skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I've always held that the numbers themselves are perfectly precise. It's the operations that don't do what you expect.

I think that this is an oversimplification, and misses a key point.

Floating point numbers can be interpreted in (at least) two distinct ways.

In one use model, floating point numbers allow a sparse representation of selected points on the (extended) real number line. In this model, the numbers themselves are perfectly precise, and the basic operations do exactly what you'd expect -- but because the result of the expected real-number operation may not be one of the selected representable points, each operation is potentially paired with a second, implicit, rounding operation, and the consequences of the cumulative effects of this rounding operation take some thought.

This first model is often comfortable for those who have done low-level numerical program with sized integers, which are likewise a selected sparse representation of selected points on the integer line. While rounding comes up in fewer operations here, and is simpler, wrap-around becomes an issue.

However, a second model of floating point numbers is that each possible bit sequence represents an /interval/ on the (extended) real number line. In versions of this model, while the set of representable intervals is still very restricted, every point on the real number line falls into a representable interval, which is a property that sometimes eases (and sometimes seems to ease) analysis. In exchange, the operations are much more complex, and their limitations are much more obvious -- in particular, not only can no disjoint intervals be represented, but for any given point on the real line only one interval that contains it is representable -- there's no way to represent intervals of different sizes containing (some of) the same points.

This second model is what people are mostly thinking of when they say that floating point arithmetic is "not precise." In particular, both the inputs and outputs of operations have imprecise interpretations -- that is, the input interval contains infinitely many indistinguishable points, and the output interval contains infinitely many indistinguishable points, even if a real number equivalent of the problem would have a single number in the desired range.

When extended to true interval arithmetic, the second model can be very useful for understanding error propagation and uncertainty, but sadly this is rarely done.
> OpenTelemetry (or OTel) is in no way an existential threat to DataDog. Primarily because OTel is simply the substrate/protocol by which data is collected from your apps/systems.

As a vendor building in this space [1] - it definitely is. We're able to onboard teams faster to do side-by-side comparisons because they can simply point their existing Otel telemetry to both us and their existing provider with just a few lines of config. That wasn't possible before otel, and levels the playing field more than before. As otel matures, it'll continue to erode against DD's position.

It also allows us as a company to focus on what users care about (as you mention that's things like dashboarding, search performance, RUM, etc.) as opposed to spending all our time building basic integrations into every platform (though we still do plenty of work to polish places where Otel hasn't). Again, levels the playing field.

[1] https://www.hyperdx.io/
He's an extreme example but in marathons the 30 and 40 age groups tend to outperform younger runners. Aerobic fitness keeps accumulating and tends to decline very slowly with age, at least until people get into their 70s.

The amount of time I hear age related complaints about being too old or feeling tired from people my age, (which is early 30s!) is kind of nuts. People are incredibly in their head about age in our culture.
So essentially, his assertion that academia is systemically bias, can only be proven through:

>Experience in academia

>Papers, which you can only get money to work on full time through academia

Seems convenient.

Looking at the paper itself it found evidence of both a gender bias (either ingroup/outgroup or against men) and a racial bias (either ingroup/outgroup or against blacks). It notably, did not censor any facts about this gender bias, and instead published them in full. In the discussion however, it discussed these two facts with overwhelming bias, treating the observed racial bias with the utmost seriousness while not discussing the observed gender bias at all.

I think there's grounds to be sceptical of anything academia says on politically charged topics.
> But what is the best smart tv?

My advice: (1) Buy the TV based on size, picture quality, format support, your budget, etc. and (2) ignore the built-in user experience and use an Apple TV instead.

(1) My current favorite resource for picking the best TV for you is RTINGS.com. If you want to reward them for their "real tests, unbiased, no ads" approach, you could give them $10 while you do your research and make a decision.

(2) I understand this advice is incompatible for people who don't have or want an Apple device, and/or who believe Apple is evil. But the playback quality is stellar, it's power efficient (between 0.3W on standby to 5.8W for 4K HDR playback), and I'm far more comfortable with Apple's privacy policies than the alternatives. The Plex and Infuse apps are great.
> Everything past this point is much shakier ground and why this is a newsletter and not a blog post, despite being 2500+ words.

ok but lets be real, with substack becoming a thing and hillel’s buttondown hitting HN every week, is there any difference?
I believe you forgot to mention something important.

US does not impose sanctions on the only basis of "hey, we don't like them, let's ruin their lives".

In each case there is a reason, you know, like a blatant violations of human rights, mass rapes, ethnic cleansings, things like that.

If some country is bothered that other countries won't be continuing doing business with it because US sanctioned it then it is implied it intends to do something of the above. I really and sincerely hope its not "most" countries out there.

