skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Could an oxygen concentrator increase my productivity?
Has anyone here tried using an oxygen concentrator to increase their productivity? I can get the CO2 level in my room to around 580 with a comfortable temperature, but I never feel quite as clear-headed as when I'm working outside. I'm wondering if getting an oxygen concentrator that gets my effective CO2 level to ~400 would carry any risks or downsides that I should know about. For example, one thing I'm learning is that these machines can be loud, so I'd need to consider whether the productivity gain from increased oxygen would be offset by increased ambient noise.

Update: Here are a list of things I think I'll try based on comments: 1. oxygen cylinder, 2. CO2 scrubber, 3. oxygen concentrator, 4. air exchanger.
My thought is to represent complex things, use better prose or diagrams. Though José and some of his friends are warming me up to interactive tools. Livebook has some stuff I need to look at more. Currently mostly targeted at developers, of course.
Every CEO of the top tech companies would be fired for the kind of controversy Musk has monthly.

Musk gets away with it because he's the owner but most social media and tech companies aren't led by this awful people.
Ghosh, a second “terrible take about the web” from Hugo Landau in a week (after the “I intentionally mix-up threat models and also I don't understand service workers”[1] we got on monday)…

[1]: https://www.devever.net/~hl/webcrypto
Do you think it's more or less funny than auto-replying to all PR enquiries with poo, when you are an incredibly large company?
To produce and distribute food for the world’s population without fossil fuels, would not be practical.

Should we halt all space exploration and aviation until neither require fossil fuels?

Perhaps someday in the future it would be, and we should work towards it, but note that oil bootstrapped a lot of modern way of life.
I'm confused, doesn't this show wasm bindgen performing near vanilla js? Admittedly, there's overhead, but fairly minimal. My assumption is that DOM operations are slow because of what they do under the hood, not because of the overhead of calling them.
> Hashing (and cryptographic hashes) need to be inverted because of the pigeon-hole principle. If we have a space of 1000 numbers, we want 1000 unique hashes to 'maximize the space'.

This is non-sensical and false.

Hash functions are not invertible. They are not injective functions. The domain is much larger than their range. You can hash multi gb files and get a small fixed size result. Furthermore, the entire point of a hash function is to not be invertible

To be clear invertibility (and especially trap door invertibility) is quite important in crypto. After all - it is mostly the study of secret messages - no point to that if you cant unscramble the message.

However understanding the goal is not the same as understanding how it works and how it fails. There is a long journey going from invertible functions are cool to wtf is an eliptic curve. The point of a course in cryptography isn't to teach people just what a cipher does as a black box, but to teach them how it works under the hood.

> Its not like Galois Fiels are randomly used you know, mathematicians liked the properties of Galois Fields... and how easy it is to invert those operations.

If you mean in the context of aes s-boxes, Other block ciphers do not do that. The important aspect was their non linearity not invertibility. Any valid sbox is going to be invertible.

> Once you realize that invertibility is the key to all of these algorithms, then its very straightforward.

I'd be curious how you connect this to zero knowledge proofs
If I understand it would be something like. You used to get a dedicated secretary. But now most of those roles are now handled by computer. So in a sense everyone has had their workload mildly increased. But worse than that the workload is typically of a different nature so, for example, excessive meetings are now easy to generate.

I would also add that it may be of a net benefit that fewer roles are needed. But that net benefit overwhelming goes to the owners of the company. And that's what we've been seeing the last 30+ years the very wealthy have become much more wealthy while everyone else is worse off. ()

() growing wealth inequality is very complex and I'm sure would be happening anyway. I'm not saying computers cause wealthy inequality but they don't seem to be doing much good in fixing it either
You mean ownership nor license changes.
As someone also with ADHD I agree. I can and have programmed in C++ and Rust but I very much dislike the noise and clatter. I don't believe it's necessary given the rise of LSPs and the ability to query relevant information as needed.

