skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
RMS did a really poor job of explaining why closed source firmware is problematic to free software, I agree, and I'll explain better below. I also have some critique of activist language.

First, activist language is pretty hard for any human to listen to. Anyone that's been tackling the "long fight" of what they view as oppression has this map in their head of things that add up to their main point in life and cannot help but continually extrapolate it for people. On some topics, people eat this kind of language up. On others, it's rather dull, especially if the person using the language can't quickly connect relatable points for people. RMS was good at long-form broad thinking that was dealing with the issues at the time. He was pretty fuck all when it came to really explaining them in a digestible, conversation style manner.

As for why proprietary headphone firmware hurts free software: take some Bose noise cancelling headphones and try to connect them to something like a mainstream Linux distribution like PopOS and use them on Zoom. They'll work, but only in a low quality mode, or the audio receiver will work but not the microphone. Now do the same with Airpods, or use Airpods on an Android phone. Airpods will work and you'll get high fidelity audio, but they're constantly exhibiting weird disconnection behaviors. On Linux you'll get incredibly low fidelity audio. Proprietary drivers are at the source of all of this.

RMS came from a day where the pioneers of Linux and alternative operating systems weren't building them for servers. They were building them for users because Windows was expensive and the machines to run it on were more expensive. Oppression to someone like him, and many others, were linked to this and many other circumstances at the time. The idea that the optimizations of computing were available only to a few was utterly disasterous.

To connect the two ideas, product x which is proprietary works best on product y which is also proprietary. It's a system that reinforces itself and excludes or marginalizes the rest, which eroded the original mission of building optimized software that is collectively free enough for anyone in the world to use.

Somewhat ironically, a lot of people in this thread are complaining about diversity when really that's what most of these initiatives were born in.
I can personally contradict this with my own interactions with RMS, in which he gave serious and continuing thought to development of libre computer interface software for blind people.

Accessibility is listed as a FSF high-priority project (https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Category/Interface/accessibil...)
Arguably, the GPL license, and the free software politics of Stallman make software less free.

Being forced to distribute changes doesn't represent freedom for users of GPL software.

Removing the ability of others to keep secret their source that uses GPL software isn't freedom.

Limiting the ability of others to commercialise software that uses GPL isn't freedom.

Most of the discussions around GPL have a anti-corporate flavour to them, with a large helping of righteous indignation about said corporations monetising the software. When did free software become about money? The GPL licence has become all about money since it's often offered as a restrictive licence in combination with a commercial licence. I feel like the people most disadvantaged by GPL software are individual programmers and small teams who could most benefit from using open source software and make a living out of it.

Of course people can choose whichever licences they want, but claiming to be the pinnacle of free software is rich, to say the least.
>"Small data-sets were definitely a limiting factor as well as limited computer power."

Not just small data-sets and limited computer power, but also very few libraries to help you out - although you could download something like xerion from ftp.cs.toronto.edu and join their email list, it was generally a case of retyping examples or implementing algorithms from printed textbooks. And it was all in C, presumably for performance reasons, while most of the symbolic AI folks came from Lisp or Prolog backgrounds.
> making performance more in line with a normal non specialized device; because memory access time dominates.

Well, yes. With a short enough piece of network cable it's probably lower latency to query a different one of these devices a short way away than wait for DRAM to very slowly charge up a row.
Those statistics sounded fascinating at first - but when I thought about it more, I wondered whether they actually show anything?

I mean, presumably in 2-vehicle collisions one person is at fault. So "50% of people not at fault" is just the baseline (if all collisions are 2-vehicle)

Whereas presumably collisions between aircraft are very rare.
This seems true, but there's also another level to it. If you're a major figure in a community yourself, you have plenty of other outlets to show off and get your message out. Those folks come to posts on Reddit because the audience is there. Maybe they're just cross-posting their instagram posts, but they're doing it because they know it'll reach a decent amount of people that wouldn't see their stuff otherwise.

Getting to that point takes time, and it takes dedicated amateurs keeping the community growing, engaged, and excited in the meantime to get it to the point where it's big enough that bigger names care to jump in.
I understood it as them turning down an offer despite the lucrative salary, not because of it. Probably because the circumstances were not quite what they were hoping for.
I think "bon appétit" has more of a "tuck in" flavour than "Enjoy your meal".
there's several magnitudes of difference between a couple of criminal cops and the wholesale import from China though
> 'remote work' requires expressly documenting and writing things out.

Not just documentation -- all communication needs to be more explicit and deliberate. Organic "water cooler chats" can happen but in different ways.
Product Launch!

Hey Everyone,

Want to alert everyone to the launching of BillSlice! We help users manage their shared monthly bills by tracking payments all in one place, send automatic notifications to all people associated on the bill, and transfer money between users!

