skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd be concerned about the lack of garbage collection in Rust.

It's little appreciated what a breakthrough garbage collection was for code reuse: it was probably more important for code reuse in Java than object-orientation itself.

If you don't have garbage collection the API between a library and an application has to address memory allocation and freeing. If the relationship between the library and application is simple this is not a problem, but if library needs to share buffers with the application and particularly if the library constructs complex data structures that are connected with pointers, it is a difficult problem because often the library is not sure if the application is done with a buffer or vice versa... But the garbage collector is!

(Ironically this is a case where "abstraction", "encapsulation" and such are dangerous ideas because the problem the garbage collector addresses is a global problem, not a local problem. As a global problem can be correctly addressed globally, this is an appropriate use of "abstraction", but if your doctrine is that "abstractions are local" you have baked failure into your mental model at the very beginning.)

It's not accidental that OO languages became popular when GUIs did because OO is a good fit for the GUI domain. Memory allocation matters a lot, particularly if you are building complex applications for creatives. If you're just writing mobile apps and overcomplicated web forms, you can say that "the panel belongs to the form", "the input box belongs to the panel", ... The idea of borrowing becomes highly problematic when you have complex applications where the user can add and remove property sheets and other controls to the UI because you now have a graph relationship between components, not a tree relationship. If you have garbage collection and other tools appropriate to graph relationships you can make it look easy, approach it with the wrong tools and you will always be pushing bubbles around under the rug.
"Playing Our Last Summer by ABBA on Apple Music"
I think the initial premise is interesting (increase in non-technical applications to YC) but the juxtaposition around the motives of people with advanced technical and business degrees is comical (and one that seems pervasive on HN)
I have a habit of checking the accessibility features from time to time, there's great stuff in there :)

My favorite is Spoken Content > Speak Screen: you can swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen and it'll read the written content for you. I use it to read articles in Safari while I'm brushing my teeth or walking my dog
You have a very strong hypothesis about the AI system just being able to "think up" such a bioweapon (and also the researchers being clueless in implementation). I see doomsday scenarios often assuming strong advances in sciences in the AI etc. - there is little evidence for that kind of "thinkism".
This is an important perspective. Surveillance capitalism is so often justified with "as long as they don't misuse the data". No, fuck that. The data should not have been collected in the first place.
> you must use (paid services) in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN

But what is a "large" file? 10mb? 100mb? Are there any actual specifications that I can read or is this just "use it and hope for the best, till you get a notification from Cloudflare sales team"?
> People who disagree just for the sake of disagreeing are, in my mind, a myth, especially in the workplace where the stakes are high and disagreement tends to go hand-in-hand with conflict and power struggle and is therefore uncomfortable territory. Nobody would put themselves through that discomfort for nothing.

Maybe so, but the persistence of this myth among people who work suggests my original point about the delivery of the message as important has some truth to it, as some people are perceived this way.
I've been making clear ice at home for a while--it's a great party trick and much easier to do than it seems.

The best part is chiseling ice cubes from a large clear block of ice: use a serrated knife and a hammer and you will end up with perfectly square blocks of ice.
They already do that now. People are getting phished for their sms codes. As a side note, my local news just reported a big crime spree of people robbing cashless places. They have the manager log into the clover POS machines and issue refunds into their cards.

Criminals have been high tech for a while now
Agreed. Presenting this feature solely as a tool for users with cognitive disabilities might undersell its potential. There's a significant number of smartphone users who only utilize a small fraction of the available features and would prefer a simpler interface focusing on the 10% of features they actually use. Interestingly, this demographic includes both less tech-literate users, who might feel overwhelmed by the complexity, and extremely tech-literate users who know exactly what they need and prefer clean, distraction-free tools.
> so instead it uses its training data to seek other ways to reduce human populations without extermination.

This is a real problem, but it's already problem with our society, not AI. Misaligned public intellectuals routinely try to reduce the human population and we don't lift a finger. Focus where the danger actually is - us!

From Scott Alexander's latest post:

Paul Ehrlich is an environmentalist leader best known for his 1968 book The Population Bomb. He helped develop ideas like sustainability, biodiversity, and ecological footprints. But he’s best known for prophecies of doom which have not come true - for example, that collapsing ecosystems would cause hundreds of millions of deaths in the 1970s, or make England “cease to exist” by the year 2000.

