skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thankfully Firefox needs nothing else than be popular and they can forever sell the default search engine for many many millions a year, which I think is a perfectly fine way to fund its development.

Unfortunately they hired a bunch of incompetent executives who would much rather starve Firefox development while spending all of the money on realizing their big business vision where they acquire useless startups then ruin the browser by turning it into a marketing platform for the aforementioned. Besides bonuses and big salary bumps, of course.
How do you expect self driving cars, or any extremely hard technology, to come about then without long term risk capital via public/private investment? Just pure R&D working out of universities and gov labs? Let them perfect it and only then try to raise capital? Go back to the Rockefeller days before there was venture capital and mature public markets?
The cause of this is the likely N+1-like behaviour of indexes on un-clustered data. Two options for speeding this up a ton (they dont' make sense to use together),

1. Cluster your data using the Gist/r-tree index. postgis docs [1] great explanation

2. Use the r-tree as covering index. IE add your associated data as dimensions into the index. The gist index becomes (lat, long, weather_c, avg_altitude), etc. This avoids having to load a separate page for each row in the spatial index [2]

[1]: https://postgis.net/workshops/postgis-intro/clusterindex.htm...

[2]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/indexes-index-only-s...
First Tesla would have to make a car with plausible hardware for self driving. Not decade+ old cameras trying to do everything. Can't even reliably wipe the windshield at the right time. The idea of robotaxis is just a fantasy.
Elon Musk is a modern day P. T. Barnum and Tesla will never have full self driving cars on the market.
Perhaps the time to discuss this was before the 2014 invasion. I doubt Ukraine would acquiesce to it now.
I think the way the dialog is designed says enough. There's "Get Mozilla VPN" and "not now".

No "stop showing me ads", "disable recommendations", "show privacy settings", instead, just "not now". This illusion of choice is a very common dark pattern that helps people feel like postponing ads was their choice (and their idea) rather than making them feel upset that ads have snuck into their browser in the first place. Websites run by trash marketeers like Reddit and Twitter do the same thing.

I wonder how long it'll take before I will just switch to some Chrome fork. This whole "privacy first" shtick is nice but if I need to turn off as many settings in Firefox to make my browser pleasant to use as I do privacy settings in Chrome, I don't see the advantage.

Last time I checked brave they were still pushing their shady crypto stuff and the UI was kind of meh. I wonder if I should reevaluate it with the ongoing erosion of Firefox as a browser.
Yes, if you control for your source IP address. For example, I couldn't find anything from a quick search on whether Tor exit nodes are blocked (or use requires other PII to be supplied).

All you get asked today (at least in Australia on a residential ISP) is a first name, last name, password, date of birth and gender (includes "prefer not to say").

Years ago I think you were correct, a phone number and SMS verification check was mandated, and each phone number could only be used so many times on different accounts.

[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/gmail-without-phone-number-...
If they meet their 90% efficiency target, that's exceeding the efficiency of a normal boat. Just the propeller losses are higher than that (at ~80% efficient [1]).

If it's just some REBCO super-conducting magnets and conductive surfaces it might be reasonably inexpensive too. And without moving parts it could be a maintenance win as well.

I'm no sailor, but at first glance this seems like it would potentially replace all propulsion on boats/ships big enough to justify cooling REBCO. Obviously conditioned on actually reaching that fairly outrageous target.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/technology/naval-architecture/Act...
Fair point - but according to the dataset it defines “used” not as having adopted, but merely having used it in the last 3 months.
Without context, this is verging a little bit into conspiracy territory.

Literally in the first reference, the first reference given of the 'Goldman Man' ... is Steve Bannon (!) as if he's part of that crew.

Goldman is the top financial firm in the world, and yes, they're going to use their status to move people in and out and leverage relationships.

That does not mean they are working for Raytheon trying to start wars.

The AWS statement doesn't add anything to the position - Amazon is one of the biggest employers in the US, and a huge DoD contractor, it's entirely rational for them to be hiring out of the DoD, and they do it from the rest of government as well. CGI (contractors in Canada) hire a ton of ex-gov people from Ottawa and the Military. It doesn't mean they are leaning on policy makers to start wars.

The fact of the matter is there isn't a lot of direct influence to start wars 'because future projects'. Obviously that is a constituency, and sometimes there is a big conflict of interest (as mentioned below Dick Cheney) but even aside from Halliburton relationships I actually don't doubt Cheney would have the same position otherwise.

So if you mean to say certain alpha corporations have undue influence via networked relationships within governance - yes - but that doesn't map at very well to 'they are pushing to start wars for Raytheon'. Aside from the Bushes, you'd have to go back to maybe 1 or 2 presidents during the intervening war periods to say that's even kind of true, or you might be able to throw Reagan in there as a 'Cold War Mega Buildup' guy but he wasn't swashbuckling around trying to start wars either, rather, he 'built out gear faster than the Soviets'.

