skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mastodon performance update and Meta Threads [Email]
A very special thanks to those of you who have supported our community
through https://sdf.org/support - We are truly grateful.

This weekend we've made substantial improvements in the distribution of
the instance across a cluster of servers which we hope you will notice
and enjoy. While usage and new user signup continues to go down, we are
still well above any daily usage we saw from 2017 - September 2022, which
is really amazing.

Many have asked about the launch of Meta's Threads. Here are some answers:

* Has Meta contacted SDF?

Meta has not contacted SDF. If we were contacted we have no interest in
conducting business with them and if asked would not sign an NDA to
discuss the their business matters.

* Will SDF block Threads?

There may be no other choice. If Threads was launched with federation
we could measure their impact on our instance and others through community
discussions on irc and discord. While Meta has been hyping threads as
growing quickly, it is clear that the signup rate is from their existing
Instagram customer pool and the numbers are likely a bit inflated.

That being said, what is concerning is that by reaching 100,000,000 or more
and *then* switching on federation we could experience a "snuffing out".
While ActivityPub relies on relationships to interconnect the fediverse if
they truly have 100,000,000 active users it could completely overwhelm
small to medium instances that make those connections forcing them to
block Threads.

Please keep in mind we're building the social network we all want and you
are a part of this. The road might get bumpy for a bit, but remember the
Mastodon Covenant and the principles of a non-commercial internet. When
Threads comes up in conversations with friends you can help them understand
the importance of community diversity, decentralization and a non-commercial
internet.

From what we understand Mastodon CEO/Founder Eugen Rochko has been in direct
communication with Meta regarding their intent with the Fediverse and has
subsequently written a blog post here:

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/

Meta may force a split into two Fediverses, but ultimately Meta will need to
make theirs pay. A positive thing to realize is that it shows we're on the
right path and it may just be a matter of weathering the storm. We may end
up just where we are today which is a Fediverse that does not include Meta.

Stay positive and enjoy being part of your community!

https://mastodon.sdf.org
No idea why Thaxll and the other comments are mentioning mutexes.

The equivalent (*) API to this Java API in Rust does exist; it's `String::from_utf8(Vec<u8>) -> String`. And the bug in TFA does not exist there. Since the signature consumes the `Vec<u8>` it's impossible for the caller or any other code to still have access to it to be able to modify it concurrently.

Also consider the similar API `str::from_utf8(&[u8]) -> &str`. The bug in TFA does not exist here either. Since the signature takes a `&` borrow of the slice, it is not possible for anything else in the program to have a `&mut` borrow of that slice to be able to modify it concurrently. After the function returns other parts of the program could mutate the slice, but they would only be able to do after the `&str` that is derived from the slice is dropped. So once again nothing would be able to mutate the slice and observe the effects in the `&str` itself.

All these "unable to do" are enforced at compile-time, because "consuming a value makes it unavailable to other parts of the program" and "cannot get a `&mut` to a value as long as a `&` from that value is still in scope" are all typesystem concepts. No mutexes or other runtime checks are involved.

(*) "Equivalent" in that it's an API to convert a sequence of bytes into a string. The Rust API doesn't have the encoding thing of the Java API because the Rust String / str are required to be utf-8 internally. But if an exact equivalent of the Java API did exist in Rust, the signature would still be the same wrt consuming `Vec<u8>` / borrowing `[u8]`, so it doesn't change the overall point re: concurrent modification. Furthermore, concurrent modification would cause problems even with Rust Strings if it was possible, because it would allow a String / str to become invalid utf-8 after they'd already been checked to be valid utf-8, which Rust considers to be UB.
This really hits the nail on the head, so many people miss this.

Didn't realize myself until I was diagnosed with a sarcoma (1% of adult cancer diagnoses), MPNST (a single digit percentage of sarcomas).

Doctors scrambled to figure out what to do - first we should just cut it out, then, well maybe we should do chemo + radiation. A day before getting a port put in receive a phone call that "oops, chemo doesn't work, just cut it out and radiation afterwards."