It's also a big factor of why I enjoy programming in Nim, which provides low level performance but with minimal use of sigils. Though I also appreciated Julia's syntax as well that also provides good access to performance.
Abstinence means what I wrote. It means to refrain (= not do) something. In the sexual context and on this topic, this would mean not buying sex.

It's cool that you have to resort to low-key ("look in the dictionary", "shaming", "primitive and regressive", "close-minded") blows to push your argument, fantastic for discussion.

Oh, and you don't have to be a puritanical to think that intimacy for sale is a bad idea and should not be encouraged.

Once again, the problem is societal. If you treat everything as a market, you will get a society where everyone is treated as a commodity.
Shareholders of companies should be held accountable, no?

They’re the ones asking for more profits…

Or what about our current government who recently demanded oil companies produce more to lower prices? Am I as democratic voter morally in the wrong? If not, why not?
https://atproto.com/guides/overview#algorithmic-choice
>One of my friends asked an acquaintance for a referral, but was ghosted. She deleted the conversation and tried to pretend that the exchange never happened.

What did he expect her to do? Cry about it?
I've always felt bad charging so much for so few lines.
Show HN: Nanoalsa, asoundlib replacement for embedded systems
Hi,

I wanted to use ALSA in an embedded system, and that's when I realized how bad the official asoundlib library actually is. It is huge, bloated, requires tons of configuration files, tries to load shared libraries in run-time, not thread-safe (due to the use of signals), often segfaults, and leaks memory badly (its developers arrogantly deny that, but valgrind confirms that it really does).

Unfortunately the Linux ALSA interface isn't documented at all (there's a doc for sound card driver writers, called "kernel API", and the asoundlib high-level interface for applications, called "library API", but nothing about the ioctl interface, https://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/). So I was curious how much of the asoundlib's bloat we can get rid off. I've spent days figuring out what asoundlib actually does, and strace was my best friend during this experiment.

https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/nanoalsa

I've concluded my findings in Nano ALSA, an MIT licensed, stb-style single header library (12k, ca. 300 SLoC). It's based on the UNIX philosophy, "do one thing only, but do that right". So it can do one thing, and one thing only. It can be used to easily play PCM data, which is what most applications want. It does not load shared libraries in run-time, it does not use signals, it does not have a mixer nor a sequencer, just good ol' PCM playback all there is. K.I.S.S.

Example usage:

alsa_t ctx; /* internal state (few bytes only) */

alsa_open(&ctx, 0, 0, SNDRV_PCM_FORMAT_S16_LE, 44100, 2); /* specify requested characteristics */

alsa_write(&ctx, buf, numframes); /* play the audio */

alsa_close(&ctx); /* free resources */

That's all to it. (Also has an async interface too, which is unlike asoundlib's, signal-free and thread-safe.)
Last I checked, he hadn't paid a single dime of that promised severance.
The original LaserWriter came out in 1985 with a M68000 CPU running at 12 MHz, with 512 KB working RAM and a 1 MB framebuffer.

The Macintosh at the time had the same M68000 CPU, only running at only 8 MHz and with 128 KB of RAM (or 512 KB for the Fat Mac) which was shared with screen RAM.
I wrote a custom FTP->GDrive proxy daemon for use by my scanner. (I wanted USB->GDrive, but it turns out my Brother scanner wouldn't allow me to override scanning parameters on its display for USB, but it does for FTP...)

What are you using for this transfer?
how do you measure productivity?
As for bounds checks (and other traps) they're all checked at runtime, no reliance on OS protections.

This has a runtime cost, the reduction of which was a focus of the last release:
https://github.com/tetratelabs/wazero/releases/tag/v1.2.1

The optimizing compiler should also help here (with bounds checks elimination, and elision of some other checks, like divide-by-zero).
I'm pretty sure they're conflating a higher likelihood of determining an action precluding risk factor prior to action with actual self control and discipline....