Population Bomb calls for a multi-pronged solution to a coming overpopulation crisis. One prong was coercive mass sterilization. Ehrlich particularly recommended this for India, a country at the forefront of rising populations.

In 1975, India had a worse-than-usual economic crisis and declared martial law. They asked the World Bank for help. The World Bank, led by Robert McNamara, made support conditional on an increase in sterilizations. India complied [...] In the end about eight million people were sterilized over the course of two years.

Luckily for Ehrlich, no one cares. He remains a professor emeritus at Stanford, and president of Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology. He has won practically every environmental award imaginable, including from the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund, and the United Nations (all > 10 years after the Indian sterilization campaign he endorsed). He won the MacArthur “Genius” Prize ($800,000) in 1990, the Crafoord Prize ($700,000, presented by the King of Sweden) that same year, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012. He was recently interviewed on 60 Minutes about the importance of sustainability; the mass sterilization campaign never came up. He is about as honored and beloved as it’s possible for a public intellectual to get.
You're right, of course, but that also makes your out-of-hand dismissals based on your own philosophical premises equally invalid.

Until a model of human sentience and awareness is established (note: one of the oldest problems out there alongside the movements of the stars. This is an ancient debate, still open-ended, and nothing anyone is saying in these threads is new), philosophy is all we have and ideas are debated on their merits within that space.
Adding water to the atmosphere does not cause more warming due to greenhouse effect at least not on this scale. Water vapor concentration is regulated by condensation, adding more water simply means more rain.

What is actually causing more warming is the increase of temperature, that changes the equilibrium vapor pressure point.
I have a page for quotes in Notion. There are only a few, I try to save it for really good ones. But this quote from Ira Glass made the cut:

"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."
Someone has to link this here, so it may as well be me :)

https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdo...
Robin AI: Integral Health's New Sidekick for Automated PR Reviews
Hi Hackers!

I'm excited show off Robin AI, the first open-source project from Integral Health. Named after Batman's sidekick, Robin is here to assist you in your code review battles.

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So far, Robin AI has performed especially well with JavaScript and Python repositories. It's already in action on 3 public projects and a number of private repos who've provided positive feedback about their early experiences with the tool.

We're in the process of securing GPT credits to ensure Robin AI remains completely free for the community. We're eager to hear your feedback as we work on making Robin AI an indispensable sidekick for devs.

Check out the project at https://github.com/Integral-Healthcare/robin-ai-reviewer and let us know your thoughts. Your feedback is invaluable as we continue to refine and develop Robin AI. Thanks!
It's all part of the "bullshit jobs" phenomenon.
It's not an insult to say that this is all about narcissism because it is all about presentation of self.
>My question is are there now enough safeguards in place that we're unlikely to be repeating the same mistakes?

Nope. For instance some of the chemicals in sun screen never had to pass rigorous safety testing because it was assumed they couldn't enter the blood, but in fact that's not the case, and already at least one is known to have negative effects on reproductive health:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2733085 . Who knows what other chemicals are floating about in various cosmetics entering the bloodstream through the skin without ever being safety tested for that.
Yes. I am a user. And I care.

I think most users care if actually given the choice.
One of the fundamental principles of art is that the artist is allowed to do whatever they want.

To the extent the artist is acting as a true artist, the public has no say in what they may or may not do. In that sense, their work is neither "good" nor "bad."

But to the extent the artist is acting as a commercial entity – one who intends to sell a consumable product – the public has every say in the value and merit of a piece.

The artist may do whatever kind of work she wants. The company may not.
You're morally right, but they'd flip it around and ask why you chose to create a situation where inappropriate images are being stored on company infrastructure.
I think the release of the headset is going to be the most surreal moment.

It's been in production for so long and its clear they felt it was just around the corner at least 5 WWDCs ago. But it's also clear they were originally aiming for an unobtrusive glasses form factor for wearing all day and have at some point recently pivoted to more of a "MacBook Pro of AR" work focused but more powerful form factor. As the narrative changed from "The Glasses" to "The Headset" at some point.