The Military Industrial Complex is a real thing with real influence, it was no less than former Supreme NATO Allied Commander that gave us the starkest warning about that system, but it's also something that is misrepresented due to a lack of context about how that power really works.
For how often it comes up one would think a $5/m subscription plan would be worth it just to not have the constant complaints about it. Even if 0.0001% of the MAU users (so ~2,000 die hard users) did a $5/month subscription that's $5*12*2,000=$120,000/y. Surely that's enough to implement it if they find pop-up ads for their VPN service over other pages worthwhile.

Instead the current pitch is "buy this $5/m VPN, of which we'll get a small cut of from reselling Mullvad, and still get all of the ads you were complaining about in the browser anyways".
I wonder if he knew it would fail but had to pretend it wouldn’t. Toxic cultures don’t accept speaking up
In my experience, this is how clueless managers try to force their coders into doing the impossible.

I just ran into this, a couple of days ago. We had a usability problem. Basically, the user could end up in a sequential-navigation “rabbithole.” It would be an unlikely scenario, but there was nothing preventing it.

I proposed a solution that I have seen before, where a second “all the way back” button appears, after a prescribed number of stack pushes. This would unwind the entire stack, instead of just jumping back one.

A “kludgy” solution, but one that I actually implemented and demonstrated in about 15 minutes. It was safe, obvious, and bug-free. Probably, 90% of our users would never see this second back button, and, if they did, its function is completely obvious.

Instead, the team leader wanted to hack the Tab Bar, so that the selected item would enable, after the stack started, and would do the same thing as the “all the way back” button. This was actually a more elegant solution.

This would have required messing with the tab bar, or replacing it with a toolbar. Since the app had been designed from the start as a tab bar app, the second option would have required a complete rewrite of the app structure, and the first option could risk strange bugs, and, almost certainly, issues with future screen configurations and operating system updates. I’ve hacked the tab bar before, and regretted it.

I made every effort to give them what they wanted, but there was really no way to do it, without that rewrite. Since the app is at about the 70% complete stage, this would be a disaster.

I put my foot down, and insisted on my kludgy solution, while making the toolbar implementation a “2.0” feature. I really don’t like to throw my weight around, like that. I think it damages team cohesiveness, and intimidates creative discussion, but it needed to be done.
And how do European countries view America's role in defeating Nazis Germany, or supporting NATO against Russia?
>I think it was 1995 when WOW!, which was a subsidiary of CompuServe, offered unlimited hours for $15/month. AOL followed shortly thereafter.

I thought AOL was the first to offer unlimited hours for a fixed fee, with everyone else imitating it. Am I mistaken?
Conservatives (big C) always favor the status quo. The opposite are the radicals, who do not. Then there are the reactionaries who want a return to the previous state of things. That’s generally how I think about it.
It's funny how humans repeat the same patterns repeatedly in history: new technology development happens, optimist expect it to happen way faster than realistically possible, they make progress but the initial output is rocky as all new things are before they mature. Luddites/conservatives come in and point at the rocky start, the societal disruption before it normalizes, the early financial losers who bought into over optimistic projections, etc as the reasons why we shouldn't have bothered in the first place. Then it comes out, the tech matures, society adapts, new rules are made, lessons are recorded but rarely listened to, and everyone moves on to the next thing.
Those are some terrible variable names
I grew up with a Readers Digest atlas¹ which had reproductions of antique maps on its endpapers. Aside from weird distortions of the shapes of continents, it also had Australia as a peninsula extending from Antarctica. I spent a lot of time studying that old map.

⸻

1. Speaking of old maps, this atlas had such details as Pakistan and Bangladesh as a single country, Vietnam as two countries, and an extensive section on the then-new concept of plate-tectonics including maps showing prehistoric configurations of the continents.
Yes, true, my bad. I have a history of not understanding what the word "spiritual" means (I think I've read every possible explanation over the years, I still don't get it), so I usually tend to find a proxy for it when I'm reasoning about something. In this case I was using "intelligent" as my proxy.
The find is relevant here, the text less so. Read about the find in another text if you dont like this writer.
My impression is that the left is more anti-imperialist-war than anti-war. Vietnam and Iraq were hard to justify morally.
People don't care. We have them because they cost less to build than having buttons.
> The majority of US automotive buyers can't afford a basic model 3.

You say that in a country where three at least $40k+ full size pickups are the best selling models.
It wasn't that easily available and took a lot of knowledge to make use of it.

