skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Canada Post Corporation exists, yet sending and receiving letters/parcels is expensive, slow, and often inconvenient throughout Canada.

Very inexpensive and accessible, and private alternatives exist. Canada Post actually does a great job all things considered. Do you really think you can get a letter to Nunavut for $1.07 faster by private courier?

Canada Post topped Canada's Most Trusted Brands list in 2020. [2]

> The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation exists, yet the Canadian news and media landscape is severely lacking in quality (and in my experience, CBC typically has the lowest-quality content).

Completely disagree on that one, and entirely opinion.

> VIA Rail Canada Inc. exists, yet passenger rail travel is expensive, slow, inconvenient, and quite limited throughout Canada.

It's actually very inexpensive - you can get from Ottawa to Toronto for like $100 CAD round trip - but yes slower than it could be, because the government chose not to invest in it. However, it has recently, and HFR along the corridor is going to be a material improvement.

As is they are much cheaper than driving, faster than driving, waaaay cheaper than flying and sometimes faster.

That said they made the list of Canada's Most Trusted Brands in the Travel category in 2022 so obviously not everyone agrees. [1]

> Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation exists, yet housing is incredibly expensive throughout Canada.

The job of CMHC is not to make housing affordable. That's the job of municipalities and zoning rules. The job of CMHC is to finance homes which they do a fantastic job of.

This doesn't make any more sense than blaming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the high rent prices in San Francisco.

Really doesn't make sense to judge them on something that isn't their job.

> Yet another federal Crown corporation isn't the answer.

So why does Saskatchewan have cell service that costs half what everyone else is paying? Sounds like it might be.

What I would say is just like SaskTel in Saskatchewan, if you don't want to use it, don't sign up. But for me, I'd be onboard in a heartbeat and you'd love them too as they pushed down the cost of cellular service even if you chose not to. Rogers, Bell and Telus plans are similarly way cheaper in Saskatchewan because they have to actually compete for once.

[1] https://www.uvic.ca/gustavson/brandtrust/assets/docs/final--...

[2] https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/our-company/ab...
Massive geothermal apartment complex is going up in Brooklyn, first of its kind
This so-called memory safety is looking like a buzzword engineered to be extremely appealing to a type of mildly technical but mostly illiterate about computer security kind of people.

This has been said before, this has been tried before, OOP was also seen as silver bullet at some point, like several others.

Computer security is a deeply complex and dirty field, switching programming language won’t help much if programmers are expecting the work to be done for them by the compiler.

If you want robust code : hire experts in the field
and pay the price.

Rewriting sudo is almost certainly going to be painful and to increase the vulnerabilities potential.
Many years ago, I managed a server room with dedicated cooling on the 4th floor of a 4-story building with a flat roof. One night the temp alarms went off, and when I showed up water was dripping off my overhead Liebert unit and onto the racks.

And it wasn't even raining outside! So I grab some plastic to cover the racks and phone in emergency portable cooling as the room's AC started failing.

It turns out earlier that day, a technician performing seasonal maintenance on a boiler tank on the roof had drained the tank and refilled it. But instead of directing the water out into a proper drain, he sent it down a convenient pipe that was actually a vent from our ceiling into the boiler house. The boiler was dozens of meters from my server room, but the water followed the old steel and plaster ceiling remnants over to my computers.

And this boiler water was more exciting than rain: it came with all the dissolved minerals, metals, and preservatives computers crave! I didn't lose any computers in the racks, but it killed the Liebert's control board.
Also, while I'm going off, this is a great example of how the clickbait-reduction policy at HN ends up selecting for titles which obfuscate or mislead.

Here, the descriptive, sensible word 'mushroom' is replaced with 'prototaxite', a word that is meaningless to (let's be honest) most casual visitors to this site.

Accessibility and meaningfulness are casualties in the war on interestingness.
> I fully believe context windows are going to grow: I am skeptical they will grow to cover "all your company's documents" or even "the full encyclopedia" sizes.

This is the type of statement that I feel like is often/usually wrong -- at least for the common case. The last time I had this argument was about CDs and how eventually we'll start burning them because they'll be in the cloud, and my friend arguing that storage and network bandwidth would make that impractical if everyone did it.

I expect context window compression or smart ways to embed them so they still provide useful context in "most" cases, even if not-lossless, will be an active area of research.

