skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
2007 Fact or Fiction?: Living People Outnumber the Dead

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...

Arthur C Clarke https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/212808-behind-every-man-now... "Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth."

also Snopes (updated 2007) https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/recount-your-dead/

no they don't. Here is the beginning of the Scientific Amercian article:

The human population has swelled so much that people alive today outnumber all those who have ever lived, says a factoid whose roots stretch back to the 1970s. Some versions of this widely circulating rumor claim that 75 percent of all people ever born are currently alive. Yet, despite a quadrupling of the population in the past century, the number of people alive today is still dwarfed by the number of people who have ever lived.

In 2002 Carl Haub, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau, a nongovernmental organization in Washington, D.C., updated his earlier estimate of the number of people that have ever existed. To calculate this, he studied the available population data to determine the human population growth rates during different historical periods, and used them to determine the number of people who have ever been born.

For most of history, the population grew slowly, if at all. According to the United Nations' Determinants and Consequences of Population Trends, the first Homo sapiens appeared around 50,000 years ago, though this figure is debatable. Little is known about this distant past and how many of us there might have been, but by the time of the agricultural revolution in the Middle East in 9000 B.C., Earth held an estimated five million people.

Between the rise of farming and the height of Roman rule,population growth was sluggish; at less than a tenth of a percent per year, it crawled to about 300 million by A.D. 1. Then the total fell as plagues wiped out large swathes of people. (The "black death" in the 14th century wiped out at least 75 million.) As a result, by 1650 the world population had only increased to about 500 million. By 1800, though, thanks to improved agriculture and sanitation, it doubled to more than one billion. And, in 2002 when Haub last made these calculations, the planet's population had exploded, reaching 6.2 billion.

To calculate how many people have ever lived, Haub followed a minimalist approach, beginning with two people in 50000 B.C.—his Adam and Eve. Then, using his historical growth rates and population benchmarks, he estimated that slightly over 106 billion people had ever been born. Of those, people alive today comprise only 6 percent, nowhere near 75 percent. "[It is] almost surely true people alive today are some small fraction of [all] people," says Joel Cohen, a professor of populations at the Rockefeller and Columbia Universities in New York City.

... more at above link https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...
The relationship between paid work and unpaid work can be complicated.

I make a living doing something I would still do if not paid. I know this is true because I do in fact voluntarily engage in a lot of unpaid work of exactly the sort I am paid for. The kind of work I do is training. I train software testers.

Working without pay is nice because it is lower stress. I generate new training material in this way.

Working with pay means I have customers. Customers deserve value for money. So, it’s more stress. Still, I only teach what I believe. It’s fun for me. I have agency.

But I rely on people to sign up. If not enough sign up, that will be the end of my business. I don’t know what I would do, then— except I know for sure that I will continue teaching until a few days before my death.
https://seirdy.one/

I'm trying to adopt as much IndieWeb as I can while still remaining a static JS-free site (except for the crappy search results page). Comments are Webmentions.

I test compatibility with a lot more than just mainstream browsers: the Tor Browser's safest mode, various article extractors, NetSurf, Ladybird, w3m, and a dozen other user-agents work well. Accessibility-wise, I'm close to WCAG 2.2 AAA compliance, and have already passed AA; I consider WCAG a starting rather than a stopping point. More on its design is in the "Meta" section.

It has long-form blog articles and short-form notes (microblogs).

My best posts are on the homepage, followed by a bunch of webrings.
https://www.zzpxyx.com/

Random technical memos and tips.
Most theatres are part of malls now aren't they, with the parking shared and therefore not unutilized most of the time?

Or is that just everywhere I've been?
i’m thinking more a custom arch linux iso, configured for a specific purpose.

unikernels are maybe a good idea, for some distant day.
https://blog.uidrafter.com

For building a startup with lean tech.

FreeBSD, Nginx, JavaScript
Yes.

Political campaign contributions is the perfect euphemism for corruption.

Corporations aren't allowed to make direct campaign contributions in Norway; political campaigns are paid for by the public.

(I've been an expat for over two decades, please correct me if anything has significantly changed - of course the companies still have political influence through choices of where to invest etc, but at least it's nowhere as blatant).

One might say it would be a waste of taxpayer money to do the same in Australia, but in the end we would be far better off by cutting off the direct corporate influence.

We might not have gotten an EV tax instead of incentives if we had politicians not directly receiving money from big petrol.

And we might just be able to raise corporate mining taxes to a far better level, clearly state that if you don't like it then just pack up and leave - and let someone else who is willing come profit instead.
"prompt engineering" is a self-destructing field. If you use any rigorous approach to optimizing the prompt, you end up with essentially supervised machine -learning: models can (and do) learn the optimal prompt once there is a yardstick for the goodness of the model's response. That's a classical for a data-scientist, but the skill set has little to do with prompts.