Luckily I was in a good position to get multiple opinions and read the data myself.

Almost 2 years cancer free now and am so grateful, but looking at the data, it's all seems like a toss up unless you can just cut it out with clean margins.

I really can't help but think modern medicine is really missing the mark with the reactionary approach to disease in general, but of course I have no clue what to do about it.
It is. The court is basically saying here "We'll accept your argument that the Switch isn't in the same market because it doesn't matter. You're wrong either way."

They do this again later on in regards to the FTC's arguments that cloud gaming and multi-game subscription services are functionally separate markets.
Evergreen Airlines went bankrupt in 2013. The founder died in 2014. The foundation that owned the museum land went bankrupt in 2016. The museum is operating as non-profit but there isn't anything left to be separate from.
Honest question: how can you expect stuff for free without ads?
This was one of the reasons. Also, how does a small company provide a laptop to remote workers across the globe in just about every locale and tax jurisdiction, many with specific job requirements and most with Strong Opinions?

There are many reasons not to work for Canonical, but the opportunity to pick and choose your own hardware rather than suffer what someone else thought your would need seems an odd choice.
Interested in some parts of the methodology (if perhaps someone knows or the creators spot this thread):

* The pairwise comparison: does it freeze updates and calculate all shifts at the same time? For example if you had A > B > C do you calculate the impact of {A>B, A>C, B>C}, sum these impacts together (grouped by the VC), and then apply them? Or do you do it iteratively: if a firm had {A}, then {A>B}, then {A>B>C} do you add 0 then 1 then 2 comparisons as you get new data?

* How do you handle the fact that respondents to the survey are over a large time-frame, so some VCs might get better or worse over that time frame? Is there some Elo-decay applied?
I am discussing a way to be disciplined, which is with decent flexion deliberately built into your self-image.

E.g. I know many people who go through bouts of intense fitness or diet fixations, take a lot of well-deserved pride in their discipline, and then hit a major event that temporarily precludes the fixation. They really struggle to get back on the train.

One major factor, IMO, is that they’re daunted by the intensity of what they achieved before. Obviously in fitness there’s a physical component to this, but there’s a significant mental component as well — especially outside of fitness.

Basically all I’m saying is you can (and should) gradually and deliberately dial up your sense of self-efficacy when it inevitably crosses some local minimum due to events outside of your control. You ought to build a self-image that’s robust to occasional and sometimes significant failures.
It’s also extremely hostile to anything non-trivial like biology or electronics. We all have that cool space-faring ideas in mind from scifi, but reality is more like swimming in a tiny boat through the storms of Pacific Ocean and it’s acid.
it's california only and "every member is vetted". Clicking the sign up button gives you a form to write out an email telling them about yourself. I think it's a "small on purpose" kind of thing
Not to distract everyone from complaining about calculus, but this reminded me of something I heard from a person with a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Caltech. They were not working in astrophysics, but they said the degree was still quite valuable to them. Whenever they had trouble learning something, rather than feel stupid, they reminded themselves: “I have a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Caltech, so I am definitely not stupid. This is just hard.”
I have no doubt English like syntax is a terrible idea but this seems like a surprisingly readable example.
I think you replied to the wrong thread
> Will the courts allow Microsoft to buy Sony gaming business?

Why not? What would it matter to the players on these consoles? Is demand for certain titles so price insensitive that Microsoft could then jack up the price by 100% and people would still buy them? Even if that's true (it's almost certainly not) the barriers to entry in the video game business are extremely low, so this would just create an enormous opportunity and pissed off consumers would jump to a newly created platform.
That is a good comic. But I am not sure "reduces your future earning potential" is really right. If you are going for future earning potential, then there are other things. Probably along the lines of - learn to code - find a way to migrate to the US - live in SF/NYC - learn algorithms and data structures - learn leet code - emotional control/resilience for putting up with those kinda jobs ... etc