EDIT: That said, looking a the original question -- I do think vector embeddings are still useful in their own right and somewhat orthogonal to context window sizes. IMO.
Impressive! Having already tried the simpler experience (development of a 2D web-browser game with multiplayer), things can get complicated very quickly and the way the project was carried out shows the quality of the work.
Beyond human data: RLAIF needs a rebrand
Well, we'll agree to disagree then. When we talk about abstractions, I think we typically mean to point to, predominantly, linguistic representations. I'm confident a crow could crack a nut but I am not confident it could produce a representation of how to crack a nut. Because of the latter point, I'm reluctant to claim a crow is capable of abstraction. I might be wrong of course...at this point it sort of feels like we've already taken "compression and abstraction" to mean "whatever it is the brain is doing" eschewing details.
The full context of his interview: bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-26/uk-inflation-boe-s-chief-economist-fails-find-the-right-words?leadSource=uverify%20wall

> So somehow in the UK, someone needs to accept that they’re worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power by bidding up prices, whether higher wages or passing the energy costs through on to customers. And what we’re facing now is that reluctance to accept that, yes, we’re all worse off, and we all have to take our share, to try and pass that cost on to one of our compatriots.

> That pass-the-parcel game is generating inflation and that part of inflation can persist. How much bargaining power and pricing power exists for different actors in the value chain in the corporate side and in the labor market?

He is literally saying that corporations passing on energy costs is also causing inflation. Absolutely nowhere does he even advocate for policy intervention. Not only is everyone putting words in his mouth, it goes against his larger point that interventions on individual actors are meaningless.
I think sometimes people forget the openbsd project was not started with a text editor opening an empty file.
FYI there is a middle ground with the AWS SDK. If you don’t need the entire thing (you certainly do not), you can import product specific SDKs as standalone. Still quite a bit fatter than building your own HTTP client, but it’s an easy win if you already use the SDK.

ex, an s3 only Java sdk:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35591248/aws-sdk-for-s3-...
That's not entirely true. OAuth 1.0 and 2.0 didn't cover much, and everything was implementation specific. Both standards only cover authorization, while the majority of consumers wanted to use it as authentication.

Big companies had to roll out their own authentication layer on top. When OIDC came into play, it was already too late.
No, but I wouldn't pay 65% more unless I could actually tell the difference. I could probably tell the difference between 1080p and 720 on my laptop, but I doubt I could tell between 4k and 1080p so I wouldn't pay for that.
Economists keep chiding us about how that will ruin the economy too. They tell us our population must keep growing to keep the economy healthy.
Yeah, unfortunately I've had no luck.
Maybe. It's also probably staggeringly expensive to run.
Huh, that's interesting. I suppose I'm lucky my IP shows me as being in SJ. TIL.
> "But making sure that PostgreSQL’s autovacuum is running as best as possible is difficult due to its complexity."

The problem, as the article states it, is that a "sensible" vacuum setting for one table is a terrible setting for another depending on how large these tables are. On a 100 million tuple table you'd be waiting 'til there there were 20 million garbage tuples before taking action.
An M40 24GB is less than $200, if you don't mind the trouble to get it's drivers installed, cooled, etc. It's also important to note your motherboard must support larger VRAM addressing; many older chipsets won't be able to boot with it (i.e. some, perhaps almost all, Zen 1 supporters).
I'm confused. Is Netflix editing books from 100 years ago? Is Disney? It seems like you're conflating two completely unrelated phenomena:

1. Publishers getting tons of free publicity by announcing cosmetic changes to old books, and

2. Netflix investing $2.5 billion in South Korean programming.

As for 1 above, the publisher of Roald Dahl's books have released the original AND edited versions of his books, thus creating new content for people to purchase and demand for consumers to rage-buy the old version.

https://variety.com/2023/film/news/matilda-roald-dahl-rewrit...
I clicked through expecting to see a blog post from six years ago, but according to the timestamp this post is only a couple of days old.
The product is ridiculous regardless of the CEO. It's at least false advertising or fraud. Looking at any video of it in action it's clearly also dangerous. It's not all about cherry picking either, on YouTube these are all big fans trying to make it seem great, but every few minutes it does something crazy.

I think the fact that it has supporters is because of the CEO, not the fact that it has detractors, though I'm sure some are more vehement because of the CEO.
A commuter typically takes a free public bus ride to work. The bus broke down this morning. The commuter had to go out of their way to take a different bus to get to work. Wouldn’t it have been better if they stayed and fixed the first bus?
Don't they still require some state to be able t invalidate refresh tokens?
> Scientists knew all along that face masks didn't work.

No.

Masks were not mandatory here [1], they were not even recommended in the beginning. Later masks were recommended [2] in public transport during rush hours during a 6 month period in 2021. The reasoning for not recommending masks in the beginning was that there were too little data supporting the effectiveness of masks. So scientist did not "know" for certain.

I am not sure we can discuss this issue yet, there are still too many with non scientific agenda engaged in the debate.

