skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's very "Bell Labs" for them to be given a vaguely defined problem (So I hear you know a lot about copper.), immediately recognize that the solution is more complicated than it was suggested (Can you artificially weather copper so it looks 100 years old?), but rather than merely reject the idea instead come up with an alternate and unexpected solution that does what they wanted in the first place but didn't know how to ask. (No but 20-year aged copper looks the same as 100-year old.) Bonus points for making use of leftover parts they had lying around anyway.

That said, why did they go to Bell Labs rather than a building constructor in the first place? It's not like copper is an exotic material. Did the NPS just completely forget that people had been using copper on roofs for centuries... excuse me, millennia.
Understanding Identity and Access Management
Nim treats C/C++ as portable assembly, so you should think more in terms of compilation than "transpilation". While it can use C gc's like Boehm, it can also use the new ORC that benefits from optional lifetime annotations like `lent` and `sink` to optimize out reference counting, making it more similar to Rust or C++ smart pointers for example.
> rather than reassessing their risk profiles, they doubled down and bought stocks "on sale" as if they can never go down again.

it's because they found out that they can afford to wait, esp. if they didn't borrow on margin to do it. But this is actually, imho, the correct way to invest (provided that you don't all-in on one stock).
I had some of my code handed over to a subcontractor once. My boss found a design issue in code review that caused me some initial blowback but I pulled out commit logs and the correct code I wrote had been changed on purpose to be "less naive" by someone at the sub. They broke the code in precisely the way my implementation was meant to guard against. They went out of business soon after that incident.
The better comparison is probably significant injury per city mile. Accidents on highways are way less common (both per mile and per hour) than city since there are way fewer points of interaction on highways (although occupant deaths are more likely on highways since speed is higher). Unfortunately, I'm not finding good breakdowns for car crashes based on road type.
> they cannot have “automatically join” disabled

They can on my AT&T iOS 16.4 device. I was able to disable auto-join on the two AT&T ones. I didn't need to delete a network to enable the "done" button from the edit screen - the state I toggled for auto-joining the managed networks persisted even if I hit cancel on the edit screen.

I don't like that they're there and auto-join is on by default, but it does appear that can be turned off.
Compression and entropy are super interesting! I'm not explaining them away; I'm pointing out that effective compression is likely to end up emulating some of the training data's generative process itself -- the patterns of thought that created text like this -- because it becomes harder and harder to "memorize" as the problem space grows.

If you try to fit samples from the function 5.2*sin(17.3 x + 0.25) using a bunch of piecewise-linear lookup tables as your basis, you'll need a very large table to get good accuracy over any range! A much more effective compression of that data is the function itself. And so if your basis includes sine and cosine functions, you'll get a very accurate fit with those, very quickly and compactly.

Claude Shannon built an early language model which was doing "just" statistics, which he describes in his famous paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Compression was exactly his goal. He builds up a Markov model to draws letters from English, including ever-longer correlations. A first order approximation draws random letters according to their frequency of occurrence in English:

OCRO HLI RGWR NMIELWIS...

A second order approximation is based on the probability of transition from one character to the next, for example Q will always be followed by U:

ON IE ANTSOUTINYS ARE T INCTORE...

The next more refined model includes trigram probabilities, for example TH will usually be followed by O or E:

IN NO IST LAT WHEY CRATICT...

It gradually gets more English-like, yes, but you are never going to get GPT-like performance from extending this method to character n-grams of n = 1,000,000. At this point in the paper Shannon starts over, using words and word transition probabilities, to get:

THE HEAD AND IN FRONTAL ATTACK ON AN ENGLISH WRITER THAT...

But even then, just extending this Markov model to account for the transition probabilities of n-grams of words won't get you to GPT. And obviously there's no interesting thought happening inside there.

That's the point I'm trying to make here; when some people say it's "just statistics", they seem to be imagining a Markov model extended to be very large, which knows which words follow other words which follow other words, with various transition probabilities...

But that wouldn't work well enough to correctly play spontaneously-invented logic puzzles. The problem space grows too fast for that to work.

Try to create a chess program that uses a Markov model. You can do it in theory, but you'll effectively need to fit the (10^120)-gram of transition probabilities (Shannon's number). Now compare that to a chess program that does an alpha-beta search. Even monkeys on typewriters are more likely recreate Deep Blue's programming than a decent Markov-based chess program.
Here are some gif showing the effect: https://www.nrk.no/nordland/mdg-mener-vindturbin-i-vindpark-...

