skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love contrarian takes but I don’t love uninformed cynical takes not backed up by data or experience, especially the kind we’ve been seeing the past few days with Apple Vision Pro. (John C Dvorak was also commenting about the unreleased iPhone at the time of writing)

Reality is the best teacher and cynics (as opposed to honest critics) are best disregarded and downvoted. When unsure, I remind myself it’s best to reserve judgement and see how things play out and not overgeneralize from my own limited preferences. I tell myself that I am one small speck in the market — i do not represent the market.

Because even if cynics turn out to be right, their reasons for being right are random and we learn nothing from them. In financial market for instance it’s not enough to be right (it’s a coin toss) but to have the right reasons for being right.
I've always read comments like this and just assume it's confirmation bias on two levels:

1. Out of the 1000s of ads you see every day, at least one of them might coincidentally relate to something you talked about. You don't notice all the ads that are wildly irrelevant.

2. Even if you personally didn't have a hyper-relevant ad experience, out of the 1000s of HN readers that might comment a reply, one of them surely did. You just might be the one lucky guy that got your hyper-relevant ad of the day.
Same in C#. DateTime, DateTimeOffset, TimeSpan.
> The one exception is, there is a higher than average probability that startup people with naive optimism end up getting into a position where they decide to end their life.

I wonder if this is true. It's certainly the case that plenty of people who do nothing with their lives end up being suicidal.
3M going under would be bad in a lot of ways. They are THE name is serious respiratory and other PPE, for instance.
> Why is starting a business so hard in 2023?

Honestly, I don't think it's any harder now than it has been before (in my adult life, anyway). It's always been very hard. Same with running a business post-startup.
Reddit CEO doubles down on attack on Apollo developer in drama-filled AMA
That definitely didn't age very well.
I'm not sure. I'm in Firefox, but I did have to refresh the sources in the uBO settings and more showed up.
A month or two ago, I stumbled onto the RegretfulParents subreddit [1] thanks to an HN comment. After reading all those horror stories... yeah, consider wisely.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/regretfulparents/
Usenet was designed with a model of sporadic connection. Every site had a copy of items in its subscribed groups, and would refresh them from its upstream servers periodically.

This is a good model if connectivity is scarce or expensive, but inefficient if it’s pervasive and cheap.

Starting to use Usenet again (since it hasn’t actually ever gone away) doesn’t really make sense. It is a product of a different set of preconditions.
Yes. In many cases, it is the ideology that forces the bad story.

In the last two movies, all the men had to fail, the ideological bent to the story required it. That's why we got Luke as a failure, Han Solo as a failure (he couldn't redeem his son, only Rey could through the power of ambiguity), and Finn as a failure.

Imagine if Finn had succeeded in his sacrifice. How powerful would that moment have been?

Instead the story we get is one where morality is an old fashioned idea. Hard work and merit (Jedi training) are "the old rules that are holding you back." We get the whole "there's no good and evil, there's just power." All of which fly in the face of the original world of Star Wars. Patience, self-control, and practice were virtues. Anger, impulsiveness, and fear led to hatred, evil, and suffering -- the Dark Side.

Rey can't be trained, because it would mean a man was training her. Leia can just develop Force powers on her own, because otherwise, she would have had to learn them from a man. Poe Dameron can't have a proper perspective on the battle or be trusted with any plans because the point of his character must be "toxic masculinity."

It made the stories of these movies suck. Contrast that with how Andor and The Mandalorian deliver female characters that are amazing. Leia is a true badass... as she was in the original movies, without the Force. Bo Katan's character goes through a deep understanding of what it really means to lead her people, and earns it. Strong women, that don't require a man to fail, in order to be strong on their own.
Generative AI cannot do the job of software devs yet. This is the truth. I do not know what will happen in next 5 years but at this stage generative AI cannot do software development. Sure it can write snippets of code which are helpful.

A CS degree does not necessarily teach you how to build complex software systems. So experienced devs are not replaceable by AI yet. But fresh CS grads with just some problem solving based coding skills can be replaced by AI. So I think it is important to learn how to build real systems end-to-end and showcase that experience.
They meant to post it at 04-01, but posted it at 02-01 instead to prove that precise timing doesn't matter
If you paid for that it would be less than a decade before that company was also doing the same bullshit and also collecting a subscription. Look at what is happening to streaming. "Oh, $10/mo for basically all the content, that's a no-brainer." Now it's returning to the cable television experience with ads every 10 minutes.
But people didn't rely on search, as much, back then. I belonged to a few forums, and I'd visit one or two portals, almost every day as my starting point on the Web, and from there people would be recommending things, and I'd follow that. All through the 90s and into the early 00s, it was sites such as Everything and Digg and Slashdot that drove all traffic. Search-as-in-Altavista was ineffective, so people didn't rely on it. We all relied on certain forums, and those drove traffic in a more organic way. Of stuff we have nowadays, Reddit almost recreates that old world, but Reddit now operates in a context where online traffic has concentrated into 2 sites: Google and Facebook. There is no way to escape the current context, that traffic is now massively concentrated. There was a certain freedom to the 90s, in that no site could reliably capture even 1% of the Web traffic, a situation that we idealistically thought would last forever.
I have both a media room and work computer room. My parents have two computer rooms. My sister want a room when she can get a house. Many of my friends have dedicated rooms for computers.
No - personal carbon consumption. New Yorkers have lived an unsustainable life style for the last 100 years, for the last 50 years you've all known about it - but you've done nothing about it.