I racked up ~$300 in one month of hourly dial up internet on my parents credit card at that age in that era. Huge amounts of trouble.

Mainly using Kali (software for emulating an ipx lan over the internet) and playing warcraft 2. Most games didn't have internet play as an option so you had to resort to things like Kali.

Irc was fun too but all in all it was nothing like you know it today and it was a pain to get on and use.
Animal names in tech have been used forever. Gopher, Python, Mouse, worm. And they also make great book covers.
Study tests the potential of 2 quantum ML algorithms for malware classification
Anche io vorrei lo spagnolo!
A collection of boot sounds:

https://archive.org/details/Boot_Sounds_Compilation
Upvoting as I feel most posts critical of Mozilla get flagged.
Reporting back again… We’ve checked the overall simulations and they check out when you use the summary data here (https://github.com/the-pudding/country-radio-data/blob/main/...) for the total number of songs (total_COUNT) and the percentage of women’s songs (onlyWomenSongs_PERCENT) for each station. For San Antonio (KCYY-FM), that would mean that the total observed number of women’s back-to-back songs (64) is within the realm of possibilities across all 19 days if left up to chance. But, the observed number is on the low end of the overall distribution, with the majority of numbers landing between 70-100. I have been able to recreate this using sxp’s original Javascript. When we’re talking about a difference of say 20 songs (across 19 days) you can’t visually see it, which is why the single day example was a poor choice for communicating this, especially because San Antonio (KCYY-FM) is one of the “better” stations.

We’ve removed the simulation section from the intro, made it clear what data the simulations use further into the story, and added a correction. Thank you again for keeping us honest.
Did you read the research you linked? It does not say what you claim it does, it actually claims the long sentences (over 60 months) deter recidivism significantly.
But you can't run uBlock Origin on Apple as far as I'm aware?
Point remains that pricing of internet access was a huge driver of adoption, even in schools.

Back in 1995, my local libraries did not have internet access available. This was a city of 100K a fair ways (about an hour) outside of Boston.

School? Super rare. Maybe ONCE OR TWICE A YEAR we would have a class scheduled in the Media Lab where we would learn about what the internet was, and then be able to barely poke at it in a highly supervised manner. This was despite the school having a few ISDN lines at the time, but that was mostly for backoffice administration, with only the one media lab having access outside of it, with a whopping TWO computers for a student body of 4500.

So even in a school with internet access, you might only get to get a vague idea of what the internet was ONCE A YEAR.

1998? Every high-level classroom in my high school of 4500 kids had two or three computers in the back with internet access. School added 8 computer labs (with 40 desktops each) that could be scheduled as frequently as weekly by a given teacher. If I recall correctly the school had upgraded to two DS3s from different providers.
There are now Tesla's driving around with 300,000 miles on their original battery. You should be fairly confident of getting 200,000 miles out of a Tesla battery, which is about as much as you can expect from any car. You can hope for more, but you can't expect more.

If you are really concerned about battery life, get a vehicle with an LFP battery. Those are estimated to have a 750,000 mile life.
And they are universally poorer quality than the default navigation apps on phones.
Can you ask your wife or sister to translate that language to language that the rest of us will understand? What are they saying?
Sebastian Lague made an excellent video "Ant and Slime Simulations" which explores how path-finding algorithms can use trails and gradient-based signaling to solve spatial problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-iSQQgOd1A
There’s this weird new browser for mac that I think is called Arc?
"It’s now 2013, want to see a video of Starship taking off?"
Can they even build a strong enough launch pad to handle starship?
The Mozilla Foundation should really sever all ties with the Mozilla Corporation. There’s no way that they should want to be associated with such a scummy company as a public charity.
Fair enough, but that's a separate question from the matter at hand. LBJ escalated Vietnam and then bugged out. Then Kissinger and Nixon had to clean up his mess. Of course, they could have done a better job, but I still posit that taking the war into border lands of Cambodia was not a war crime.
Note added later: Some people have pointed out online that if MINIX had a GPL license, Intel might not have used it since then it would have had to publish the modifications to the code. Maybe yes, maybe no, but the modifications were no doubt technical issues involving which mode processes run in, etc. My understanding, however, is that the small size and modular microkernel structure were the primary attractions. Many people (including me) don't like the idea of an all-powerful management engine in there at all (since it is a possible security hole and a dangerous idea in the first place), but that is Intel's business decision and a separate issue from the code it runs. A company as big as Intel could obviously write its own OS if it had to. My point is that big companies with lots of resources and expertise sometimes use microkernels, especially in embedded systems. The L4 microkernel has been running inside smartphone chips for years. I certainly hope Intel did thorough security hardening and testing before deploying the chip, since apparently an older version of MINIX was used. Older versions were primarily for education and newer ones were for high availability. Military-grade security was never a goal.

