skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's an interesting thought experiment.

Any technology that much more advanced than our own would require intermediary technologies before we could replicate it. If you took a car back to ancient Rome, they wouldn't be able to replicate it in one step even if they understood it, because you need sufficiently refined fuel, metallurgy, manufacturing precision, etc.

The technological baseline needed to rollout any wildly advanced technology would necessarily lead to an incremental advancement before we got to the end result, and each step would be a plausibly "natural" advancement on current technology.

There doesn't seem to be any particular place where a bunch of wild advancements are emerging from, which leads to a few likely possibilities: we haven't found alien technology; we have, but it's so advanced that we haven't cracked the surface yet; or we have, and have cracked the surface, and are replicating it, but they're doing a very good job keeping it secret. I don't think it's possible to keep the lid on something that big, and space is so big that I'm very inclined towards the first one.
> On 16 September 1994, there was a UFO sighting outside Ruwa, Zimbabwe.[1] Sixty-two pupils at the Ariel School aged between six and twelve[1][2] said that they saw one or more silver craft descend from the sky and land on a field near their school.[1][2] One or more creatures dressed all in black then approached the children and telepathically communicated to them a message with an environmental theme, frightening the children and causing them to cry.

> The sightings at Ariel occurred at 10am on 16 September 1994, when pupils were outside on mid-morning break.[1] The adult faculty at the school were inside having a meeting at the time.

How convenient that all the adults were inside and only 6-12 year old children saw it. Anyone who believes this story is far too credulous.
I have never hauled submersible wrecks from the seabed, but have recovered lots of other stuff from the same place.

Depending on the weight and bulk of the component, you'd likely do one out of three (at this depth; in shallower waters, you have more options)

a) Small-ish items are simply dropped in a basket attached to the ROV doing the recovery, then brought back to the surface with the ROV.

b) Larger items may be handled by the ROV to a basket suspended from a winch, then hoisted to the surface.

c) If the items are too large for the ROV to handle, it will be used to attach a sling to the item, which is then in turn attached to the hook of a crane/winch, before being hoisted to the surface.
I cant even find anything resembling an explanation if what "speculative realism" posits in that wiki article.

What is it and why is it silly?
Well, I can say π := 3π, and -1 still works. The point is exp() is that 2π*i periodic.
Fully compliant to RISC-V how? Is it conforming to a specific RVI profile? The project states "By emulating a complete rv32i instruction set inside the wiring system of Terraria, we push back speeds to the early 70s era, tossing the ball firmly back into the court of silicon engineer without losing any software functionality."

So this is building a RISC-V *microcontroller* but what version of the ISA? 2.2 from 2017? Is it sucessfully passing conformance tests (https://github.com/riscv-software-src/riscv-tests)? I don't want to dunk on the project, but the title is over-selling and not scoping the context of the work. I look forward to some more updates from @misprit7!

Note: I'm the working group lead for distro-integration within the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE) group.
You might be surprised to learn that they're solving the wrong problem.
other related stuff: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1823 https://www.scottaaronson.com/response-p1.pdf https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5pYPdmKMzDLZHe4zx/link-scott... and probably lots from hacker-news too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23158502

that said i'm still keen to see more/better discussion of IIT, and/or more modern extensions. IIT is certainly quantitative, and arguably elegant, despite problems. so it puzzles me how eager some people are to just junk it rather than repairing it.
I would assume the issue would be that a government agency is reversing UFO tech and congress doesn't know about it, not just that it's being done. A government agency going rogue in such a manner would be a big concern
Ask HN: Being managed out because of asking for parental leave
(Letter form feels weirdly appropriate today, so I'm going with it. I'm writing this not only to get advice but to get off my chest that this stressful thing is happening to me.)

Dear HN,

I was elated to find out 2 months ago that we're expecting a baby. Once the non-invasive prenatal (genetic) testing came back indicating no risk of genetic issues, we started to let folks know that we're expecting.