Yes - the capital markets are also huge enablers.
Nah. I think we should move to 500 bit times. That'll give us the Planck time resolution from the Big Bang through the heat death of the universe.
Yup.

But we have seen that movie many times, haven’t we? It’s a given that if someone builds a business on a thing and that thing turns out to cause buttcancer, they gonna cover that shit up.

Sometimes covering it up is easy if you just rely on scientific ground truths, like “the dose is the poison”. Even water is a poison if you chug too much of it, so just the discovery that something is poisonous at some dose is almost like tautological. I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the “cover up” was based on that kind of science.

Basically, if there’s utility to something, then there’s money to be made, careers to be made, legacies at stake, etc - and that will bias folks towards covering shit up.

I bet you the folks involved in the cover up were good people who just failed to check their biases.
Morrowind also has random loot based on your level: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Leveled_Lists

This is especially obvious in the Mournhold sewers were basically every chest you find draws from the "silver weapon" list.

Tribunal also had the usual expansion pack problem of basic enemies carrying better equipment than the top level items in the base game. (The goblin sword is worth 100 gold, but does 10-35 damage! The Daedric Wakizashi, the best short blade in the base game, is worth 48,000 gold... and does 10-30 damage.)
One of the most widely circulated PR about GPT4 is that it passed the bar exam

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2023/03/14/gpt-4-b...

and it's had the most vocal and sensational PR about how AI needs regulation now

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/09/tech/korea-altman-chatgpt...

People assume the smalltext does not apply to them.

openAI does not get a lot of flak from the media for the amount of BS that chatGPT can blurt out

Does anyone remember what happened to Galactica which did the same thing ? That too was clearly labeled as hallucinatory . But it was shut down because they did not BS the media enough about regulations and such.

I m afraid these LLMs are turning into too much of a political game to be useful for much longer.

On the other hand, if they become political, then people will be even more incentivized to build offline, local LLMs
Crowdfunding is a terrible way of financing a startup. It can be a reasonable way of financing a product, if done carefully and thoughtfully.
Indeed. This is fine by me and it's great that you can do this in this kind of case. But what's being discussed is people deleting all their posts because they're upset at reddit for their recent policy changes, and that's what I think is not a good thing.
Endorsement always happens at the aesthetic level, there's never anything explicitly political about fascist work.

Take Fight Club which you're 'supposed to' take as criticism of explosive violence but it still basks in it. Or superficially anti-war movies like Black Hawk Down which are basically war porn aesthetically. The Young Pope is another good recent example. Superficially it's satire but on every other level obviously sympathetic to what it portrays.
You can still say whatever you want online. You just can't guarantee an audience, but that was _never_ the case.
Bootstrapping refers to not taking outside capital; you can bootstrap and grow simultaneously and indeed, that's what you should be trying to do anyway.
Beyond Liquid Crystal: DARPA Seeks Novel Tunable Optical Materials
Prompts are natural language, but you're using them with the model in a way similar to getting a split-second gut feel reaction from a human - that reaction may very well vary between people.
Neither do I...
Quanta magazine and all these pop science websites need to be stopped.

(Not because popular science is bad, but because they do it badly, and the clickbait is insufferable)
on February 25, 1991 American Patriot Missile battery in Dhara failed to track incoming missile because they used floating point time instead of integers. 28 dead 100 injured

time precision was decreasing with time since system was booted and after about 100h of operation this accumulated enough to system believe that incoming missile is already unreachable using existing calculations and caused it to not react at all

I think that is great example why changing precision depending on time might be very bad idea.

imagine that afer Y2038 that slight drop in precision would cause some critical system to fail in unexpected way
HP Elitebooks are very good. Haven't tried Windows but Linux runs nicely.
He failed his duty to both client and the court. This was wilful negligence.

This is like surgeon doing wrong procedure he just invented on patient.
Even if true it's unnecessary. I just can't read anything written by Wolfram without rolling my eyes
I suspect things may be a tad simpler than discussed in this essay, even when most of it is compelling and rings true.

