skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm coming around to building everything for a VPS from the outset. There's a lot of upside to VPSes, such as:

1. Can be purchased as a fixed cost, usually at a rate that's much cheaper than on-demand pricing, and especially serverless--this tends to only get better with time as competition keeps prices low

2. It's "just" a Unix/Windows/Mac box, so the issues with runtime constraints you mention are bounded differently (and often more favorably); serverless is also just a box, but the constraints tend to be more onerous and limiting and it's not usually accessible in the same way

3. With containers, it's trivial to move between providers, so the hardware itself becomes fungible

4. On containers, I'm having a great time shipping Docker Compose configs--this works really well for the scale of application I'm targeting while avoiding the dreaded complexity of e.g. k8s

5. There's decades of high quality tooling already built and battle tested which makes operating VPSes much easier; the fact you can SSH into the machine, for instance, has huge leverage as an solo person working on independent products

Going forward, I'm planning to skip edge compute altogether unless there's a really compelling reason to want it. I should also mention that when a VPS is paired with a CDN, you can layer on bits of "edge compute" where it's warranted; or, you know, use it to cache static assets close to your users. :)

All-in-all it's kind of a funny return to where I started ~20 years or so ago with web development.
For me it lasted close to 4 years. I had installed a tracker that uses a SIM that you have to keep topped up to receive the messages. No issues where I live so over time I stopped and didn't even think about it. Fast forward, I went through 3 batteries, couple mechanics, bought a portable jumper and a physical battery disconnector and even got a voltage meter and was mucking around with the fuse box etc and just grew to live with it until one day I was cleaning the car, saw the thing and just disconnected it and then a few weeks later I noticed that leaving the car on weekends the battery was fine the Monday (usually had to jumpstart as it would drain). Turns out the tracker was trying to send messages almost every minute THAT it couldn't send messages! So it had been doing that for years and was the tiny leech on the battery, not large enough to be detected but enough to slowly drain a brand new battery over the course of a few days.
There’s no great solution to this apart from the economy and company doing well so that this doesnt happen. I’ll lay out the reasons below:

1. Let’s say we pass a law that prevents offers from being revoked. This will make hiring much harder and increase 5 rounds to like 10 and involve many more committees and even then most candidates other than sureshots getting rejected.

2. Ban revoking offers only for overseas employees (who are hurt most by this). This will ensure that the hiring bar for overseas employees is set sky high and it will already be harder for them to compete since they likely won’t have prestigious firms on their resume already compared to FAANG that American Employees would have.

Open to policy suggestions but I don’t see any good methods that prevents new candidates from being unfairly disadvantaged and stops months of preparation being put to waste due to offers being revoked
In what sense are they "blockchains" (as understood in the "crypto" sense) if they are not de-centrally written to? Is there proof of work? Distributed consensus? Can the public read entries from the ledger and verify something cryptographically?

Who is the arbiter of truth in private/business blockchain? Public blockchains that produce currencies reward operators of nodes with a token that is self-contained within the system. How does any of this map to private/business chains, or any other "blockchain" that is somehow mapping some truth state external to the chain into it? It seems these words are thrown around without any meaning, for marketing purposes.
Video games are already a very good approximation for virtual worlds.
If it's one tool, it's not a problem. If it's every tool, it becomes a problem quickly. I had a tool that moved from 300/month to 2,000 a month just for SSO (for our needs.) Launchdarkly is just not usable due to the additional price for SSO.

It's absolutely a tax if it's the only feature you need.
Time to learn about a relocation clause in the general employee agreement:

Clause [X]: Relocation Expenses and Redundancy Protection

The Company agrees to reimburse the Employee for reasonable and necessary relocation expenses incurred by the Employee in connection with the Employee's relocation to the work location specified in this Agreement, subject to the terms and conditions set forth herein ("Relocation Expenses").

The Relocation Expenses shall include, but not be limited to, the actual costs of moving the Employee's personal property, temporary housing expenses for up to [number] days, transportation costs for the Employee and their immediate family members, and any other reasonable and necessary expenses incurred as a direct result of the relocation, up to a maximum amount of $[amount].

The Employee shall provide the Company with receipts or other documentation evidencing the Relocation Expenses within [number] days of incurring such expenses. The Company shall reimburse the Employee for the Relocation Expenses within [number] days of receiving satisfactory documentation from the Employee.

In the event the Employee's role is made redundant before the Employee's start date, the Company shall still be liable for the reimbursement of the Relocation Expenses incurred by the Employee, provided that such expenses were incurred within [one (1) month] prior to the date the role is made redundant (the "Cut-Off Date").

The Company's obligation to reimburse the Employee's Relocation Expenses shall survive the termination of this Agreement for any reason, including but not limited to the Employee's role being made redundant before the Employee's start date.