Last week, I told my manager. This week,

- I'm receiving e-mails regarding project status

- I'm receiving Slacks regarding small misses when working with a difficult partner who we're integrating with. When responding to these Slacks, my manager screens them and sometimes chooses not to respond.

- New feedback is being brought to light that was never discussed in the past. While I am not perfect and I'm sure there's always feedback to give me, I feel that the feedback comes from a place of making a case to manage me out rather than support me through parental leave.

I've already seen folks at the company disappear without any notice. There's also a clearly hostile tone coming from leadership (confirmed by many of my peers) which seems to be motivated by encouraging more output from engineers.

While I _can_ find a new job, I'd prefer not to make major changes until after the baby is born. I also feel that building up a positive reputation when you're months away from going on paternity leave is going to be far more difficult than sticking it out here.

Am I looking at this all wrong? What should I do?

(parentheses)
FYI: the FAA certified Dragon for the first ever commercial re-entry license in 2010.

https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/as...
It does, but, it's not terribly important given you're not limited by power output in a stealthy submarine.
Zapier 10% layoffs
> There is essentially no secrecy.

There is secrecy, which is why the countries that haven’t found a shortcut around it (as in the nuclear arms race between Argentina and Brazil) have a harder road than those that do (like South Africa via Israel).

> Research the Nth Country Experiment

The Nth Country Experiment focused on paper design of a device, which, while a requirement to getting to functional nuclear weapons, isn’t the whole or, in practice, the limiting factor.
I went back and read the comment again and I'd guess it's that first sentence. IME the ChatGPT models tend to output something similar to that when you ask them to answer questions as an expert in a field.
Actually they recently rewrote Time Machine to work with APFS. A rather big change.
There are non-trivial differences in designing vessels loaded with compression vs. tension, and the most experience we have is with internal pressure (e.g. tension).

The analysis is very nonlinear and unfortunately not as widely understood as internally pressurized vessels. It requires a lot more analysis, troubleshooting, and expertise that is short in supply.

Add the additional catastrophic failure modes for composites and there's a reason that industry experts warned against this.
And now it's 2023, and they're inventing the wheel again.
What about your hippie leftist friends who are begging for the government to pause or slow immigration (other than for refugees) right now?
Isn't this the Google curse? Companies hire an engineer who was at Google and suddenly find the Google engineer is building out all the Google internal infrastructure within the new company and because You Aren't Google, it sucks.
The measurement size is just marketing at this point. The actual transistors are much larger.
Windows 10 was released in July 2015 and is currently set to receive updates until October 2025. That's a little over 10 years.

And with previous generations of Windows there was nothing really stopping you from upgrading to a newer OS on the same old hardware - although you might run into serious performance issues with a modern Windows OS on 10+ year old hardware. But you could also switch to plenty of other OSes. I assume that's also an option for 7+ year old Macs?
Block 39% of all HTML smuggling by just blocking JavaScript document.write()
Forget tickets. Tow them. It should be treated the same as parking in a lane for cars.
You mean Ping?
You need to pay for all the supporting infrastructure (roads, power, fire services, etc. etc). Not that simple :)
Patently untrue. Recovery from physical and emotional trauma is possible. It requires actively working at it.
I think you're reaching a bit.

I'm not seeing very many people "celebrating their death". I am seeing people making fun of the complete absurdity of the situation: a couple of billionaires are spending the equivalent of two Starbucks coffees to visit a mass grave in an untested discount submarine known to have safety issues, fully aware that it could mean their death and just... not caring?

When you are a minimum wage worker, seeing people spend several years' wages on something as silly as this, it just feels like you are living in a completely different reality. It is so absurd that I wouldn't have believed it if it was written in a science-fiction book. It is so detached from normal life, it just doesn't feel real.

