skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Covid fearporn and Ukraine outrageporn are essentially old and boring news now and the media needs something else to make money off of through fear/outrage clicks.

I'm not saying that people aren't trying to make money through fear and outrage, but there is a very real possibility that the fear and outrage are real.

The thing is, we're dealing with something that is new to most people. They don't understand what is going on and what will happen. It doesn't help that even people versed in the discipline don't know what will happen while being acutely aware that there have been cases of enthusiasm for progress in the past that have had less than desirable outcomes.

That is not to say that this pessimism is permanent. It will likely subdue once people realize that the most dystopian science fiction portraits don't reflect reality and that people have the capability to adapt to the new circumstances. But that takes time, and for a bit of the sheen of the current hype cycle to wear thin.
Pharmacists and pharmacy techs are given "training" on how to identify supposed fraudulent sales. e.g. if your hair is long or you otherwise look like a person who would manufacturer amphetamines (whatever that looks like) they won't sell it to you.

So, congrats to you for looking like a fine upstanding person and not like a clandestine drugs manufacturer.
> they don't think twice about driving a few hundred miles in a gas guzzling truck, producing as much CO2 as tens of thousands of water bottles

This is a strange complaint to levy while the world’s largest economies aggressively electrify their transportation systems.
Ah yes, i always get deep desks for myself so the arm can be flush with the wall because the monitors need to stick out further to be at arms length.
The "sigh" in the title makes it pretty clear that "to the moon" isn't meant seriously and just reference to often mentioned phrase "dogecoin to the moon"
A deadman switch should be good enough.
non-insignificant
 significant

you're welcome
Geophysical Analysis of Aeromagnetic and Gravity Data in Arizona [pdf]
Like management, engineering is a discipline of means divorced from ends. There are certain vital skills that are shared amongst engineers regardless of their particular domain, and those are the skills most important for an engineering manager to have.

A computer engineer without those skills is merely an amateur physicist. That's enough knowledge to light things on fire. A software engineer without those skills is merely a programmer. Ask a quant with no engineering background to put their ad-hoc scripts into production one day and let's see how that goes once other people start depending on it.

Musk might know some science, maybe he's written some scripts in his day, but none of that makes him an engineer. He's proven he doesn't know the first thing about keeping a lit boiler from exploding.
That is their right, of course. Could this be a sign that it is tough in the SWE job market at the moment?! Usually moving on from Google would have been a non-issue to find a new job.
"Let me walk you through how that works. First, an attacker hides a malicious prompt in a message in an email that an AI-powered virtual assistant opens. The attacker’s prompt asks the virtual assistant to send the attacker the victim’s contact list or emails, or to spread the attack to every person in the recipient’s contact list. Unlike the spam and scam emails of today, where people have to be tricked into clicking on links, these new kinds of attacks will be invisible to the human eye and automated. "

wait, why does the text even have to be "white on white" then, if there are "ai assistants" that are just reading emails before we do and doing what they say? Is this a thing that's in email clients right now? literally reads the email unprompted and acts upon it? what? in what universe would that be released by any software company today ?
Yes but most people around the world never fly. Lots of people use electricity generated from coal.
Bike shed the crap out of everything in pr review (I have been guilty of this)
Thanks for chatpdf.com I found it very useful
Saudi Arabia believes in anything that looks like a great investment when you consider only as much as you can fit on 10 presentation slides...
Yes that would be great, but instead what is happenning is that with each new electronic component the system is closed down further. With the increasing popularity of wireless shifting (Di2/eTap) and e-bikes this will only get worse I'm afraid. I don't even know if we can realistically hope for some sensible regulation.
Anything written in interpreted languages like Javascript/Typescript.
UI stuff usually has hot reloading where you get "compilation" times measured in milliseconds, and from experience restarting even a complex typescript server is a few seconds max. This applies to mobile apps as well when using React Native.
> I'm not saying that AI isn't important, but I'm just saying to remember that media hype cycles exist and impact all of us too.

Last year it was crypto-currency, this year it's AI. The headlines are work regardless of topic: "We need a much more sophisticated debate about crypto-currency" or the other article on the front page of HN right now: "We are hurtling toward a glitchy, spammy, scammy, crypto-powered internet".

What we need are slower news cycles.
Some details about creating print-quality PDFs
I get the sense that this is an investor/bankroller that fancies themselves as an engineer, or a manager that has done a terrible job of hiring so far.
Textual 0.18.0 adds API for managing concurrent workers – Textual
Venvs are self contained python environments, no interaction with system python.

For those already familiar with venvs, the above just condenses to “remove the old venv and create a new one”.
Delphi used to compile 200k lines in less than ten seconds. That was around year 2000, with first generation Pentium. Later it slowed down a bit, but not so much.

IIRC, C family compilers suffer from some problem with headers that makes compile time much longer than it should.