I reckon there are plenty of PhDs earning less than $100k around the world, who know calculus and matrix algebra like their ABCs.
RE: Meta Unspools Threads
Every other frame is "penis" text, a drawing of a penis, or something similar. I believe it's a work of art nonetheless, definitely cool. If they did it "right" the result would just end up looking like someone took the original movie, converted it to 16-color space, then randomly moved around groups of pixels. I agree the way this is was executed was much more interesting than the "right" way. It's a cool experiment!
Yeah, back in the day there was Owsley, "crystal dealers", the guys who made white blotter, and all the junk underneath that. The legend was that Owsley was sitting on a giant LSD crystal in a freezer in San Francisco somewhere, and the mass per dose was so small he didn't have to make any more ever.
50 years ago, teenagers partied in the Bronx – and gave rise to hip-hop
Python, Excel, PowerBI are tools, not careers. Should an auto mechanic learn how to use a wrench or a screwdriver?

I haven’t seen the LinkedIn courses but I suspect they count for very little. Most technical certifications have little value on a resume, but may guide you through learning something.

The human mind can learn more than one thing at a time. Schools operate according to that principle. Amazing, I know, but maybe you can learn multiple things at once.
Boring topic again.

Shouldn't there be used to post topics related to science, technology and innovation?
It's still shocking to me that they're used widely, and also pains me that my 15+ years of railing against digital voting computers is now looked upon the same way as the hard-right-wing's complaints (made up ones, but in a semi-related space to my complaints) about said computers.
https://github.com/ccaldarella99/hotdog_not_hotdog
Code Interpreter experiment, where I run YOLOv8 object detector inside Code Interpreter
> What a joke. Because Microsoft is now failing as a gaming company the past 10 years, they’ve been allowed to swallow up competiton.

And why not? If Wal-Mart gets a failing games division, I don't see why it should be stopped from buying Activision, either.
Making a UI that is usable at multiple density levels, especially if it has to adapt to different screen sizes and allow for other customization, seems like a big jump up in complexity. It might be worth it, but I'm not surprised few apps do it.
I posted about it in another comment but will restate it here too. The ARK Venture Fund has exposure to it (roughly 7% of the fund).
What if the pattern had some significance in some culture?

Anyway, something of that caliber actually happened. Torvalds addressed wearing socks and sandals in some interviews as him being not that into fashion.

https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/19/an-interview-with-milleniu...
This had got to be the best thread I’ve ever (inadvertently) started.
Yes, yes, YES! I think you just summarized Douglas Rushkoff's last book in 4 words.
Weren't there four or five investigations of Silk Road going on? If two of them were tainted that still leaves the others.
See https://www.boredpanda.com/cockatoo-anti-nesting-spikes-kato...
“You’re famous so I get to abuse you however I want and you can’t complain” is an absolutely terrible point of view.
No biggie, they could always outsource it to IBM and they'll do it in 4 years.
In practice, mainstream distributions do not offer ready-to-use zero-conf sandboxing for userland applications.

There are of course exceptions, like those using Flatpak, but what I would like to see is Firejail/bwrap applied to all binaries, with sane defaults.

In other words, if I run python or Firefox and they get compromised, they should not be able to read e.g. ~/.ssh and steal my private keys (unless I gave them permission to).

Nix has done a great work making dependencies declarative and reproducible, I would also like clean sandboxing as it is an equally important issue.
Those low power stations in NYC and Chicago are currently using it for a different reason. ATSC 3.0 technically allows for an analog FM side channel at the upper end of the channel's spectrum. In both of those cases, that lands right around 87.7 MHz, which is receivable on most FM radios. They run that as a defacto commercial radio station.
Throw out whole frames that have a large enough Wasserstein distance?
And yet the Art of War tells you to attack when you are ready and your opponent is not. There are some problems that really need to "stew". Others require immediate action even when you aren't ready. It's very hard to tell the difference, but it's wrong to assert that all problems require immediate action (although I agree that if you're going to err, do so on the side of action, in general)
Activision has dozens of famous titles, and a huge IP catalog from the 80's which they can make 100's of exclusives. The $68 Billion price tag tells itself of it's importance in gaming.
To directly answer the question: absolutely yes, though it is not a popular theory nowadays. Whether this is an act of the subconscious, unconscious or is hard to know, but certainly it can frequently manifest unintentionally.

