skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you'd invested $599 (original price for 8GB) in Apple Inc (AAPL) on September 20, 2008, today the investment would be worth: 21,706.45

Annual rate of return: 28.08%

Total increase: 3,523.78%

Total profit: 21,107.45
MS Flight Simulator 2020 or Automobilista 2 are absolutely awesome VR games that can be controlled by keyboard only in real time and there is vorpX allowing older games to be played in VR. Surely, Alyx is slow, Hellblade has restricted movement, but those strange VR controllers allow some interesting experiences like Adr1ft when one feels like a real astronaut in open space.
For a while, declining fertility rates were de facto considered a good sign in the demographic transition model. Usually experts would say "declining fertility is because people are chasing more fulfilling things! Our societies are so good that there is so much more to enjoy than children!". This always felt wrong. Why would the happiest society be the one that turns off it's natural processes? Is there any instance in nature where a declining birth rate is a sign of good things for a species?

Glad the tide is finally turning to recognize the obvious truth: declining birth rates is a sign of distress in a society.
https://open-flash.github.io/mirrors/swf-spec-19.pdf
People are afraid for their economic security
I think this attitude is a little bit simplistic.

It doesn't address what that time frame would be or what happens in the interim. When you say pretty quick is that 5 years or 500 years?

While I agree there are some strong feedback mechanisms that lead to population growth, stating that alone ignores the fact that there are even stronger forcing mechanisms in the present pushing population down. The outcome will depend on how those extremely strong feedback mechanisms on both sides interact moving forward.

The modern world has yet to see a population where growth rates have bounced back, and some countries like Japan have been declining for more than 50 years.
They even have inflatable ones you can easily fit in a backpack - I have one sitting in my garage from years ago when my tots needed them.

But yeah, if your kid is too small, it's a hassle to to carry around that bulky infant seat.
Very cool if true, but it appears they haven't done it yet:
https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/src/branch/forgejo/LICE...

Could someone post a link to the decision?
I've been there recently and can confirm it still draws a healthy crowd.
It depends.. salt works down to -18C on cycle paths as long as you maintain it snow free and do not have big puddles of water. Brushing the snow away down to the asphalt is my preferred surface condition for cycling.
Armin Ronacher is a super smart guy, a leader in the Python community and a real giver in terms of his really significant open source output including Flask, itsdangerous and others. He is to be praised and thanked for his excellent work.

It is true however that he was super pessimistic about Python 3 and was one of the leading voices for a long time talking down Python 3.

Python 3s transition was a lesson in how not to do things, but history has shown ultimately Python 3 did not kill Python, it led to Python 3 becoming one of the worlds most successful languages, despite the pessimism and naysayers.
One argument is that it requires building on top of a raw socket, which can open you to all sorts of ancient vulnerabilities that have been patched in the battle-tested code running in the kernel, e.g. this recent ICMP remote code execution vulnerability [0] ("An attacker could send a low-level protocol error containing a fragmented IP packet inside another ICMP packet in its header to the target machine. To trigger the vulnerable code path, an application on the target must be bound to a raw socket") [1].

[0] Discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/11s80zo/cve20232341...

[1] Advisory: https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...
Show HN: A GitHub Coding Bot Named WALTER
This weekend I built a GitHub GPT-4 coding bot I’m calling WALTER (acronym to come). I’m hoping to open source it later this week once the code is cleaner. I’m just really excited to share the progress.

The workflow is just like the workflow we know and love. Open an issue on a repo and communicate with the GPT-4 via issue comments to design a solution to a problem.

Then you approve the design. The AI writes the code and submits a pull request based on the discussion.
Actually it would likely collapse the entire economy as thats whats historically happened. Then you have tons of people out of work and starving so you could feel some sense of justice for a few
Ask HN: Is it too late for doctors to unionize for AI?
Much of the AI sweeping over the highly skilled work force in the coming years is being trained by that workforce, sometime unknowingly.

Is it too late for doctors to unionize such that their training of the AI would result in residuals?

Radiologists in particular, were singled out due to the ease of taking images and the results for training. Should they not have been rewarded?

AI only (currently) pearly from training by others. Who really owns this? The doctors? The hospitals? The patients?

And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but maybe a crypto based DAO is the answer? Or maybe that’s just an implementation detail.
I guess if you have a long enough timescale, every living human is ethnically African.
See "E2XJgyWARW8" on youtube and check on how GPT-4 can be used to fine-tune MidJourney Prompts.
The company I work for, literally blocked the OpenAI site at the network level "until they can assess the potential security impact". I guess they fear people might leak sensitive information to OpenAI. Very frustrating for people with a legitimate use case for it.
> Why would you want that, rather than just hitting 'r' or whatever?

Because it's more immersive.

> Having it be "realistic" doesn't actually make it easy or discoverable.