Second note added later: The online discussion got completely sidetracked from my original points as noted above. For the record, I would like to state that when Intel contacted me, they didn't say what they were working on. Companies rarely talk about future products without NDAs. I figured it was a new Ethernet chip or graphics chip or something like that. If I had suspected they might be building a spy engine, I certainly wouldn't have cooperated, even though all they wanted was reducing the memory footprint (= chip area for them). I think creating George Orwell's 1984 is an extremely bad idea, even if Orwell was off by about 30 years. People should have complete control over their own computers, not Intel and not the government. In the U.S. the Fourth Amendment makes it very clear that the government is forbidden from searching anyone's property without a search warrant. Many other countries have privacy laws that are in the same spirit. Putting a possible spy in every computer is a terrible development.

Source: https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/
I would say that the window has shifted on at least the following topics:

* vigilantism and militias - the Jan 6 rioters, George Zimmerman or Kyle Rittenhouse are widely celebrated in right-wing media, I don't think this really happened in the early 2000s

* overt racism - racism scandals from the 90s/2000s, like the Willie Horton ad or the "Macaca" incident seems rather tame compared with what I've seen from figures like Trump or Tucker Carlson.

* the mainstream Republican view is that the Democratic party manipulated the election results and 2020 was a fraudulent election, I don't remember anything like the mainstream acceptance of this kind of conspiracy theory after the 2008 or 2012 elections.
Hi Jay,

I really loved your [explainer on AI Art](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXmacOUJUaw), and I've already added more of your videos and articles on my watch-later read-later lists! Can't wait to spend more time with them this weekend.

Thank you for creating such wonderful resources!
Fine. Choose your own words. The point still stands regardless of vocab.
More of this is coming down the road, it's the kind of vapid nonsense that children are being force fed from school right into uni. Along with wondering if the internet has improved life in general, I now seriously suspect that education was better when it was truly elitist.
Researchers debate why orcas are attacking and sinking boats [video][5 mins]
> and all legal liability.

People really do not understand that the Companies like Uber, Airbnb and Deliveroo make a huge amount of money from offloading liability - it's suddenly not Deliveroo's fault that the guy delivering your pizza in London does this on illegal, unroadworthy e-bikewith no insurance, and in case of a crash he is liable. Airbnb routinely rents out apartments in blocks that have this forbidden in the leave / rental agreement.

If the human is gone, then liability offloading is impossible. You have noone to blame.
That liability off-load is worth more to deliveroo than is the pittance they pay him.
Alpaca Llama Vicuna -> Gorilla

Chad move
Yes that's the one, thanks.
ChatGPT is amazing.
I can't shake the feeling that we're going to pad everything with GPT-generated filler text only for other people to use GPT to distill the text again into a consumable summary, from websites to emails to, apparently, teacher evaluations.

In some situations, there are social norms to be respected, but often the content rather than the form matters. So not a condolences card from your employer's HR department, but a report on how a student is doing and how to potentially improve. Does it actually help to write five keywords and have GPT fill it out to such a crazy long report card with no meaning beyond five keywords?

Edit: Or do the teachers just rant a bunch to GPT (or feed it other kind of data, like from a report log like my old high school had) and then ask it to nicely format, professionalize, and remove redundant points? There I would see a beneficial use.
Lol he said he would put them in his children. But he doesn’t have one?
Significantly better, a more comprehensive answer than I could ever provide is the Sparks of AGI paper.
I can sort of live with that? The what’s new page is not my content that is being invaded with ads.

When they start popping it up all over the place is when I draw the line.
It very common im China. Qr code link to websites and online payment. They even start a timer to track wait time.
hard to argue “more technical”, but at a similar level. they weaved clothes, spoke language, built dwelllings, made art and interbred with us. they are part of us to this day.
> This survey was conducted among 10,701 U.S. adults from March 13 to 19, 2023

Very possible this stat has increased in the last two months, would be interested to see the trend here
Tesla's have a BMW-like ride, with significant road feel. Drivers love it, passengers hate it. There's a reason that limo's use Mercedes', not BMW's.
Bit rot, tapes are extremely prone to actual physical rot too.
It's not just Mozilla. Western society as a whole is transitioning from one where discourse and consensus is based on reason, to one where it is based on feelings.

Listen to some prominent politicians today. Politicians have always had to speak in convoluted and stupid ways to conceal or deflect the truth, but generally they were coherent, the sequence of words had some meaning you could understand even if it was wrong or they were lying. Now it's just complete gibberish with feel-good words sprinkled in.