skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By "we let slide" I don't just mean the initial privatisation of the internet or the web, which I agree -- it's hard to imagine any citizen was in a position to change that against the interests motivating it. Instead I mean the ensuing 30 years in which we've constantly ignored the warnings and analysis of e.g. civil society about the dangers of surveillance and data acquisition, devaluation and diminishing of trust in the fourth estate, labour exploitation and consolidation around platform capitalism, etc. because the toys those privatising forces offered were too shiny. At every point we've had a chance to say: no thank you. Or to build slowly and with consideration instead of aligned to the profit motive. Well, you can see it in this thread: we're at one of those points now but ostensibly well-informed people are begging for more software-companies-as-benevolent-dictators. We have a chance to channel the current energy of frustration into a new generation of the web guided by a focus on values like community ownership. Unfortunately the responses of many of my fellow technologists don't inspire much hope! But I still believe we can yank a few of those things back.
It's really tiresome reading all the crying from no-JS snobs in a world when you cannot use most websites without JS.
Move on or turn on JS.
Who said I'm not?
full-fledged browser using Javascript

Someone actually did that almost a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7071132
Twitter engagement is definitely lower[0], though it’s difficult to know from the outside how much and we can’t trust their numbers.

Anecdotally, the accounts I follow in various niche subject areas have both depleted in number, with I’d estimate around 20-25% having stopped posting altogether, and cut back on how often they post if they did stay.

[0] https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/4/15/23683554/twitter-dy...
Yes, if only the major rivers in China were different...

The Yellow River and the Yangtze River systems are so close that it isn't realistic to have long-term control over one and not the other. And controlling both gives you a fantastic base from which to conquer your surroundings.
This is normal pragmatism and real-politik. Mao is looking after his and China's interests.

The public are usually fed simplistic, emotional propaganda by their governments, all of them: good vs evil, right thing to do, freedom, whatever. But in fact policies are based on interests and cold calculations.
Particle physics has the advantage of being simple (there are a few fundamental particles, all particles of one type are indistinguishable, etc.), and we had decades of experimental evidence at lower energy as well as heaps of observations of highly energetic cosmic events confirming our simple and consistent theories going into LHC.

Is there anything close to that pile of evidence for life (whatever that means, maybe not necessarily carbon-based) on moon or lack thereof? Now do Mars? Personally I don’t think there’s anything on moon, but the evidence isn’t much. In the 60s it might as well have been nonexistent.
Meg's really been redeemed by time. The Raconteurs is amazing, the Dead Weather pretty great, Jack's solo work is nice too - but it's all not the White Stripes. And that distinctive White Stripes sound is very much the sound of Meg's drumming.

I hope she can enjoy the praise she does get, even as she gets pressed for interviews all the time.
> [1] By task I mean some app specific unit of work that makes sense, not some Rust std lib string allocation.

Congratulations on successfully moving the goalposts. You don't get to decide which dynamic allocations fail, if you did obviously you'd choose "none of them".

> You just have to build your app in a way where there is a core that can continue running with no further allocations.

Again Rust - unlike say C++ - is actually defined so that this just works. So whereas C++ std::array can't exist in the standard without also having a heap allocator - yes really, Rust's [T; N] works just fine even including fancy features like select_nth_unstable_by_key() without needing an allocator.
This week in KDE: major plumbing work in Plasma 6
> if you subtract two `time` types, the result must be a valid `time` type, so you can add/subtract to it. The result cannot be a `timediff` type.

Huh? Of course `time` - `time` gives a `timediff` type. You can add/subtract to it: you add/subtract timediffs, or you can add/subtract a timediff to/from a time. Why would you ever be directly adding times? What is 100 AD + 100 AD? 200 AD? Not if you pick a different 0-point for your calendar ...
Good luck getting the elderly customers to adopt such practice.

Naturally is their fault for not getting them, and should be punished with the 5 to 10 € for going to the counter.
Aliens I find hard to stomach as well, but I'm probably gonna be team AGI when we get there.
From what I remember from my classics classes, the Romans weren't all that into running around named as much as the Greeks were, even before Christianity came around.

Many Romans revered parts of Greek culture (for a long time Greek was the language of scholars and the elite, which is pretty funny considering that Latin later fulfilled that same role hundreds of years later). Statues and other art were often inspired by Greek masters as well, with references to older Greek art all throughout Roman art. It's not too dissimilar to the artists of the renaissance rediscovering putting their works full of references to Roman and Greek antiquity.

However, when it came to the ideals of clothing. The statues and other art works still contained plenty of visible skin, both a Greek influence and proof of a masterful artist, but the romans themselves were often prudes. There was some public nudity, for example in the baths, but day to day work involved wearing tunics (and sometimes togas,which were status symbols). Defeated tribes and slaves were dressed down to humiliate them.

