skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I consulted with a company that used AI to craft individual responses in a high-ticket-item sales effort. The result: sales cycles got 25% shorter.

The explanation was, by addressing customer concerns and questions earlier, the customer could make up their minds faster. It removed doubt and agonizing over uncertainty.

It's not all bad, this AI thing. Some of it is helpful, removes pain points and confusion.
My guess is that retail investors buy without thinking about the price and institutional investors play along.

For some reason, retail investors look at the price when buying a car, but not at the price of a company when buying a stock. At the same time, institutional investors focus on the near-term due to misaligned incentives. As Warren Buffet put it in 1985, institutional investors can't wait for a good long-term deal or people will start shouting "swing you bum" [1]. So, the whole system is in some kind of crazy frenzy of pumping up the price until it burst. If it bursts, the institutional investors are the first to leave or obtained their fees.

Long story short: I think you understand it perfectly well. Buying Nvidia at a 200 PE ratio makes no sense from a valuation standpoint.

[1]: https://youtu.be/T6HHwOoq9M4
Why do you want to leave the room? Reject genetic programming which creates motivational states.
On Linux, I use Kate, the (imo superior) Notepad++. It even has vim bindings (which I turn on accidentally and then have to burn the editor with fire until it stops)!
I think there are so many possible tipping points out there - some we won't notice until it is far too late, some we may be able to reverse and some the will seem like nothing - until suddenly it becomes rather serious.

Fun times ahead.
In practice, as the thesis proves, you can use iO to generate a lot of things people care about in cryptography.
I will go out on a limb and say you can use it to build almost everything interesting :)

Now, it happens for a lot of those we don't need iO and iO may be impractical, but as a theoretical building block, it's quite nice.

As for your concern, yes, this is now possible, at least in the sense that you do as good as is possible to do in making them computationally indistinguishable. This does not prevent you from attacking it in other ways :)

Two things, good or bad depending on how you look at it:

1. You can prove iO is as least as good as the best possible obfuscation scheme that can ever exist. So whatever that enables you to do or not, it's the limit.

2. It also means you can get away with handing over less secrets, ensure better isolation, etc.

The following things are possible with iO (trivially so), due to this paper:

Adaptively secure succinct garbled RAM - which would let you hand secure databases to untrusted providers and not worry about it.

Sender deniable encryption where you can't prove what the original plaintext was and various options are equally likely.

Fully deniable interactive encryption where secrecy of communication is protected even if the parties are later coerced (or willingly bribed) to expose their entire internal states: plaintexts, keys and randomness.

etc

These are just some examples.

Now, some of this, as I said, we know how to do already, some we don't. But this paper gives you iO as a building block that can do them without having to separately prove that it is as sound and secure as existing crypto systems are.

Again, iO only provides computational indistinguishability, not other things, but it is a nice primitive.
The mistake of using build tags, or the mistake of not using them?
> Put an online backup in a another location then.

And hope your online backup doesn't get hit by the same group/malware that took out your primary production system.

Offline backups help with certain types of risks.
That is the scale argument.
Scale also brings competition.
Performance Analysis with Atop
And hire a plumber.
Engine breaking, which any manually car driver uses, does not produce any indication that you're slowing down. Technically, the engine noise is louder, but not enough to notice outside of the car.
If compilation speed is an issue, you're already sunk in C and C++ because the #include evaluation rules leave very little room to optimize the massive redundancy of computing headers over and over (and every header includes all its headers, and etc).
> The punishment should fit the crime. Being born in a location run by a terrorist organization is not a crime.

The problem is, as soon as you remove the sanctions, Hamas will use that to collect funds to buy more weapons to send off to Israel.

The only way to achieve actual, lasting peace in Israel and Palestine is to get an Arab country as a guarantor that Israel won't be attacked - but Hamas is so deeply connected with Iran whom everyone else in the region intensely dislikes that no one will take on that role.
So you're not disputing any factual claims he made, got it.
> armchair doomerism

Exactly.

For years the cranks and conspiracy theorists have been whingeing about rumors of oil being traded in currencies other than dollars, as if that would somehow wipe out US global power.

This argument never made sense to me since forex trading is extraordinarily liquid and cheap.