It's more just that the smarter you are the more likely you are to both recognize the existence of the risk factor as well as "do the math" before your impulses induce action.
Holding a private key in a way that is both usable and secure is not easy, for fundamental reasons. As such, it is impossible for this to catch on with the general public, ever.

A far mor likely outcome is for government-managed identities to become the only way to access certain kinds of services, for better and for worse. Governments already have the identity management part handled, with the legal system acting as the ultimate fall-back for any corner case. The integration is already widely used for certain services (the entire financial system relies on government-managed identities already, all around the world), so it's just a matter of extending this. It also helps solve certain less talked about problems of identity systems, such as preventing children from accessing certain kinds of content.

Ideally, instead of the current solution of every institution having access to all of your personal details so they can check your identity with the government, governments could start working for the opposite model - a government-issued and managed IdP, where only the government knows your personal details, and where enterprises get an opaque token they can use to ask the government about a set of details they need to operate their business.
> Developers really need to stop bringing their religion into open source.

Says the person complaining "why isn't my language supported"
For a current example, see Elon Musk. Even here on a relatively level-headed hacking forum, any discussion of Musk will turn into poo-flinging between fanboys that worship him and haters who deny that success of his companies has anything to do with him.
What would be the shape of a rotationally-symmetric (nearly conical) shape that has 1/2 of the volume of a cylinder with same base?
Not necessarily. I have been working fully remotely for a USA organization, although being a non profit the compensation is nowhere near FANG or anything from tech.

I have some ex-coworkers and acquaintances working remotely from Europe for Bay area companies and they definitely have way higher compensations even without taking in account stock options.
It seems more plausible than the alternative. Let's say that Twitter availability issues were really caused by disabling anonymous access and that Elon wants to back out of his decision due to public backlash, wouldn't he just reverse the decision? That would fix both of his issues at once. He could even claim to have solved the scraping issues through a clever trick that doesn't require disabling anonymous access. The fact he hasn't done so indicates that there is a genuine issue that he can't just fix by restoring anonymous access.
I think you can still find the admission rates for Oxbridge online. Keep in mind you can only apply to one or the other when comparing.

It varies a lot depending on course, but here is Oxford:
https://www.ox.ac.uk/about/facts-and-figures/admissions-stat...

For undergrad it's 14%.

Harvard:
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics

3%

That's quite some difference, especially if we consider that Harvard has special tracks for legacies and various others. What's the real admission rate? 2%?

For other European unis I don't know what exactly the criteria are for being elite.
Whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly
Infact, if there was some practice, like advertising, that could make an instance profitable, that would be incentivised. Ad-based instances and others with paid extra features that are not protocol-compatible might start popping up, and fedi would be enshittified, just like it's predecessors.
Given this is their only comment I'll dare say they're very deliberately being inflammatory.
The spent-fuel pond fire is also the ongoing risk at Zaporizhzhya. There's a long list of stressors going into that probabilistic equation: e.g. the reservoir it draws on for cooling water source collapsed with the dam bombing; and all of its connections to the offsite power grid have disappeared, save one (now a single point of failure).
The crucial difference is that people consent to get on a plane.

There are quite a few people who are afraid of flying, so afraid that they refuse to fly. That’s of course their prerogative.

The problem with nuclear power stations is that when they have serious accidents they don’t just affect the people who wanted to build them, they affect everybody, including the people who didn’t want them to be built, and even people in neighboring countries who didn’t even get a vote on it - depending on which way the wind blows.

So the nuclear power station has to be built as safely as the most fearful person demands.
As if people don't have the right to get a little emotional when this is what they're up against.

Is there a name for this "appeal to-non emotion" line of non-reasoning? Maybe the "Vulcan Fallacy"?
PromptAppGPT: A rapid prompt app development framework based on GPT
Hi all! We're rolling out a rapid prompt app development framework - PromptAppGPT.

