skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 4% of Thais have used illegal drugs in the past year.

Care to wager on the fraction of US users of illegal drugs?

https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjbxw/202302/t20230209_1102...

> In 2021, findings by NCDAS show about 19.4 percent of Americans have used illegal substances at least once. Out of the 280 million aged 12 and older, 31.9 million are drug users, with 11.7 percent on illegal substances and 19.4 percent either having consumed illicit drugs or misused prescription drugs in 2020. If alcohol and tobacco users are included, the number of people in the United States who are abusing substances totals 165 million.

> During the past 12 months, 48.2 million Americans over the age of 18 consumed cannabis at least once.

> During the past 12 months, 10.1 million Americans have consumed opium at least once.
Never expected I'd get a reply from Beej themself.

Thank you for your contribution. Your work enabled me to send some bytes from one place on the internet to another, which ignited a passion and a career for me. Thanks again.

Also, thanks for making me wonder where Chico State was and what the pizza was like.
How do we make sure no country builds an underground nuclear weapon making facility?

I don't actually know the answer to the above question.

But at least for chip making, you need hundreds of different highly advanced technology suppliers and chemicals to make a chip. I would think that making an advanced chip making facility is actually much harder than nuclear weapons. Many countries have the ability to make nuclear weapons, but no one can compete with TSMC, Samsung, and Intel right now. Even then, all 3 rely on ASML machines.

That said, I suppose countries will slowly see the value in chip manufacturing and invest heavily into it in order to train more powerful AI models.

I'm not suggesting that this solution is perfect, but it does seem to buy us significantly more time.
Yeah, this concerns me. If someone believes they can upper bound LLM capabilities, I think the onus is on them to explain where and why scaling laws break down. Regardless, it seems like we'll get to AGI relatively soon (say, within a century), whether that's using transformers and LLMs or not.
Wouldn't a villain encourage reckless AI capability advancement, not try to stop it?
Sounds like you never make any mistakes. If that's the case, I'm hiring.
Using a VPN (or any other mechanism) to bypass ANY service banned under the provisions of this act[0] would be illegal (TikTok is not mentioned at all):

Section 11 (a) (2) (F)

> No person may engage in any transaction or take any other action with intent to evade the provisions of this Act, or any regulation, order, direction, mitigation measure, prohibition, or other authorization or directive issued thereunder.

The criminal penalty for willingly violating that "shall, upon conviction, be fined not more than $1,000,000, or if a natural person, may be imprisoned for not more than 20 years, or both". Cool and reasonable, to be sure.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...
>How is this even remotely acceptable?

Why not? It's not reasonable to expect everything to be public. There are classified documents, for instance. I skimmed the bill and "covered transaction" refers to financial (?) transactions with banned entities. Is that being exempt from FOIA laws really surprising? I wouldn't CTRs[1] to be requestable under FOIA, for instance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_transaction_report
The problem is, for the rest of us, who just want to
buy decent audio equipment and don't have lots of
disposable wealth, their hobby fills the space with
so much noise

Amen. Soooo much noise.

While not perfect, and while they don't provide as much objective data as I'd like, I have always sound Wirecutter's coverage of audio equipment to be of a very high caliber. No snake oil.

On the hobbyist side of things Erin's Audio Corner and Audio Science Review have some great data driven reviews.

I would say basically zero return in fact
between 500 and 10,000 dollars

Wow! That's a spicy take. Are we assuming that these theoretical speakers will be properly crossed over to a subwoofer or two, and properly EQ'd?

If so, then yeah, I think I'm almost on board with you. My main system is basically a pair of < $500 JBL studio monitors crossed over to a couple of subs.

If not, then bass and total output are definitely going to be lacking with that $500 system. Most $500 small, commercial speakers are going to struggle to hit 40hz with any kind of authority.

Another thing that a lot of speakers get wrong is off-axis performance. Most of the sound we hear is reflected so it helps if speakers are doing the right thing in as wide of a cone as possible. Paying more tends to get you better performance in this regard but it's a rather weak correlation.
Well drugs feel really fucking good, and living as a teenager these days does not.
AGI isn't even imminent it's just the Twitter AI hype cycle has gone out of hand and is spilling over and producing this kind of silliness.
I did at some point, and worried. I VPNed out the for concerns on logging traffic. I searched a bit the cameras, I am not sure if these cameras have resolution high enough to intercept passwords or screen text from few feet. Anyone knows more about the capabilities of typical indoor IP security cameras in public spaces?

There is of course large variety of products, but well known companies probably deploy standard cameras for general security and preventing abuse (say, 1080p or up to 10 megapixels).