Isn't it the games job to teach you this? Like it's teaching you which button to use?
He also had access to Paul Allen, who mentored him and was a professional programmer. Same for Jobs who had access to Steve Wozniak, the engineer behind the Apple I and II.
Love UFO stuff too. I think it comes from growing up in the X-Files era :-)

Your paradox point is the same with most conspiracy theory. It's usually along the lines of "they're keeping a big secret from us / they like to drop hints and love symbolism". It never makes sense to me. What purpose would hints or symbolism ever serve? Why reuse 'crisis actors' etc. Secrets are hard enough to keep without 'dropping hints'. And as anyone that's tried to organise a social event for a group of grown ups knows, organising people is nigh on impossible. The idea some shadowy 'they' cabal is coordinating all these massive conspiracies seems so highly unlikely. But maybe that's what they want me to believe..?!
I wouldn't expect any intern to be thoroughly familiar with those topics. Each one is an entirely different specialization that goes extremely deep.

If you need someone to write a network stack and a concurrent database system, you don't need an intern, you need an engineer.

Interns are generally students. Sometimes they're still in school. If they had skills in these kinds of deep topics, they would be applying for full time engineering roles, not internships.

People apply to internships because they lack experience and skills. It's your job to mentor them and expose them to these kinds of specialized roles so that they can decide in what direction to start their career. Interns come to you to learn and gain experience they couldn't otherwise.

Interns aren't workers, they're apprentices. Once you treat them that way, you'll have a much more rewarding relationship. They're there for you to teach, not to do an engineer's job for a fraction of the pay.
I mean, no one is arguing to replace all cars with bikes. Just where appropriate and if you want to. Enjoy your suburban paradise.
If the models don’t become more efficient to run , then it won’t be sustainable for almost any company to scale
Them up to me smarter, and have them so heavily used no one has jobs.

So we have to assume you’ll be able to run them on much more efficient hardware soon.

Anyway, I’m not necessarily talking about individuals running their own, but groups of people.
> Absolutism gets us nowhere,

And building out natgas will get us into a situation where we are locked into decades of guaranteed emissions, as all the vested interests in the production and consumption space fight tooth and nail to protect their line of business, and the capex they've dumped into it.

There's no plausible net-carbon zero path this century that's compatible with our current buildout of natgas. Perfect is the enemy of the good, but this isn't even good!
This post that also got featured on HN:

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/11wkw5z/has_chatgp...
I couldn't get that one working with my controllers in VR (HP Reverb G2). I could see the initial screen and being seated in a cockpit, but nothing responded to anything I was doing.
Most of IT is a lake a mile wide and an inch deep...Sure, there's parts that you'll drown in, but you can get by with the inch deep stuff.

It's not even a Jack-of-all-Trades thing, and I hate it. You're a Git away from building your startup and you've got no idea what libraries or dependencies it has, you just logged into AWS with a credit card and ran with it.

(Not you, exactly, the 'Royal You')
Seems like a wild take to me. VR is not nearly as immersive as people say. But reloading guns with physical interactions is one of the few bits that does feel very good.
Any new technology has some benefits and some drawbacks.

Electric cars have no direct emissions but increase mining operations in certain parts of the world. Or they can be used to plow through a public gathering of people. Or with some rewiring to electrocute someone to death. If you think hard enough, you can find nefarious purposes for almost any household item that's made your life easier.

I think what's important to focus on are the "net" benefits but the outliers feed into our emotional response.
Implying there is a limited resource of research effort that is being diverted from vaccines and into aliens, and that if all that research effort was put into vaccines it would translate into better results in a shorter period of time. If this was true, maybe it should all be reverted to curing infant cancer, or solving global hunger and bad distribution of wealth.

In any case, those assumptions don't necessarily hold: we can very well study aliens, at the same time we research vaccines and try to redistribute wealth.
Is your ritual interruptable by an outside actor?
I was a regular at Pinballz for 5 or 6 years. I love it and it's one of the number one things I miss from Austin. They maintain a great selection of games and they route a lot of games around town as well. Pins at Pinballz get a lot of play and can be in rough shape or out of service at times.
I know it's certified and automated, but that doesn't stop Apple from detecting and blocking it somehow. There is a certificate process that's crucial to install the app onto the device and that gives Apple the control it may need to make the apps un-installable for at least a little while.
People who use the "bad apple" phrase like that are using it to mean the exact opposite of what it actually means and it drives me crazy. The phrase is "one bad apple spoils the bunch."
Does it also emulate the wickedly slow I/O times of the CD/RW drive (er, Canon Magento Optical drive, apparently)? I seem to recall waiting really long for anything to read or write to that thing, despite the wonder of having a CD that I could erase, with 660MB of storage.
I wouldn't count on many developers going back to update old games with ARM support. It's more likely that the community will work to build some sort of Box86 + Proton stack to get games working, which should get a lot of the classics working[0]. From there, I think the struggle will be getting Box86 to run fast enough for modern games. Apple's ARM CPUs have great IPC, but that can still get annihilated when it's forced to simulate SIMD/AVX instructions. I assume Apple has some sort of vector acceleration framework in Apple Silicon, but it will take time and effort to reverse-engineer and implement.