The article is in Norwegian, but look at the pictures. It must be stressful to have all those read warning lights blinking all night.
what the documentary called and where can you stream it?
How can we be afraid of AGI if we can't define consciousness?
The Westworld TV show from a few years ago gave an interesting perspective - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S94ETUiMZwQ

Bernard: “Life like, but not alive? Pain only exists in the mind. It’s always imagined. So what’s the difference between my pain and yours, between you and me?”

Ford: “This was the very question that consumed Arnold. Filled him with guilt. Eventually drove him mad. The answer always seemed obvious to me. There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts. No inflection point in which we become fully alive. We can’t define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there’s something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do. Seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next. No my friend, you’re not missing anything at all."
It should be super uphill battle. I really hope so. Parents should determine what’s appropriate and the use cases. People trying to create laws left and right for every damn thing is just nuts. We have ended up with “I accept cookies” on every website now. Isn’t that enough for these “bring in government into every aspect of our life” nuts?

My wish would be no laws could be passed unless we have 3/4th of votes and every 10 year old law gets expired unless passed again.
This is wrong, the networks show up as “my networks” and a iPhone 14 Pro Max on 16.4 will 100% connect to that with the same priority as a real/my personal wifi network.

>and it’s on secure networks

No it’s not, my home networks are behind strong firewalls and things like pie hole. Do you not see the problem with all of my families devices “preferring” a neighbors network over mine?
Ask HN: Do you work less than 40 hours?
Have you found a way to reduce your work hours?

If so, how did you do it?

Has it been worth it?

Can you tell us what you do with your extra non work time?
Thanks I figure its better quality to do this than try a kvm switch.
What fraction of people on Genesis do you think were security researchers versus criminals, though?
> You're making a different argument to what you started the thread with.

No, I'm not. The field has been making gradual improvement for a long time, with transformers (ca 2017) being a notable jump forward. Research is always a form of punctuated equilibrium.

> Starting with AlexNet there have been numerous discontinuous improvements in CV, NLP, Game Playing, etc. It's just not true to say otherwise.

Nor did I. I said that these models have been advancing gradually for a long time. The fact that particular steps can be characterized as "jumps" when viewed in isolation is not a rebuttal.
Yep, that's precisely the point I was trying to make.
Capital cost of capacity mainly.
Which will be very expensive for startups as well and ensure those with market dominance stay that way no matter how bad they get. This isn't sounding good.
Those things will still be there in 6 months. Millions more will be displaced and the economy in a shambles. The network can't take the upset. We should figure it out and not just rush headlong without thinking.

Pause, not stop. Think before we act. The consequences are real.
I do wonder sometimes how much of the supposed ills of social media are just social media making things that were already happening much more visible.

I and many others were bullied relentlessly at school through regular non technological means, and I'm sure it had a pretty negative psychological impact. I'm not really convinced it would be any worse if I was more active on Instagram/TikTok/whatever.
Wait 5 minutes and check it again. “Auto join” will be turned on again
Move from one EOL OS to another.

You do you, you’ll be fine until you aren’t.. I feel bad for anyone you convince that this is okay.
It is now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35437726
I'm vaguely aware of a band that had a track titled something like 8600 baud that was basically instructions to decode a secret message. Not quite what you wanted, but it proves the principle of digital-on-vinyl is possible. Another similar demo is a long forgotten digital VHS format, which wrote binary video data to an old fashion VHS tape. IIRC it had some outrageous capacity for number of hours of video it could store. So very doable though storage density and bandrate would need to be calculated.
My concern with child proofing other than I don't think it works is that it starts impacting me directly. No more sign up with email, now I i have to produce credit card or government ID or similar. Which I don't trust sites to protect anyway. Google has been bugging me for two years asking for my birthday on a 20 year old account to comply with laws like this. It can vote, its over 13.
Only startups that are based on advertising.
There is a real public health issue here. Teen mental health really has fallen off a cliff in the last 10 years, in every measure available. Self-reported rates of depression and anxiety disorders have more than doubled. Suicides of 10-14 year olds have more than doubled. Suicides among 14-19 year olds have gone up ~50%. Hospital admissions for non-fatal self harm in girls 10-14 have ~tripled. It's not just an increase in diagnosis. [1]

The bulk of the evidence points to smartphones and social media as the primary cause. Specifically, the combination of smartphones video/image based social media causes kids to spend way less social time in person, and to make way more unfavorable social comparisons. Heavy social media use is unambiguously correlated with depression and anxiety. And the studies on causation all show that social media causes mental health issues, not the other way around [2]

Between 2003 and 2019 (pre-covid) the amount of time teens spend in person with friends dropped on average from ~144 minutes per day to ~41 minutes per day. How could that not have major health effects? [3]. The only plausible explanation for that drop at that time is smartphones.