> I always thought it was sort of a joke when people said "eat the rich"

It is both a joke, and not a joke. Some people are literally starving, and wealth inequality is worse than it was during the French Revolution. I don't know anyone who wants to literally "eat the rich", but it is getting increasingly obvious that the status quo isn't sustainable either.

> you would have killed them yourself if there was no consequence

No, that's not how it works. Very few people actively want other humans to die, but that doesn't mean they will mourn the death of every single stranger either.
You can prevent any obscenity, O and 0 confusion, and I and L confusion, just by excluding vowels. If someone interprets "f4g" in an offensive way, then they have bigger issues than can be dealt with in software.
And had the final result of the migration completely automated alerts? Or did you have to employ round the clock L1s to weed through the alerts?
Aren't Oracle's license fees based on the number of cores/threads available to the machine it's running on? (Or have they changed to number of sockets instead?) Seems like the most efficient way is to use a fewer number of powerful cores (as opposed to more not-as-powerful cores), but Oracle's customer base have more than enough money to spare, but so little brains that they use Oracle in the first place.
Titan submersible debris brought to shore
I'm sure it's pretty fun to see the stuff you worked on in theaters, and from what I've seen on the 'VFX Artists React' show that Corridor Crew puts out the VFX artists actually do have some amount of creative control - depending on what they're doing.
There was a report suggesting California might flip to being a net power exporter in their peak periods this year.

If true then these high temp grid dramas will be a thing of the past by next year.
> Time Machine gets little to no love, and users are getting steered ever more strongly towards backing up data onto iCloud.

Is there a platform other than Linux that doesn't push integration with cloud services? Windows pushes OneDrive, and Google pushes Google Drive on their platforms.

Also, I would argue that Time Machine gets little to no love because it's nearly feature complete. It's dead simple to use, does what it says on the tin, and stays out of the way to the point I forget about it most of the time. Is there anything in particular that you feel that Time Machine is missing?

> Even buying an Apple device isn't really buying a device anymore. You're really buying a transferable lease for 6-7 years on a device that has a hard stop to go to landfill after that time due to software obsolescence by way of unpatched vulnerabilities.

Again, is there a platform other than Linux that isn't similar? Also, with the progress that the Asahi Linux project is making it should be very feasible to slap Linux on an M1 Mac as soon as it goes out of support.

> I don't actually dislike Chromebooks at all, but this is saddening when you've bought a computer to use it as a computer and any sense of ownership or agency is quietly clawed away.

I keep seeing vague hand wavy claims like this on HN, but I feel that Windows, Chromebooks, and Macs are still very open to tinkering.
I’m saying that if one class is already engaging in warfare, it’s not unreasonable for the opposed class to attempt to respond. Of course that is only possible with state power, which in most countries is now in the hands of the owners of capitals. That’s their main tool for engaging in class warfare in the first place.

Individuals associating voluntarily is a liberal fiction. Such freedom only exists if you are already wealthy. Otherwise you have to work for an owner of capital or starve.
Quantum computers could break the internet. Here’s how to save it
tl;dr Some people travel only to say they did. Those people suck.
Everyone reading this should assume it's talking about FB around 2014 or so, I don't know how it could otherwise be so wrong.

> FB's code search is just grep. It's literally called BigGrep.

This hasn't been true for a long time, codesearch at FB is more complex than just grep and has some semantic understanding. Here's some discussion here when some of this infrastructure was open sourced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28365880

> FB C++ might take 2 minutes just to load the DAG before it builds anything.

Yeah, this is pretty terrible, but is mostly a description that doesn't apply to buck2.

> This is essentially instant at Google because a lot of infrastructure has been built to solve this problem. This is a combination of SrcFS and ObjFS.

SrcFS and ObjFS aren't what solve this problem at Google. And to the extent that they do, FB's sapling and buck integration do the same.

> All non-www builds at FB are local builds. Nothing at Google (on Google3 at least) is built locally, including mobile apps. This is way faster because of build artifact cachcing and you have beefier build machines.