If the seller of oil wants to receive euros or yen instead of dollars, and the buyer of oil wants to pay in francs or pounds, the cost of the forex conversion is measured in hundredths of a percentage point.
How do you think they wrote it? (Reminds me of this: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html)
There's a difference between taking criticism of a section of code to be indicative of some kind of moral failing, and taking that criticism to mean that their understanding of that piece of code was not complete. The first is a direct hit to self worth, the second is a hit to one thing that is used to determine self worth along with lots of other things. The first way is taking it as some kind of attack, the second way is taking it as a learning experience and a chance to increase self-worth by becoming a better developer.

So I think what people mean when they suggest detaching their self worth from their code is that they shouldn't take criticism of their code as a personal attack but as a chance to learn and grow. Hence "you are not your code": the attack isn't a direct assault on you, it's a technical argument about the actual code itself.
Here's an example of study that was done like that and the results were never published:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/records-found-in-...
HN removes certain words from titles automatically.
> “should the unthinkable occur”

Yet so common that things like this book make sense.
A story about a monster on a flying sewer.
The problem with your reasoning is that you think that the atmosphere problem is a problem that should be equally burdened by every country, whereas it should be equally burdened by every human. There is no reason that people that are inmore populated countries should be burdened more than people in less populated ones.
It's just a list of links with no real substance. Don't they have some crypto scams to attend to?
would it be good idea to short the stock though?
I would. He repeated his points several times.
> False dichotomy. I live in the suburbs, The closest things to me to walk to (within 30 minutes) are a gas station, or another gas station, or an automotive replair place.

> When I take conference trips to other cities, I do walk everywhere.

Pardon me, but you seem to have accepted car-dependence an inevitable fact of your normal life, even though you see how others live on a regular basis. Why?
That is a weird example, because you make it sound like you easily could have just extracted the Deno-compatible JS, and made a regular ECMAScript Module and avoided an NPM compatibility layer at all.

In fact, I did this exact thing to use marked[1] with QuickJS[2]. Obviously, QuickJS doesn't have an NPM compatibility layer because it doesn't need one, and neither does Deno. The great thing is the resulting .js file can easily be a Deno module as well.

> I tend to be an idealist in my programming - that's why I like Deno - but the absolutism I'm seeing in this thread is bizarre

I don't really see any absolutism in this thread, it's just a disagreement. Yes, NPM compat is great for adoption. I'm arguing it's not great for the runtime, and that it adds tech debt, and slows the team down from doing (imo) more creative things. It also adds more to the binary.

[1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/markedjs/marked/master/lib...
[2] https://bellard.org/quickjs/quickjs.html
You can use https://www.hnreplies.com to get notified when someone replies to your comments.
> Competition seems to always lead companies to drop what makes them special in pursuit of the other guy's customers.

Can you explain in your own words why supporting the world's leading package manager system makes Deno "drop what makes it special"? Does it make any sense to argue against gaining access to all conceivable dependencies?
Among other things, tons of desktop software and most mobile apps and even javascript you run from most websites is obfuscated. How is it possible to avoid that? Do you run 100% open source for everything with javascript disabled?
"parallel execution of the string_agg and array_agg aggregate functions" caught my eye - that feels like one of those minor improvements that might enable some pretty interesting new applications.

array_agg is particularly interesting, because it lets you implement patterns like this: https://til.simonwillison.net/sqlite/related-rows-single-que...
I think that depends on who did the predicting :)

There was a lot of "ooh, it will catastrophically fail within weeks", which was fundamentally an assumption that the previous team was entirely incompetent. (Any halfway decent team tries their hardest to build resilient systems, not things that need hand-holding all the time.)

The current trajectory is exactly on the expected failure path predicted by anybody who does actually work on large systems - a steady increase of smaller failures, punctuated by the occasional large failure. (Cf. DeSantis announcement)

In essence, a reduction in staff will result in worse SLO results. It will result in less coverage of edge cases (technical and UX). Smaller teams are more constrained to travel on "the happy path". And the fact that marginal utility of additional engineers decreases means you can usually reduce teams a lot before impacting that path.

In complex systems, reductions also mean you're more vulnerable to a black swan event being irrecoverable, but that still requires a black swan first.
Have you tried out using ripgrep [0] or fzf [1]? 200ms is quite a lot for history search, I'd expect search to be 20ms or less. In fact, it should be instantaneous as it should all fit in memory really. I've been using fzf and the searches are all faster than my monitor can display frames (so less than 16ms), although I only have 10k entries on my history as I clear it up once in a while.

