skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
About once a week I consider dropping out of the tech industry and becoming a politician just so I don't have to sit and watch by the sidelines as incompetent, ignorant people, who studied humanities with not a drop a technical aptitude, bullshit their way through funding and regulating technology. They are never well informed enough to come up with any sort or coherent solution, because they're barely capable in actually grasping the issue in the first place. They're just not qualified enough to know who they should be taking advice from, and who are the obvious snake oil peddlers.

I live in the UK. Our Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology is a woman called Michelle Donelan. She graduated with a BA in history and politics, and her career outside of being a career politician was in marketing, including a time working on Marie Claire magazine and for World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). How in the world is she qualified for to run the nations tech initiatives? If she was appointed as CEO of a tech company, the stock would sink like a rock over night. Dare I even get started on Michael Gove, who originally wanted the role...
I don't understand all this modern "supply chain security" stuff. What is the point of getting cryptographic signatures and bills of material from people you don't know and don't trust?
As I understand it, the amount that you can spend on your own campaign is unlimited (thanks to the first amendment), but the amount that other people can contribute is strictly capped due to campaign finance laws. Michael Bloomberg took advantage of this when he did his "primary blitz" in 2020.

If this was actually Trump paying his own hush money via his lawyer, then it makes Michael Cohen a liar (when he said that he paid it out of his own pocket, thus admitting to violating campaign finance law), but Trump seems to not be implicated at all.
If you don’t know something, and know you don’t know something, you’re likely not going to do something bad with that information. For example, if you don’t know anything about engines, you’re probably not going attempt to fix one.

But often times we think we know something, and are confident that what we know is true, when it really isn’t. And that’s what gets us in trouble. For example, thinking you know something about engines, but instead you flood the cylinders and require a real mechanic to fix it instead.
Forgive me if my EE knowledge is old and rusty, but isn't an anode required for a battery to function? You have to be able to harvest a voltage differential, and to do that you must have an anode and a cathode.

Perhaps they meant there wasn't an anode that gets degraded by use?
Well they do of course. There are export restrictions on supercomputers now, including many NVIDIA GPUs.

I contend that doesn't matter.

There is sufficient compute available now at consumer levels to make it too late to stop training LLMs.

If cloud A100s became unavailable tomorrow it'd be awkward, but there is enough progress being made on training on lower RAM cards to show it is possible.
I really wish they would fix the static linking. has needed a hack for three years:

https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/issues/15220
> but the almost-like-vim-but-not-really key bindings are a deal breaker. I just can't make the switch.

> If Helix were completely different in this regard, like Emacs is, I could handle--and I know because I use both vim and Emacs regularly pretty fluently. But Helix is way too close to the vim keybindings to discern it from a memory muscle perspective.

You might want to reconsider trying a bit to see if you think it's worth it. I ended up learning vim deeply, emacs deeply, and meow (most similar to Helix being almost somewhat vim-like but different) somewhat deeply. I thought before each one that I couln't possibly learn the other, especially the similar one.
Rocketry progress stopped because world governments cut back funding dramatically in the 1960's, and private demand for rocket launches isn't much.

Aeroplanes stopped developing because the whole industry is now highly regulated. The barrier to getting a new type of plane/engine design to market is beyond what pretty much all startups are capable of. That's why we still fly some planes like cessna designed in the 1960's, back when regulation was more lax.

I don't think either rockets nor planes are anywhere near fundamental physical limits if we took away the 'human' limiting factors.
Cool, maybe they'll start looking at some of the other defects they've ignored for 20+ years.. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194863
Is the ‘for mortals’ thing a Steve Jobs-ism?
> A Grand Jury (for those that don't know) is composed of citizens, about 16-20 or something, that proceed like a court case understanding laws and evidence presented, including witness interviews, and the result here is that they chose to indict. This means that 12 (or more) citizens decided there was enough evidence that specific laws might have been broken to bring charges against him.

There's also a famous saying, though, that any prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich (interestingly, I never knew the original author of that quote was a judge who subsequently served 13 months in prison, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Wachtler).

But, the overall point is that the bar for grand jury indictment is intentionally low. I'm not going to speculate on aspects of the indictment because I don't know what they are yet (and it always amazes me how so many folks always dig in to be part of "their team" even before they know what the game is), but before the indictments I did see some legal experts who were definitely not Trump fans argue that it was not a case they would've brought.
I like nim but I found the dev experience to be quite awful. Couldn't just install a plugin for VS code and hit run...had to configure stuff and not sure how to get the debugger to work still.

I have strongly suspected for a while now that the language is kind of irrelevant, but the supporting infrastructure like package managers, IDEs, other utils, platform support, libraries, etc are far more important when picking a language to use. Who cares if java programs are 2x as long? Trying to fix your $obscure_language$ tooling will take 10x as long.
You need to post it around 9pm EST or it will never gain any traction.