This is wrong since at least 2015 FB's build system had the build artifact caching, and you can see in buck's git history that they've had remote execution just like Google (in fact, using the same RE api as bazel) since like 5 years ago.
XP got patches for so long just because many many governments and very large corporations convinced microsoft to keep extending it.
In fact, it’s a well used strategy to use buses or other types of transportation to move undesirable people out of your area into a different area.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
Your arguments won me over
Shout out to RS232, as an aside!

One of my very first experiences with coding was communicating with devices over serial with RS232. 25 years later it's mostly usb-adapters and 5v TTL converters instead of the old school (in my day) db9 connectors. But I still use it all the time for hobby projects.
Yeah, "hold off funding announcements until we've got something else we want to push into the news" was a pretty common thing in my experience as well.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to both the press and the readers here - they want to report/read news. Events. "Company X continues to exist" isn't really news. And "Company X adds new feature Y" is rarely noteworthy news, no matter how big a deal it is in Company X. Sometimes new features are news if either the company is huge ("Amazon adds support for Foo to AWSBar") or it's strategically significant ("Company X adds feature Y, now putting it in direct competition with Company Z"), but I think those are the exceptions.
I'll own the snark (and point out that height is only non-transferable if you aren't trying hard enough, a la Harrison Bergeron), but my point stands. Life is full of situations where someone has it better off than someone else in whatever dimension you care to look at. I believe in equality of opportunity but not equality of outcome, which is what GP seemed to suggest in coveting the personal freedoms of a billionaire.
by the same metric the iPhone 5s still got some patches even this year [1], which makes it "supported" for 10 years

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-en/HT213597
the nature of the medium allows one to create games that don't have "writing", per se—where the "narrative" is the emergently-developing narrative you the player are telling yourself as you play. in this way, games have the potential to be fundamentally different than all other forms of linear storytelling. I still enjoy story-centric games, but as time goes on, I find myself looking more and more for something different and better. some of my best and most meaningful experiences with games have been these emergent narratives. it would be nice if more people tried to make games like this, because it's really something you can't get anywhere else, aside from a tabletop RPG (but even then, that's different, too).
> And they do genuinely do good work in these areas.

I have seen genuinely passable. And lots of "good enough until we fix the underlining issue".

What I have never seen is offshored developers doing really good work. And I'm convinced their incentive structure will always punish anybody that tries.
You can get 4TB, although it’s a bit cumbersome: https://appleinsider.com/inside/icloud/tips/how-to-get-4-tb-...
For one, Italians are not a race. They are at best defined as a distinct ethnic group of the Caucasian race. A race I am apart of.

Secondly, nothing of what I wrote is written based on the idea that I am superior to Italians based on their traits. Only that I find their inability to value their culture and appropriation of others’ culture confusing.

And finally, your name is “namaria”, which sounds close to “marinara” and is almost an anagram for it. Thus I judge you of being an upsetti spaghetti Italian.
You’re right that Tesla is in a different place, it’s why I didn’t mention them. I wonder if it’s to do with strong leadership from people like Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX (who seems amazing from everything I’ve seen) and perhaps a lack of that at Tesla allowing more muskiness to get through.

Tesla’s safety standards do seem to be high in tests, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is primarily because safety tests for cars are a well understood part of car marketing, rather than because Musk fundamentally believes Tesla should make the safest cars.
How many tech jobs does Canada have? If everybody who wants to move to (or stay in) the US but can't because of visa issues moves to Canada, are there enough jobs for all of them?
> Aliens have super sophisticated tech that is hardy enough to travel millions of light years through space but it crashes so easy on earth?

Selection bias. We don't know how many crafts fail to make it to Earth. Maybe the trip is extremely dangerous and only a percentage actually make it.

And/or, like most air & space travel, takeoff and landing are the most dangerous parts.

Also, we have a very good handle on air travel, but planes still crash sometimes.