Still, even with cameras that don’t have high resolution, some information could be learned. It’s a bit like working in a public space such as a coffee shop.
That machine will run blender absolutely fine for simple tasks! Heck, I learned blender on a 2013 Core i7 MacBook Pro years ago, and even then it ran pretty darn smooth all things considered.
https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins
It seems completely unnecessary to specifically mention VPNs though. It shouldn't matter whether you funded terrorist organizations over the public internet vs through a VPN, either should be equally illegal.
I was making carvings for the wooden kayaks that were built from 4mm CNC'd Okouame plywood I cut on the same table.

I also started a business, The Wooden Image, where people could upload a photo, preview a rendering of the bas relief created from it and order it to be cut on some 1" maple board. Staining was extra, but really brought out the relief and made it pop.

I received a call from a guy who created bronze plaques for gravestones and he wanted to buy my software. Nothing ever came of that probably due to the fact that I was on to the next thing back then. "thewoodenimage.com" shows on the internet archive, but not with the photos and the upload photo section...
The connection between food and heart disease is not nearly as strong as you seem to think. Heart disease is multi-factorial, with genetics and (lack of) exercise also playing a big part. You could stuff someone full of foie gras for an entire yacht trip and they're likely to be just fine.
That's your western opinion though.
Instagram allows the public to make accounts for free.
Lack of attention to details in the marketing material of an app that sells attention to details.
Not just chip fabs; also data centers. According to Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, if push comes to shove, we can also order airstrikes against the latter:

If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.

https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-no...
> I think you're going to let go of anyone who is somehow totally incompetent so I'm not sure that's a real case.

It's so hard even in that case, though. And I don't just mean hard from an HR/legal standpoint (which it is). Letting someone go (and the performance improvement plan that leads to that, and the Serious Concerns conversation before that) are all exhausting, emotionally draining, and difficult from the manager's side. You like this person. This person is trying. You want to help this person. You don't want them to have to go home and tell their spouse they were fired, if there's anything you can do to get them on track. And so there's a long road ahead before making the cut.

Maybe it's easier if someone is truly 100% incompetent, but usually there's something there that will make the manager want to believe in them.
The idea that Rand Paul is a libertarian is pretty absurd.
One graduate student failing to replicate does not support the assertion that it 'is now considered bunk'
> Fines up to $1M and 20 years in prison. It also uses civil forfeiture and makes it illegal to properly run a VPN.

I genuinely don't understand where this interpretation is coming from; I'm not challenging the interpretation, rather asking for an explanation. They intend on cratering SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS (+ insert any other solution where VPNs are ubiquitous with respect to access) for the purposes of prohibiting access to TikTok and ilk that belong to "foreign adversaries" (China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela)?

- Will B2B VPNs be allowed, and B2C / commercial VPNs be prohibited?

- How would they accomplish this? Ask ISPs to blacklist VPNs?

- How would any of this be enforceable? (perhaps I answered my own question with the preceding question)

edit: I replied to the general post rather than the individual whom I addressing my inquiry.
> >No person may engage in any transaction or take any other action with intent to evade [...]

IANAL but "transaction" in this case surely refers to financial transactions, not just visiting tiktok with VPN on? If the government is sanctioning Iran and say you can't transact with them, it seems fairly reasonable for them to also say that if you try to evade that through various ways you should be punished as well. I don't see why the same shouldn't apply if tiktok is sanctioned.
>for new modules, you typically only have the choice between commercial and GPL. Unless you are content with that for all of your software projects, that's quite the problematic constraint.

For a FOSS project like KDE, why would this be problematic? I don't see how this is an issue at all.
Might want to check out these guys as well:
https://cocktailpeanut.github.io/dalai/#/
Yeh, the grip of both govt and business will gradually wear down everything that made it amazing in its infancy. It has been sad to watch gradually unfold. Keep using and propagating open software and hardware, I guess. Not sure what else one can do. I mean, we can vote and rally and raise awareness but like, the largest forces in society basically guarantee the "enshittification" (as Doctorow puts it) of the net, sadly.
I have a Samsung phone and it feels like it's a combination of Microsoft's software quality, with IBM's innovation capabilities and Facebook's customer service. Quite a treat!
Yeah, and I also make exceptions for == null and != null where it aids readability of the code. Linter blocks any other type coercive comparison, but allows that one (and honestly I think it should be mandated, but I haven’t had a need to push that lever for a long time either).
US statistics are very skewed because marijuana is an “illegal drug” sold legally in most states. I did provide numbers for Asians in USA though, which was similar to Thais in Thailand.

Opium is at 3.3% by your number, which is comparable to the numbers I showed on Thailand.

We can both cherry pick data but USA has tried prohibition of various substances for over 100 years. Prohibition by itself caused more problems than it solved.
>It seems completely unnecessary to specifically mention VPNs though

"VPN" occurs exactly zero times in the bill.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...
Generate objects, animations, and textures using prompts
More likely, he is trying to delay others from building a better self driving car
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35367702
Rust is a very obvious security win.
>but there's no actual evidence ...