Things are certainly looking better than they did a couple years ago, but getting ARM to run x86 code faster-than-native is an uphill battle. Maybe even an impossible one, but I've been surprised before (like with DXVK).

[0] Crysis on a Rockchip ARM SOC, for example: https://youtu.be/k6C5mZvanFU?t=1069
Incorrect. As we are seeing all over the country, the "ruling class" has been voting to reduce policing--because what the f--k do they care? They have private security, or live in exclusive enclaves. The bulwark of support for the police is middle class parents and property owners. They're the people who, unlike the wealthy, can't rely on private security and geographic barriers to protect themselves from criminals.

Look at who voted for Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa in New York City, who both ran on a pro-police platform.
True but beyond hobby projects this becomes a double-edged sword that swings back at you.
Keep in mind the spec being violated is the privileged spec, not the core instruction set (which is what people think of when they think of an ISA violation). Personally, I think the privileged spec is a little too overzealous about the implementation-specific details that it specifies, and a little more should have been left to chip vendors.
I honestly can't tell if you're serious.
Adjacent Peninsula cities are barely within an hour of each other at commute time. Where are you talking about?
Jobs in Open Source Startups
Was Hynek a disinformation agent in the same way too?

This has been logged by governments at least since ww2 and the IC has worked to cover it up since. Lue is fairly new in terms of the timeline.
We're all a bit more anxious/pessimist than what's objectively needed for a situation - natural selection, etc.

Writing about my plans has helped me give my anxiety/pessimism a productive job: help me spot what makes me doubt/worry so I can probe further. Identifying these items where conviction is low, makes me explore my motivations, look up data to validate my claims and breakdown my plans further.

The worrying becomes a task about finding what needs to be validated/double checked. If I'm assuming X isn't going to work because Y, then I can lookup evidence/data or make more specific questions. What I like about it is that it generates actionables - the worrying for it's own sake eats up my motivation but having a checklist of stuff that I need to look into gives me an outlet.
Calls for ban on light-polluting mass satellite groups like Elon Musk’s Starlink
The big question I have is whether this can possibly support mandatory Vulkan features that are not available in Metal. The one I care about most is device scoped barriers, which in turn are needed for single-pass prefix sum techniques.
Wear mittens
> Netflix had insanely good revenue when they started out and there wasn’t much competition.

I'm really curious about when you think this was, and what you mean. They started out shipping DVDs at a loss and took a very long time to become profitable--or to start the streaming service we know today.
> But when the lease on her apartment in Seoul, South Korea, became too much to afford

This is not complicated. If you want more people there has to be somewhere they can live. It is far better to not have people born than to hit the point where overpopulation starts killing people (usually via homelessness or violence).
take a deep breath...

FRB is the same bank it was two weeks ago but with $30 bln more in deposits

there is no material evidence that it is dire straits

there is no material evidence of malfeasance

there is no material evidence of a run on the bank

the P/E for FRB is now UNDER 2

re-read that...UNDER 2

you either believe FRB's collapse is IMMINENT (and if so, what is the evidence?)...or this is the strongest insane buy signal I have seen in years

the stock is trading for $16 and most analysts still have a price target of over $120

this is literally a panic selling mania that seems to have no basis in evidence at all, its crazy

even NYT commenters are pointing out...there's nothing wrong with First Republic
it's also The Register which is sort of known for these kinds of fear mongering clickbaity headlines. Just about anything can be misused for nefarious purposes. The implications of a sophisticated generative text program (simplifying it [a lot]) are rather obvious
summary: (human edited! no AI)

1. As you’re lying in bed, think of a random, emotionally neutral word that has at least 5 letters. Example word BEDTIME

2. Starting with the first letter, “B,” think of a word that begins with B, and visualize that item. Like imagine a Bear. And then a Banana. And then Bacon. And then Bread. And then Butter, etc.

3. If you can’t think of another word starting with B, move on to the next letter in your word BEDTIME – in this case, the letter E. So you’d imagine an Elephant. An Egg. An Escalator. And so on.

4. If you get to the end of your word and are still awake, just pick a new word, repeat.
Far from "usually", in my experience.
I agree that nested data is a weak point of TOML. But writing TOML files that don't have huge levels of nesting is a charm, which would be precisely the place where php.ini, Cargo.toml and package.json operate in. Deno had the chance to innovate here, but they missed out on it.
Right... so violent revolution and if successful then the mob owns the robots. That middle bit doesn't seem a bit worrisome?
> Property rights are not the same as copyright.