Hope you all can find it useful in your lives!
Implication is that the claim: "Because capitalism is the only system which incentives continual innovation" has no basis in reality. By the lack of answer to the posed question I'm guessing you are starting to agree?
What you're describing is a more intense (brighter, higher energy) blue, not a more saturated one. For more saturated colours, you need different RGB primaries than the ones defined in sRGB. The DCI-P3 colourspace used in HDR displays is exactly that, offering something halfway between sRGB and Adobe RGB. Of course it pales in comparison to filmic colour spaces like ACEScg, which can represent almost the entire visible gamut.
The author's seeming eccentricity does come through in the copy, but to me that made it seem less corporate / more old-school, rather than putting me off (though also preparing me for potentially some similarly eccentric design-choices in the actual product if I ever used it - no Windows installs these days though so I'll have to keep it in mind for the future).

On the other hand, I had a look at the sourcecode after you commented on text selection and it is... bizarre. The author has gone to absolutely enormous effort to prevent text selection - even if you disable all the (multiple layers of) CSS protections there's further JS events preventing you from seeing selected text (it still gets selected & you can copy but you have no way of knowing where you selection begins or ends).

Given everything is on Github under GPL, I can only think that this must've been done as a "let's see if I can" type of personal code experiment on their personal website, rather than any deliberate effort to obscure anything. Which is cool in a way I guess...
I find that Dart rides that middle line much nicer than typescript does, at least for now. As of Dart 3, you can now have sound null safety, and sound type safety for 100% of your code, if you want. The recent addition of records also makes working with some of javascripts methods with multiple return types better, as that is one of the things dart is still missing, union types. Though, I tend to prefer dart over typescript just because of not having to deal with the node ecosystem at all.
> Checking overflow for addition on the other hand is something that is very seldom used

Arithmetic on numbers larger than your word size. Poster child: crypto. It's 2023 and crypto is not rare. This post cannot get from me to you without crypto in the datapath.
This was one of the few things my siblings and I could watch when we visited my grandparents. I love the absurd cartoon physics, like turning into tank treads to travel across the desert.
I don't agree with OP, but you have never heard of Stripe or Ticketmaster?
The way it looked like while it was happening was they propped up a figure (esr) who was symphatetic to the needs of corporations and all too ready to enjoy the spotlight. They then FLOSSified the movement as if Free Software and Open Source were the same thing. I always likened this to the sale of Manhattan to the white man for $24. Dumb injuns right? The thing is, the white man did not buy it from the actual owners of the place. It was a different tribe taking the money and helping the westerners establish a false claim.

It might be a little harsh since the open source "movement" did exist already and was a thing. It wasn't specifically created for this purpose as far as I know.
> but because he directly insults and threatens other individuals when he doesn't get his way.

Given the last attempts to remove Stallman, I'm confident that he isn't alone in OSS having these traits.
Good article but the title is pretty weird:

> I’m not defending those nor the man himself.

Then why such title "We need more of Richard Stallman, not less"??
Vice put out one of the most blatantly false and disgusting smear jobs in recent history [0].

You're defending the indefensible - why?

0 - https://stallmansupport.org/debunking-false-accusations-agai... (with links to primary sources throughout).
Admittedly running a binary is quite simple to run on a monolith, depending on size and scaling needs a container still makes sense IMO
I’m not very familiar with TechDirt. But this article isn’t labeled an opinion piece, and it is written by the founder and chief editor of the site. Looking at some of his other work it all seems to be written like this.

I guess what you’re saying is that TechDirt is a garbage rag that I should add to my blacklist?
I have 6 dogs and also have to leave the country every 3 months to keep my tourist visa current. Having a really good (and, fortunately, affordable) dog boarder is the answer to this.

Not sure that really changes his point; only that sometimes there is a C when you are looking at choices A & B.
Yes. My comment above glosses over some details.

The SRAM clock and the Ethernet clock can be independent. The SRAM clock rate is what determines the rate of lookups for a single cuckoo hashtable.

On a modern FPGA, the SRAM clock can run up to about 500MHz. So, if you pipeline things, you can get 500 million lookups per second in the FPGA fabric. The maximum packet rate in 10G Ethernet is around 15 million/sec. So, no matter how you design the protocol you use to communicate with the FPGA, if you only request a single lookup per packet, you will be well below the maximum rate the RAMs can support.

Of course, I haven't actually built any of this. The clock rates in the blog post are much lower, and the chip is much smaller. So, this is all an educated guess.
PanML – a high lvl LLM library
> Which is a good thing since "turn spec into code" is a job function that will be taken over my AI in... (Checks watch)

You realize that if your prediction comes to bear, that the job of writing code would become much more difficult: writing specs in an imprecise natural language instead of a precise computer language? Try reading anything written by a contract lawyer for why this is not an improved state of affairs.
So, a slave would phrase that "How is the food and shelter I receive from my master not the fruit of my labor?"