Edit: oh, and that was rebuilding the whole program from scratch, including all libraries. A little change in the current file was les than one sec. Native code, in case you're wondering.
It's really really tiny and rather incredibly small.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.00110

" Collaboration data to extract the r.m.s. mass radius of the proton Rm=0.55±0.03 fm. The extracted mass radius is significantly smaller than the charge radius of the proton RC=0.8409±0.0004 fm. "
Then let's see the unexpected stuff we can get by developing carbon reduction and cheaper transport technologies.

This is the failure of lack of scientific regulation: you go head first in the wall.
Ask HN: I Learned OpenAI's API – Now What Should I Build?
Hi, I'm a Full Stack Developer, and I can build almost anything. Recently I learned OpenAI's API. Now the question is: what to build? Ideally shooting for a product that makes me money. Thanks for the suggestions!
Write a line to a config file, yes.

It's a consequence of Nix' goal of accountability, atomicity, and reproducibility.

- If a package isn't listed in configuration.nix, it isn't installed. That's powerful information to have.

- If you want multiple systems to run the exact same set of packages, you can do that trivially by just pointing them all to the same configuration.

I suspect it would be much harder to provide a fair answer to the question of why you _wouldn't_ deem it important to know what software is installed on your computer. That seems like a pretty significant pitfall of most operating systems.
I think it's more useful for second guessing your past choices.

You're absolutely right that it's worth weighing the chances looking forwards because it can guide your future choices.

But when looking back and thinking "if only I'd done this or that differently, everything would have gone well," that's torturing yourself with a imaginary timeline that never happened and for which there is a non-zero chance could have been worse.
ADHD patient here. If one did not have ADHD I could see someone possibly becoming dependent, as well as unintentional weight loss.

Personally I forget to take it often, but thats because my brain is wonked out with ADHD. I also forget to eat often if I do not take the medication. Life is certainly weird.
Correct, though my intuition for the amounts was insignificant < non-insignificant < significant and I felt that better described what I was thinking :)
That's one of the few places where what one does 'for show', and what might be an effective strategy overlaps...
Installing Python: the bare minimum you can get away with
I could say the same about most second rate software engineers. Thats why im not moved by your arguments. Theres plenty of peope just as stupid and who will give you confidently wrong answers.
LLMs might become helpful here.
...still?

Damn.
> ~15 hours to get to the other side of the world is fast enough

So someone did ask “what are we building this for” [1]. You just don’t like the answer.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35438423
the real problem is build time with the windows filesystem (in my case). switching to wsl2 you get under 20 sec. pretty easily, and most projects > 20 seconds are fixable (that is, if someone fixes it). Deploy time, on the other hand...
> literally reads the email unprompted and acts upon it? what?

many antivirus programs open emails and click on links to make sure they are not viruses on the other end
If the open letter is taken at face value

That's quite an assumption, because i (and many others) don't believe it is to be taken at face value. It looks like a ploy of Elon and others to catch up to their main competitor (openAI). It's known Elon hates openAI[1] and is competing with them. He also provides the majority for the organisation that published the letter. Some people on the letter are well meaning but misguided.

[1] https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-histor...
Total global battery production seems to be 200-300GWh/year. If you want to buy approx 30% of total yearly output it's very unlikely you can negotiate your way to the head of the line. In fact, buying that much might raise global prices for batteries.

If I want enough solar panels and batteries to make my house off grid I can just write a check and the stuff shows up in a few weeks. But that doesn't scale upwards without limit. Eventually the limits on global supply kick in no matter how much you want it.
The “fiction” people are worried about is better described as a set of thought experiments, to which AI optimists never directly respond. These considerations have existed for decades and reality is playing out more recklessly than most thought experiments even take as their premise. It’d have been too unbelievable in a sci-fi story for the owners of AI to be field testing it on the open internet, giving it fluent human language, and giving it money to replicate itself — yet here we are!

AI is either an extremely powerful technology, and like all extremely powerful technologies it will carry risk, or it’s not.

My theory is that AI optimists don’t address the concerns directly because they actually agree that they’re real and they have no good answers as to how we’ll mitigate them in time. I have yet to meet any optimist who thinks there’s not a chance of catastrophe at the end of many roads of AI development.

They might think this generation or the next 3 generations of LLMs specifically might be fine, and they might be right! But that doesn’t address the core observation that capability is clearly accelerating much, much faster than our control mechanisms and market dynamics will make sure this continues. Arguments that we’ll get right up to the brink of out of control super intelligence and then learn to control it are dismissible on their face.
This discussion is in the context of SQL Injection attacks. Where someone passes in a username and your application drops a table instead of returning that user's e-mail address. That can be easily solved like I proved above.

