly, you mean. But let's go in on your assumption. What is 'fairness'?

From whose perspective are you making the judgement of 'fairness'? Would the man who you are convicting to life in prison after he murdered 20 people feel your fairness? What if he denies that what you are doing is 'fair', does you definition change then? What happens if you do care about consensus, but you know enough to discount this particular case, which other opinions do you discount? Because it sure won't be the last one

I could care less about the U.S. justice system, society has plenty of tools to punish individuals, and I have no problem using them.
Do you want the engineer who works as mentioned or one who follows the new management directives?

I have been on both sides. Be clear. Make the call. Take the action. Don't look back.
Moderate and Low are Words of Analytic Confidence [1]. This has more to do with the quality of the sourcing than a numeric probability number.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_confidence
>So you are presenting the fact that lawyers must digest an absurdly large corpus of legal documentation, but also maintaining that is something a human lawyer has some sort of advantage over a LLM?

No.

A LLM has more opportunity itself to replace a Lawyer, the person typing the prompt is not necessarily required to be as educated. Though a case can be made that you need to validate the information.

As it happens we have an opportunity to tell how this works. Software engineering has seen many abstractions of which each comes with its own complexity in verification.

What tends to happen is that people don't really do a lot of verification, we are just "mostly right" very fast and leave an immense amount of inefficiency and indirection behind us.
That's a nice theory but a lot of subscriptions are decidedly not cheap on an annual basis ($100+) and there's a lot of potential for money leaks you aren't pro-active about. Though I actually agree that subscriptions as a principle often align developer and user interests.
The coast guard is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and law enforcement is one of their primary purposes.
And this is (one reason) why so many are keen to believe Lab Leak - because then it was done by 'bad humans' and so can be fixed, instead of being (another) consequence of our encroachment on the natural world and indeed something that often just happens. Much easier to believe the 'baddies' have been found and 'brought to justice' than having to face up to the world we live in and our effect on it.
Kind of orthogonal to the article, but I feel the iOS App Store's subscription mechanism is how online subscriptions as a whole should work. There's a unified predictable way to start subscriptions, and more importantly, a unified predictable way to stop them. I don't have to jump through hoops to stop a subscription, and the UI is clear on when recurring charges will occur next and for how much. I would love it if banks let me unilaterally cancel subscriptions just as easily on my online banking page.

It almost makes the Apple tax worth it. Almost.
Gotos are quite nice for some state machines too. You essentially store the state in the instruction pointer instead of some helper variable.
Nice! Please consider adding https://mwmbl.org

Thanks!
The extended version of this is the book Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming [1], which is just incredibly good.

There's also a summary poster [2].

Actually, CTM was in Rich Hickey's reading list when he designed Clojure [3].

[1] https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html

[2] https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/paradigmsDIAGRAMeng201.pdf

[3] https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/137472.Rich_Hickey_s_Clo...
Show HN: PDF cleaning that removes headers, footers, references for TTS engines
In JavaScript you can arbitrarily generate a stack trace at any point without interruption.

console.log(new Error().stack);
> IMHO it should be considered for an "age v2"

Definitely, though personally I wouldn't go as far as recommend we make a version 2 just for this. The downsides of such a change are not worth the arguably extremely slim security benefit.

(And I agree with Age author it's not worth warning users about either. Not now in 2023.)
> Every American touched by covid knows this in the back of their head.

only Americans were touched by covid I guess...

> The first stage of grief is denial.

At least a leak is not intentional like killing hundreds of thousand of innocent people by bombing their homes.

Leak doesn't mean engineering a disease to kill some specific target, anyway, if China did it to kill Americans, it wouldn't be as bad as the Opium wars and the American invasion of China in 1900

The first U.S. multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, made part of his fortune smuggling opium into China.
Clearly the Falcon should be replaced with Norrlands Guld.
> The rifles that Americans own themselves are just fine. Average quality is better than military, though the military does get features that are illegal for civilians (like full auto).

And that's going to protect you from a drone strike how, exactly?
Yeah but as with Windows, in a decent environment you'd still need credentials for access to networked resources.
Kerbal Space Program 2 makes rocket science approachable, but no less complex
> I do think subscription-based creates better quality software

Maybe compared to pay-once. But the pay-for-every-major-version model that used to be common also provides an incentive to improve, while avoiding redesign churn: the amount of sales you get is directly correlated to how much better your new version is. Meanwhile with subscriptions you mainly have to update the design to attract new customers, your old customers are stuck paying unless you become worse than your competitors.
worked great for Intel