Capitalism is a system where the people doing the work are not the ones deciding over the fruits of their labor. This decision is instead made by the entity that owns the means of production.
Highly contextual to the person, project and company.

I’ve had time periods where weekly wasn’t enough, and others were monthly felt like too much.

The most important thing is to recognize what is needed at the time, and to adapt to what is needed vs. applying some arbitrary formula, IMO.

And strongly implied by this: don’t be the type of manager who always cancels 1:1s because they’re the least important thing on the calendar when that other thing comes up.
We need less of Richard Stallman and more of Matthew Garrett. Free software is good. Monomaniacal obsession with free software at the expense of literally everything else is why Stallman's allies are few and far between.
I found Zig implementation of json parsing is interesting. The code is free from hidden control flow !.

https://github.com/hanabi1224/Programming-Language-Benchmark...
A web3 Reddit alternatives is needed
> That isn't to say federation will be successful

Federation is already successful, since email is federated (you can register on gmail.com and send an email to an account at yahoo.com, or even run your own email server, although the ecosystem has evolved/commercialized to make that more difficult than it strictly has to be).

But Lemmy, we'll see. Maybe a better-written competitor emerges, or maybe they get their act together, or maybe the world doesn't want a federated Reddit clone (although my personal bet is that it does and subreddits are sort of the centralized prototype of that). But there's no question that federation itself is useful in certain applications.
Read the story, but did not understood what's wrong with Telegram.

Sounds like a FUD campaign.
Russia claims use of new tactic of remotely detonated tank laden with explosives
Lexisms
Whether or not you deem the viewpoint useful, these ethical dilemmas exist. Whether you choose to acknowledge those dilemmas is your choice. But by recognizing these ethical dilemmas we can make better choices to reduce potential negative impact on others/the community/ourselves. Recognizing inescapable complicity is just accepting accountability and introduce the possibility to grow and change as individuals and as a society as a whole over time.
LeCun et al (1989) had backprop working for digit recognition.

LeCun, Bottou, et al (2002) in "Efficient Backprop" described techniques for improving backprop algorithms.
> I usually point at the way F1 teams do their meetings where everyone wears a headset, even if a bunch are in the same room

That's because F1 cars are LOUD and without noise cancelling and headsets you may miss someone's comment.
> It wasn’t for me; I’m not saying it’s not for others.

It was for me for a while until I got the fear after a near crash, became a father and ... it's not really worth it anymore. Still get dark thoughts about all the close calls I had and stupid shit I did (riding 6K km through Africa with fork oil dripping all over my front break disk). Problem is as soon as I get on the bike I become fearless again.

> The kicker for me is you can do everything perfectly correctly and a drunk driver sideswipes you and you’re just a list of organs available.

Yeah that's the old "you have to get it right all the time, they only need to get it right once"
Having source code available is similar to "right to repair" but for software products. It absolutely does give more freedom to users, but at the expense of some monetization opportunities. Whether that trade off is worth it is a matter of much debate.
Not me. It read to me as the kind of pretentious garble spoken by someone who doesn't know the meaning of the words they're uttering, and perhaps doesn't even know what thought they're trying to communicate.
Apple fired its head of DEI for saying they should consider diversity of thought, its cult like behavior - https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/13/apple-diversity-head-denis...
How has this ever worked out? When I look at the world today every terrible action seems to be the nth wrong to make it right; every terrible active situation looks like continual quid pro quo. For you to say this is necessary over huge time frames with almost infinite players is a bold assertion.
An excellent article that shows that these intramural fights are nothing new:

>The A.C.L.U. has in fact often gloried in its internal contentions. It split over decisions to represent the Nazis in the 1930s, the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s, and the Nazis in the 1970s. After Skokie, a leader of the left-wing National Lawyers Guild complained of its “poisonous evenhandedness.”
I just recently saw a post where someone said something similar about Reddit versus traditional forums.

There's a balance between engaging with new members and not turning it into a time sink for older members. This is probably a good use case for LLMs.
There's a bit more nuance to this than "minorities suck at their jobs".

Let's say I have two candidates, one is asian and the other is black, and on paper they both look great. They both attended Harvard, and they both interviewed well.

Now if I know that the average SAT score required for Asians to be admitted to Harvard is 1580, and the average SAT score required for Blacks to be admitted to Harvard is 1360, and all other metrics (GPA, conscientiousness, work habits, etc) fall along similar lines of differing standards, then I would have a statistical bias toward selecting the Asian candidate. Not because I'm racist, but because DEI and other equity efforts at Harvard have pre-biased the candidate pool for me.

In the absence of equity efforts, "I went to Harvard" would be a metric that stands on its own, independent of race. But with DEI, it is not. We have eliminated the "I hate them damn blacks" style of racism and replaced it with a more insidious "In order to make a statistically correct decision, I need to be biased against Blacks" style of racism. I'm not sure this is an improvement.