Copyright is a subset of property rights.

> Intellectual property is not property.

Intellectual property is intangible personal property is personal property is property.

> Infringing copyright is not theft.

Right, it doesn’t permanently deprive the property holder; its more like trespass than theft.
As anyone well-informed how LLMs work will tell you, it's not violating any copyright or IP, because these answers are coming from a probabilistic walk through condensed remix of learning, not the sources themselves.

Another way of thinking of it is compressed knowledge, with learned structure, and an ability to pick likely words to describe that structure rather than an ability to use original words.

The compression ratio of the source corpus versus the model demonstrates it doesn't have all the source material, ipso facto, results are not infringement.

As an easy to understand analog, if you grab a Shutterstock photo, change it from 100% quality to 5% quality, the file size drops to 100th of the original and on display, none of the pixels are the same. While it may be the same general concept depicted badly, it is certainly not the original and clearly isn't copyrightable.

(Note: That last paragraph is firmly tongue in cheek /s ... I've used the "uniqueness (originality) is compressed out, what remains as learned is fair use" argument in the past, but on further reflection about the interaction of creativity and structure, I'm not sure it stands, especially at temperature 0 aka zero creativity.)
Tech is so full of arms races where both sides do nothing.
In War of the Worlds the martian's are defeated by viruses. This is pretty much science fiction tech as envisioned by the original writers.
If they don't have to deal with cars, perhaps it's ok - but yikes. Helmets for everyone because even at 20kph someone could get a nasty/fatal head injury when they're yeeted out of the cargo area.
Maybe in the new generation the same % of people will decide to not have kids and populations in developed countries will continue shrinking geometrically maintaining the present trend.

This line of reasoning is very interesting to ponder though. The black plague in Europe made survivors materially richer as they were able to take possession of what was left behind from the deceased. As there's less and less people to compete for stuff, the existing younger populations will be richer, thus giving them an incentive to focus on leisure and reproduction. Then there would be a cycle were the sharp decline in population, plants the seeds for the next big rise.
Brings back memories. Going to 2600 meetings in the early 90s at the Citicorp center (in the food court, near the pay phones) and playing "spot the fed".

One clarification, though. He says:

>BBSs were all text all the time — no graphics, no icons, or avatars to go along with your posts and musings.

In fact ANSI art was huge on BBS's back in the day. ACiD, UAA and a variety of other groups all created spectacular "graphics" that virtually every BBS (especially "elite" boards) featured on their splash page.
Forgejo currently is only applying branding changes and currently plans on being a soft fork. I think it’s existence is a good thing for the ecosystem (if Gitea the Company did something wonky, there will be an organized group already doing releases ready to go), but I’m not sure there is a huge benefit in running it, at this juncture.
If I'm not wrong, the issue is with funding government programs. Most government programs are funded by taxes and if the populations is dropping then naturally the tax base is shrinking.
Because the bot would have to be producing something of value. So if now will have access to something that can also produce value without having to pay a gatekeeper? You don’t think that’s important ?
> I think the parent comment was making the case that if these companies raised wages, they could hire US permanent residents which wouldn't require these timelines you've mentioned. Making the immigration process less onerous would have the opposite effect.

Like I said, the companies are more likely to open offices and hire in other countries than to keep raising wages in America. By arbitrarily preventing the smartest from coming to America, we are encouraging American companies to go elsewhere.

But why don't they just raise wages? Because that's how American capitalism works. One could argue that American capitalism needs to change but by the time that happens, the smart people have built a competing service in another place. See: Tiktok
That's a great answer. I would only add that the cognitive load of CS taken broadly is far greater than most 4-year CS curricula can hope to cover. I do think CS curricula could be significantly better, but they'd have to lighten up on liberal arts requirements to get there, and even then most undergrads 18-21 couldn't handle it. Add to that the sorts of things that software developers have to know that CS curricula won't bother covering, and the cognitive load of it all requires well over a decade to master, if not more. Plus the mastery of any one individual will greatly depend on what they've had to work with.

Well-rounded computer scientists spend a lot of time reading papers (and docs and blogs and...) and a lot of time thinking about things. But that means having less time left over for being 10x engineers unless they're also 10x computer scientists.
I am neither an Apple lover or an Apple hater. I think Apple produces extremely well polished products thanks to their vertical integration and have innovated in hardware pushing the frontier, especially with the ARM suites. However, they also have a fairly closed ecosystem in which they are trying to overprice things when they can abusing their dominant position. I would feel sad to contribute to its success but I also selfishly really need the best tool available.
I am going to the PHoF in Vegas this weekend and hopefully you (or anyone who is reading) can help me with some doubts I have. Do I need to bring cash, so I can change into coins there to play? Would they accept international credit cards to buy coins? (I am not from the US)