I want to highlight that the main difference in my opinion is, and always was, that of attacking versus defending. Attacking is more often a clusterfuck of complexity and a constant process of messing up as opposed to defending a territory. When attacking you must have that critical 3:1 or 5:1 ratio in all aspects of employing your force, and it’s expected that mistakes will be made, losses will accrue and even grander failures will abound along the way. I would claim that even the Russians eventually adapt, albeit rather slowly, and so does anyone else. It’s about morale, motivation and will, and here it is likely that defenders have an upper hand.

In short, when attacking, be ready for a hell of a suffering in almost any case, except for when you have a hundredfold superiority in all facets of warfare, or alternatively, if you have stellar intelligence capabilities and the benefit of surprise when your enemy least expects it. And I’m not even talking about maintaining order after you’ve conquered a territory…
Whole factions you can play as an army, no. But there are the Jokaero, who are techno-savant orang-utans who float about the universe in inexplicable spaceships making gadgets.
Real chad developers use string.
The keynote was certainly weird. It seems they imagine it being used to run regular 2d apps.
Speaking of Appalachian bootleggers, my great grandpa was one. There are ruins far in the woods outside my childhood home when you can see the old infrastructure and a pile of rusty cans that used to be 10 ft high. It's mostly disintegrated now. My great grandpa retired from it when he was visited by some rival Italians who wanted to have exclusive access to him. He was offered the choice to retire or serve them exclusively so he gave up the business and went back to farming.
"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower." - Steve Jobs.
My understanding is that the difference between 0-indexing and 1-indexing manifests in algorithms which iterate over a list. If the start of a list is at index 0, the end is at index "length - 1" and if the start of a list is at index 1, the end is at index "length". Neither fundamentally changes such algorithms.

That's why it's so low on the list of importance when considering language features; it doesn't fundamentally change what the language does or how it's organized (perhaps beyond some contrived examples) and instead only affects what the code looks like.
John C. Dvorak is the Jim Kramer of technology journalism.
If the executed script transmits the key, then yes. (But the script we observed does not.)
Caches drive the internet.

They are orders of magnitude more important than compression. 99.99% of requests hit a local cache. (1)

Compression is important too.

(1) I worked in a telco. Check it out for yourself!
The idea that people would rather pay unknown extra dollars to middlemen to avoid picking up a phone and talking to someone for 2 minutes is so bizarre to me.
Speaking of which, has anyone made an open source pretty printed input interface for sage or do I have to keep flogging my old Mathematica 7 license for a few more years?
My org does the live-store-on-zfs model with a thin proxy cache on the front end to take the load off the CPU constantly regenerating the top-5% most popular NARs.

It seems to work well for us, but I am curious how that would look at 425TB scale— would filesystem deduplication pay for the losses in compression, and if so, by how much? How does that change if you start sharding the store across multiple ZFS hosts?
Did you find any evidence? In my experience Bard got less usable (I cannot say dumber). I used to ask it to fix grammar for sentences. Now it says it is an AI assistant and it can't do that. But it works for some other people :/
Overall it is very confusing.
I agree. The iPhone came out in 2007, and that year over a billion cell phones were sold. That's a solid market that Apple entered, and the iPhone brought obvious improvements over existing devices. Apple solved the problem of wanting a large screen, a full keyboard, in a small device. That was an existing pain-point, they solved it, everyone understood that this was the future of cell phones.

In 2022, there were 20 million VR devices sold globally. Apple has now entered this market with a device that's 10x as expensive as the competition, and one that doesn't solve any existing obvious pain points.

The iPhone out-competed dumb phones and communicators and blackberries and stylus notepads and, eventually, pocket cameras. It did all of that, better, in one device.

What exactly is the Apple Vision replacing in an obviously better way? If I buy one, what device can I throw away? I have yet to see an answer to that question.
> Second is I removed stock because stock is hugely outsized in value for tech companies, and most of these jobs aren't going to have RSUs.

RSUs are the companies you're talking about are effectively cash, and they make up a significant portion of the compensation for the "elite SV" companies. So yes, if you exclude ~40% of the compensation for the "elite SV" companies, then you friend is probably making more.
GitHub accused of varying Copilot output to avoid copyright allegations
Makes sense, though if you'd asked me before your explanation, I'd have thought the idea of accelerating at high speed without leaving free fall impossible.
IDK, I think it is plausible they might be joining by IP or deeper connections. I've seen some ads that aren't relevant to me but are for something my partner was looking at on a different device.
Boy, I sure can't wait until 2 days after this "strike" occurs when people can move on to whatever we're supposed to be outraged about next. Most people (a) have a better version of information actually worth saving already saved somewhere else, and (b) have zero use for their reddit posts without the context surrounding the post.
Reddit old is as good as it's always been
But phpbb had its own issues. Many were run by hobbyists who eventually stopped paying the bills or updating the site, and then some bot steals the data or breaks the database.