You are talking about AI alignment: "Can you get it to say something racist? even though the developers intended to prevent racist output?" No attacker is injecting anything in that case, you are just finding bugs with the program.
Location: Toronto/SF

Remote: Yes, remote-first

Willing to relocate: Only back to SF

Résumé/CV: http://jonpurdy.com/r/jp-resume-hn.pdf

Email: hn202304@jonpurdy.com

Me: Toronto-based Technical Program Manager, just relocated from SF. Five years experience as TPM, 9 in tech. I specialize in working cross-functionally and bridging the gap between technical and business teams and have had a lot of experience at startups and scaleups. Pragmatic with development methodologies; been on both sides and using the minimal amount of collaboratively-built process to enable engineers to build stuff without getting in the way.

What I'm looking for:

- US-based company that is looking to scale the development team's size and efficiency, technical infrastructure, and product documentation

- Or established teams at unicorns or FAANGs that have already established products and workflows but want to improve cross-functional communication and work more efficiently with other teams

- Or a Canadian company that is looking for someone with US tech experience to help them scale up

- Alternatively, happy to do a short contract (1-3 months) to get your teams set up for success, then hand off. Can also jump in and help forecast existing projects (I built a Jira integration) to determine accurate target dates based on existing performance.

Thanks and please email me if you have any questions or just want to chat!
Something the EU could trivially implement - but rather than taxing the fuel directly, tax the fuel

Countries like the U.K. already charge poor tax on airlines - fly 20 people from london to paris in a 747 and you pay far less tax than than flying 100 people on an a319, despite causing far more pollution.

Instead charge based on the length of flight the the efficiency of the plane, regardless of how many people are actually on.

You’ll probably have to cap the tax on longer flights east otherwise everyone would transfer via Istanbul or ME3, but it wouldn’t require taxing fuel, or having airlines fuel up at the other end
Well these are well known facts to any kid who is beyond first experience with styrofoam cups, heck apart from appalling chemistry being leaked into drink, I do actually prefer cups that keep temperature longer when ordering drinks. That's the whole purpose if styrofoam here. Heck, there is whole business around thermal mugs for exactly this purpose. Same would be valid for standard tea - you start with cca 100C and its actually how it should be. If you don't like it hot, order something else or go someplace else.

If we would be talking about case of little kid not knowing this type of cup burning themselves, even way less than she did, then that's a completely different story. Or was she also somehow mentally impaired to not understand hot=bad in groin? But as facts are presented, people do themselves harm with stuff that is well known and expected to cause harm.

If I let chainsaw in my lap and accidentally start it somehow via normal way it should be started, well that would be also life-changing injury, and result of my utter stupidity and nothing else. I do get I could sue the company making it, and if in US I can actually win but that's ridiculous.

Sorry, as much as I hate corporations including McDonald for many, many of their transgressions, this one is properly ridiculous even with all the facts stated and all the time passed. There is no end to people getting themselves injured or killed every single effin' day, even right now, doing stupid things with dangerous stuff. Some internet sites are just endless daily streams of records of that, and its pretty damn crazy. So instead of lesson being 'be careful with dangerous stuff, the dangerous part is serious', we bend reality backwards so hot coffee is not hot, just warm, because somebody will put it in their laps, or throw it on another person, or will pour it over their face.

Instead of saying ie - McDonald, please present 2 types of cups, one for people like me, call it 'hot that lasts' and charge extra 20c for it as an added value, and another 'warm coffee that won't burn ya even if you shower in it'. I really don't see actual moral lesson for McDonald in this case. A little bit of personal responsibility expected from citizens would be much, much better lesson for society as a whole.
Not all of last year's internet of original ideas have had Monte Carlo complexity paths fuzzed and rebased for something ummm-imaginably different using A.I.
The issue with our AI debate is that there's not a single "problem" but many inter-dependent issues without a clear system-wide solution.

- Big tech monopolizing the models, data, and hardware.

- Copyright concerns.

- Job security.

- AIs becoming sentient and causing harm for their own ends.

- Corporations intentionally using AI to cause harm for their own ends.

- Feedback loops will flood the internet with content of unknown provenance, which get included in the next model, etc.

- AI hallucinations resulting in widespread persistent errors that cause an epistemological crisis.

- The training set is inherently biased; human knowledge and perspectives not represented in this set could be systematically wiped from public discourse.

We can have meaningful discussions on each of these topics. And I'm sure we all have a level of concern assigned to each (personally, I'm far more worried about an epistemological crisis and corporate abuse than some AI singularity).

But we're seeing these topics interact in real-time to make a system with huge emergent societal properties. Not sure anyone has a handle on the big picture (there is no one driving the bus!) but there's plenty of us sitting in the passenger seats and raising alarm bells about what we see out our respective little windows.
What is your measure of interesting? Of "medium" sized? Go probably compiles 15K lines/sec.
There's a llama.cpp fork (I think?) with a build in HTTP server for an API.