Interesting to see how this will play out or if it'll be another iPad or if it'll be more like the Oculus Rift where everyone who bought one raved about it and they sold 7 figures of them but ultimately it petered out.
Sure, but not all regulation is created equal. Sometimes it's created in good faith. But many times, particularly when the entity being regulated is involved in regulating its own industry, it's simply a cynical consolidation of power to erect barriers to potential competition. The fact that it masquerades as being for the public good/safety makes the practice that much more insidious.
When I was an intern in the 80s TCE was very popular as a degreaser. We were supposed to wear gloves when dipping our hands in there but often didn't.
It seems like all the brokerages got sold hard on this. I have a friend who did customer support for Fidelity and they also pushed the voice ID thing very hard. I think it was to the point they wouldn't help you until you set it up.

I have had Schwab accounts for over a decade and called them a couple times, and they didn't bug me about it. Would still prefer WebAuthn to log in, however.
"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." I do not think you can quantitatively assess the value a single person brings to an organization. Even so-called "cost centers" enable the revenue generating aspects of the organization. These metrics also fail to account for specialized subject matter experts who may be only needed in very unique situations but otherwise can have lots of downtime. Moreover, organizations waste millions of dollars a year on vanity projects and resume driven development by middle management, yet I don't see machine learning being used to identify when competing divisions or factions of managers are wasting time and resources on trying to elevate themselves and their own ideas. If companies legitimately want to understand the value a person brings to an organization, they to have an empathetic, servent-leader manager who takes the time to understand the work each person does within the organization through observation and conversation. These poorly thought through metrics do more harm than good, you'll wind up with crappy products or services as employees focus on gaming metrics as opposed to actually delivering value.
For chemicals that cause illnesses that take decades to show up, it's my guess that we will never find all of them, and there are likely a lot of them out there. It's a hard problem. Maybe it can be helped by using modelling techniques to extrapolate effects over time.
Folks like to lick a boot
My first thought of this went to capturing the voice of a parent or family member. Imagine being able to talk with them after they pass...
In the old days, there were flocks of birds so large that they would blot out the sun, and the herds of bison were so large that it would take a week for a herd to walk by your campsite.
Under apparent US hegemony, the US was wasting trillions on wars, while China’s economy grew at a much faster pace.

Their increased local suppression, political and military flexing may be helpful to those consolidating power at the top, but they are costly moves to maintain, and have upended the compounding economic power game they were quietly winning.

> “The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.” [0]

[0] Sun Tzu (Some Chinese guy), The Art of War
Yep. I agree that HN is a terrible place to a rational financial discussion
That's a lot of fad-based tech in this article but you do what you have to do. The first language I used professionally is not the same language I use today. However any one of them certainly could have become "fad" tech... except maybe C, Lisp, and Haskell; those ones seem to be built on foundations (discovered or invented) that are repeated, rediscovered, or reinvented but rarely change.

I generally think of "fad" tech as frameworks and ecosystems that are built around a commercial interest or novel idea. They often fail to overcome network effects. And this leads them into obscurity to await deprecation.

There's a lot of churn that happens in the frothy red waters of "trying to make programming easier/faster/accessible-to-non-programmers".

And we're not so great at maintaining our legacy, the state of the art, the pedagogy and history of our science. Over a twenty-plus year career I've seen people re-invent solutions to the same problems over and over. Each time it's a revolution. You don't want to dishearten the young and eager but at the same time seeing them run into the same problems, learning the same conclusions, etc means we've not been doing a great job at teaching and mentoring and all that.
i’ll read this tomorrow
Even that's a false assumption IMO - Amazon has the advantage in that returns aren't all-or-nothing, they can instead be more granular about who they allow to return items.
But what are the environmental effects of harvesting & manufacturing the food for the cats that are kept indoors? This is always left out of the equation in these conversations. Cats have to eat some animal to survive. To me, it seems bad for the environment to have cats as pets at all... (I have a cat)
Open AI has been pretty dishonest since the pivot to for-profit, but this is a new low.

Incredibly scummy behaviour that will not land well with a lot of people in the AI community. I wonder if this is what prompted a lot of people to leave for Anthropic.
Suggests voter ID law was ‘gerrymandering’ that backfired
Full title: Jacob Rees-Mogg suggests voter ID law was ‘gerrymandering’ that backfired on the Tories at local elections

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-65599380

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/jacob-reesmogg-rosie-w...
The explanation I saw was that radical oxides do a bit of damage to the cell and this triggers alarms which cause the cell to initiate repair mechanisms or kill itself. By taking anti-oxidants you are messing around with this alarm system, and basically make the cell live longer than expected, which increases cancer risk.
Ronnie Coleman also can't walk anymore on his own because of those heavy weights.