Consequently, it's not the US that "sends generations into poverty". Typically it's the ruling class who, being bored out of their minds due to their needs being met by their appropriation of national wealth, decide to do something normally unthinkable for "reasons". And let's not forget that people always have a choice of leaving or changing their government.

It is actually good that there is a power on the mudball that can if not coerce idiots to behave but at the very least impose so much pressure they cannot enjoy their lives as if they did nothing wrong, without military involvement.
If the point of sqlite is to embed into a single program, being LGPL is counter productive to this usecase.
My *first* test is not very successful.

> Whoa there!

> You have exceeded a secondary rate limit.

> Please wait a few minutes before you try again; in some cases this may take up to an hour.
It's the default on pretty much any modern Linux system!
The author makes note to discourage the licking of loose phone wiring, and I would just like to double-down on his wise words, from experience.

When wiring a phone extension for your grandma and you can't find your wire strippers, please take pains to make sure you are only stripping "dry" wires with your teeth, not the "wet" ones, lest you find out that those in Hollywood movies who fly across the room after touching a live electrical cord actually has some basis in reality.
I see your point. (I think)

However in this instance I feel that the current physics framework will describe what's being observed.

Either:

- Small compounding influence of various factors over billions of years can make something seem out of place or odd.

- some other influence in the planets past is to blame.

- or both?

- or something else within the current physics framework at play.

Or I am just being a stubborn old fool who really wants to see some cool physics rule breakage in their lifetime that would allow for things such as ftl or mind uploads but know this is pure fantasy.
Because we eat and breath through the same tube
At the age of 52 I ran my first marathon, not an organized race, I just picked a day, trained and ran it with a friend (an Ultra runner) who paced me round. I will never be fast but the sense of accomplishment of even a 10k or a 5k makes running such great form of exercise for the reasonably fit person.
I miss the Orange County, CA oranges. I had a tree in my yard as a kid, it was a dwarf, and it produced insane amounts of the best oranges i've ever had.

Oranges now are all navel oranges, which i find tougher, less sweet, and more tough fleshed.

As an aside, the oranges i am talking about are exactly tennis ball sized and can be fired out of a tennis ball cannon - to about 2 blocks away.
I would like to believe there is a future where blocking access to the internet is unilaterally impossible. Major powers being able to pull the rug on what has become a foundation of modern society like this is too scary of a thing to allow. What could the answer be? Satellite-powered relays and DIY-able user devices to talk to them?
> Ignoring the objective fact that disarming legal citizens does nothing to quell armed crime

citation needed. what's the one unique thing about the united states that makes it #1 in mass shootings? banning bump stocks or other band-aid solutions are not going to make any kind of significant dent in mass murders.
For that the requirements are well known - infinite resources, infinite knowledge, infinite time. See Theory of Bounded Rationality.
You could say the same in reverse. Humans can't lift fifty times their own weight. Humans can't communicate in real-time with pheromones alone. Most humans do not know how to build their own home. An ant might well consider us backwards, not advanced.
So don't tolerate intolerance. It's an easy solution, I have no idea why there is a paradox about it. If you allow shitty behavior to persist it will. If you don't tolerate shitty behavior in people it tends to diminish. You'll never get rid of all of it but you have to correct toxic mentalities and behaviors.
Why aren't US interests threatened by the Euro?
I didn't count UN sanctioned peacekeeping as "invasion", but I can see how this could be seen as a purely semantic distinction.

I personally think it should be one instrument on the table as a matter of last resort, mainly for the purpose of deterrence.
I don't think it's just that.

1/0 is infinity but 1/(-0) is -infinity
> So whilst the people who weren't alive in the 1990s are wrong to be hung up on the "I thought it meant 'from Mars'." confusion, since the saddening reality of 2023 is that we're no nearer to that being a realistic source of confusion than we were in 1991;

There’s a Mars Fleet of about 11 operational spacecraft and robotic landers/rovers/etc on or around Mars right now, and in fact the robotic helicopter, Ingenuity, runs Linux. I legitimately thought it was related to those. There were no operational missions at Mars in 1991.