And it's been discussed here at least a couple of times already.
As well as battery charge cycles
I mentally group Flash, Visual Basic and Visual FoxPro together as dying because they were unfashionable in tech circles despite being highly productive and practical. They never got effectively replaced and we will very slowly end up with modern equivalents.
Or, knowingly/unknowingly allowing someone else to. Really GDPR is the implementation of an actual legal requirement around the old concept of professional discretion. I.e. my business records with a European Citizen are not valid targets of subsequent unrelated transactions without consent; something which is importantly defined as not being granted by default, or invalidated when obtained through deceptive means.

That the rest of the tech world was so enraptured by the fact that suddenly, handing off people's business records to somebody else no longer involved literally moving boxes of paper, and threw professional discretion to the winds is more an indictment of the state of mind and sense of entitlement of the typical tech-enabled business class as a whole than a condemnation of the allegedly "backward" European Union.

t. American Technologist actually proud of the EU for standing up for common decency, and recognizing exploitive behavior when they see it.
Oh, ok, certainly, there can be different levels of gravity for the same offense. But it's not the case of "you haven't positively proven intent so no conviction".
yeah people are scratching the surface of the potential.

you can write prompt to clean unstructured text into structured text. that becomes the work area.

instead of asking gpt "write me some code in pyton that does x" you can just tell gtp "do x with the structured data in the work area and present a structured result"

gpt becomes the computation engine

granted it's super expensive and quite slow, today

but with a few plugins to take care of mechanical things and the token memory space becoming increasingly bigger, writing the programming step directly on there may be the standard. as soon as vector storage and reasoning steps gets well integrated, it's going explode.
Because they leaked what they think is the most damaging information to their propaganda arm
They don't copy and reproduce the data. They change it sufficiently for the licence to have any say. Fair use it's called.
Janet users are not encumbered with the historical cruft of scheme like hiding libraries behind unmenorable srfi numbers, or the ancient an un-portable oop implementations etc etc
That doesn't sound impossible. Your kids don't even have to play sports. We act like privacy is that important to us but then we go ahead and do things like this.

I'm not on Meta side on this but I actually don't use a lot of services that I'd like to and have real inconveniences because a certain level of privacy is actually important to me.
It reminds me of the boundless optimism of Mr Meeseeks:
https://youtu.be/qUYvIAP3qQk

GPT-3/4 is like a Meeseeks box for computer and internet tasks. Keep your task simple, and it will quickly and happily solve it for you before ceasing to exist. (Well, that’s how I use it via the API, at least. ChatGPT will preserve the state, but of course the context window is still limited anyway.)
They're addressing crime....by committing it.
They say they do the verification for "security reasons", which is a lawful basis and accepted justification under GDPR (it helps them control abuse and make bans stickier). You assented to it when you signed up.
Unfortunately this is very true. My machine has 64 gb of ram 3600, and a AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor. Even inside openbox jetbrains apps run extremely slow. Tried on windows, tried on mac, i endup in the same place. Sadly I will have to give in to using vs code.
I’m currently building out Wordpress for developers.

Our logo in an upcoming release uses inlined SVG, and it’s taking a class name property to change the text color dynamically.

https://github.com/elegantframework/elegant/blob/v2.0-alpha/...
There aren't enough raw materials to 1st world lifestyle the whole globe in any capacity.

Serious adjustments will need to be made, or we need major technological breakthroughs. It isn't just a question of fossil fuels lasting forever or there being enough lithium. Almost every resource is under pressure. Drinkable water, fertilizer, copper. Good luck everyone. And no need to explain the economics ideas about how price spurs investment and so on, I know.
This. Exactly this. I got downvoted to hell the last time I expressed this sentiment so it’s nice to have my opinion validated by a set of fresh eyes.
Slow down and let people adapt.
The problem is not AI replacing jobs, it is the speed of the replacement that is critical.
Its pretty simple, there aren't thousands of missing GPUs that would be required for an agency to be training massive models on and there aren't hundreds of the best PhD students disappearing while working somewhere in the DC Metro Area. They don't seem to have the hardware and they certainly don't seem to have the brainpower either.
Same year as Unix datetime underflow. Nice

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
send some data scientists and researchers into an NYPD office to "touch" things and see how that goes
I think the Scott Aaroson link posted did a pretty good job of that.