From my experience as an art teacher of many years:

- The student with only one arm who painted figures with only one arm. She did not realize she was doing this and was amazed when it was pointed out.

- The student with only one eye who painted wide panoramas. He had absolutely no interest in landscape as a genre, but it all came together for him when he understood his paintings as devices for evoking the binocular vision he had lost.

- The obsessive rugby player who painted groups of men arranged in scrum form. Even their heads looked like rugby balls.

The worst thing that can happen for an artist is that this process can become intentional. A good example of this is the paintings of the Surrealist painter Max Ernst whose obsession with painting birds was self-attributed to his sister being born at the same time as his pet bird dying. His paintings can be difficult to enjoy without knowing this mythology.

TFA mentions how a painters depiction of faces tend to be similar to their own face. Certainly true.
Show HN: Vizor – Live Video Connection Through Virtual Frosted Glass
At the time Wikipedia didn't have that kind of WYSIWYG editor. So this is a rare case where the passage of time has made the scene more accurate.
I like the idea, but I’m gonna say that (a) calculus is more than a good challenge and (b) math is actually easy.

To understand how things actually work, you need math, especially calculus. Deep learning? Calculus. Statistics? Calculus. Finance? Calculus. Physics? Calculus. Mech E, robotics, earth science, econ? Calculus.

Second, calculus, like all math, is easy. Like that’s the point, it’s the science of simple things. That math is competitive and presented as a cryptic challenge is beside the point — it is designed to make it possible for anyone to reason for themselves and solve problems. The sense of impatience and criticism around math is totally unwarranted and isn’t good for anyone.

I get kind of bummed when I see schools spending so much creativity and enthusiasm on art and theater. There really is no reason why science should be thought of as judgmental, difficult and painful, while putting on a play is creative, inviting and fun.
Yes, the map-reduce chains for summarisation, to work around context size limits of LLM. It works while there is a lot more debugging to do why is it much slower than expected (but it is fortunately fast enough for the task).

Langchain has a lot of surface area and it is still on 0.0.x, so also much advised to pin the versions hard.
He also lived and worked with Melissa Cargill during this time, who was a trained chemist at Berkley and also became the mother of one of his children... This usually isn't mentioned very much for some reason.

Not to take away from his genius, but this surely helped..

I recently read "Owsley and Me" by Rhoney Stanley, another woman he lived with at the time (The three of them lived together), who also become mother of one of his children, at the same time...

Yes, quite a character.
Yeah that's a great summary.

Not a magic bullet but it helps to build your own mental defenses to this. Recognise that the deadline is arbitrary. Predict what will happen when it arrives. Adjust your effort so you are not overextended time and again.

Similarly recognise when code is likely to be thrown out, and don't pour your heart and soul into it. Make it good enough, then look for you life satisfaction elsewhere.
From that perspective, going through any kind of struggle (and building willpower/discipline) would be a good enough proxy for learning calculus.

It’s a little sad that the best value that the OP can impute for learning calculus is masochism — I cannot imagine saying that for anything in the school curriculum that I actually learned/understood. I wonder (in good faith) whether the OP actually even absorbed calculus at all… (i.e. can they solve calculus problems even today, for example?) — if not, they’re not the person who should be making authoritative comments on the usefulness of calculus.

Calculus (Taylor approximations, perturbation modeling, error propagation, significant figures in measurement precision, gradient descent, etc — just off the top of my head) is so deeply embedded in my thinking, that it strongly shapes how I think and amplifies my effectiveness!

I disagree with the OP’s claim so fundamentally — they might as well claim that schools/education focus on literacy for the same reasons.
Nah. I've driven EVs. Modern ICE vehicles have all the same tech.
My personal bugbear (on top of the whitespace) in Windows 10 is how you cannot enforce application borders anymore. Every second application wants to do its own thing, "for aesthetics".