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4414

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars
It's a better use of space than manicured grass.
His nephew feels the farm belongs to him, saw my friend, one of the three actual legitimate heirs, as a threat. It was not just toxicity, it was escalating violence. Though my friend is the strongest man I know and could literally tie his skinny nephew into a double knot, and I could tell you stories of his ridiculous physicality that I personally witnessed, he is a pacifist, nonviolent, quite gentle for someone with farm hands. His nephew barely has a HS education, though I would consider him extremely financially successful, as is everyone with a share in the business thanks to the farm's success. But he is young, thinks he knows everything but doesn't know anything, drives a $100K pickup and thinks a lot of himself, as success can have that effect. He drives a planter, and that is all he knows. He doesn't have any education in the sciences that would lend themselves to farming, such as agronomy, genetics, biology, ecology, meteorology, business, economics or engineering. I'd be very surprised if he knew algebra. My friend has a mechanical engineering degree from a high ranking engineering university, and he worked on that farm for 40 years under his grandfather, then his father. For the last 2 decades, though not a mechanic, he's fixed the broken equipment, which broke down all the time, and kept it running, saving the farm untold amounts for this alone, and ran the front office, and also handled sales, as well as driving a combine, harvester, delivering product with ten wheelers, or whatever else he needed to do. I don't think his brothers recognized his value, and I don't understand how they're getting along without him. He knew what he was leaving behind, actually got a fair settlement, but accounting, and it is controlling actually, is easy money to him compared to farming.

Farming is extremely lucrative, but there are far easier ways to make money. And if his nephew ever does get control of the farm, it will not last, because he is an uneducated moron that is mentally ill and abusive. That he is a Millennial is incidental. He's young, but also identifiably a narcissist, and I should have just said that and left what generation American he was out of it. I believe the children are our future. Millennials, as sensitive as they can be at times (if hn comments are any indicator), and maybe it is just that they get too much unjustified criticism, are going to save the world, I have no doubt about that. And I am and should be grateful to them.
Bernie is far left in the USA, and AMLO is far left in Mexico. We aren't discussing Europe, so your spectrum isn't relevant.

AMLO is a nationalist, you are right there - and in a nation that is hostile-to-ambivalent about the USA it's really telling for him to say this. Maybe people are waking up to how shitty a China led world would be.
No mention of civil, chemical, mechanical engineering.
Actually go and read about coverage of India in NYt and WaPo. Those editors have a Vendetta out. I have not seen more dishonest coverage about India . Not everything is happy and progressive in india but it is far from the hell hole these media organisations show. Infact democracy rankings rank India below Taliban controlled Afghanistan. Are you kidding me ? What kind of drug they are on ?
What does that offer, i.e. what are the benefits?
Google blocking third party invites in Calendar
There was no reason for that toot to be that aggressive :(
Buy enough bonds that you can pay taxes with the coupon? Or dividend stocks? Factor this into the total cost of the property? Also include realistic depreciation in your accounting.
The DID method has to satisfy a lot of requirements. I did a ton of research on DHT and blockchain approaches and none of them give the right performance, reliability, and cost outcomes while also supporting key rotation. DNS isn't far off but it's a little obtuse to cram it into, so we're starting with did:web and did:plc. We'll add others if they have the right characteristics.

The only options that seem reasonable for PLC is for it either to be operated by some trusted multi-stakeholder institution like ICANN or to be a closed-group blockchain. I'm open to either approach but they require the creation of a consortium, which requires buyin from a set of stakeholders that don't exist yet. So until that happens, we run it, and that's why we called it Placeholder. We'll backronym it into something else once we get there (the C most likely being Consortium).
Link for anyone interested in Clear Linux: https://clearlinux.org/

Had heard of Alpine and used it plenty for containers, yet hadn't heard of Clear Linux before. Nowadays I just use Ubuntu for my container images (due to the same environment as my dev machine which simplifies things for me), but there's also a lot of benefit and elegance in more lightweight alternatives.
Peer-peer wifi mesh based intranet could become a solution
I dont know of any real vigilante examples on Police in US.
Kind of missing the point, I think the above commenter was noting that they couldn't imagine Apple ever encouraging someone to get intimate with the internals at all. I certainly can't. You might say, "Why would you want to," but it's more about "why not?" I guess that's all a roundabout way to say that Framework is pretty in-touch with the hacker mentality, whereas Apple is too far gone in that respect.
Whoever provides the infrastructure needs to be paid though right?

How do you pay the satellite provider?
You can't get the sort of low end torque with a turbocharged i4 that you can with a large displacement V8 even if they both have the same peak horsepower. More low end torque give a better throttle response and different characteristics than more high revving engines.
Compliance: Impossible
> It is increasingly clear to me that running a globally compliant Internet business will soon be, if it is not already, impossible in several important domains. In two specific spheres, crypto and publishing, the problem is most acute. As the post-war international order fractures, so too does the Internet. The result is that soon Internet businesses in crypto or publishing will have no choice but to violate the law somewhere if they want to continue to exist.
What a LOAD of bull.

Look, the hard truth is, nitrogen is the limiting nutrient. A square kilometer of plants can fix only so much of it on its own via symbiotic bacteria (and maaaaybe archaea), fungi can NOT fix nitrogen on their own.

You can optimize, curate, cultivate, paint yourself in dog shit and chant at the full moon however long you want, but there's a hard practical limit on that amount. And that's it.

Animals can concentrate nitrogen into manure, but they don't produce more of it.