(I don't actually believe we have ET crafts coming to earth, but it's fun thinking it through).
This whole narrative on UFO coming from US Gov at the exact same moment the fear around covid has faded is so suspicious.. It's really really hard not to see it as a pathetic attempt at keeping the population in a state of mass hysteria.

(yes i know this sound completely paranoïd, but i have absolutely no other idea why they would do that)
The interesting NABU was IMHO not these, but the NABU 1200. An early 8086 Unix machine. I got one at a garage sale in 1993 or so. It worked, and the Microsoft Xenix 1.0 was a direct port of V7 Unix from Bell Labs and quite educational in this respect precisely because it was still simple and understandable, compared to to the work station OS's of the time.

Proprietary no-source OS's were still common then, so binary patching the kernel to put in a different hard disk parameter table (to use a luxuriously large 20MB drive in place of the ST412 the machine came with - precious! Must not mess with the irreplaceable original OS image) was undaunting, especially with a .h file handy that gave the structure. Compiling "elvis" to get vi in the absolutely stripped down Minix mode, that used 63Kbytes of the maximum 64K of code space that executables could use... fun times. Of course back then you still had a hope of compiling current C with ancient pre-ANSI K&R C compiler. Most stuff that I ran on the machine didn't need much porting.
Ha, I wish, good catch on the typo, I can't edit, but should have been "mb"

It's been so long that thinking of ram in anything other than GB is weird.
Why are US retail workers being denied chairs?
The description of the "anchoring bias" doesn't make sense. It starts with:

"The crux of the problem lies in the anchoring bias, which leads us to heavily rely on the first piece of information offered (the 'anchor') when making decisions.

When initially joining the company, the employees were primarily concerned with compensation and job security, the "anchors" in their decision-making process."

OK, but then it says:

"However, once within the fold, the pandemic caused them to shift their focus to work-life balance and flexibility... the rigid return-to-office policy made these new anchors seem less attainable"

So the "anchors" are NOT the first piece of information offered, and they can change willy-nilly. Not much of an "anchor."
I can also run modern Linux distributions on 20 year old hardware.

The "landfill" comment was likely just about how software support periods have become so short, meaning for the current crop of computing devices (including actual computers, phones, tablets) the hardware itself almost always outlasts the company's support period for official software updates, which is disgraceful. I have drawers full of old phones that turn on, display is perfect/bright, battery is reasonably strong, can connect to WiFi, everything works, except the company threw their arms up and gave up on software support.
But - sincere question, as I am largely ignorant on such matters: Those pressure vessels made from composites usually are used to contain a pressure on the inside, taking advantage of the excellent tensile strength of the carbon fibers, no?

Having to withstand a large, external pressure is a whole different cup of tea, isn't it?

(Please be gentle; I am an electronics engineer)
Solid point, but some of the suckless stuff is pretty good, I use `dmenu` with i3 and often run the `st` terminal.
Only anti intellectual leftists would deny that increasing taxes increases the odds of capital flight, but it's not the only factor to consider. There are various benefits to living in a country, and a tax increase will not necessarily cause capital flight, or more importantly, decreased tax revenue. Seems like Norway overplayed their cards this time, but that doesn't necessarily mean a wealth tax is bad. Just important to keep in mind that economics is real.

Also noticed that a lot of people are suggesting laws against capital flight, but this is also a very risky idea. Having capital that can't be moved inheritly decreases its value. You might be able to capture short term value, but you risk future investment, which could lead to a death spiral.
Plus we can install Linux applies to Macs as well. It basically just runs on Intel ones more or less and for Apple Silicon there is the Asahi Project.
That's not even a billion dollars! If you round down, it's zero billion!
Activision CEO says gamers would 'revolt' if 'Call of Duty' were made exclusive
I'm only talking about the parent comment in my reply.

But okay, I'll bite. How is fly.io not the Web?