skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Reverse engineering is already legal and is very explicitly not a copyright violation

So you're saying I can reverse engineer Windows software, and use the results in my own product, without Microsoft raining hell on me?

Wow, those ReactOS guys are really dumb with their clean-room reimplementation then! Someone send them a fax!
Zotero is awful. It's heavyweight - in fact, a whole separate browser only to manage my bibligraphy (ever tried to use it with ~10k items?). Provides no CLI interface (to automate workflows with scripts). It's data model is weird - e.g., item types include such thing as "instant message", but more academia-relevant types (e.g., "dataset") are absent ("preprint" was incorporated only recently); ISSNs are treated as properties of articles rather than journals. And it boasts it has included its own PDF viewer, whereas I see it as down-side rather than improvement (more bloatware included - why not just follow the division of labor and delegate this functionality to external viewers... ahhh, yes, there is no annotating standard among PDF viewers...).

But all other alternatives for bibliography management I know of are even worse.
They killed all the interest shows for me. I stopped watching when they cut Santa Clarita diet. Bojack horseman was the last complete show I watched.
Lifetime Ticket on United Airlines
Yeah, I just stumbled upon this project and wanted to share, I'm currently using Obsidian for my personal wiki, but I use Zotero a lot as a paper repo and reader, the organization and metadata tools are great, and extending it to a more powerful note-taking tool seems like a no-brainer.

Now it just needs an EPUB reader to replace Calibre, then it'd just be the perfect all-in-one personal library. For now I'm using this plugin that exports and keeps in sync the calibre library to Zotero:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=3339191

Very grateful that this open source project stays alive, I've seen attempts over the years from startups and other projects to tackle on spaces like pkm, research, paperless office, to then be abandoned yet Zotero keeps getting updates.

There's also Tropy, from the same organization that develops Zotero, for organizing digital assets:

https://tropy.org/

Getting a bit off-topic, but this thing could use some sort of Moodboard designer to visually sort the assets in a canvas, kind of what you can do with Miro, Notion, Mural or locally with Obsidian Canvas/Excalidraw. On that note,
there's also this project that takes on that space, previously featured on HN but has made significant progress lately:

https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE
If you have ssh access to a server you can run weechat on a screen/tmux and enable relay access. Then you can use the glowing bear to access it and have a much improved IRC experience! I'm using this setup for many years and am really happy with it.
From the famous split-brain experiment I would conclude that they don’t share every memory. We are just very good at filling in the blanks, like we can bullshit forever about why that apple happened to be in our hand, even though we have no idea.
See https://blog.roblox.com/

There's some impressive technology R&D. Their layered clothing system solves some hard problems. It Just Works, without the user having to fuss with mesh fit problems.
I don’t completely get your second sentence, but we can surely hold multiple conflicting ideas simultaneously — we are absolutely nowhere near rational.
I gave ChatGPT (GPT-4) the code to the generator and asked it for its thoughts. It responded:

== Begin quote ==

INTERCAL is a esoteric programming language designed to be as different from conventional programming languages as possible. It's known for its obfuscation and convoluted syntax, and your provided program adheres to this style perfectly. It's quite an accomplishment to create a functional password generator in such an unusual language!

Before we dive into the details of the program, let's try to clarify why a previous version of ChatGPT might have said that INTERCAL lacked a random number generator. That statement may be somewhat misleading. It's not that INTERCAL inherently lacks the ability to generate random numbers, but it doesn't provide a straightforward, built-in function to do so. Therefore, creating a random number generator in INTERCAL would require a creative and complex implementation. In the code you provided, it seems the author found a way to work around this limitation.

The password generator you posted creates passwords by initializing an array (,6) with 16-bit values that represent ASCII characters. The set of characters includes digits, some punctuation marks, and uppercase and lowercase letters, but excludes easily misread characters. It creates a 16-character password using these values, and it seems to enforce a certain level of complexity by ensuring the inclusion of at least one number and one punctuation mark.

The main loop begins at `(1) DO COME FROM (9)`. Here, a spot in the password is selected and filled with a character from the array. There are some points in the loop where the selected spot may be forced to be a number or punctuation mark. If the character set is checked for digits and punctuation marks, pre-chosen spots for these types of characters are dropped. The selected character is then read out.

This INTERCAL code uses a clever trick to generate seemingly "random" numbers - using the `%50` operation (which in INTERCAL means to mingle the bits of two 16-bit numbers), along with unary operations like `#1`, `#2`, `#4`, etc. on the same variable, to generate different results each time the loop is run.

While I must say this is an ingenious solution, it's not a truly random generator, and the randomness of the password depends heavily on how INTERCAL handles the `%50` operation and the subsequent operations on the same value. It's more of a workaround that takes advantage of INTERCAL's quirky way of handling operations than a typical random number generator.