[1] Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_masks_during_the_COVID-19...
[2] EDIT: I said mandatory, it was not.
A useless generalization like "people don't want this" is a great example of why there's room in the world for a federated network of small instances. Humanity is not the Borg. The folks who obviously do want something different than a centralized network run for profit can go on happily using federations while people who want a new Twitter with a new board of directors calling the shots can go use one of those. It's ok for both to exist and to serve different purposes. Really.
Prompt injection attacks hijack today's top-end AI – and it's tough to fix
Does that count active users? Or total users? Be a bit sad if you were perpetually paying for some rando that posted a message 5 months ago.
It carries a hundred or so missiles to shoot down other missiles.
Government employee salaries are often below equivalent private salaries, and would be better being raised in many cases.
It's not just america.
It will be the foundation of the next world war.

The fight is between collectivism and individualism.

Collectivization requires that all sacrifice and all gain, lashed together.

Individualism allows for some to sacrifice and for some to gain, devil take the hindmost.

The questions facing those of us undecided on our allegiance are:

Is our morality objective?
Are we willing to die for a stranger?
Are we willing to risk being ruled if we are uncomfortable ruling?
Do we truely want the same things?
Is harm minimization or gain maximization a better long-term strategy?
Do any modern western governments truly represent the interests of their people? They're all suffering from fragmentation and discord. Without high trust culture, they end up balkanizing their people and being ruled by oligarchs.

I think the non representative democracy the US initially was worked well (as history can attest to). Fully representative leaves you with demagogues (as the current day can attest to).

> history

There have been plenty of good kings who saw it their duty to see to their people. This is more or less the default for how humans operate (families, tribes, businesses, etc.).

> present day monarchies

There are not any left in western society that I'm aware of, so there's a bit of a sampling bias.
Ignoring the Middle Fallacy: overlooking long-term trends
> Facebook seems to be floundering.

The link that we're literally replying to just described that it's growing in all major metrics. Stop letting niche internet communities for clingey geeks over-influence your world views.
What sold me on nix is home-manager and flakes: I can easily bootstrap my environment anywhere nix is available.
Right! Like with airplanes, there are no unsafe airplanes, only careless pilots.
My passport is in a safe place. But as for recovery codes, I was told you should never write your passwords down on a paper, right?

Passport is different from pass-code. Passport has no password.
There are plenty of drugs after which you can’t drive.

Also, the “danger to others” aspect is even then negligible as opposed to some faulty software controlling a ton of steel/battery in a system that depends heavily on predictable behavior of each other.
But what advantage does not turning HDR mode on give vs doing so is the question. I guess you could be trying to generate a NeRF with a really old smart phone?
this is the answer, Stremio is the easy-to-use solution that I setup for my parents and forgot about. the comments above with their complicated usenet setups reminds me of the famous hackers news comment when dropbox was released.
Alright, I'll take the obvious bait.

The experts in the field are right over there, getting paid to rewrite it in rust.
Hmm, I feel like this could do with a different colored top bar. Making it look exactly like HN makes me feel more like ‘why not use HN then’?
It does not need much growth when profits provide so much recurring revenue. If facebook makes $30 billion annually in profit , that is $ that must go to shareholders.
Inflation is a worldwide thing, along with increased prices for oil and gas. But it doesn't seem like anybody is blaming Brexit much there?
But what if their strategy makes more sense because most people give up and keep their subscription in the first place?
> evolutionary cohort

This is a very cool idea; I haven't heard of it before, and I'm not finding much on this concept on the 'web.

Anything you can point me to? :)
> So somehow in the UK, someone needs to accept that they’re worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power by bidding up prices, whether higher wages or passing the energy costs through on to customers. And what we’re facing now is that reluctance to accept that, yes, we’re all worse off, and we all have to take our share, to try and pass that cost on to one of our compatriots.

That pass-the-parcel game is generating inflation and that part of inflation can persist. How much bargaining power and pricing power exists for different actors in the value chain in the corporate side and in the labor market?

That's the actual quote

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-26/uk-inf...
Why not put some other generative AI oon top of that to further fuel the age of average?

https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
That's been going on for long time. Lower price per ad is also being driven by more impressions from lower income countries and lower monetizing surfaces like reels
The Sad Story of OAuth 2.0 and Open Standards
Yes, but checking refresh tokens will occur much less frequently than checking access tokens. So you can imagine, for example, access tokens being JWT, so they are cheap to check. But every so often you have to validate the refresh token against MySQL (or BigQuery or what-have-you), which is more expensive.
That wouldn’t mean anything the moment they get bought.
Playfulness in 3D Spaces (1998)
Your documentation is amongst the best I've seen on OAuth, but it suffers from the same naming confusion I always run into when I'm reading OAuth docs.

> OAuth 2 makes it easy for large service providers to write many APIs that users can securely authorize third party consumers

If I'm trying to write a Mastodon client, I'm reading this line piece by piece:

> OAuth 2 makes it easy for large service providers

"service providers" OK, that must be the Mastodon service.

> ... to write many APIs that users

"users" That must be me

> ... can securely authorize third party consumers

"consumers" OK... that's also me?
>A Netflix account is supposed to be one per family, it was never supposed to be tied to an individual person. Who in their right mind would assume that a package that allowed four simultaneous streams would be for a single person watching four shows at once?