I don't think their arguments deserve anything more than that.
lmao please, I can't even get ChatGPT to be a decent DM for a DnD bot because "killing that orc would hurt the orc's feelings" or some bs like that.
Probably both, depending on which developers you compare against and how you measure productivity. Keep in mind there's an entire world of development where productivity is measured by number of JIRA tickets closed for button text updates.
Let the AI Coding Wars Begin
I'll jump in here between the two of you and say that from my point of view it's you ignoring facts not jacquesm. I accept that if you believe jacquesm to be arguing in bad faith there's not a way to say that without it being a little bit rude, but I believe that description actually applies to your comments and not theirs.

edit: your original claim-

> GDPR tries to enforce its rules on servers outside of its territory.

It's enforcing rules on data sent to/from people in the EU and the servers (not just servers ofc), i.e. on companies offering their services to people in the EU. If the companies don't wish to follow the laws of a specific country (or in this case, all EU countries), they're welcome to not provide services to those users.

Since you seem to think the example they gave doesn't count because it's a Californian law not federal (not sure why that matters...), how about stuff like "The FTC engages with competition and consumer protection agencies in other countries to halt deceptive and anticompetitive business practices that affect U.S. consumers." ( https://www.ftc.gov/policy/international ) which includes laws such as COPPA ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_... )

Or let's say there's a country in Europe where hacking and ransomeware are completely legal, and a company in that country focussed their ransomeware efforts on attacking American companies. Would you argue that either the USA wouldn't care about that because it's outside their jurisdiction, or that they shouldn't care because it's outside their jurisdiction?
What makes you think US Population is receding? By all census counts, we're still growing, a lot.

Numbers for 2022 are something like 900K immigrants living in the U.S. became U.S. citizens. 2 Million more migrants came with about @ 150K documented boarder crossings per month for 18 months straight. The only time there was a huge drop-off was during Covid, for obvious reasons. "The Build Back Better Act included a a $1.75 trillion framework that called for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and a recapture of visas that were not issued in previous years"

US is the third largest populated country at 335M.

Trying to understand your "depopulate further" statement.
I found this [0] to be interesting, however, because I'm not well versed in law, I'm still unclear on a lot. Maybe a real lawyer could weigh in?

[0] https://www.justsecurity.org/85745/survey-of-prosecutions-fo...
>>this seems like a weak case to me.

Said another commenter who, like everyone else outside of the DA's office, has literally no data on what is in the now-reported to be 34 indictments.

>> hard to parse the above, but it sounds very technical
So, "I don't know what I'm talking about, generally don't like it, so I'll just call it weak.", is itself a very weak statement.

It is extremely unlikely that this reluctant prosecutor would go to the mat with a weak case around one event such as a payoff to one woman, even if it was done in a way to violate tax and campaign finance laws.

We know no details, but there are clues in the public domain. The same DA office already convicted the Trump Organization on 17 counts and got the maximum fines [0]. There were witnisses called before the Grand Jury who would have spoken to much more than a single payoff scheme. There were multiple women, and David Pecker, former publisher of the National Enquirer, who was known to have paid for and killed multiple scandalous stories on Trump's behalf, and Allen Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, who plead guilty in a 15-year Trump Org Tax Scheme.

Based on this, it is a reasonable inference to expect charges of a years-long conspiracy to commit tax, business, and campaign fraud.

I suppose if you consider white-collar crime "technical" and therefore weak, any such indictments would be weak.

But in terms of the actual strength of the case, based both on that DA's record of convictions, and the historic profile of this case (and the career-terminating consequences of losing it), they would not be bringing charges unless they thought they were extremely strong and they were extremely confident of winning.

[0]https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-organization-sentenced...
Many laptops now are 99.6 Watt hours.

The 100Wh battery limit means they have little incentive to further improve battery technology. Any increased storage capacity wouldn't be legal to fly with, so all it could do is make the laptop very slightly thinner or lighter.
> since it was accepted by a judge, it has been human-reviewed and can probably be considered accurate.

My issue is that the judge thought it was a good idea to consult ChatGPT in the first place. There are other ways to get better answers that don't rely on a general LLM, like making a search index that includes every legal document for the case and consulting that. But using something that seems to be somewhat persuasive in its delivery is a cause for concern. It's like (weird example, sorry) as if the judge watches anime and made five of his favourite characters speak different verdicts and then chose the character he felt he liked the best. Almost reifying the source of the information and then considering human-ness a viable metric for judging how trustworthy a source is. Really reminds me of people that use LLMs as a "therapist" or for "roleplay", it's very disgusting.

> high risk government decision-making

IMO what that means is "high risk decision-making, like law enforcement and criminal justice, which is the kind a government engages in" and not that only some high risk decision-making pertaining to law enforcement (or criminal justice) by a government is prohibited.
Even "kill all humans" is difficult to define. Is a human dead if you flash-freeze them in liquid helium? It would certainly make it easier to cut out the cancer. And nobody said anything about defrosting them later. And even seemingly healthy humans contain cancerous cells. There's no guarantee their immune system will get all of them.
Interested in a bit more context re Ireland Health Service - how does this work with older people / those in remote areas?
So the word LISP does not appear in the entire introduction. If you’re introducing a language thats a LISP, that’s really the kind of thing you’ve got to state up front.