If the Employee voluntarily terminates their employment with the Company within [one (1) year] of the Employee's start date, the Employee shall be required to repay to the Company, within [number] days of the termination date, a prorated portion of the Relocation Expenses reimbursed by the Company, calculated based on the percentage of the [one (1) year] period not completed by the Employee.
It's great they got LLMs running on resource constrained devices but are they any good? Or I should ask, with the limited resources they get, what good are they for?
Since we're imagining things, we could choose to spend our time imagining good things!

The comic book Marvelman has Marvelwoman invent the ultimate A.I. algorithm to help people find romantic partners.

The latest William Gibson novel has a benevolent A.I. tell people things like

"Your Mom just woke up, I can tell because she's scrolling Twitter. You should give her a call."
Why are we acting like there aren’t objective evaluations for “dangerously mentally ill?” Everyone here is talking about how the justice system fails at this. Well yeah, it’s the justice system. They shouldn’t (and wouldn’t) be there in the first place.

This is a psychological problem and it would be dealt with by people who have domain knowledge. We’re not talking about hungry DAs with a political agenda or overworked public defenders not doing their job. We can and should evaluate people to determine the extent of mental illness and mandatorily treat them. Anything outside of that is passive misanthropy.
That'd be a remarkably narrow and convenient bug.
Why Aliens Might Already Be on Their Way to Us
Its kind of impressive that getting hired is now slower than college admissions or getting married.
Thank you. Do you think blogger missed it, focused on the 'should' part or it is part of clickbaity nature of our news cycle? Either seems as a likely possibility. I don't think EU would be stupid enough to kill open source.
Didn't this happen in mining? When finally they got their machines new better tech came out already.
Who said anything about currencies? Block chain is just a meme term for “decentralized ledger.”
George would have been happy to continue as part of the group if given a bit more leeway. He made it clear that he’d have been willing to solider on, at least for recording.

John was the leader of the group to the end, despite McCartney’s creative leadership in the latter days. If he’d said “yo, let’s get back together once a year and do an album” the others would have done it. If he’d said “let’s not break up,” they would not have broken up.

It wasn’t Yoko or George. It was John. And what John seems to have actually wanted was more creative and personal freedom. Paul’s perfectionism made both him and George unhappy.

There is an incredibly in-depth fan analysis of the audiotapes that provide the backstory for Get Back here: https://theymaybeparted.com/. The upshot is that it’s very clear Paul and John were aware of the issues with the group dynamic — Paul understood that the others perceived him as overbearing — but they just didn’t know how or didn’t want to resolve it in a way that kept them together.
Yeah, I guess they are mostly full sized pickup buyers?

Maybe full sized SUV. But even a 5000lb Ranger Raptor is probably not a competitior.
They do teach statistics in undergrad engineering though.
The perennial panic on HN over declining birth rates seems like thinly veiled cover for cultural conservatism.

First off, if we want to bring the birth rate back up, we would probably do well to implement social policies that makes having kids less of a nightmare for everyone but the very rich or very poor: generous paternal leave, some kind of childcare (a creche-like system), better tax credits, good public schools, etc. I understand that well-paid developers might be less attuned to this kind of thing, but as a non-dev professional in a HCOL city with a young baby, I promise you that economic factors are the major reason we will not have another child.

Second, while I understand that the economy is organized around ever-growing populations, it seems like at some point, we'll have to figure out how to deal with declining or flat birthrates. We can't just grow forever, can we? Could the planet really sustain triple or quadruple the current population?
We can infer from publicly available information. BLOOM[0] was trained for four months on 384 A100 80GB GPUs, excluding architecture search. They specifically indicate (in the Huggingface page):

> Estimated cost of training: Equivalent of $2-5M in cloud computing (including preliminary experiments)

You can see from the training loss[1] that it was still learning at a good rate when it was stopped. The increased capabilities typically correlate well with the decrease in perplexity.

That makes many believe that GPT-4 was trained for vastly more GPU-hours, as also suggested by OpenAI’s CEO[2]. Especially so considering it also included training on images, unlike BLOOM.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.05100.pdf

[1]: https://huggingface.co/bigscience/tr11-176B-logs/tensorboard

[2]: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1620951010318626817
Duolingo's spaced repetition is poor to non-existent. The whole point of spaced repetition is to prompted to remember information at the right time, but Duolingo relies on you to decide what to do and when. In the new Duolingo layout there is some pseudo-SRS in that the lessons are ordered such that concepts will be presented a few times with increasing gaps between them, but it's still on you to decide whether and when to do new lessons, and once you've done all the repetitions of the lesson you will not see it again unless you decide to go back and revisit it (in which case there is no help to decide when to go back to it).