Nevertheless, creating such a program in INTERCAL is quite a feat. The author deserves credit for coming up with such a complex solution in a language that deliberately eschews conventionality.

== End quote ==
"What do you do for a living?" "Basically, I make machines that lie to fish."

I know there's a very good reason for all of it but sometimes I try to imagine explaining our jobs to people of several centuries prior. It's almost impossible to do without having about six whys in the list and it occurs to me that civilization is an ever-increasing layers of why atop one another.
It's not that profitability is a focus, it's just that it's a style these days to sacrifice user freedoms/utility for it where it was unthinkable before.
They don't. They are apparently US-only.
> the biggest thing was that since the start of the smart phone era, I simply haven't had a good enough idea for an app.

Doesn't matter if you do, some dodgy company in a foreign country will happily wrap your app in ads and somehow be higher in the search results than your app[1].

If it's a really good idea, someone like Zynga will simply write a polished clone and make millions off your idea while your original app still doesn't show up in the search results.[2] Or anywhere, for that matter.

[1] I wrote an app in 2012 or thereabouts and this happened to me. I don't know if it is still possible.

[2] See how well they did this with Angry Birds.
Only after Borland management lost it.

They never had anything like Turbo Vision for MS-DOS, unless one counts the very first VB versions, which were interpreted.

They were the last vendor to have a C++ compiler for MS-DOS, with the release of Microsoft C/C++ 7.0.

MFC always felt a poorer experience than Object Window Library and Visual Components Library.

Visual Basic had to reach version 6 to offer the compilation features, and COM development of Delphi 1.0.

Visual C++ never was as visual as C++ Builder.

But yeah, as Borland lost it, and went through all the mess, Visual Studio is now the best IDE for Windows development.
I don't know about the industry as a whole, but at least the (early) Rust community evangelism seemed to have a lot of them involved.
Gas, property insurance, car insurance for your home (especially since insurance companies are starting to refuse to sell in the state) and even food is more expensive.

To put some real numbers on it.

My 30 year fixed 3.5% mortgage all in from 2016 - 2021 was $2185 and that included the FHA PMI since I only put 3.5% down. I refinanced in 2021 to a 15 year mortgage and bought points and got rid of the PMI. My house is now worth close to twice that.

My mortgage? 1.97% fixed 15 year - $2550 and $1575 of that goes toward principal. My total household expenses as of March 2020 when I was making “only” $150K with my wife working part time making $25K was around $6000. We were bringing home after taxes and before retirement savings about $10500 after maxing out my retirement savings it was about $9300 a month.

And if you haven’t noticed, people are moving away from the west coast and office occupancy is down - that doesn’t bode well for home prices long term.

Our lifestyle is a little different now (see below). But out of my base income which is still only $160K - and my wife no longer works -with the rest coming from RSUs, we still manage to pay all of our expenses and I’m able to max out my 401K.

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966).

I don’t think people who have been in the tech bubble understand how easy it is for a two income earning family to accumulate wealth where one is making your standard enterprise dev tech salaries in a major non west coast city.

Most couples I know our ages where one is a mid career developer also has a spouse working making at least $70K (the average salary of a college grad). You can do quite well in most cities with a household income of $220K.

If you’re younger and single making $135 to $170K - typical for a developer with 5 years of experience outside of the west coast - you can find an apartment or buy a condo in the city for $2500/month.
I just recently discovered Zotero and it makes my life so much easier. It finally makes sense to read PDFs and work with their content, when I know where to store the notes and find them, when I need them.
The point of punishment is to discourage you (and other people) from doing that action in the future. You don't need free will for that.
In my opinion a lot of Devops comes down to improving "developer experience" (DX - another buzzword, but still). It starts with project setup and choosing tools that enable this such as JS build tools that are fast. Then you have easy (and again: fast) means of running tests, continuous integration, deployment for staging (or sharing with less technical team members). This has to be as frictionless as possible so developers can actually enjoy their work. A "by-product" is that you can also more easily deploy for production.
I’ve been writing JavaScript for 25 years and have always felt it has utterly trash syntax. I’m not sure that’s 100% on GPT.

(And I don’t mean to be rude - I just really hate that syntax!)
As someone that has mainly done Web development in Java and .NET stacks, knows UNIX since I used Xenix in 1993, and used most of the big names.

Windows is perfectly fine for Web development, never missed UNIX while using it.

On the other hand, XEmacs was the rescue to sanity in a world depleted of nice tools like Borland IDEs.
While that is true, it would actually be worse bullshit to claim that the “random number generator” generates cryptographically random-enough source material that your password can’t be cracked. So maybe ChatGPT is onto something.