Somewhere in time the Greek beliefs and practices fell out of fashion, with the social status as a major driver for change. When you walk around in a robe to announce you're a citizen (most weren't), it's easy to associate those without clothes with lack of status.
Oh it’s way lower than that. Once you’re past a certain door everything including the toilet paper is marked SECRET, just in case. Why not? Better be safe than sorry. And who has the time to actually evaluate every document?

Source: I worked behind that door.
Fun fact: There are 17 European countries that rank higher than the US in the Index of Economic Freedom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom
He will sell it to you if you tell him it's for hardcore gamers living in a household of 10. lol
I think you’re right. Building a social network in 2023 is a hopeless endeavor. At least social networks that are like Facebook, twitter and Reddit.

I come to my conclusion based on a couple of analytical frameworks I like to fall back on when deciding whether a business is
1. A good investment to put money into, or
2. Worth putting sweat equity into.

When I think about social networks and whether they’re a worthy endeavor I think about VRIO framework.
Are social networks VALUABLE? - I guess that’s a matter of opinion, possibly in terms of the amount of data a social network can generate about all manner of things, yes, they’re probably valuable - but is the product they offer to their consumers valuable? I don’t think so - if people leave the social network, the data would become less valuable.

Are social networks RARE?
No, they’re not. There are some who have brands that have more mental availability in the mind of humans like Facebook and twitter, but they’re definitely not rare, and a disadvantage of them being so common is that the cost of switching social network is low (to fall back on porters 5 forces for a moment).

Are social networks easily IMITATED?
Absolutely without a doubt they are. And again, going back to porters 5 forces when the barrier to entry is low, and it’s also easily imitated, it’s really hard to maintain a competitive advantage over your competition.

Then finally, does the ORGANISATION exploit the other three things (value, rareness and inimitability)?
The only thing social networks seems to exploit is its users, and their data, which I’m not necessarily sure is what would contribute to the success of a social network in the long term - however organisations like facebook, and twitter do seem to have gone the distance.

So then I guess, the other thing I think about is what are younger generations doing, and how do they engage with each other socially?
Anecdotally, I see a lot of social networking happening among the youth via gaming networks that have a social network elements built into them but they also offer, in someways, a complete alternate reality and operate with a platform business model.

Maybe it’s not that social networks are an unworthy endeavor, maybe it’s just social networks like Facebook and twitter don’t really offer their consumers anything “tangible” - and maybe to imitate those social network business models is a waste of time.

I would definitely personally not invest time or money into creating a social network. I would prefer to create something that was completely different that other people haven’t thought of yet, but that lots of people would need.
I have ignored plenty of CADs and threats from lawyers over decades. Sometimes I work on open source stuff that pisses people off. Lawyers know all they can do is bark in cases like these.
Interesting Futhark mention as well in the Related work section:

> Another approach to GPU-based array programming with
an APL focus is the TAIL/Futhark system [8], which is a
compiler chain taking APL to the TAIL (Typed Array Inter-
mediate Language) and then compiling TAIL code using the
Futhark GPU compiler backend.
The group's tolerance for a troll defines the term.
Falcon-40B: The Most Powerful Open-Source Model
Falcon-40B is a large language model (LLM) and one of Falcon LLM models with 40 billion parameters trained on 1,000B tokens
I wonder if Mao was truly stupid enough to believe that German could’ve invaded Britain without naval and air superiority or they were all talking in jest.

After all he was the man who thought of killing all the sparrows in China and forcing people to build non-functional steel smelters in their backyard instead of working in their fields..
> Given the right context of communication it’s a likely a group of dolphins would side with us to exterminate another group to take their territory and females, as condemn us for anything.

Uh... Okay. The Industrial Revolution to me is just like a story I know called "The Puppy Who Lost His Way." The world was changing, and the puppy was getting... bigger.

So, you see, the puppy was like industry. In that, they were both lost in the woods. And nobody, especially the little boy - "society" - knew where to find 'em. Except that the puppy was a dog. But the industry, my friends, that was a revolution.
Inside Task Manager with the Original Author (Dave Plummer)
But Germans didn’t even have the naval to capacity to successfully execute a mostly uncontested landing unless there was perfect weather.
I always wondered how different computer graphics would be if Bui Tuong Phong hadn't died at such a young age. It's crazy how much of an impact.
I think the networking layer is unnecessarily complex for the vast majority of situations and it bleeds into a lot of the other services.

I use AWS daily and have for the past 5 years, but despite all that I wheep
The reaction is overblown; it's still possible to remove your data. And you have control of it at the privacy dashboard here; https://account.microsoft.com/privacy
How does U2F come into this?
I love this feature. I just wish there was a way to browse more of them from the UI.
> Most of these events occur from October to February; typically 50 to 150 hours per year, a single event usually lasts up to 24 hours.