PromptAppGPT is a low-code prompt-based rapid app development framework. PromptAppGPT contains features such as low-code prompt-based development, GPT text generation, DALLE image generation, online prompt editer+compiler+runer, automatic user interface generation, support for plug-in extensions, etc. PromptAppGPT aims to enable natural language app development based on GPT.

PromptAppGPT significantly lowers the barrier to GPT application development, allowing anyone to develop AutoGPT-like applications with a few lines of low code.

You are wellcome to:

1. Join us to collaboratively develop the framework: https://github.com/mleoking/PromptAppGPT/
2. Visit the website to try the framework: https://promptappgpt.wangzhishi.net/
3. See the example apps including the 70-line low-code implementation of the AutoGPT-like AI auto-assistant: https://github.com/mleoking/PromptAppGPT/blob/main/PagApps.m...
Cigarettes are still legal and oil should remain so but the price of oil should include its cost to society, not only profit maximization considerations.
Idk, but maybe you can experiment with an oxygen cylinder and one of those nose pieces they give to sick people. If that doesn't help, an oxygen concentrator might also not help. The experiment should be relatively inexpensive.
I'd say that this is an application of Fubini's theorem which is very clearly calculus (or analysis, not sure where the distinction is drawn in English).
This is a great point.

There are two things that pop into my mind here.

One is that to pay more for an ad the advertiser wants to know which user explicitly interacted with it or saw it. So non-intrusive ads on the sides of a UI are by far lower in value during sales.

The other is that the one way to increase interaction and value is to prove that the ad is the only thing the user was exposed to, ie. eliminate everything else.

So what we get today is an entire aesthetic and de-cluttered look. Even when you pay for premium the design is still made so that the machine can read into what your eyeballs are up to.
what a concept
This will not survive the courts. Damages are unconscionable.
"Tainted" is an odd word. Any country that would reject a Jew from entering for having an Israeli stamp in their passport is a country I would never want to step foot in, whatever my views on Israeli politics.
You shouldn't have to. If you look at the reviews for product A, you should be getting reviews for product A. If they've updated product A, it is still product A and they can let you know that it was for an old version.

Google already does this for games and apps on their play store.

You shouldn't have to sort because companies are showing you reviews for product A, but you are looking at product B. These aren't even reviewing the same product. It is dishonest, and the consumer shouldn't be the one with the responsibility here.
The difference is that Twitter was not arrogant about it. Saying they where hardcore engineers with insane working hours and other bollocks. Musk dislike comes from him being extremely dickish about other peoples work while being an absolute clusterfuck of a manager.

Twitter was not bad because of its tech. Musk made it worse.
The real difference is lawyers and doctors are protected by law from competition.

If programmers had similar gatekeeping, the union would make sure everyone had access to training from time to time.
An obvious problem is no servers. You'd have to get really creative to build a forum on IPFS, and hosting Wordpress is just not possible.
His entire point is "as long as the quality is decent".

I think he's right - low quality CCTV will just tell you what you already knew - your stuff was stolen by a man of average build wearing clothes.
> An improbable outcome of widespread catastrophe (irradiating a million people) is and should be treated as something worse than a more-probable outcome of localized catastrophe (plane crash).

Quoting myself again:

Imagine if any other tech had the same fear-mongering. We'd never have a single hydroelectric plant after Banqiao dam failure that killed anywhere from 25 000 to 240 000 and left 11 million people homeless.
This is what Org mode does. It's still very tied to Emacs, but there's an effort to standardize the Org format. Hopefully this will help its adoption outside of Emacs, it's a nice markup (and a lot more).
not if disney can prevent it
The facts are straightforward.

Oxbridge's admissions rates are not the lowest in the UK; schools no one outside the UK has heard of, like Warwick, have the lowest, and their admissions rates are still two to three times higher than the Ivies'. In many countries, universities admit all applicants that meet the qualifications. An example is Switzerland, where ETH Zurich—by every measure, among the world's finest universities—admits every Swiss with a Matura (university-track high school diploma) who applies.
5 minutes is maybe an exaggeration. I know that when Tweetbot reported I had >500 in my feed I had enough nonsense to read for a couple of 20 minute tram rides.
Not to fall into exactly the trap that you set, but there is a survivorship bias at play here.