There are major freedom of speech issues with this sort of regulation. And there are major technical and policy complications to actually implementing a ban. But the evidence is that social media is a public health crisis comparable to opioids. There is a real tradeoff that needs to be made between unlimited access to digital media and public health.

Lots of people on HN have a strong reaction against any attempt to regulate the internet. And there have been generations of moral panics about new technologies. But the available evidence show that this time is actually different, and we do need to have a real conversation about whether the health effects on teens are worth it.

[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness...

[2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

[3] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-new-cdc-report, Figure 4
I live in one of the most heavily populated areas of Canada. Almost 20% of the population of the whole country is within an hour of my house. I live directly on a fairly major highway. Utilities are above ground and right at the end of my driveway.

Local internet options are 5mbit DSL, 10 mbit fixed wireless, or 25 mbit fixed LTE.

If this were a “cottage” in the vacation home sense I’d say “Starlink is generally reliable enough”, but we’ve got two people working from home here.

We’ve got the Starlink as the primary (fast) connection and pay another $60USD/mo for the 25mbit fixed LTE as a backup. Missing a day of work due to an outage would pay for about a year of the LTE connection so it seems like some relatively cheap insurance.

I do end up falling back on it relatively frequently when the Starlink isn’t “out” but the service is degraded enough that things like video calls are have a lot of short (1-2s) stutters or high latency. I could do probably live with it, but it’s there anyway so I use it.

On the other end though, Starlink _also_ saved my ass when the whole region was without power for over a week. Cell tower dropped after about an hour and the LTE went out. Starlink relies on no local infrastructure so got the generator fired up and worked through the entire week without any real issue.

If you’re planning to WFH in the “boonies” you’re basically describing my current setup and it’s been very solid. Can definitely recommend.
Basically, this is a HUGE argument with several simple solutions, but it does BEG to be resolved promptly before the vulnerability (and the WTF) threshold go through the roof...
I noticed this because a condo has neighbors nearby with routers blasting said hotspot, so now you’re not even safe in your own home.
The majority of Instagram posts are ads, whether actual advertisements or not.

This would be almost impossible to enforce.
Wait 5 minutes and check again, auto join will be on again
The engagement optimizing feeds amplifly some of the ills that are otherwise manageable in "private" groups of friends reading chronological communication. That's what really needs to go.
And yet another step when it comes to infantilizing American teenagers. It's bizarre how a country that superficially cares so much about freedom treats people who are almost adults like toddlers, increasingly even when they've turned 18.

>How you feel about all this will likely come down to whether you believe that social-media platforms are addictive products—like cigarettes—

No, the anti-smoking and anti-drinking hysteria is just as bad. I remember Christopher Hitchens like 20 years ago causing a stir in the US when he openly defended teenage drinking, pointing out that these kinds of experiences are perfectly normal and part of social life. If you look at today's teenagers in the US, anti-social, delaying almost any experience teens should make, he was completely right.
What's noteworthy about the decimal mode bit in OP's example? (Not familiar with 6502 nuances, so this sounds interesting.)
We are all children at heart. Ban the rest of us, too.
That depends on the carrier. There is such a thing as SIM authenticated WiFi networks and they can use it.
There is no real workaround, it all comes back as soon as you add cellular service again.

You can only temporarily fix it by disabling the “Phone” part of iPhone
It's really just decentralized cloud computing. Where people used to make money from mining and trading crypto, some people realize they could make money by selling the computing resources for well, computing. It can match popular tools like AWS in price and latency. I would not vouch for it yet, but it's interesting, reminds me of the GPT-2 era.

But it's still in the Innovation stage of the innovation curve, while HN lies in the early majority group.

I'd say Show HN actually lies on the shifting point from early adopter to early majority and that's where the hype sweet spot is at.
No one is taking away your AlphaFold, I don't think you understand the ask.
What would really help is across the board carbon taxes. Tax imports by carbon equivalents. But that seems politically impossible.
It's pretty generous to say that the models are thinking, and to denigrate brains as merely squishy. During every period of technological progress, people have used the most complicated technology of the day to try and describe brains, like clockwork or hydraulics. This is no different.