Yes, believe the point being that evidence remains undiscovered and underwater...
What is the US's prevailing philosophy for domestic protection? Is it absolutely 0 risk? Is it 0 risk for certain things and not others?

My mind struggles to understand a cohesive leadership strategy for the next 100 to 500 years. The current state of affairs could easily devolve into anarchy within 100 years - I just don't understand what they are giving us to work towards together?

Bills like these say very squarely, 'we don't trust you, the citizen, to be able to defend yourselves. Nor do we believe that your efforts at incorporating new products and cooperating together to defend yourselves will be sufficient.'

So... you're saying we are absolutely hopeless in the next 100 years? I seriously don't get that as a leadership strategy. The American spirit is one that overcomes any adversity, not through avoidance, but through head-on action powered by an unshakable resolve.

This bill, as well as the original Patriot Act and almost every one since, discards the everyday citizen as the first and primary hope for the future. It is an erosion of the 'American Spirit' from our direct keepers of the flame; it's unbelievably sad.

I say all of this 'couched' knowing full well evil people exist and keep a whole community behind for almost 50 years through racism - so it's not a 'let everyone be mean to each other' == freedom either.
totally agree! this is a really cool use case :)
I don't see it as hype to be honest. It's a real problem we need to solve now.

Also, it seems like the letter was faked?

Anyways, it doesn't matter if it's faked. It does make people notice that it's a real problem now.

General consensus amongst data scientists of when each AI breakthrough will happen have almost always been wrong. AI breakthroughs tend to happen earlier than what the consensus predict. I don't see AGI predictions as any different.
In order to beat China, we need to become something worse than China?
The language exempts everything pertaining to this act. If there's intel informing a ban, that's one thing. But everything, even unclassified information? That's too much.
Foreign boogie men still rule the day in America’s self-owns.
Unfortunately the word "or" means the word "transaction" can be completely ignored and thus literally everything else is covered by the overly-broad words "take any other action", such as using a VPN or similar service.

To make it more clear, you can read that specific entry as:

"No person may engage in any action with intent to evade the provisions of this Act, or any regulation, order, direction, mitigation measure, prohibition, or other authorization or directive issued thereunder."
IDK, I'm assuming "boring" here means stateful monolith?

So you have:

a) No enforceable isolation, reliance entirely on good behaviors and module systems

b) No independent scaling

c) No isolation of security components so instead of a minting service and an edge service you have one service that does both

d) Single language lock-in

I could go on and on an don
The processing time appears to vary roughly linearly with your whiteness, youth and skills. My friend with an Asian wife and two kids has been waiting two years.
This is amazing. As one of the commenters said it makes Alexa look completely outdated.

One curious question:
I looked around your docs and git repo but couldnt find anything related.

When integrating with Twilio for telephony does it use Twilio's ASR or can it be confugired to use Whisper?
One of the biggest hurdles in telephony is the SIP/SRTP gateway componet to use your own ASR - I presume you arent tackling that yet.

Again great demo and it can become a base library for most bots.
Apple uses a laser infrared dot projector.

Other manufacturers cheap out on that part, or prioritize design (no notch/camera hole) over security.
Is it irony? Immutable data structures in languages like Haskell work the same way, copies are made and then the older ones are garbage collected. Seems like the same definition applies here.
What is your perspective on the cause?
I go into more detail on my thoughts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35363138

The context in the thread is modestly useful.
Proof of stake has some measures of security that proof of work doesn't. Essentially, the cost to perform a consensus for a bad actor (or set of bad actors) attack might actually be higher. We've already seen centralization of mining pools on the bitcoin network, very nearly leading to 51% attacks on multiple occasions. We've also seen "Eth Classic" and several other proof of work networks suffer consensus attacks.

Of course, there are ways the proof of work model is better too. There's tradeoffs both ways. But nothing offered by cryptocurrency makes up for the enormous energy usage of proof of work at scale, so the other consensus mechanisms are the only real, sustainable models for world-wide adoption
I'm in Japan. But I'm not dating women in their 20s. It seems like older women are only interested in long-term relationships, which is understandable of course, but it's quite different from women in their late 20s being happy to go to a love hotel on the 2nd or 3rd date. Maybe I'm missing something.

I'm not complaining really, but every time I read stuff about women here not having many inhibitions about sex and sex being really commonplace, I feel like I'm in an alternate universe because that just isn't my experience, but again, I'm not dating women in their 20s any more so I think there's probably a big generational difference.
Write to Your Representatives
Tech people need to know when to struggle on their own vs when to ask for help. Some people struggle a lot on their own, while some people dont struggle at all and ask for help on the first hint of hurdle. Both approaches have +-. A wholesome engineer does both.
The only thing that's going to solve this is safe and regulated access to clean drugs. Cut the black market dealers out of the market, and dump all the profits into harm reduction and addiction prevention and treatment resources.

