skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The recently published book Rust Atomics and Locks by Mara Bos has an interesting section on why Rust uses the futex syscall directly.

> ... However, there are a few issues with that, as this pthread type was designed for C, not for Rust.

> In Rust, we move objects around all the time. ... The pthread types we discussed do not guarantee they are movable, which becomes quite a problem in Rust. Even a simple idiomatic Mutex::new() function is a problem: it would return a mutex object, which would move it into a new place in memory.

> A solution to this problem is to wrap the mutex in a Box. By putting the pthread mutex in its own allocation, it stays in the same location in memory, even if its owner is moved around. This is how std::sync::Mutex was implemented on all Unix platforms before Rust 1.62.

> The downside of this approach is the overhead: every mutex now gets its own allocation, adding significant overhead to creating, destroying, and using the mutex. Another downside is that it prevents the new function from being const, which gets in the way of having a static mutex. Even if pthread_mutex_t was movable, a const fn new could only initialize it with default settings, which results in undefined behavior when locking recursively. There is no way to design a safe interface that prevents locking recursively, so this means we’d need to make the lock function unsafe to make the user promise they won’t do that.

> A problem that remains with our Box approach occurs when dropping a locked mutex. ... pthread specifies that calling pthread_mutex_destroy() on a locked mutex is not guaranteed to work and might result in undefined behavior. One work-around is to first attempt to lock (and unlock) the pthread mutex when dropping our Mutex, and panic (or leak the Box) when it is already locked, but that adds even more overhead. These issues don’t just apply to pthread_mutex_t, but to the other types we discussed as well. Overall, the design of the pthread synchronization primitives is fine for C, but just not a great fit for Rust.
Maybe we really are.

Many sifi stories feature heroes encountering an advanced AI doing "sth". We usually see ourselves as part of the hero group in these stories but maybe ultimately we will end up the side note about the civilization who built the AI.
Good luck getting to the end of this without giving it. It bathers on so much that's nothing to do with the story.
Yeah, and the particular old-school UNIX I had in mind was Win32. :)
Have you considered that Laos is the way it is because of its past history and geographical location? For one, it's the most heavily bombed nation in the world per capita (done by America during the Vietnam War)? [1]

It isn't easy to develop a country that is so severely set back by war. Especially without outside help and/or investment.

Laos also isn't getting the same attention as its neighbors like Thailand and Vietnam by the West almost as if it holds no strategic value to the West.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexploded_ordnance#Laos
(job) security by obscurity.
Interesting. I assume this only works for x86 based Chromebooks?
What would happen if there was a war like this that we actually need to fight in?
Oh, good question, I have been running some stuff as systemd user services but I don't actually know if they get real cgroups.
Housing? Healthcare? etc
Show HN: OneMessage – Open any number in WhatsApp
Hi HN,

I created this PWA page / site / app to send WhatsApp messages to people not in my contacts. I get calls from delivery people or cab drivers asking me to share my address over WhatsApp and I have to save their contacts before sharing those details. Invariably, I forget to delete those contacts later.

All this app does is to open WhatsApp for me to send the message directly.
How to Escape from the Simulation [pdf]
> That shows the LLM can pick up on abstract thought and reasoning patterns that humans use.

Does it? I’m still unconvinced it’s more than copying other examples of “show your work”.
Perhaps there is some fancy selector which excludes images?
People have been doing that for a long time. It's usually a form of malicious compliance to "document everything" policies.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/4ktp12/my_...
Why do people brag about this stuff?
the author is a woman.

https://www.wired.com/author/virginia-heffernan/
The court order discusses this, and says while the first sale doctrine means IA could resell or lend their physical books, that right does not extend to unauthorized reproductions (such as making an ebook by scanning in a print book).
Seriously.

Has there been any kind of movement towards a law that would automatically put zombie works into the public domain?

It really doesn't seem unreasonable that if a book, film, recording, or video game hasn't been generally available for sale over the past 5 or 10 years it becomes public domain. Use it or lose it, in other words.

Although it might really only apply to past works. Because while physical books go out of print, e-books will probably be available forever, no?
Requires an account to download the PDF.
They did this a Chappelle show I went too in NYC. You could keep bring your phone into the show but it had to be locked I a thick neoprene pouch they gave you. When you left the show there were people there it open them (they were locked magnetically somehow)

I think it was this one
https://www.overyondr.com/howitworks
And honestly they probably have a better (albeit still terrible) case because it was transformative
Hell, even Los Angeles is mostly empty

https://noparkinghere.com/
> After sending +50 emails yesterday to contact potential customers and editing them manually to adapt the content to their business, I learnt that Fastmail banned my account without warnings because I was sending "spam"

Because it is spam.