If you are not rigorous, then what you are doing is essentially "black art". It may work for some tasks ad-hoc, but with the rapid pace of model improvement your skill will likely become irrelevant/not needed quickly.
Sorry, this was already on its way out from the very beginning with the term "software engineer".

Outside of tech, being an actual engineer involves universal standards, certifications and the onus and responsibility of failures that the deregulated libertarian paradise of the tech world is impossible to implement.

Actual engineers go through rigorous testing, certification and have universal standards that uphold them to meet these standards regardless of business pressure.

Until the tech and software world have anywhere near that level of scrutiny by public institutions (good luck, all you will hear is the screams of "communism!") then frankly its already looked dumb ever since developers were even called "engineers" to begin with.
>Fireworks are an absolutely minuscule contributor to climate change.

That may be but I still spend the 5th and 6th wheezing
No, they do not. That's not how LLMs work, and stating that it is betrays an absolute lack of understanding of the underlying mechanisms.

LLMs generate statistically likely sequences of tokens. Their statistical model is derived from huge corpora, such as the contents of the entire (easily searchable) internet, more or less. This makes it statistically likely that, given a common query, they will produce a common response. In the realm of code, this makes it likely the response will be semantically meaningful.

But the statistical model doesn't know what the code means. It can't. (And trying to use large buzzwords to convince people otherwise doesn't prove anything, for what it's worth.)

To see what I mean, just ask ChatGPT about a slightly niche area. I work in programming languages research at a university, and I can't tell you how many times I've had to address student confusion because an LLM generated authoritative-sounding semantic garbage about my domain areas. It's not just that it was wrong, but that it just makes things up in every facet of the exercise to a degree that a human simply couldn't. They don't understand things; they generate text from statistical models, and nothing more.
India aims to produce semiconductors at home within 18 months
> One benefit that I can think of is a niche, overriding DLLs and SOs to provide
updated functionality, for example, on my Windows 10 machine, when I want to
play a game that has 3dfx vooodoo glide support, I usually use that, but I replace
the glide2x.dll with a new version from the nGlide project, which translates the
glide api into a modern API and also gives me control over resolution and stuff
that the original program does not know anythig about..

This is such a cool idea... if only
They are lucrative because they are drab. No one wants to build the unsexy stuff such as enterprise tax systems. It’s also normally one that requires deep technical knowledge outside of tech
> I suspect the goal there is being able to stop/disrupt those groups without going all the way through the legal system.

In other words: a loophole
Postgres is harder to setup; Using Couchdb can be set up completely in-memory and in IndexedDB as a prototype tool (as PouchDB), then set to sync with a hosted DB somewhere else. For < 10000 user apps, I'd want this flexibility, I think.

If I have more than 10k users, I'd have more problems
https://nickolinger.com

I post infrequently but try to keep it interesting
https://porkrind.org/missives/

Just random stuff, quite often just how I solved something that I did’t have much success googling. I used to wonder if it made any difference until I googled some obscure error I was getting and ended up with my blog as the top answer. Totally solved my problem, too :-).

I was going to submit this entry to HN but never got around to it: https://porkrind.org/missives/decoding-the-sprite-format-of-...
https://magis.substack.com/

Writing about data-as-a-serice (ie. selling datasets), especially as it relates to finance & hedge funds. Includes both technical pieces, summaries of big events at my startup, and higher level questions on data valuation.
While US celebrates its independence, Hawaiians still wait for theirs
Relevant tidbit: hot mixing with quicklime was key for this self-healing property[1], as it allowed the creation of small lime clasts across the material.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/ancient-roman-concre...
Biden was going for a Hail Mary on this one. I suspect that even he thought it was a big-if. I'm sure there were a truckload of attorneys telling him why his executive order was overreaching.

But the problem remains, what do you do about a problem that is stifling a whole generation? It's leading many to postpone buying a home and even starting a family. I suspect it's affecting the size of the next generation too. They never should have gotten into so much debt. But they did. Now what?
Simple Unix Chat
Hyrum's law to the extreme. Adding anything in OSes tend to have users that rail against breaking changes.
Whether we take it seriously or not is immaterial to its overall contribution to the discourse.
Lena Khan wouldn't let Microsoft acquire a paperclip manufacturing plant right now, do you think this merger would ever be allowed?
I curate the list of channels that I'm willing to watch. Mostly science, math, engineering, etc. Like that I'm free from the algorithm. YouTube is still the best most educational and interesting media out there.

But yes. YouTube shorts are a massive net negative. I wish I could remove them completely.
Kremlin open to prisoner swap involving detained US reporter Evan Gershkovich
Not sure what to say. It’s been hard. I need to take a break.
Do you ned a lot of experience to know how to start browser-native tools?