I'm on mobile and can't find it right now though.
SEEKING WORK

Location: Southeast Asia
Remote: Yeah
Willing to relocate: Not at the moment
Technologies: any mainstream high-level programming language/framework/stack
Email: evasive@duck.com
Résumé/CV: [1]

[1]https://gist.githubusercontent.com/donaldchicken/8cb66513a44...
Thanks for the details, sounds like a right way to do it, congrats!
Yes it seems like they’re set on a proven design.

I used to use a USB hub and have the two cables next to one another on my desk, manually unplugging replugging it to transfer keyboard and mouse at once. With USB extenders so both machines have their plus right next to another.

But I saw in this thread there are USB switchers so maybe that’s a solution?
Even without an agreement to not tax jet fuel, few economies would have an incentive to tax jet fuel.

There are big benefits to being global transit hubs. Cheaper fuel is one way to become that.
I completely disagree.

How games work is simple. It's a simulation run at some frequency and the simulation can be affected by player input. Sometimes there is a synchronization step with a server and that is more complicated.

ECS is a pattern that results in better performance and more maintainable code. There is no reason not to use it.
How does a 10% boost in efficiency yield higher Mach levels? It sounds like it could be more like a rocket design. Get a super high altitude at a smaller Mach level and then let gravity do its work. But then it’s less clear how this would be better price economics than a traditional rocket which needs more than a 10% reduction in fuels to make it profitable at scale, no?
I'm pretty sure that the probability of hitting 7-figures in a consulting firm is smaller than hitting that figure as a founder of a startup.
What works for me: forcing myself to start a task, with permission to give up at any time. It often extends to my true goal once I start, but still allows me to exit early when I'm in a bad mood without feeling too bad.

Going to the gym? 95% of the time I get a decent workout once I gey there. Once I was in a particularly bad mood, so I arrived, warmed up and left. It felt liberating!

Going for a walk? It feels nice most of the time once I get in the rhythm. Sometimes it doesn't, so I come back after a few minutes.

Reading? I wanna do it more. So the goal is to read at least a single page - often it leads to many more, sometimes it's just that page and that's it.

The routine + acceptance of sometimes giving up really takes a lot of stress away from me!
I expect it to be different because it is different.

Machines rusting and painting needing restoration is because they oxidize.
Wood does not magically degrade, it decomposes.
These are physical phenomena confined to the physical world.

Your example of the book being unreadable because people's language changed, that is a closer example but even that falls short because language is a human to human communication pathway. We have to spend literal years training people to understand it, it is inherently chaotic and messy.

Software is math, it is engineered. We don't wake up to find that suddenly the coefficient of friction is different and now our tires fail to grip the road. Or more to the point, that our speed and feed calculators are now trash and will crash the endmill into material ruining the machine and part.

Computers and their ability to run or not run software after and update is completely in the control of the people programing the updates. The reason so much software fails is because either A. It was not well designed to begin with or B. the people creating the update did not design it well.
I dont understand why people are so opposed to or feel its ridiculous to halt progress on AI when we do the same thing for experiments on human genome? Is China going to stop because we do?
> one of the few places where what one does 'for show', and what might be an effective strategy overlaps

Heat pumps [1]?

[1] https://electrek.co/2023/03/31/heat-pump-sales-2022/
I use a usb polycom deskphone I trashpicked(bluetooth sucks, and I don't want another potential stop to the "oops, sorry" cycle when I join a video call), and a usb to ps2 for the microsoft ergonomic keyboard I've used since I was little. Also, I recently acquired a perixx vertical mouse that felt like holding a cheap taco so I filled it with pennies wrapped in gorilla tape. No problems so far
Will crypto industry ever recover?
I have been thinking hard and I wonder if the crypto industry will ever bounce back.

What are your thoughts?
There's a big fallacy that's very important to point out (and probably why you're suffering downvotes) because it keeps cropping up, and is detrimental to the broader discussion if people internalise it. This is the fallacy: "there is some weakest link, therefore it does not matter if the other links weaken".

Reductio ad absurdum: What's the point in websites having authentication if someone can watch you type your password?
It has to do with several things, among them you have:

- the end of the cold war, with the clear hegemony of the US which halted state-sponsored terrorism from unaligned-but-socialist-minded countries (especially Libya)

- targeted assassination of terrorist leaders and infrastructures (no more training summer camps) no matter the country they are in (mostly through drones nowadays), leading to a progressive reduction in sophistication in terror attacks committed, and the rise of lone wolfs instead of structured terrorist commandos.
I would caveat: The majority of shoppers who buy clothing regularly and are into fashion. Which it makes sense for fashion companies to prioritize. Practical women who make pockets a priority also don't replace clothes just because they're out of style, take fewer chances on new things, and buy less.