It's like cloud-hosting email: everyone wants to not host their own email server, but then you're at the mercy of the service provider. For most people its worth it... until it isn't.
They had already made it subscription-only shortly after they bought it. That's when people generally stopped using it.

They're sunsetting it now as a result of that loss of users (imo).
Has vlang managed to get past its controversies and actually deliver on its promises? Last I heard it was still promising too much, under delivering and not handling the feedback too well.
Yeah, it's not a technical thing. It's that the unwashed didn't have access/weren't even aware. Sure, you can do the same thing today given explicit gatekeeping and moderation.
There was real and actual danger to the millions of people killed and maimed in the proxy wars between the US and USSR. But aside from a few acute crises, there was very little danger to civilian Americans or Russians living their day-to-day lives. Arguably, there is far more danger today due to gun violence, which has killed vastly more Americans than Russia ever did.
Isn't "code is art" table stakes for having copyright apply?
Is it using Chat GPT api behind?
> WWII started just before WWI. Some people call the Second World War part 2 of the first.

Ehh......

WWI is complicated, but it essentially boils down to a great power war caused by a breakdown in relations that reached the point that diplomats were unwilling or incapable of keeping the war from breaking out. The result of WWI was that all of the traditional great powers (both those who won and lost) were spent [1]. The peace treaty sought to see the victors compensated by the losers, and part of the compensation was breaking them up in the vain hope that this would make war less likely, with some parts being carved up into independent countries, and others (especially colonies) being annexed to the victors.

WWII isn't so much a single war as it is four (sets of) wars of naked territorial aggression (Germany, Italy, Soviet, and Japanese) and two civil wars (China and France) that got merged into a single conflict by the fact that everyone ended up aligning into one side or the other. These wars don't start just before WWI; in many cases, the territorial jealousies that precipitate the war can't start until after WWI (e.g., how can Russia start seeking to invade its neighboring countries when they're still part of Russia?).

In between these two conflicts is a very large series of civil wars and revolutions and failed revolutions that are largely born from the instability of the international political sphere following the exhaustion of all great powers in WWI. These (relatively) smaller conflicts provide a more or less continuous segue between WWI and WWII, to the point that it may be better to just think of the period from 1914 to 1949 as a modern Thirty Years' War that sees the world shift from a balance-of-power regime involving the major European powers to a world that involves just two superpowers and their alliances.

[1] The US was the only major country not economically devastated by the war, but despite its economic size, its unwillingness to participate in European affairs means it's not really a great power as far as people at the time were heavily concerned--it doesn't enter the stage until WWI.
less a replacement and more an alternative made years ago whose last post is 4 years ago and is currently restricted

and the pinned post is saying they need moderators so back to square one. creating a new one isn't a problem but scaling users and finding people to run it well is
> where massive dossiers are built on you automatically and you're tracked all over the internet by ad companies

...that still utterly fail to provide relevant ads. This is my pet peeve - I periodically disable adblocker and - suprise, no surprise - 100% of ads I see are irrelevant to me. I can even see how they're trying to target me, but they're totally missing what I really want or interested in. "Personalized" news feeds are sensationalist click-bait crapfests with accidentally useful local news (just by the virtue of local news being more relevant, in general). Book recommendations only work in "more from the same author I've read and liked" category. Summing it up, those massive dossiers aren't seem to be worth shit.

Either the industry needs to drastically ramp up their models' complexity (and maybe something will start to happen - although I wonder about the economy of this) or maybe someday they will have to admit all those profile data hoards were the new tulips.

The Internets of old at least hadn't pretended that ads were "useful" or "relevant". There typically was no positive quality to them, except for honest "this shit brings site owner (or host) some money".
Well, I'd call the inner ear an evolutionary response to gravity...
now imagine believing that this electric motor can self-drive itself to the supermarket
Considering that the old quote is Cicero criticizing pre-dictator Julius Caesar for the way he wore his toga (and not, you know, all the things that Sulla might've put him on the Proscription Lists for), I'd argue its more that old people consistently criticize the wrong thing about young people, focusing on the superficial, rather than the substantive.

EDIT because I forgot to add:

This missing the mark is rarely because there's something intrinsic about old people and other people's haircuts. Its more that we are generally raised to respect (as authorities) our elders, and sort of subconsciously expect that people younger than us will in turn grant us the same respect. So the criticism basically comes down "they're not giving me what's due to me".

Meanwhile, if the criticism leveled against Caesar came down to "he's waaaaay too ambitious, and has already shown a propensity for ignoring social mores to get what he wants", then Cicero's criticism might feel more prescient, and less like an old man shouting at a cloud.

All of that said, its actually really hard in the moment to identify what will be dangerous to society before it comes up. So maybe Cicero had a feeling in his gut, but all he could come up with is "he's kind of sloppy with his toga"