Personally, I dislike having every app implement (or not) it's own version of SRS, so I combine language apps with Anki. For each lesson in an app, I make an Anki card which simply tells me to revisit that lesson. I then put those cards in a special deck with customised settings with larger review gaps so that I'm not overwhelmed with time-consuming lessons.
"Good samaritan" is a pretty relevant keyword here because many countries have so called Good Samaritan Laws that explicitly give legal protection to those aiding others in peril. The idea is that you won't want to discourage people from helping those in need by fear of repercussions. Its not unreasonable that similar liability protections should apply to those freely sharing software.
A 2000 pound vehicle driven an average of 15000 miles per year does $x of damage to the roads. X is a calculable figure. Tax the vehicle to at least pay $x. If it is in the pennies then tax that amount. That a heavier vehicle does more damage just means calculating the appropriate amount to tax it.
It seems to me the Boomers were the generation "unequipped to deal with the responsibilities and demands of a real relationship", hence the rise in divorces and latchkey kids and single-parent homes. Boomers are still getting divorced at a higher rate than other generations. A lot of younger generations may just be trying to avoid the very obvious mistakes their parents and grandparents made when they married the first or second person they dated and then had children as quickly as possible.
You might be correct that some people are panicking about this for moral reasons, but I don’t think we can conclude that’s all that is happening here, or that this is a baseless concern.

Taking morals out of this, and instead focusing on human nature along with current trends, it’s not hard to imagine this having a real impact.

I don’t think any of these possible downsides are a foregone conclusion, but neither should we dismiss the unpredictable impact of developments that fundamentally alter the sources of satisfaction for basic human biological drives. We already know that we’ll happily trade the future for short term satisfaction, so when something new comes onto the scene that encourages the proliferation of this behavior, we should bring curiosity, not dismissal.

We’ve already observed similar phenomena in nature [0] (the bottles were eventually redesigned to protect the species), and while this doesn’t prove that humans are as susceptible as beetles, it’s worth considering the nature of unintended consequences.

The term moral panic has started to lose its meaning, and caution about AI should not be conflated with unjustifiable beliefs about culturally controversial pastimes. They are orthogonal and unlike each other, and the nature of the concerns are quite different.

- [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1440-6055.1983...
The reason I can't ever buy one is also weight. The hummer will very unlikely ever be sold in Europe as it weighs more than the max allowed for a regular drivers license. You will need a special license and you will also be very limited where you can drive it.
Graydon2 – “What Next?”
“People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.” - Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Having an offer rescinded for 'business reasons' is unbelievably annoying, and the author has my sympathy. That said, it's kind of understandable too. Things happen. The landscape changes. Some people will be affected. You kind of have to roll with it sometimes. I wish the author the best of luck finding something else quickly.

What I find truly incredible though is that it took a full year to go from application to having a start date. That's glacially slow even for a giant company. How can any team get anything done if it takes that long to bring additional resources in?
That sucks. I moved first, then started looking for a job, because I was afraid of this exact scenario. I am not Russian but I imagine that for Russians it is likely very difficult to immigrate into a western country without a job offer in the current geopolitical situation. Good luck.

The current SI job market definitely made me reconsider my previous approach of finding greener pastures every 2-3 years. Being the newest person in a company during mass layoffs would be butt-clenching. A good reminder to all of us that we are not special and good times don't last.
Pretty much that.
After GDPR many small shops refused to work with EU IP addresses and just redirect to a page with some disclaimer.

But big players (who were consulting politicians when GDPR regulations were written) only won from GDPR, they don't need to show the cookies banner all the time on their platforms and still have a lot of power over your private data.

Certification of software is always expensive, so expect new open source licenses: "Open source as usual, but if you are from EU, you are not allowed to use that code".

Or expect Amazon to take an open source product, close source their fork, do certification and provide SAAS.

Again, there are companies who can do some commercial support for their code, but they are really could not be interested in adopting all the EU regulations.
Didn't want to make it too obvious.
Yes, BetterDisplay got DDC support on HDMI M1 soon after its dev learned that I added it in Lunar: https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay/issues/1361

I’m friends with Istvan (the BetterDisplay dev) from the time he was a Lunar user, and we usually share implementation details for non-Pro features.
Any thoughts on implementing really "enterprise" languages like Java or C# so you could attract "the big boys" (corporations)?

I know the corporations I work at are very anti-node.js and very pro-C# and everything needs to be approved by a tech committee. I don't think we could get Supabase approved (and instead we fork millions a month to Azure instead).