Maybe stop sending spam?
Why don't more people see this capability as an accelerator and/or amplifier? To borrow from the book "Smarter Than You Think" by Clive Thompson, it can turn us into "centaurs", fusing the minds of humans with the computing power of AI.

Doesn't this show that we can now use this technology to generate and execute code for modest problems that have already been solved, while we can spend more time on even more complex problems?
I’m so tired of the fake make pay role canard.

All depositors had $250k guaranteed at the bat. But sure maybe that’s short for 2 weeks of payroll for many companies.

Well FDIC was already cash payout warrants against the size of of their deposit assets (something like 50% would be available). If you need more than 50% of available cash to make payroll, you were already a dead firm walking.

With liquid assets like long term treasuries, they could have been liquidated quickly, and at worst most companies would have seen a 10-15% haircut.

A haircut hurts. But running a business includes all sorts of risks. You could have a lawsuit. You could have a fire. Your cloud provider could shutdown. They knew about the risk of being uninsured (since many companies have corporate treasurers who manage multiple banks and portfolio of treasury bills to manage bank risk), and this was just the one risk their company faced that came to fruition.
They don't seem motivated to do so now, while torrents, Russian hostings and warez seem up for years. How come?
It is trivial- a matter of prompting and reading API documentation. The latter is well understood by existing developers.
A giant typically means famous. There are many giants that we will never know the name of. For me, I’d rather die famous with my friends and family and have changed the world in my silent way. I’ve been fortunate enough to do it a few times already, and I hope I’ll get another chance before I die as most people never get the first chance. That’s I think a better goal - when a chance comes to change everything, jump into it head first. But don’t bother trying to be famous. It’s meaningless.

Regardless, I bid Dr Moore a fond farewell. He lived to see the horizon of his law.
You won't fire off a quick email nor warn others because there's no bug bounty?
> Only taking over job market is still taking over.

That can't happen:

- getting a job creates more jobs, it doesn't reduce or replace them, because it grows the economy.

- more importantly, jobs are based on comparative advantage and so an AI being better at your job would not actually cause it to take your job from you. Basically, it has better things to do.
Just becasue people are doing that for a long time it doesn't mean we should make it more efficient.
Then would be when baby shark jumps the shark!
Nonetheless, its still the sort of thing that can colour opinion. If you want to change things with a precedent, it is usually best to try and be a perfect angel in every other way possible.
Ah, I worked in a place like this. We had a lightweight Fagan inspection process (with 4 roles and all that stuff) and some scripts we wrote to ensure each commit was either reviewed or explicitly skipped.

It was OK - definitely better than nothing, but with its own problems. Biggest defects were the worst - lets say someone made a new library function and inspection found out that function should not exist at all. By the time it's time to make a fix, code might already be used. The latency was not so great -- to save time, we often requested a review of entire patch series so the time from the first commit to the first comment was pretty long.

Later on for business reasons we had to stop working on that codebase and start all new code from scratch. Everyone on the team voted to switch to "pull review + code review before commit" and we never looked back.

Thinking back about this, the main reason to use post-inspection was that the tooling sucked. Back then we had SVN and branches were super heavy, the easiest way to share code was to email files around, and combining yours and someone else's unpublished changed was arcane process which could easily lead to data loss. Additionally, all sort of tooling, like advanced tests and staging environment required code on master. So making merge quick and easy was the only solution.

Luckily by the time we started again git was around (but not github, and we self-hosted everything anyway), so we improved the tooling itself. Turns out having lightweight branches is great! And being able to tell a colleague "PTAL at my branch" is also great! And we improved tooling so we could push any branch to staging or run extended tests on any commit! And we can review the code and fix it before having entire company use it! So the fact that a PR might take a day or two to land was not a big deal at all.

If you are still on the post-commit reviews, take a look at your processes. The new features are great, and you might be missing out on them.

(This assumes a medium sized team. If it's just 2 people working on a codebase, the benefits are much less and costs are relatively bigger)
>You are absolutely right that the States, particularly the smaller and weaker States, would have zero incentive to agree to surrender their sovereignties in deference to the other States.

Except that they already have. Each of Vermont(3), Delaware(3), Hawaii(4), Rhode Island(4), New Mexico(5), Connecticut(7), and Oregon(8) has already ratified legislation agreeing to the compact. That's seven counter examples.

I'll point out that there are in fact enough states pending ratification that will obsolete the EC should they be confirmed. In a twist of irony, a sacred duty to represent states could be foiled by state legislatures themselves.
There's a subreddit where people post angry prescriptive memos or notices from their terrible bosses, and this would fit right in.
I found the opposite. They were one of the few places who continued to report the news. Also unscientific. That said I think that the news simply became more polarizing and people looked to confirm biases rather than get news.
Ask HN: A productivity AI assistant for meetings and mails?
TL;DR: Does anyone know of an AI-based voice app that allows you to manage calendar and mails?