The "tranq" additive that's becoming endemic in streets drugs doesn't respond to narcan either. It's only going to get worse. Wait till carfentanil gets into the supply.
I wouldn't consider the original wording unacceptable but I would suggest leaning more towards the phrasing foobazgt used a few replies back. Specifically, claiming that X broke Y is likely not fact-based. The facts in such a situation are often: a certain test started breaking in a certain build and the build reports that only one commit is different than the previous build. I would suggest stating that fact instead of inferring that the commit was the reason the build broke. I've seen plenty of instances where it turned out that wasn't the problem. The build infrastructure itself was changed. The reported set of commits versus the previous build was inaccurate. The test was flaky. A third party dependency that the build system didn't insulate itself from was updated. The list goes on.

Allowing for the possibility that we are wrong isn't professional only because it is nice. It is also professional because it is honest and it helps focus the whole team on the facts so that we don't spend our time investigating the wrong thing.
Passwords stink. I want to think about them less, not more.
True, I think the political elite made a big mistake, revealing the clowns behind the curtain. The younger generation, even with their default disgruntlement with the system, still might've taken another decade to figure out just how much the emperor has no clothes.
Absolutely. Putting an intelligent intermediary in front of an API is an age-old pattern, and moving that logic into the backing system itself may have its own logistical challenges.

Working on a product in an adjacent space, we translated WS-Security-protected SOAP interactions to OAuth JSON request/responses. The responses had omitted information based on the authorizations given in the OAuth access token scope.

In some cases you would have to replace the XML gateway with an alternative system, for instance when it is combining information from multiple sources which aren't allowed access to one another (say, for PII separation/auditing reasons).
It literally does not. As per your own quote

> Any information submitted to the Federal Government by a party to a covered transaction in accordance with this Act, as well as any information the Federal Government may create relating to the review of the covered transaction

That's certainly not "everything pertaining to this act".
And if you want to spend your hour break somewhere where your restless kids can safely run around, it norrows it down even more.
The existence of the moon is not a metric someone invented. It can be detected by many (at least 5 available to general populace) means, its shape and features too. Stop making bad analogies and howaboutism.

Our "distortion metrics" are barely validated garbage that has not been corrected since 60s. (Including THX standard which uses them, a pretty funny joke. It does better at room and speakers.) Hence, they are only useful as a check not a rating.

We do know what sounds good, obviously it is an application of a bass boost knob. /s

What's under the question is what sounds accurate (or accurate enough) and high fidelity. And the metrics we have typically do not answer it in the positive, only in a weak negative.
People designing amplifiers typically do not chase these numbers too hard either, since that ends subjectively audibly poorly. We do not happen to have perfect amplifiers, it turns out.

The metrics are not psychoacoustic for one, nor have been correctly validated. Better ones have been proposed but not applied.
There are some definitive statements like "distortion 80 dB lower than signal cannot be heard in headphones" but there's no validation of it. (Plus it seems suspicious compared to what we know about psychoacoustic masking and absolute thresholds of hearing. Plus time domain behavior might be audible too in some cases, we just don't have an audio metric for that.)

Some people have taken to plotting harmonic distortion graphs for multiple orders separately already, but it is way rare and still hard to interpret and it still does not differentiate audibly different (and differently annoying) kinds of distortion.
Ask HN: Developers that also do support?
We are a startup with just a few people and the hardest position of all is tech support, from filling it to retention. The requirement is that you need to be a mid-developer at least but also do support all day.

We're having a super hard time finding someone that wants to do this even when paying over the mid-dev rate.

Developers hate support or any kind of prolonged client interaction, support guys don't have technical experience. Besides that, it takes 2 months minimum of training for a tech support position to get remotely productive, it actually starts at 3-4 month mark.

After all the time the team spends on training them and they start to actually deliver something, we're seeing them fleeing away to a full dev job on some other place.

We just spent months on interview and training and they leave exactly when they start to become helpful. Since we're a very small company of 7, this affects us a lot.

I'm very frustrated about this. Do you guys have any idea on how to handle this?
Used this to voice my lack of support for the tiktok ban (patriot act 2.0). There might be a better site to use, perhaps one that automates the message.
> a new crater appeared on the moon tomorrow, their camera would need a software update to capture it.

Source? Afaik it was using ANNs to upscale, not dropping in previously taken images.
Ultimate OSINT Search Engine Project.
Best book on addiction, period https://drgabormate.com/book/in-the-realm-of-hungry-ghosts/