On the other hand, it could be the cryptographic industry’s bullshit that some computer somewhere using a random number generator at an indeterminate time can be cracked and we should all be hoping for true sources of entropy. tptacek?
The most profitable subscriber type.
Bit ironic the anti-mimetic counter cultural artcle is written in full longform buzzfeed clickbate style.
Thats interesting about the visits to Edinburgh castle, probably very accurate. Feels accurate too. Around 2009 or so Edinburgh was pretty "dead" I remember work mates complaining about it, so much one of them moved to Glasgow. Now we have the opposite problem.
Nah. Human utterances convey purpose on a discursive level; including your comment or mine. We say stuff because we want to do something, like showing [dis]agreement or inform another speaker or change the actions of the other speaker. This is not just probabilistic - it's a way to handle the world.

In the meantime those large language models simply predict the next word based on the preceding words.
I can say a few things as someone who has been running a matrix server as a slack alternative in a company for a while now.
Element does not have an "administration" ui. Synapse has an extensive admin API, but element so far has not created a ui for it. This can make it hard to use for example in a business because a lot of compliance and security related aspects are hard to control and dial in.
Another thing is that quite often, users don't familiarize themselves with the encryption model. They create a key but then lose it and all their chat histories with it (especially non technical users). Well, because everything is encrypted, a server admin can't see or recover their messages when that happens.
There may be some privacy concerns when federation is turned on, such as user profiles leaking or unwanted users joining rooms they shouldn't be able to in a server. Again, these things are all addressed by Matrix/Element but they are an issue because users don't familiarize themselves with it enough.
Element are developing something new called Element Call, which is a Jitsi alternative that uses the Matrix protocol. So far it's in early development and not very usable for self hosted servers yet.
There is not a lot of administrative control really. If two users just spam each other in a room it will fill up storage and of course the server admin can't check what these people are writing.

Another thing that can trip people up or make Element hard to use in a company is that the Element clients have certain defaults. For example, the video calls by default use a pre-defined Jitsi instance. Other aspects also use external service by default, even if connected to a self-hosted server. That is pretty much a nightmare if there are compliance/privacy concerns and a company wants to host everything in house.

What's really pleasant is how verbose and easy to understand the matrix protocol is. It's quite easy to create bots, send messages over the API etc. So it can be easily integrated into other business processes.
It will now take less than decades thanks to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
oh,I actually implemented something similar few days ago, I was doing rpm build script to make repository on s3. repo is mounted with rclone and I'm using overlaysfs to make staging area where I can add new rpms while those are build and update repo metadata, but without risking that if at one point something fails to build i get inconsistent state (eg build succeeds for x86 but failed for aarch64). i when whole build process succeeded then I'm using rclone sync to commit changes back to s3
GPT4 is better than its predecessor and quite impressively so. The (probable) param count reflects that.

It’s not just param count, because not all large models are good, but it clearly is part of the equation.

I always wondered why Altman said going bigger is a dead end. If it were true, saying it would needlessly inform your competition. What’s the use in that? If it were false it might dissuade them from going down that path.. I think I got my answer.
Just to be clear what this means and what it does not mean: It means that nuclear power can count towards Sweden's goal towards fossil-free electricity. It does not mean anyone is actually building nuclear plants, or that anyone would want to pay for it. (The article mentions plans from Vattenfall to build SMRs, but well, SMRs don't exist yet, and as far as I could see, the only thing they did yet is perform a feasibility study.)

And then there's this:
https://www.power-technology.com/news/orsted-offshore-sweden...
Danish company Ørsted wants to build offshore wind farms that could power half of sweden. Ørsted is a fascinating company, it is basically the only former oil and gas company that successfully transitioned towards clean energy.

Between Vattenfall having announced that they might build a type of nuclear plant that has never been built before, and Ørsted wanting to build massive offshore wind farms, I know which one I think is more plausible.
> These models will lie to obfuscate their incompetence

They were trained on human data after all.
And still relevant.
The only aspect I would be iffy on (mainly because I've never looked) are the things you get just for being a Red Hat subscription holder. These are the Red Hat hosted services, like the Customer Portal and Hybrid Cloud Console (Insights, etc).

But the actual products you get from the subscriptions? Yeah, those are all open source software with available upstream.

As for value, the hosted stuff is actually pretty cool and helpful for getting proactive analysis, suggestions, alerts, etc of your environments. In general using the Red Hat product over the upstream provides a handful of benefits. Usually the software is pretty well stabilized, you're not getting random updates that require massive changes. Deployment can also be easier than upstream, or at least better documented. For example, deploying and maintaining AAP is a breeze, and can be done on traditional servers instead of k8s. It provides all the disparate pieces in one place, rather than needing you to deploy AWX, Galaxy-ng, Pinakes, Keycloak, etc on your own manually.