You can define the term for those unfamiliar, and you don’t have to dwell on it, but people who are turned off by LISPs will feel a little swindled if they get 3 book-pages in before finding out. And people who specifically like LISPs might pass this over without realizing what it is and miss out.
Gptxy.com – Simple Interface to GPT4
https://pets.webmd.com/dogs/risks-of-essential-oils-for-dogs
A Simple interface to ChatGPT4 that can be used for proof-reading, text summarization, and questions
Unless jank rebrands itself as NativeClojure retaining 100% Clojure compatibility with a few more native related goodies, I don't see it offering more than Janet, which is also inspired by Clojure.

Given that they have similar goals, why not merge and join efforts? Would help in softening the rough edges and reducing the bus factor.
I worked for a French engineering school for 3 years, on government salary (we have a weird system). It was 37k/y for a junior position, so quite low (I doubled that in 2 job switch), but I had 57 vacation days.

More than 11 weeks, not counting the 4/5 national holidays (depending on the year).

I'm building a treasury right now, but once my house is paid, I'm going back to this kind of job.
Janet has close integration with C going both ways. It has built in C ffi and you can easily build and distribute a janet binary that uses C libraries.

It's also easily embeddable in C programs the same way lua is, making it possible to use it as a config, extension, or scripting language in a larger program.

Aside from that having used it a fair bit I think it's got a very "practical" orientation. It provides immutable structures, but doesn't enforce immutability semantics the way clojure does. It has a good concurrency system but is cleanly single-threaded and performant by default. And imo the standard lib is a really good balance, neither forcing you to build EVERYTHING yourself (lua) or having the whole last 50 years of CS research in it (racket).
The curious case of the missing link text automation feature
>Do people, on the whole, even want the metaverse?

My impression -

Do people want magical alternative worlds they can hang out in? Yeah, video gaming is huge, bigger than movies.

Do people want to interact with those with a VR thing stuck on their head? No, not on the whole - normal screens are fine.
>not AGI here (which is quite a ways out, realistically)

You don't know how far away it is.

>If anything - we should be accelerating development toward the goal of AGI, as the implications for humanity are profound.

Given we don't know how far away it is but current models are matching Human performance on lots of tasks and we don't know any way to ensure their safety it's entirely reasonable to be scared.
Please don't do this here. The topic deserves serious discussion.
There was never any realistic possibility of controlling a highly contagious respiratory virus, so COVID-19 didn't expose anything about humanity's ability to control global phenomenons. What it did expose was the tendency of many people to irrationally overreact to a relatively minor risk, mostly because the risk was novel.
So we're all just orphans from a long-dead init process? :(
Thank you for the feedback!

I made use of LabVIEW around 2002-2005 and I liked it, working on systems to measure the length of fiber optics down to the femtosecond (it's amazing what you can do with differential wave form/phase analysis), which was then used to write custom C++ code to do these measurements in real-time at a millimeter wave interferometer, enabling the ability to do real-time adjustment to the sample phases for any fiber that was being heated/expanding in the sun.

LabVIEW allowed us to make a very quick demonstration of this as a working concept. Which illustrates what I believe is the most powerful thing about visual programming environments. They can excel at demonstrations and full working solutions without including the parts of computation that are social constructions (language syntax, data structure access and limitations, ...).

I am not convinced that the idea of a "killer language" will happen. While there is a through-line of abstraction heaped upon abstraction, I am unconvinced that these first 60 years of computation in society are going to be visibly recognizable another 60 years from now.

OR!

Linus Torvalds will invent a language that takes over everything, based on how git has consumed almost the entire space of source code management systems (a sociological phenomena/opinionated work flow process) and the success of GNU/Linux more generally.
Nice, I didn't realize Forth used them - thank you!
Yeah agreed, I can totally see that!
> I really like the Kakoune-style motions.

Kakoune has often seemed like a platonic ideal to me. Of course, my mind doesn't agree so much about the visual by default stuff much of the time. Maybe I didn't use Kakoune long enough.

I gave it a try for a while, but had to go back to emacs ecosystem.

This led me to inevitably tryout https://github.com/meow-edit/meow which I think is the best combination of fast, stable, well-integrated, similar to the kakoune model.
The GGP was making fun of the OP, but looks like the comment was not absurd enough to pop-out in our current hyper-hyped climate.
Both fertilizer and drinkable water can be synthesized from sea water. Our only problem as a species is that we can’t produce enough power cleanly. Fingers crossed for fusion.