Just a bit of feedback. I'm not a fan of C# or Java at all these days given how good Rust, node.js/Typescript/Deno have become. I just now work for 40,000+ person companies where I know this would be a non-starter unless you were super lucky to get all approvals aligned and be on one of the "cool" team.

Maybe not the pivot/user feedback that aligns with your goals. :D
I'm endlessly fascinated by people who have one major problem (inability to run unsigned code) and assign blame to another thing (secure boot). We're talking about technology here! The problem is one of implementation.

And Apple, of all companies, has offered an implementation solution. Their ARM chips in Macs can boot an OS with a fully-vetted chain of trust on the same drive as a completely untrusted Linux distro. And macOS does not reduce its security level to allow this. Why can't Intel do that? Wouldn't that be a great compromise? Don't any Linux people see value in a chain of trust?
Sorry this happened to you. I’d obviously not your fault. I want to give general advice for people changing jobs in the future.

Don’t quit your first job until you’ve physically started your second job. Take sick leave. Take vacations. Just don’t show up if you have no other option.

This is particularly the case if your immigration status is dependent on employment but it applies generally.

Companies will not hesitate to get rid of you or rescind an offer based on market whims if nothing at all. It’s of no consequence to them. They’ll be fine if you just don’t show up. It is an asymmetrical relationship with a severe power imbalance.
It might remove the need for the state to be involved at all, other than for litigation purposes. You’re basically saying things are fine already, which a lot of people disagree with.
We definitely need protections for people who are institutionalized. But we also need protection from the members of society who are being victimized by mentally unstable individuals. Many large cities seem to have no interest at all in the latter, to the point where there’s a class of unwell citizens that the laws no longer apply to. Many are threatening people daily, violently assaulting people, committing frequent theft, using the streets as a bathroom, etc., mostly with impunity, and law-abiding citizens are told to just live with it.
I took advantage of a similar transfer program in WA state (about which this article is written) but it was not at all straightforward. The state colleges only had so many openings they made available to transfer students, and the application process was worse in many ways.

Part of the issue they won't tell you is that you can apply as a transfer student with basic admissions requirements, but to actually get into some of the specific undergraduate programs had their own admissions requirements.

I was in a weird situation where I got accepted to the college but not into the undergrad program I had been working towards. AND ON TOP OF THAT you couldn't transfer in as a sophomore - you had 6 months to declare a major or you got kicked out. So you were forced to find ANY program at the college that would accept you.

(So as much as people have bad experiences with community colleges, I personally had a much worse time at the university level)
I think the more accurate description is that the people pushing critical theory purposefully make it as obtuse and confusing as possible because if they say plainly that a critical theory is distinguished from a regular theory by being activist in nature seeking emancipation from some poorly defined slavery/injustice people will point out that activism by definition has a result in mind and is inherently not rational in the face of observation, as the conclusion has already been decided so it is, at best, an abuse of words to call this crap a theory. The collision of names is likely on purpose because there is no validity to the "solutions" proposed by the "theory" (although there is some validity to some of the observations of injustice, as with any good lie there is a kernel of truth)

This isn't made any better by the two semi distinct historical roots of the modern schools of this crap bringing in either marxism by way of the frankfurt school or postmodernism (or increasingly some combination of the two). In general it becomes pretty obvious that it is a self contradicting mess that has no place in society, let alone at institutions of higher learning.
Bitcoin’s Dark Side: Uncovering the Hidden Challenges
Surely by law you've not "worked" anywhere until one complete business day under contract?

This "minus 10 days" is another way of saying "My employer & I had a contract which they legally revoked before my first day of employment"

The blog entry reads like SEO spam to tell potential employers "Hey, I was smart enough to get offered a job at FAANG!" without _actually_ working there.
IANAL but I would expect you can only be held reponsible for a product if you say it fits a particular purpose.

But the python licence explicitly says:

PSF is making Python 3.11.3 available to Licensee on an "AS IS" basis.
PSF MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. BY WAY OF
EXAMPLE, BUT NOT LIMITATION, PSF MAKES NO AND DISCLAIMS ANY REPRESENTATION OR
WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR THAT THE
USE OF PYTHON 3.11.3 WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY THIRD PARTY RIGHTS.

So it's not sold to you, and not distributed with any implied level of quality or guaranted service.
The article mentions that a car in the main derailment incident contained molten sulfur, which apparently exists a temperature slightly above boiling water. I reviewed the Wikipedia page searching in vain to find some reason why it is shipped in its molten state (not to mention how the temperature is maintained while the train is in motion). Any clues?
The point is that “Yoko Ono is freakishly weird” — true or not — is not why the Beatles broke up.
Thanks for following up with more details. You're absolutely right about all of it. After experiencing some/all of those things, most rational people realize there time is better spent elsewhere and move on.