[0]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep

[1]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
The last known copy of that burned with a Benedictine monastary in the 14th century
> The book features the honey-loving bear created by AA Milne and illustrator EH Shepard instructing kids about how to react to a mass shooting. It is not an official production, Winnie-the-Pooh has been in the public domain since 1 January 2022.

Not what I expected from "well-known childrens franchise goes public domain"
My guess is that they tested thousands of existing drugs (cheap to produce and easily available) in order to build a short list of new compound (significantly more expensive to produce).
Definitely an ambitious project with a great start. I'm impressed by the scope of this, and have found myself writing smaller scripts for various functions that are already included here. Nice job!

The "algorithms" and "database" files alone contain a lot of work. Thanks for sharing this.
Yes. But the point is more information is good. You can be the most observant most defensively best trained driver, and more predictable information is still good.

I don't understand the motivation of arguing an objectively provably demonstrably good thing, because some other thing is also good :-).
I was an early member of the CNCF community (circa 2016), and at the time I thought "wow things are moving quickly." Lots of different tech was being introduced to solve similar problems -- I distinctly remember multiple ways of templating K8S YAML :-).

Now that I'm spending time learning AI, it feels the same -- but the innovation pace feels at least 10x faster than the evolution of the cloud native ecosystem.

At this point, there's a reasonable degree of convergence around the core abstractions you should start with in the cloud-native world, and an article written today on this would probably be fine a year from now. I doubt this is the case in AI.

(Caveat: I've only been learning about the space for about 4 weeks, so maybe it's just me!)
I also agree it is becoming a commodity, I even made an open source tool few years ago to remove the background from images and videos https://github.com/nadermx/backgroundremover
"It's now trivial to work around sanctions and they don't matter at all."

Putin did not dare to travel to south africa. The Oligarchs cannot use their Yachts anymore and their international assets are frozen(and they are not happy about it). That sounds like pretty effective targeted sanctions to me.
Please create a PR for my library goto-drink.js which uses labels for each libation so you can continue or break your drink.
To me, he definitely does symbolize the same, though I don't think it's fair to pin all the blame on him. People make mistakes and there are a lot of factors in play. Also, to Doctorow's credit I do think releasing through creative commons and touting remix culture is admirable.

That said, holding onto the scrappy tech-rebel free internet idealizer persona of early 2010s is just silly today, and those who do it look like fools. You can't just treat the fact that the big tech companies "went bad" as an incidental that can be fixed. The implicit promise of the early internet idealizers was that big tech companies were good because they were tech companies and that big copyright holders were bad because they were IP owners. This has been proven ridiculous.

I think now is the time for honest people who idealized the internet needs to take a few big steps back and reexamine their premises more deeply than just whinging about needing regulation for "big tech" so we can get back to our anarchist cyberpunk future and start giving some more respect to the people who they considered backwards ten years ago for not being excited about the newest shiny thing.
Hacker News in Slow Italian
There are plenty of podcasts to listen to some slow basic Italian, but often they just talk about random things I'm not that interested in. Nothing a few hours of tinkering with Python cannot solve these days!

Introducing Hacker News in Slow Italian. Each episode is generated automatically, using GPT4 API to summarise the top articles on Hacker News and then fed to Play.ht for text-to-speech.

The (very short) code is available on Github: https://github.com/laky/hn-slow-italian
Yeah, that's one of my favourite characteristics of PostgreSQL: if a feature makes it into a release, you can be VERY confident that it works well even across weird corner-cases.
> Why do we need an accelerator when we know how fast the wheels are turning directly?

Because the car doesn't precisely know the wheel's radius. The radius depends on the rim, tire, and tire pressure - and the car's operator may have accidentally or deliberately chosen something unexpected for any one of those 3 parameters.
I had no idea who he was before picking up End of the World Is Just the Beginning and I read it cover to cover. He is just very entertaining.

Not even the slightest bit self-doubt when he says China won't exist in 10 years lol.

The amount of salt I take him with would be deadly for anyone with high blood pressure but he is so much fun.

I think a big part of his act is telling Americans what we hope will happen while not believing it will. Also plays on the idea "everything you know is wrong" .

I would recommend Niall Ferguson and especially the Good Fellas show/podcast/youtube show from Stanford Hoover Institution.