I wouldn't have a clue how to start with Web Components and all the other things, to build a < 1000 user web app. I've read the Web Components docs and tutorials but there's few tutorials that are like "Here's how to a full system for XYZ; here's to
handle templating, routing, API data layer, server-side, etc."

I don't think I have the energy to move off from Sveltekit to a new thing, without having to re-learn everything and make a ton of mistakes
Microsoft literally researched every tech article about GUIs to extract all the terms journalists used to describe them. They then chose the most common word from all these articles.
Browsers have bugs, meanwhile most extensions are actively malware while also having bugs.
The blockchain does prevent fraud as it is transparent, it just requires the end user to in essence wipe their own ass.
Have you tried nixos? Its a totally different paradigm and definitely an acquired taste, but I used gentoo for ~2 years, then used Arch for ~5 and now am switching everything to nixos.

Main benefits is setting up a new machine is much easier, and updates are easier because almost all the normal configuration is managed by nixos (in the nix language) as opposed to regular files floating around etc.
https://normal-people.com/

I can see I love the mix of business, psychology and software dev...
Sprae: Microhydration for Document Tree
Hmm, so is your conclusion that dog walking startups are not venture scale? But there are several dog walking startups that have received VC funding, and at least one that's IPO'ed. I agree with all your points that makes these types of gig economy businesses difficult to be profitable, but they similarly apply to many businesses like food delivery -- so this can't be right. (unless you believe none of these gig economy apps are successful, which some people argue, but is a bit of a stretch imo).
Why LXD over podman? I've found podman to be a pretty great docker lite.
Yep. In practice, people wanting to make something cool when they'd be way better off making something boring can be a real multi-pronged liability.
People who think A.I. will kill us should be worried that concrete will kill us.

There are many materials that could be superior in quality and environmentally benign than Portland cement-based concrete not least the Sulfur concrete which is commonly used in China today

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7660051/

and particularly Geopolymer concrete

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

but all of these face resistance from the Portland cement industry which has already standardized products for regulators.
Can’t tell much from the docs — How does this compare to fly.io?
Solar energy cannot be harvested "24/7 just about anywhere." Not even close. Not even half. And it's unpredictable on top of that.
Aaron is often said to be a reddit founder but I dont think that is true. His Wikipedia page goes into the details. He founded infogami and created web.py as part of that. He later joined up with reddit and helped port reddit from lisp to python. The article states "As a result, Swartz was given the title of co-founder of Reddit." Which sounds retroactive/honorary to me.

Not to put down Aaron in any way. Just interested in what really happened.
BTCPayServer’s container setup was quite trivial, granted I used it last a few years ago. I had no issues with the container itself. You are free to install deps in whichever you want, but not sure how containerizing setup makes it bloat and/or unnecessary.
Electrical stimulation might help prevent atrophy while waiting to see if the bracing works.
To save you a click, it's ambergris.

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-ambergris.html
So much this. The thing hallucinates far more than the hyperventilation seems willing to acknowledge.

You really need to be quite competent in the thing you're asking it to do in order to ferret out the hallucinations, which greatly diminishes the potency of GPT in the hands of someone who has no knowledge of the relevant language/runtime/problem domain/etc.
https://www.barbariangrunge.com/

About writing and analyzing fiction, and now featuring original fiction

I think this is my most popular article: what I learned after reading 100 short stories

https://www.barbariangrunge.com/p/what-i-learned-after-100-s...
Wrote this blog awhile ago, thought this title would scare most of people to click in
By thriving what I meant was be a really skillful person in the field. But to answer your question definitely building things a handful of people love is my goal. Can you tell me how to improve ML skills?
Fractal created 130 companies. Founders say VCS 'blacklist' them
I only write about things that I think are a genuinely unique contribution to a topic.

https://marctreagan.medium.com/
God knows there’s enough material
Thank you for these my friend
https://insightfultroll.com/

Just random stuff I come across and my thoughts on it - more of entries that have interested me and so I have a log of it over time. More for me then others so - hope someone also gets something out of it :)
Or after some window, maybe exercise of the muscles within the allowed loading and movement range.
https://archive.ph/rIc69
I'm not hip to all the big names in open source development, but I know Lennart Pottering and Guido van Rossum both ended up at Microsoft, so they might be able keep a few other engineers around.
And yet drug prohibition has made those worse, not to mention the worse policing for people.
I opened your home page. The two guinea pig headlines were enough to convince me I should add this to my RSS feed list and read more.
Same here. Anyone that works in a highly-regulated industry doing software (e.g. finance, healthcare) is probably not going to see much AI pressure on programmers until the legal quagmire is cleared up. There are privacy concerns with the data, the same ownership/copyright problems often discussed, and ultimately, there needs to be someone (a human) to take accountability (blame) if everything falls down horribly.
I hate 3D secure, it's a way for banks to move the liability and inconvenience to me, their customers. In most implementation, I need to wait for an sms, often that sms takes ages to come.