I absolutely hate it. All the app windows just blend into one, it's just so hard to see them.
YouTube has its own internal micro economy of channels, networks of channels, etc that is thriving from ad revenue. Binging with Babish was “a guy cooking food from tv” a few years ago and is now an entire platform of channels. I think those companies can all be considered separately from the operator of the marketplace.
That’s economic profits that approach 0. You can still run an accounting profit, it’s just not bigger than it would be if you invested your money somewhere else, like land or mining or coffeeshops or whatever.
This really is a thing people need to understand. The quip comes out from some new startup “everyone thought [success story] was dumb as well”, and portray that as a badge of guaranteed success rather than going “why are they wrong this time, generally they are not”.
This is the "jonny_eh meta-principle" at work! Finally see it with my own eyes!
That video makes no sense. If renewables are cheaper, then fossil fuels have even worse margins. The video claims for some reason that fossil fuels are "more exploitable" and more profitable, but assuming you're baking storage into cost, a lot of energy is fungible. Furthermore, solar can easily be installed on prem and many energy users have plenty of unused roof space, so even if all energy providers conspired to keep energy prices high, energy users can install their own solar.
They don't call it "The" cartel because there's one on every corner.
Frontier AI regulation: Managing emerging risks to public safety
The fact they actually flew that helicopter under that bridge is the one of the most insane stunts of all time.

Just mind boggling
Those of us who remember when Google first started might even remember that part of it's early success was precisely that it didn't have tons of banner ads like the search engines that came before it. In no way was it the first to prove that "ads could work", the ad-driven model was already bananas before it came out.

It's only much later that Google went full on awful ads. Few and unobtrusive ads were a huge early selling point for Google.
what is Couchsurfing's revenue model?
It's easily bested by Word's file save "dialogue" (which is akin to a mini os of its own!).
I've been publishing The Sizzle - a general tech newsletter that comes out daily and has an Aussie take on the last 24 hours of news - for almost 8 years. 1,300 people pay me A$60/yr to read it. There's a 30 day free trial (no credit card needed, unsubscribe any time via a one click link in every email) at https://thesizzle.com.au
This is one thing Ted Nelson was hung up on. It’s tough to solve.
So a mobile game (not relevant to Sony), a PC game (not relevant to Sony), and a PC game (...)
Even the pre Apollo saga, reddit ad revenue was nowhere close to facebook. Same with twitter, before Musk its ad revenue is not good. And both platforms are now trying to emulate facebook with heavy control on the app and the API.
Depends on what you mean. Advanced GUI is much better on SUSE though https://yast.opensuse.org/
Agreed, I rather like this line of code, but I must admit that the C-like version is perhaps better:

sales_tax_amount = balance * state[42].tax_rate;

(Assuming I've guessed the meaning of the Cobol correctly - perhaps that's the rub.)

(ETA: Added semicolon.)

(ETA2: Fixed critical indexing bug.)
I raised the same questions as Nat, but I think he hasn't really discovered why we were asking that. The reason why I was looking for a good reason to study calculus is because I was lazy, and if I'm lazy enough then I can change the definition of what "hard" means. For instance, I could convince myself that if my could teach calculus, and him being just another dude, then surely I could learn calculus.

I would also be cautious about setting yourself up for a hard life. The takeaway resonates well with the HN crowd, myself included, because we like challenging ourselves. There's a lot of people out there who are simply looking to satisfice their lives, and you'll need another way to motivate them to learn calculus.
This fight isn't over yet. Nevermind the misleading title. The fight is only beginning. FTC lost on the injunction, which was only sought when MSFT brazenly threatened to close the deal when it learned it would not be approved. MSFT still has a monkey on their back. Khan is far from giving up. Perhaps FTC can get a stay pending an appeal to the 9th Cir. The July 18 deadline to close is rapidly approaching.
A great many podcasts now have ads of various sorts.