This is an example from college admissions, but the same analogy can be drawn in any environment with strong DEI influence.
It's also possible that lockdowns were causing deaths.
It’s not WW2 mobilisation but I’ve always thought the UK’s Government Digital Service is a wonderful example of what government can achieve in tech:

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digit...

As I understand it they’re effectively a central dev shop for other government agencies. It’s worth their time investing in good practises because they’re going to use them over and over again. And from the user perspective you get a very consistent, reliable set of tools for interacting with government. A win win in my book.
In this case, it looks like the private company which did the work is also getting away with it...

https://www.caracal.agency/en/projects/discover-eu
Gren 0.3: Source Maps
This is very cool, and I hope the dialect isn’t defeated by prescriptivism. Somehow — and I can’t trace exactly how — my public school education removed most of the dialect that I had when I started; I feel this is a shame since I’m fond of how my grandparents speak.
https://www.apple.com/icloud/find-my/

“You can even find devices that are offline or powered off.“

There’s some technical details there. The key words are “Find My Network”
Worse, there's laws in place (in the name of "cost savings") that need changed before any policy improvement could be made. A group can't just decide "it would be better if we didn't use the lowest bidder." There's legal repercussions and losers can sue (leading to more expense than if they just went with them in the first place). It's truly terrible.
I see. Thanks a lot for the info.
> He became a dad at 51.

In both the stories about men having children or dating later in life the age of the woman wasn't included for some reason.
Honestly typescript is fine, just give me:

Standard library that isn't worthless - no more npm package spam.

Type knowledge in the runtime. It doesn't have to be typed, just make it so I don't have to do crazy checks on properties before casting to a class.

Imports without webpack.
The thing is, China isn't doing it now. American capitalism is. That's what's different - the opium wars required the exercise of force, today's opium crisis simply requires the wealthy to bribe the powerful.
Yes, whenua and pākehā are just a few examples of the Māori words that are now frequently used in the daily speech in New Zealand.
> Literally none of the factual claims of “RMS said X” have been false, it’s pretty much all been on the record.

On the contrary, literally every single claim about what RMS said or did was fabricated, or pulled out of context so badly you could still see the severed threads trailing behind. The original posts and subsequent press articles were one big patchwork of lies and manipulative statements; this was all trivial to verify and apparent to anyone except those who, for some reason, really wanted to believe it's true.
The project seems great!

However, newcomers (like me) are pretty blind about minimum system requirements.

Could you please add them to the models list?

For example: what minimum hardware do I need to run Falcon-40b?

PS: If you only have a few setups "known to work" (or just one), listing that would be helpful too.
LOL, wanted to say the same: DO NOT TOUCH!
Strategies for Dealing with Meeting Anxiety
IRC doesn't even have history, one of the most basic requirements for a modern rudimentary chat app. It's ridiculous to suggest using it in 2023 when it doesn't have features a freshman homework assignment chat app has.
No, we actually do call BS on the Greeks. They didn't even have any experiments to replicate. It's sheer luck that they got the "atom" thing right, and no other aspects of matter.

When psychology is prepared to take its inherent difficulty seriously, we'll listen. But as far as we can tell, they're still trying to take shortcuts. (And even if you complain that's because they're underfunded or something, it doesn't matter. The results are just as compromised.)
I thought the project was implemented by private agencies? Article says MCI and Caracal.

Isn't that supposed to be how the government gets the best results with the greatest efficiency under neoliberal capitalism? Subcontract the private sector to do it. They have the expertise to know what they're doing and avoid obvious errors, which would not be the case if the government did it themselves?
FBI resisted opening probe into Trump’s role in Jan. 6 for more than a year
Ask HN: Why isn't Kotlin getting enough attention on HN
Is there a reasonable explanation for why Kotlin isn't getting enough on HN, at least as much as Rust or Zig.

Kotlin is indeed popular in it's specific domain (Android & Java). But the company is keen to position it as "write once run anywhere" space with a strong focus on multiplatform development.

1. The build system provides platform specific bindings for free (compared to the hassle of writing the core in C/C++ and then hand-writing platform specific bindings)

2. Keen focus on enabling single codebase for multiple platforms.

3. The company went so far, as to build a multi-platform UI Framework (Compose Multiplatform) that directly renders to Skia and runs on all mobile/desktop platforms. And even on browsers (with wasm)

https://kotlinlang.org/docs/multiplatform.html

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/compose-multiplatform/

I find it odd, that such interesting a language / compiler finds little attention beyond its domain.

Is there any reasons for this that I'm missing?
ChatGPT: The Good, the Bad, and the Controversial
> There are plenty of rough edges, that the community is finding

What have they been doing since 2019?