You can't even quote honestly...
https://github.com/WolframResearch/Chatbook/blob/ba3e783602f... should help answer some of those - I am on a mobile device so hard to write much, but, OpenAI 3.5 at least
> Why doesn't HN open news to a new window?

Because the links don't have '<a ... target="_blank">' in them.

> Was that a design choice?

That's the default for links. You have to explicitly add the target attribute to tell the browser to open a new tab or window. Someone decided on this behavior (the default behavior), so I guess you can call it a "design choice."

> Why would they choose that?

Because browsers let you open links in new tabs/windows if you want (right click, middle click, ctrl-click), but they don't let you prevent the new tab/window if the <a> element has the "target" attribute. In lieu of compelling reasons to the contrary, it's best to let users control their browser.

Maybe the HN programmers also wanted to cut down on the "I have too many tabs open, I need some way to manage them" posts by not contributing to that problem.
The EU was designed by paranoid lawyers and diplomats rather then the naive idealists that made most national constitutions, which makes it both very hard to love and brutally effective at producing legislation that don't crumble the second someone devious start to look for loopholes.
> why on earth is a robot going to be doing genetic engineering projects ? To grow itself skin ?

Because it's the key to all? Life is nanotechnology. Genetic engineering is a very high-level interface to play with that nanotech. It's already useful industrially for us (e.g. getting organisms to manufacture specific chemicals for us), it has many more uses, and is but a first stepping stone to mastering lower levels.

An AI that wants to optimize anything in physical space long-term will definitely want to get a good handle on nanotech, because in some sense that's tautologically how you do physical space work at scale at close to optimum. And the obvious path to that starts with genetic engineering and doing all kinds of horrible shenanigans with life on Earth, humans included.
> AWS now is basically

It’s literally in the name… web services.
> Remember when a job such as being a waiter still meant you could in fact survive and have money left over for the occasional niceties in life like a bit of relaxation, or a frivolous purchase like (gasp) some clothing that isn't needed for a particular purpose?

The author's experience was three years ago. Yes, I think we all remember, no, not that much has changed in three years. Many people still make a comfortable living in a big city waiting on tables; many struggled to make ends meet even way back then.
Getting into a federated space brings a lot of questions for normal people. Why this instance? Why not this instance? Can I only join one? What if my friends join a different one? This one only has 100 people, is it weird if I join? This one has 1,000,000 million, isn't that basically Reddit/Twitter/whatever?

These are the sorts of questions that come to mind for normal people. By the time they've asked this pile of questions they've already decided it's not worth the hassle of finding the answers
1994 was way way after dialup Internet access was mainstream (both Yahoo and Amazon were founded that year).
Any first access in the state would be sometime in the 80s. By 1993 there were already national level dialup ISPs.

> that was about as long [15 minutes] as it took to load one webpage with one image.

Very hyperbolic. A simple webpage with text would load in seconds on a 28.8k modem. A single image would usually be a 10s of kB in those days, so maybe some seconds, not even a minute.
RedReader Reddit app granted non-commercial accessibility exemption
>Hacker News is great, but it's pretty much a glorified subreddit. There's almost no difference.

i think you stopped using reddit in 2009 or something, hn is akin to what reddit's tech subreddits USED to be.
You realize that blabbering makes OpenAI more money right?
The surface of the moon is 100 m thick blanket of impact debris that has been pulverized over billions of years. Nothing in kind of structure could survive that treatment, regardless of whether it is silicon or carbon based. No plausible metabolic cycle exists for breakdown of lunar rocks, which would not be detectable through outgassing or spectrographically detectable alteration on the regolith. We have actual surface samples and drilled cores that have been thoroughly analyzed. There is no life on the Moon.

Mars is a different story.
Yeah you have a good point - not sure if there’s a name for what you’re referencing but it’s tough to be an expert in something and read a bunch of cringe pop sci articles on your field. This topic comes up frequently with my partner who is a researcher - Ed Yong recently wrote a piece on some work by their lab and it was “tolerable”.
Not a huge fan of Quanta myself but Aeon frequently has articles written by researchers/experts and are higher quality in my opinion.

Interesting to hear about Kvant!
If on a Mac, most of mine have been mentioned...

I would add Better Touch Tool. I use it to launch apps and trigger actions in apps from a global context. I things mapped to the function keys and also presses on areas of the Trackpad. So for example, regardless of what app I'm using at the time, f19 will pop a new iterm window on my monitor that has focus. Ctrl and a numpad key will set the brightness of the monitor I'm using in 10% increments. Pressing (not touching) the top left or right corner of my Magic Trackpad will seek a few seconds backwards or forwards in Spotify. It's useful to control other apps without switching focus from the current app. I've looked into window snapping areas with it which are powerful, but I currently have it set up where a four finger swipe on the Trackpad sends the current window to the left or right half of the current monitor. I was planning something more elaborate, but it's become a reflex now.