The other non-software pieces, like the knowledge base, discussions, docs, hosted apps, etc are all effectively bonus material of a sort. But they are really good bonus material to have.
It looks like a powerful combo. Back in the day I went the LaTeX path, nowadays I’ll be tempted to follow your approach.

I have tried Obsidian a couple of times, but it never stuck with me. For some reason I cannot go back to “regular editors” after years of vim (and now neovim), it is not only the modal editing (IIRC Obsidian has a decent vi mode), I guess it is more about having all your editing in the same tool (and the terminal).

Nowadays I stick to neovim plus Telekasten plugin, not as polished as Obsidian, but with enough features.
It's compared to Vue, React and Svelte on the homepage. So it's a frontend framework in Rust? Came as a surprise to me.
You could be right. I don’t know.
What scene in the expanse is that?
This will make Putin happy, as it increases the west's reliance on the Russian nuclear fuel supply chain.

Russia owned 40% of the total uranium conversion infrastructure in the world in 2020, and 46% of the total uranium enrichment capacity.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/23/russia-dominates-global-nucl...
The thing that makes everything impossible to predict is that the parties currently in charge have, for political reasons, decided that nuclear power is the only possible solution (ignoring the fact that t takes longer to build than the available time to transition) and that wind and solar are bad options.
On what subjects does he give answers? If those subjects interest me, I may like to subscribe too.
Maybe they just needed a face saving excuse to retreat
The JS requirement still annoys me. Mastodon is a whole lot faster than Twitter, but it still can't compete with Nitter and that's just rather silly.

I'm fine with things like pagination and submitting forms being broken without Javascript, but at least make it possible to view a linked thread.

I've been running a Lemmy server or my own for a bit and I have to say, Mastodon just seems so incredibly wasteful. Lemmy's UI may be quite barebones in comparison but the server component runs a lot more efficiently while also providing actual HTML when you ask for content.
Yeah I'm aware you don't really own IP addresses just as you don't really own domain names. In both cases there is degrees of stability you can expect though. I'll look take a look at RIPE, thanks.
Here's the thing about buzzwords - they are a useful abstraction for grouping together a set of concepts for non-tech people to make decisions with tech impact.

The ideas presented here are a good summary of the day-to-day issues I experience as a "DevOps engineer." I wish I had the pull to instigate a shift in mindset towards a more platform-oriented mode of work, but unfortunately for me, that is not the case. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but forwarding articles and presentations like this to senior directors can be a way to influence the direction of their thinking to align more with what you believe to be in the best interest of the organization.
An LLM can only ever reproduce what it has seen before.

I don't believe it. How do you explain Midjourney? The art that it produces is incredible by any measurement.
Sweden has plenty uranium, all we need to do is mine it and enrich it! (Apparently a trivial task, according to politicians in charge).
> Danish company Ørsted wants to build offshore wind farms that could power half of sweden.

It will "power half of Sweden" in the ideal conditions of 100% wind always blowing.
> If we don't have loops where a lot of CPU time is spent, why even write in C++?

Because it isn't just hot or autovectorisable loops that are faster in C++; everything is faster. Function calls, member accesses, arithmetic, etc. Even loops are normally not very hot and not autovectorisable.

You're right that things like audio/image processing, compression etc. benefits from SIMD but that is in the 1%. Those are libraries that have already been written. The vast vast majority of people are not writing audio codecs or whatever.
>Ironically, Firefox also used to have a nice UI for browsing RSS feeds but they removed it awhile ago.

IIRC, (some) browsers used to have a feature that allowed you to browse a web page that had XML content, such as http://a.com/b.xml .

You could expand and collapse nodes. Or maybe I remember it as being for XML, but it was actually for RSS. After all, RSS is an XML format or application - is that the right term?

See the Example section at:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

Haven't checked lately if browsers still do.
> as a nonprofit foundation like wikipedia.

btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36396801 - 5 days ago, Wales' Trust Cafe; at the moment looks like a mashup of reddit, twitter and instagram
I find it relevant especially in the lights of the recent developments around birdsite, meta expansion at fedivesrse. Back to the roots may provide new paths and ways to save the interweb. Not saying we should all go back into the gopher hole but just maybe the answers for the future can be found in the past...
He tried LSD once, when it was still legal, at the urging of Dr. Timothy Leary. He then thought he'd solved a hard problem in physics he had been working on. While going to give a talk on the solution, he realized that he had not solved the problem, but had hallucinated that he had solved it. He was very angry. Never tried LSD again. "I like to think, and I don't want to break the machine", he wrote.
Most restaurants with bars are closed between 3 and 7, finished with lunch and busy prepping for dinner.