That's why fertilizers are absolutely essential, as long as the Earth's population is above ~2B.
The Disappearing Computer: Exclusive Preview of Humane’s Screenless Tech
It seems like it's "ride the wave with us or get left behind" kind of thing.
Maintaining a cross-platform desktop email application (and an Android mobile one) is far from a simple project.
> I think about this a lot when I see UI redesigns that "look fresh" or "updated" while actually reducing productivity and degrading the life of the humans

This ^^^ it totally annoys me having to relearn programs when I'm faster with 16bit versions from the early 00's.
That was my feeling, but thanks for spotting the evidence.
My own blog is now 22 years old! It began in my university dorm room. It was not really a blog in those days. Instead it was just a loose collection of pages. It acquired its blog shape and form much later when blogging became fashionable. I still update it occasionally.

https://susam.net/blog/

https://susam.net/maze/
I'm shocked they work at all.

For example, the very popular oobabooga /text-generation-webui repo on GitHub has a Dockerfile that simply won't build.

Oh, maybe it was possible to build it once at some point in time, but then some Python package got updated, and it's game over.

It's astonishing how fragile the reproducibility of everything in the Python and ML world is. Even with the help of Docker, things break within weeks, and then stay broken.
Can't wait to bring Spring, dependency injection and Factories into my browser apps!
Also came here to read about AT modem commands. Still have no idea (and admittedly little interest) what this other nonsense is... Did it have to use the existing name? Did the authors not have access to a search engine?
There was a time when I would have believed that too. It’s a probabilistic type view, which in general, on average works out to be mostly correct.

In the physics analogy, I imagine thinking of it like heat.

But, if you pick any individual, just like if you go to an individual atom, you will find that velocity, position, etc. is still impossible to predict except as probabilities on a curve. And unlike atoms, people have strong incentives to lie (to themselves and others), and a rather impressive ability to do so.

And given enough atoms/people or time, you WILL find the truly unpredictable. And you will often find the nonsensical, the self destructive, etc.

The general human motivations (or at least what we perceive them as) are also statistical averages. It doesn’t take much looking to find folks with very, very different ways of acting on them than what we’d consider normal.

Due to this fractal nature of the complexity of reality, it is a delusion thinking anyone can understand the moment. Truly, anyways.

Everything is through a lens, it has to be, or it would be impossible to comprehend at all.
From an info overload/attention spike/network theory context how similar are these intenet shutdowns to brain seizures?
I’ll suggest that farmland is even older, like thousands of years old, and it belonged to other people who lived there before Europeans showed up. So it’s important to keep that in the conversation.
Maybe the internet as a whole is intractable. But perhaps we can get a meaningful digest of snapshots of the important stuff that can work over slow links, intermittent links, and one-way links? Perhaps we can mechanize the selection of important content.

The real question is how you do this in a way that doesn't encourage one-sided propaganda, sybil attacks, etc.

I'm reminded of systems like Secure Scuttlebutt and the Othernet satellite transport. https://othernet.is/

I know the internet is fundamentally two-way. It seems there's always a few competent users who know how to get information out of a conflict zone or disaster area... getting information in beyond a few choke points seems to be the hard part.
there is no such thing as -0.

if you want to say "zero approaching from negative one", fine, say that. but that IS NOT the same thing as -0. zero is just zero, it doesn't have a sign.

some people just want everything to fit in a nice neat box, and sometimes folks, life is not like that. this is an awful change, injecting meaning where there is no room for it.
Eli's blog is one of my favorite. High quality content. Looking forward reading you for another 20 years Eli.
I'll go ahead and answer as well since we're just talking about anecdata anyway.

> Is your Amazon shopping experience better than 10 years ago?

Depends what you mean by "shopping experience." Some aspects better, some worse. Generally if I'm looking for a specific product/serial number or something, it's perfect. If I'm searching Amazon for a type of product, it's not as good - but then again, searching via Google or DDG and going from there is generally better.

> Is product discovery easier?

It was never particularly good, it's not particularly good now, but is probably marginally better especially if you have something specific in mind, e.g. something better than going on amazon.com and typing "waffle maker" into the search.

> Are you confident that you’re getting genuine merchandise?

Yes. IME the "OMG COUNTERFEITS" stuff is pretty overblown. Amazon not commingling inventory would be a step in the right direction but logistically that's difficult and would result in even less competitive pricing.

> Are delivery promises being met?

I can remember exactly two times where something wasn't delivered as promised, and one was years and years ago (maybe more than 10). The other one was damaged in transit and automatically reordered with a later shipping date so you can't even really blame that on them.

> Are the prices competitive with other online and offline retailers?

This is my only complaint. You end up paying a bit for the convenience and shipping speed which is worth it most of the time (IMO).