Then there's a bit of a monopoly with 3d secure implementation by cardinal.js and their solution falls down completely if you have a decent amount of traffic on the site (I have worked on flash sales websites, cardinal js is about as reliable as I can throw my car)
Most stores I shop at are unable to take money if their internet is down. And, to be a grumpy old man, it seems most of their employees lack experience in offline credit cards or cash and making change. And I have no way of getting cash with ATMs which seem to be via some sort of network. I don’t think I can even make phone calls or send sms without IP transit available to the phone companies.
It did for a while but fell out of favor. Couch doesn’t have any current major endorsements and many companies that used it have moved onto better solutions. Couchbase had most of the momentum and it turned into a different product.
I have a huge steam library but only has a macbook, steam deck enables me to play a lot of those games. For some games I even prefer to play it on the deck over my PS4, for example I had a great time playing Sekiro on the deck.
My guess is that the NTSB wants to focus on causes that they can issue guidance for, rather than assign blame. Sure, the captain's state of mind most likely contributed to the incident, but it also revealed a couple of issues that warranted new guidance, which is a big part of what the reports are for.
olshansky.info
On Windows, your specs will make most of the difference in benchmarks.

When running on wine, we could say that how you are running a game can have as much on performance impact as your specs.

Identifying the differences between setups is hard.
> The issue has changed in my lifetime. Originally affirmative action was used to help people who had been systematically discriminated against get into higher learning institutions in an attempt to make up for some of these wrongs.
Although a difficult process I believe most people genuinely believed in the concept. Fast forward to today and we have a much different framework. Equity.

The people who believe either of these ideas aren't a monolith. Some people subscribe to affirmative action for the original reasons you describe without wanting or subscribing to this "equity" concept.
I want to know what their DRM strategy is going to be. Are they just going to terminate the contracts of anyone who downloads the full sources?
10 mins a day is still way too much. It’s 99.99% absofuckinguseless.

I say this as someone who read it for decades. It’s all caricatures of the truth designed to push some other narrative.

Every single time I thought I was informed and chatted with someone who had even a small notional bit of first hand information, it became immediately apparent how I was both extremely ignorant and how my false sense of knowledge made it worse.
It doesn't sound like it. It just harvests the charge off the water particles.

Imo this is interesting, but I'd expect there should be diminishing returns to more layers of this in any one place - subject to airflow and current humidity at the least - there can only be so much charge on any particular set of water particles, and even if natural processes restore it they won't do so instantly.

The big question is, in a more optimized form of the device, whether the economics of such power generation are useful - how many $$ has to be spent to produce what sort of power output. It's an interesting proof of concept but without competitive economics for some use case, it is unlikely to see any notable adoption.
I'd say the issue is not just "going back to that situation", it's the world being forcefully thrown back into that situation one random day in an instant, with maybe a couple hours advanced notice, which is the bigger issue. Also the impact on other systems such as potentially long-term significant damage to the electrical grid, it's not just losing the internet. It would have an immediate, out of the blue, devastating social/industrial/economic/civilization impact.
>I posit that one should be afraid of fighting an ant because the ant is weaker than you. The fear in this case is not of being defeated or humiliated, but of being cruel and unkind. So simply, what kind of character are if you can only fight something that is weaker than you?

That's different - that person wouldn't fear the ant like a coward, but take a moral instance against fighting entities weaker than oneself.

>On the other hand, if you choose to climb the harder hill or fight the harder fight (lions, kraken, etc.), that isn't indicative of foolhardiness and neither is it indicative of courage (I agree). It is a simply a fight that befell you and you decided not to roll over and die. I think it is nihilist to fight something that is stronger than you, and you tacitly accept your defeat before you even begin the fight.

I think that courage is only a meaningful attribute to assign to a being when there's an actual choice between fighting and not fighting. In the case of a "fight or die" situation, you don't really have much of a choice.

>Tbh, fights are depressing. I am more inclined to being a fool than a fighter.

Frankly? I hear ya. Ditto, in large part.

The same reasoning could be used with other moral dimensions than coward vs. courageous vs. reckless. I'd argue that it applies to greed; by Aristotle's reasoning the opposite of greed would be making oneself poor, or perhaps lack of care for material possessions. It's a silly argument, in the eyes of someone living in 2023. (Even if it was a rather clever reasoning for those times.)
To Whom It May Concern,

By reading this, you have confirmed your membership in the Five Percenters Club. Welcome.