If you are wholly committed to young earth creationism, many college classes will be an unpleasant confrontation from start to finish and very little of your existing knowledge will help you pass classes even if you want to play along. People who come to college with more mainstream ideas will have an easier time and be more likely to succeed.

And it's not entirely surprising that graduates have a bit of a calcified worldview. If you read Marx without dropping out to join a revolution and were able to deal with a lot of compelling but conflicting arguments in whatever field you studied it's going to take quite a bit for you to radically change your mind.
There is certainly bias, but there’s also a whole lot of “refuse to acknowledge reality”.

Certainly, there is a cost/benefit to compare, but really, bluntly, we’re shit at cleaning up nuclear disasters.

In every situation where they’ve occurred, it’s taken longer and cost more than anticipated, and the point here is that this enormously expensive disaster could have been 10x worse if not for a lucky coincidence.

> Even if there is a risk of a $10 trillion disaster…

/sigh…

The problem is not that it’s too expensive; it’s that we’re not technologically advanced enough to deal with nuclear disasters other than brute force “pack everything into bricks and bury it in a hole”.

People will do it, because they close their eyes and hope nothing goes wrong (hey, won’t be in office when it does, this is your problem next generation, haha~), but things will go wrong, and it will. Again. Be crushingly expensive.

…and until we solve ”deal with it when it goes wrong”, bluntly, nuclear energy is always going to be controversial based on different levels of risk acceptance by different groups.

It’s not cognitive bias. You just have a different opinion. Neither you nor they are “right” about acceptable levels of risk.

The solution isn’t singing and dancing about nuclear power being safe.

It is not safe.

The solution is find ways to make it safe by being able to contain, control and deal with nuclear materials without needing “10000 years in a hole in the ground” for waste material, or “evacuate the entire metropolitan Tokyo” when things go wrong. Those are not things that happen with “safe” technology.
It shouldn't be an either or sort of situations - it is quite possible to go after both.

If you don't go after Amazon, the issue continues. If you don't go after the supplement seller, they rebrand and/or just start selling elsewhere and keep up their deceptive practices.
In the long term, everything is a good thing over all because humans adapt to make it that way
> The problem with nuclear power stations is that when they have serious accidents they don’t just affect the people who wanted to build them, they affect everybody

Why do we keep building hydroelectric plants (and dams in general)? Why do we keep building coal plants which are more radioactive than niclear plants, and are often located in densely populated areas?

Why don't you apply the same logic to other things?
As an immigrant in US, I feel that this whole American exceptionalism thing has been sort of internalized and reflected by much of the American liberal left into some kind of "we're exceptionally bad" deal. I often hear claims that US is horrible because such-and-such is common practice here unlike "all other civilized countries" or some such, while the speaker is oblivious to the fact that many American laws regarding something are actually very liberal by that standard (voter identification is probably the single most common example, but it also comes up sometimes wrt abortion term limits in some states).

To be clear, being better at something than somebody else who is even worse than you is not a valid excuse for being bad either way. I just hate that this kind of rhetoric 1) discredits the points being made, and 2) spreads misinformation.
Can you describe what happened that qualifies as "scapegoated"?
This misses two important points about moderation/censorship:

1. I don't want to trawl through garbage to reach posts I like. Even a single gore video or such is enough to ruin most people's day.

2. It's not enough for me to block content I don't like - in certain situations, I have a legitimate need to block others from seeing content I don't like. Specifically, if someone is spreading lies about me, or pornography of me, the fact that I can block that person is not going to help me, I need a way for the platform to stop showing those lies/pornography to others, or at least to automatically attach my own version of the story to those lies (of course, I should first have to somehow prove those are lies).