Brains are special. We know some of their principles but we still don't understand how cognition occurs given those principles. They are, of course, physical machines. They must operate on physical principles. But comparing what is basically a reflex response from an unthinking ml model to them? Come on.
Apparently donations are returned to the sender after a while if the website/account owner doesn't claim it. The problem is that my sites are verified... are they keeping the money? No idea.

I've asked them 5 days ago to remove/unverify the sites if they plan to keep my account suspended. No reply so far.
How old do you think kids would need to be to play Catan? (I've never played, but would like to give it a go if I can play with small kids)
I am pretty sure many math grad students are not that great at mental arithmetic, which is the topic here. We are obviously not talking about the kind of advanced maths grad students to.

It is an interesting topic. I remember seeing an article about teaching maths to shopkeepers kids in third world countries. By western standards, they are quasi-illiterate. They are however remarkably good at tasks like giving change. When asked about their reasoning, it involves exchanging bills and goods rather than abstract numbers, and IIRC, they do better than western schoolkids of the same age.
Really enjoying the Wikipedia rabbit-hole this led to. Never knew the Normans made it that far south.
Check again in 4-5 minutes, it will be on again. I can disable it too, but it just switches back.
It's not about how hard it is to make, it's about how willing someone is to exchange dollars for it. I think Stew and co. are just trying to rapidly find paying users that can help them steer to a better product vision, which they can then build out.

Don't make a startup to do hard things. That's what a hobby is for.
>And then there's 11 which doesn't really feel like a new version at all to me.

That's because it isn't, Windows 10 and 11 both identify internally as NT10.0.

For some context: Windows Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1 identified as NT6.0, 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3 respectively; Windows 2000 and XP identified as NT5.0 and 5.1 respectively.
Judge rules that SIM swap leading to a $24M crypto theft was not AT&T's fault
It’s essentially manipulation of the dopamine system in the exact same way as casinos except it’s worse because it uses AI to really start personalising what keeps us hooked. Would you let your children become addicted to gambling?
Hey, yeah feel free to reach out with questions to alicia.hetrick [at] 1mplatform.com. Lots more detail in the posting link, too.
> SMRs 1) don't exist

Your information is dated. Two SMR's exist, one in Russia, one in China ([1]).

> produce lower temperature steam at lower head than a coal burner

That is not a problem (see [2])

> The concept underpinning this approach is the use of multi-stage compressors which are capable of uprating SMR-160’s relatively low enthalpy steam (700 psi @ 595 Deg F) to the elevated pressure and superheat needed to run the turbogenerator of a fossil power plant. The needed enthalpy boost can be modified to support continued operation of any plant’s turbogenerator, and in most cases would not require any external energy input. A provisional patent application has been filed for this innovation which opens the pathway to repurpose any coal-fired plant by replacing its coal-fired boiler with clean steam from the SMR-160 plant.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor#List_of_...

[2] https://holtecinternational.com/2023/01/10/holtecs-smr-160-n...
They apparently have a video game series - Monster Energy Supercross 1-5: The Official Videogame. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Energy_Supercross%3A_T...
If you want to ban your kids from using social media, you don't need to wait for the government to do it for you.

Far more dangerous than social media is this increasingly pervasive attitude that the government is responsible for parenting your kids.
I'd rather not have to provide my ID and verify my identity like on certain crypto exchanges to watch a youtube video or like a friends post on instagram.

I can't see any other implementation of this working, instead we'd have 2 popups now every time we visit a new site. One for cookies, the other to say "yes I'm over 18".
There's stunningly little data in the article about why social media is bad for kids. Most of the citations are about why other people _think_ it's bad for kids.
This troubleshooting story explores an apparently common gotcha with PG's WAL replication. The details shared are useful to those who rely on PG's WAL replication.
An entity that acts like an AGI can still kill, even if its not actually conscious.

TBH I am more afraid of a "fake" AGI than an actual AGI, as the pseudo AGI is more prone to irrational logic chains that end in scary outcomes.
Some ideas for science fiction in the 2020s
Maybe we just ban kids from smart phones.

Or ban social media apps on phones operated by minors.
Geothermal energy should be enough to sustain life.
This is acceptable only if the bike lanes are meaningfully and permanently separated from motor vehicle traffic. Most "bike lanes" are simple stripes painted alongside the road shoulder which cars/delivery trucks/etc. will happily use as parking, or which become blocked by snow or construction signs and force cyclists to weave around (and into car traffic).

I'm tired of the half-measures. Actively car-hostile urban planning is the dream, but at the very least we need to elevate alternative modes of transportation to the same level as the car.
Americans are worried that AI will make the US more totalitarian dystopian like China.