I’ve been searching around a lot and couldn’t find a virtual AI (I.e cheaper than humans) assistant/app that’s voice based that allows me to manage my calendar and emails; I wanna be able to check what’s coming, quickly send attendees some follow up information, mail people, schedule new meetings etc. I’d be realistic about the quality and not use it for the most important customer communication etc but I’d assume AI in the last year has come far enough that some Startup us created such an app?
You can sell or lend the physical copy you own. You can’t make a copy and then loan that. Copyright is the right to control making copies.

You could sell or lend virtual copy if the platforms supported that. You are allowed to make a copy for backup purposes, and no one will ever know if you use that or even lend it. But if you make business of it, then they will notice and sue you.
they'll survive due to geopolitics if nothing else, the US government has no choice but to make sure they stay viable due to the potential issues in Taiwan
“Surely there are no threat actors here. Not that I’ve checked or anything, I just feel surely there wouldn’t be any here…”

Great opinion
The whole “devalues other money” thing is the ‘quantity theory of money’ which has never really been observable as true in normal economies - only at the very extremes (but other factors play in - all in all velocity of money is more important).
Apparently all the free Docker users believe so.

I'm not saying they're right or wrong, but they believe so. You need to count this when writing down your monetization plan. People nowadays are generally extremely entitled.
It was designed to do that.

The creature from Jekyll Island
by G. Edward Griffin is a book that describes the creation of the FED, how it was done in secret.
I wonder about the end-game effect of the BTFP. Great, today banks got enough liquidity thanks to the Fed, but after 90 days they have to return borrowed funds together with a relatively high interest and get back semi-worthless paper (because selling it will result in realized losses). In 90 days credit conditions probably will be even tighter than today and a lot of people will flee to the too big to fail banks. How we expect small/mid banks to stay stable after that?

And I don't even want to touch the question of fiscal deficits, which not only do not show signs of moderation, but accelerate even further. It either ends in a real default, or persistent high inflation, with negative real rates, which in a sense is also a default.
> You're saying something similar to "you wouldn't download a car".

It's applying without considering it.

The digital book isn't being kept at the old location because there is no digital book in the physical book.

It's the only way to transfer a single copy of a book without destroying the physical copy.

Judges should consider stuff like this and it's a disappointing ruling.

But go on...
Conventions that strong might as well be mandatory — at least if you are a decent coworker.
I've worked two SRE (or SRE-adjacent) jobs with oncall duty (Some unicorn and a FAANG). Neither have been remotely as bad to what you're saying. (Only one was actually 24/7 for a week shift.)

The whole point is that before you join, the team has done sufficient work to not make it hell, and your work during business hours makes sure it stays that way. Are there a couple bad weeks throughout the year? Sure, but it's far, far from the norm.
Not sure why so many down votes for you. HN is clearly very pro-AI.

I think you're correct about the training data problem. This is starting to remind me of the Final Question story by Asimov. "Insufficient data for meaningful answer". While in that story the AIs kept progressing, I think in reality we will forever be stuck with diminishing quality of training data.

Even just consider post-Copilot Github. Presumably there is now code publicly available that was generated by an AI. Next time somebody slurps up Github to train a new model, some of that code will be included. Overfitting ensues.
Very timely post. I was recently looking at the ways one can implement a plugin system using WASM (outside the browser). Communicating between the host application and the plugin is sure tricky... I've seen places that use WASI to map stdin/stdout to files and use that. It feels... wrong.
Any path to AI replacing all programmers that doesn’t involve replacing a huge numbers of other office workers first is nonsense.

Have people who write these things never heard of an “email job?
I don't think the technology was leaked from Moderna, as BioNTech was a major player in this mRNA technology before.

I don't have the poll, but as far as I remember only in the US was the majority for prioritizing the own country. Though the amount of money spent on "project warp speed", a US effort not matched anywhere else, could play a role here.
I don't think that answers the question. Suppose I want to go to the movies on my day off. I can't, precisely because everyone else is off, too.
I searched on "Moore's law is not a law" and found [1], "Moore’s Law Is Not Really A Law But It Is Still Obeyed", from someone who was a semiconductor engineer at Intel 40 years ago. As he says, Moore's law was more a roadmap than a law. Companies strove to keep it going for fear their competitors would succeed while they failed; sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[1] https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/moores-law-is-not-real...
Our local ski resort has no cell reception, and it's magic. When you sit on the charlift you always talk to strangers. In the lodge everyone has their eyes up and is talking, and even when waiting for a lift people actually chat and laugh and joke.

I genuinely hope they never build a tower up there.
https://archive.is/hQjhB
> Either it’s not real and it doesn’t matter, or it is real and it matters a lot. It’s not conditional on if someone can pull it off.