Like cable, internet connection, or Costco membership - it's per household not per family.
> Many students would turn in low-quality work to get feedback,

Sounds like one of my coworker's PRs
Missiles can shoot down other missiles. So, if you have enough radar coverage, then I guess you're good as long as you can keep resupplied.
>And if not they run a high risk of losing their head.

This happened to roughly one British monarch, Lady Jane Grey and Mary Queen of Scots make it "roughly." Do you think there was only one monarch who failed to enrich the British populace?
Your account profile appears to claim " This account is no longer active in protest of Hacker News censorship."

Did you forget to update it?
> If almost every post is an ad, then it makes sense. Like others have pointed out, 70-90% of content is an ad on Meta platforms.

If you start your statement with hyperbolic nonsense why would I care to read the rest of it? I just checked IG reels and I went through 36 reels before getting to my first ad. I admit that is way more than I even guessed it would be, but pretending 90% is reasonable is a joke.
> multiple ip addresses, some of which are ipv6, but ipv6 is blocked… there you go with random connection delays and possibly timeouts.

RFC6555 “Happy Eyeballs” discusses this.
Specifically, it's algorithms that by design work against the user's interest in favor of the company's interest (ads, engagement bait, etc).

If the developers of a social network have incentives that are more aligned with their users then it would be possible to create genuinely useful and interesting algorithmic content feeds.
You mean puts?
One of the New Zealand cell phone companies has done this same deal and are advertising it heavily at the moment (along with SpaceX branding, which may not be the positive they think it is right now)
And that's a pity because I got really excited by the prospect of the alternative. It made my gears start spinning for viable ways to accomplish that. Oh, the ideas I'd work on if I had unlimited time...
True, but there are quite a few CVEs (of varying severity) https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-9237...

Another way to look at that is "SQlite has had these bugs in the past, and our standards are unlikely to be that high". It does deal with a quite complex problem domain, but is still a strong warning re. vulnerabilities in C.
If you came away from narcos thinking Escobar was a good person, you only saw what you wanted to see in that show. Any amount of rape wouldn't change that. He blew up a plane full of innocent people...
Yes, but a lot of folks save $0 even if they have a good paying job. So no job = very bad.
A subreddit permabanned me for not following the 90/10 rule where only 10% of my content can be self-promotional.

I then tried to get back on the subreddit with another account that was following the rules. I got caught and got temporary ban from Reddit.

I then used another alt account on different subreddits but got caught and am now permabanned from Reddit.
Well, where exactly is this progress?
Where is Google's answer to GPT-4? Why weren't the 'researchers and developers' making a GPT-4 equivalent?

Turns out you sometimes you need a top down, centralised vision to execute on projects. When the goal is undefined, you can allow researchers to run free and explore, now its full on wartime, with clear goals (make GPT-5,6,7....).
Yes - it should be everyone gets access, and they rate limit based on how much demand they could support. If that means everyone only gets 3 requests per day for GPT4, then so be it. That would be fair.

It's disappointing since Sama was a part of YC which does seem to care about merit and "fairness." So you'd hope he'd support the same principals to "support the little guy" and give everyone a shot at having the best tools.

At least GPT4 isn't good enough to use something like AutoGPT to actually be useful at self-developing large portions of software. Once AI is that good, API access will be critical. Entire infrastructure and first-mover advantage could be dependent on API access at that time... there would be AI pipelines that wouldn't have been possible months ago that a highly intelligent AI model could see to use instantly and build out in a day. Imagine if your competitor has access and you don't in that AI future.
This is a good example of how "percent employees of underrepresented groups" isn't a very useful metric. They're counting all US jobs in that category, and page 211 of the report shows that it's only 67% URM for service workers, laborers, and "operatives". Once you hit professionals it's 80% White or Asian.
A non-trivial component to MySQL popularity was that easy installation (not necessarily administration) and comparatively low resource usage with good performance at default settings (even today one needs to run some basic calculations for postgres in production, IMO) meant that cheapest possible dynamic hosting using Linux, Apache, PHP3, and MySQL 3, was what simply was the only available option for many. This codified LAMP stack, people learned from tutorials/courses/word of mouth how to write web apps with PHP and MySQL, used cheap LAMP hosting, optionally installed LAMP servers themselves, etc.

This also led to popularity of bigger reselling setups (I don't miss installing cpanel...) and services like Dreamhost.

MySQL in this way gained a virtuous cycle completely unrelated to Google. Hell, most people I know, who dealt with LAMP space for years, never knew Google had anything to do with MySQL (most people that knew about it were... Lispers. Because of who built the first version of Google Ads)

Even Mac OS X Server shipped with MySQL and PHP because of that, in 2001.