That could certainly apply in this context if talking 20 years down the line.
Gross take. I generally loathe impressionist work for a number of reasons I won't get into here, but that doesn't change the fact that standing in a gallery in front of Monet's "Woman with a parasol" you can -feel- a light see breeze and smell salt. A powerful and (correctly) celebrated work done after the advent of photography.
What are the 2nd and 3rd order effects that we're missing?

Qattara depression lies in the Horse Latitudes that is full of arid deserts. So there's a high chance that flooding it might not make it turn into a lush wonderland. It could even end up being another dead sea.

1: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/horse-latitudes.html
I would say there's a difference between a fir Douglas plantation and a multi-species forest. The two are not ecologically equivalent. At least around where I live (department 71 in France), there are less and less forests and more and more tree plantations.

I think it would be interesting to look at how much biodiverse forests we have now compared to 100 years ago. I might be proven wrong.
‘My voice is my passport please verify me.’

“…You’re right. I can’t kill my friend.”

::turns to goon::

“Kill my friend.”
All 5 years of my web software development, I've ported code to Angular. I've read your legacy code, and ported it to a framework that's already in decline. Of course it's all legacy.
I'm not sure that the regulation being proposed by Altman is good, but you're vastly misstating the actual purported threat posed by AI. Altman and the senators quoted in the article aren't expressing fear that AI is becoming sentient, they are expressing the completely valid concern that AI sounds an awful lot like not-AI nowadays and will absolutely be used for nefarious purposes like spreading misinformation and committing identity crimes. The pace of development is happening way too rapidly for any meaningful conversations around these dangers to be had. Within a few years we'll have AI-generated videos that are indistinguishable from real ones, for instance, and it will be impossible for the average person to discern if they're watching something real or not.
Maybe a solution to unintended negative consequences from destructive activities that never cared about environmental impact until too late is more so a constructive project with intended positive consequences and specific environmental goals and less so the default alternative of "keep doing those destructive projects as before and stall anything else"
I love this concept, and applying open source to it. I have long seen the correlation between code and food, because recipes are just instructions for humans on how to interact with food to construct something.

Recipes are code, just a different form.
Also a bit creepy.
> Why is building what amounts to a calculator/spreadsheet/CAD program for language somehow a Rubicon that cannot be crossed?

We've already crossed it and I believe we should go full steam ahead, tech is cool and we should be doing cool things.

> Did people freak out this much about computers replacing humans when they were shown to be good at math?

Too young but I'm sure they did freak out a little! Computers have changed the world and people have internalized computers as being much better/faster at math but exhibiting creativity, language proficiency and thinking is not something people thought computers were supposed to do.
By this standard, Beethoven's 9th Symphony is also no longer "relevant".

The first to do something are remembered, those who come after must be significantly better or different to be recognized. If someone wants to see Caravaggio's style, they are likely to simply see Caravaggio - it's just name recognition, nothing to do with the "relevancy" of the style itself, whatever that means (Popularity? Or a self-fulfilling justification for whatever style the art world elite is pushing?)

And there are in fact newer artists with name recognition that painted in a representational style (but not the exact same style), e.g. Dali, Frazetta, Giger, Beksiński.
And regulatory capture begins.
Density doesn't always matter. I'm reminded of Apple's 5nm M1 Ultra struggling to keep up with Nvidia's 10nm RTX 3080 in standard use. Having such a minor node advantage won't necessarily save them here, especially since Nvidia's currently occupying the TSMC 4nm supply.
Sometimes it's interesting to read the comments on articles like these. Many if not most of the comments which lean towards ignoring support for older or lesser CPUs don't seem to care about much more than sheer popularity, as though something that 90% of the world has should become the de facto standard. That's the same logic that used to be used to rationalize not supporting free Unix / Linux.

Why do people who have money and fancy, sometimes expensive things so often insist on getting even more, when getting more means that those without the means to afford better get less? I suppose we could fix the planet if we could figure out how to deal with this.

So, in a nutshell, I dismiss those who have fancy CPUs and who insist that everyone use AVX, even when it affects those who can't.

Really, though, the answer is quite simple: run-time code paths for various CPU feature sets. This problem would be moot if programmers just programmed and let compilers and assemblers output AVX optimized code for CPUs that have it and regular x86 assembly for those that don't, in the same binary.
Forget the words and look at where the money is: regulatory capture, which they’re racing toward