If it is real and it does matter, and them LARPing research papers and giving OpenAI more advertising material makes it more likely to happen, that is conditional on their reaction. If the risk is real and they're making the problem worse (basically accelerating the timeline), then it would be better for them to stop talking about it and focus on basic security practices instead.

> The security concerns that impact people today are just not on the same scale of importance.

The security concerns that impact people today are tied into the risks of AGI. A company that can't secure its products against basic XSS attacks and prompt injection is fundamentally incapable of securing a rogue AI.

You'd have a point here if these were actually different categories, but they're not. 3rd-party prompt injection by random actors is a very feasible way for an AGI to turn rogue. That should be a big priority to fix if the concerns about AGI are real. And if it's unfixable, these people should be screaming from the rooftops that we should not be wiring up AIs to any real-world systems at all until we find a better mitigation technique. I mean, you're talking about something existential; obviously if that concern is real it's more important to mitigate those problems then for OpenAI to displace Google search and get a competitive advantage on the market. And those people should terrified that OpenAI is both rushing to the market and proving that they have bad security practices.

But for the most part, that reaction really isn't happening; so it makes me wonder how much people actually believe that AGI is an existential threat.

The really wild thing is that most of the current-world problems that exist with AI have massive implications for AGI. Systemic bias, corporations controlling the training functions, anthropomorphism from the general public, the ability to produce deceptive material or bypass human security checks on a mass scale, prompt injection and instruction bypassing -- all of those are extremely relevant to keeping a rogue AI contained or preventing it from going rogue in the first place.

As far as I'm concerned, anyone who was seriously concerned about AGI would be focusing on that stuff anyway: those categories represent some of the most immediately tangible steps you could take to prevent an AI from going rogue or from breaking containment if it went rogue.
I bet their bike racks are gonna have a lot more space
I agree 100%. Framework devs forget that the rest of us have real jobs to do and can't spend weeks updating to the latest version of the framework every 6 months.
Same way we did in the 90s. Someone just shouts "Gnicholas, your wife is on the phone!"
I don't understand why users would voluntarily move away from piracy. I prefer "you can't do anything about it" to "please let us." Why the norm, base line expectation of the end user is not identity obfuscation and free access to information without hindrance I just don't get.
Which positions do they support that you would call left wing?
People who are writing software in Nix-based dev envs would be interested in what we're working on, but the featureset is tightly bound to resource limitations and needs, so I can't really say any more without making promises I might not be able to keep, and I would feel bad badmouthing s6 if I couldn't do any better myself.
You're comparing apples and oranges.

In the case of a physical object needing to temporarily go digital, it needs to be sent digitally and the records kept, and of course the physical copy has to be kept.

In the case of the GPL there's no physical copy and thus there's no need to consider how to move from one form to the other.

To require that a physical object never be used digitally is bad for society.
I have very bad news about what most of the electronics in the average home are doing right now. Especially the Chinese ones...
This is a handy way to search for things in the monthly "Who's Hiring" threads
For 2-5 days, sure. But for 1+ month, it's way more expensive than what AirBnB proposes. If you are digitally nomading around the world, there are little options left.
> the publishers take issue with only 120 or so books

Not quite. The plaintiffs have to name some specific works on which to base the case. The 120 is enough because the statutory damages for just those 120 works could be a staggering amount that would bankrupt IA.

The complaint [0] also asks for an injunction enjoining IA from any further infringement of "any of the respective copyrights owned or exclusively controlled, in whole or in part, by Plaintiffs, whether now in existence or hereinafter created." [0] at 51.

[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...
> kids

Not sure it's just kids
Exactly. And there lies the issue. Internet archive has the book and lends the book simultaneously. Hence why they lost.
I’m sure it outperforms the general population since most people can’t code a hello world, or regurgitate an answer to a problem they have been trained to answer but have no understanding of like ChatGPT can. But if a minimally competent human gave me a completely nonsensical answer to a question they haven’t seen before, the way ChatGPT does so confidently, I would think one of us had a stroke.

I would expect a journalist who never had do think through a theory of computation course to make breathless claims that ChatGPT can “solve programming problems“, but I’m pretty surprised to hear so many people who have jobs in tech repeating these claims, especially since all it would take them to trip up ChatGPT is a few seconds to type in a slightly unfamiliar or non-trivial question. It’s like a kind of second-order Turing test: if you think ChatGPT can program, you’re not a real programmer.
> I wonder how gpt-4 does.

The problem is that as soon as people started tricking ChatGPT 3 into problems like that, the correct answers are now being used to train the next versions and are going to be part of the dataset.

So GPT-4 or GPT-5 may get the answer right, but that still wouldn't mean anything.