Alfred to launch apps by just typing the first few characters. I try to keep my fingers on the keys as often as possible.

Jettison is good for ejecting and remounting removable disks when I put the machine in and out of sleep.

I use an open source utility to limit battery charge level as my MBP is always hooked up to a dock these days.
people should not need browser data sync. MOST people only use a single phone. what are they "syncing' to?

this whole thing looks like forced adoption for the sole purpose of collecting and harvesting data.
just going from your own quotes here, he describes the cases in which one might "apparently unacceptably" as "rare", and the example he gives has lots of conditions. and he believes you could never recommend the action to others.

so I don't think "any utterance" of his or his followers is inherently untrustworthy no.
All companies have these pledges, but they are mostly marketing. These companies know they don't really need to reach those targets, and unless we see massive investment from them to achieve this goal, it just won't happen.

"In an evaluation of some of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters, the investor engagement group Climate Action 100+ found no company has fully disclosed how it plans to reach net-zero."

"Some of the boldest pledges rely on carbon removal technologies that don’t even exist yet, or at least not at the scale required. Many more are heavily reliant on carbon offsets, which allow companies to invest in “nature-based” programs like tree planting or forest protection to counteract their own emissions. Offset projects, however, have been plagued by allegations of flawed accounting, greenwash and sometimes even of actively fueling climate change."

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/26/climate-...

That is, they say they'll do something, but they don't even know how, or at least won't tell for some reason... meaning that there's no way to check if they're doing the necessary work or mostly fugding with the numbers (some high profile cases where companied just patently fabricated numbers regarding their progress have already been revealed in the news).

I believe there's zero indication that companies are serious... emissions in 2023 are set to be the highest ever recorded (and this is not because of higher emissions in developing countries, the developed world is still leading the shameless business-as-usual route)... that's in the middle of a global economical crisis... imagine if the economy had been doing really well!

Until actual emissions start to fall dramatically, don't believe in these companies empty promises.
From a user perspective (i.e., not a developer one), what have either of these projects improved since the old days of GTK2 and X11? Maybe I'm not enough of a power user, but I see no tricks in my Linux GUI today that weren't already there 15 years ago. Preemptively, I reject the "security" answer, since Intel/ AMD/NSA/Mossad can already peek my RAM at will.

The whole mess feels like corporate sabotage.
Airlines optimize for profit, like almost all businesses do. Otherwise they don't stay in business. All of the supporting businesses -- the concessions in the airport, the car rentals, the shuttles, etc. operate according to the same principle: make money. They may prey on their captive audience with $7 bottles of water and terrible service, because they can.

A traveler who wants to have an experience catered to them can pay for premium class, or a charter or private plane. The rest of us tend to optimize for spending as little as possible, so we get what we pay for.
Using biology as a tool is not science fiction, it's a legitimate view that already delivers effects today. Life isn't magic, it's nanotech. Engineering principles apply. See for example how insulin is made today: by E. coli bacteria genetically engineered for that purpose. And AFAIR there are talks (or maybe actual practice) of using yeast for that, and plants in general, to achieve even better production efficiency.

And in some sense, using biology as a tool has always been a thing - it's only the brief period of the last ~200 years that we figured how to make a lot of things using simpler chemical processes. Before, nearly everything was repurposed biology: the clothes, the tools, the lubricants, the buildings, the ships, all made from plant and animal bodies. And now we're going back to using biology as a tool, except with much greater fidelity, allowing us to treat it as proper engineering discipline.

AI doing anything with biology is just an obvious extension of that. It's not even that speculative - all the AI would have to do is to continue the development trajectory we're already on.
Valid advice, take it. Especially the beard's gotta go. Clean up and be more presentable.
Reminds me of the Stanford Bunny:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_bunny

Or, more distantly related, the test photo Lena, which recently fell victim to political correctness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna
Serves a 500 error if you try to sign up
What happened to Gaia-X, the previous European cloud project? If I recall correctly, its main objective was not to build new data centers but rather to develop an overlay on top of the existing European VPS providers.
I hope people majoring in CS will not think that, as they learned that n log n is the theorically best complexity for a sort algorithm. They will rather think that they found an algorithm with better constants in front of n log n.
What are you talking about?

Most people who have been around a few AMAs know that there are some obvious pitfalls and anything but transparancy is going to very quickly degrade into a mess of an AMA.

You would expect the CEO of reddit to have some understanding of that, yet his answers were textbook examples on how to torpedo yourself quickly.
A nice reversal of the meme where "the supervising professor takes all the credit and the army of grad students do the real work".
Something like RSBAC/SELinux is a good fit. Not sandboxing in the traditional sense, but pretty bulletproof if setup correctly. The problem is the time it takes to do that.