To contrast Niall with Zeihan on China, we are in Cold War 2 that will last multiple generations. When debt payments surpass military spending it tends to be the beginning of the end for an empire. The problem with Niall is I think he is actually talking about reality.
The links are the substance. Do you see no value in compiling a list of resources? They also explain why each article was included which helps quite a bit.
I got better at taking criticism when I started unpacking my depression and anxiety in therapy. My self worth was so low, any critique of my work felt like further evidence I was a worthless person. I think it can go the other way too, where you're ego is so huge you can't fathom having made an error and get defensive. So my small bit of advice is to be mindful of where your feelings are coming from.
> The worst thing about politics is that you just need to hire one person who is “good at it,” and it spreads like a virus.

Oh my goodness this is true. I’ve seen it play out myself multiple times, destroying the organization in the process. If I could filter out candidates based on this trait, all my hiring would be based on that.
There is a legitimate difference between accurate, honest advice that is hard to swallow, and being harsh, rude or mean. For some reason that I don't fully understand, some corners of the programming world seem to conflate the latter with the former (sometimes under the guise of "brutal honesty").

Sometimes you won't have a choice and you just have to put up with it. But my advice, in so far as possible, is to surround yourself with people who understand this nuance and for whom it is a goal to be compassionate (while still being honest and truthful about problems that exist).

I just wanted to mention it because some of the advice in this thread doesn't seem to make this explicit. Improving yourself is great, but life is too short to put up with jerks.
Correct, the fbi never breaks the law or does anything not strictly above board.
From their about page:

"Our first experiment, Quality News, is about helping communities to collectively allocate their attention. We propose a news-aggregator ranking formula which reflects the intent revealed by the voting behavior of the community. It should help the community to focus and drive more intelligent conversations."

https://news.social-protocols.org/new

Interesting to see if this evolves/grows
Doesn't africa have really low vaccination rate at like less than 25% in most countries?
In your case, it sounds like you want to go to university but you feel like you shouldn't.

Just go. There's no rules or expectations except those of other humans, and they don't matter.
> A while back someone unironically described Germany's nuclear power policy as "the single most catastrophic decision ever made by any government in peacetime".

German here. Accurate description if you ask me. It's one of the dumbest and most irrational decisions ever made in energy politics. It's completely inexcusable.
Ask HN: How are you dealing with AI FOMO?
Is anyone else feeling the immense Fear of Missing Out with respect to the breakneck pace of progress in ML tools?

This has been weighing on my mind for the past couple weeks - ever since I got API access to GPT-4 (and simultaneously, access to test GPT-4 deployment at work that's company-approved WRT. handling of confidential data), and found myself... not making much good use of it. Not because I don't know what for, or how - but rather I hardly have time and emotional space for it.

Mind you, I use GPT-4 daily. Mostly through chat interface. I have hundred ideas for how to do better, and am aware of many tools making progress along those lines - but I don't have the time/means to develop or test them.

Thing is, with a full-time job, two small kids, and after a rather tough last year, I'm still buried under a small mountain of personal and professional obligations (and I'm not even counting any self-care / self-maintenance here). I'm slowly digging myself up, but right now, I'm seriously worried that by the time I clear enough mental and temporal space to pause and reflect on the new AI tools, everything interesting that could've been done will have been done by someone - and/or, we'll accidentally launch a proto-GAI and the world will turn upside down.

Are you also feeling like this? How do you cope?
I thought the point of sanctions was to discourage whatever behavior caused the sanction to be implemented in the first place.
Probably not. When you short, your potential gains are limited to 100%, but your potential losses are unlimited.

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

- A. Gary Shilling (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/).
> he goes from 60 mph/96 kph to 0 in 13 seconds and the stop lights never illuminate

I ride a motorcycle and I give Teslas a lot of cushion when riding behind. They're common enough in the bay area to be treated specially, because of the one pedal driving (my car is set to "creep", but it is still strong at 70mph).

The way the car changes speed and the way the Model S looks from behind, it takes a bit of time before you realize it is getting too big in your PoV without lights coming up, particularly as people lift off through turns or highway onramps.

The cars which are bigger or higher up like an ID4 or Rivian seem to not suffer from this sort of "hidden width" that the Tesla has, the wheel flares melt into the backdrop when looking at it.

I don't think Technology Connections is ever going to drive a Tesla or test it, but the low profile fast cars are much harder to figure out speeds off from parallax without the brake lights.
I knew someone who had to stop by a secure data center on the way home and transport a backup tape to a safety deposit box a block or two away. Not the offsite backups I would have asked for, but that's what they did.
We're the creators of Val Town ;)