skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Been happily crunching away at Nim in production. I'm working on what is mainly a data analysis and report generation tool, compiled as a CLI executable that gets called by server scripts.

Nim makes fast, small executables. It has an excellent heterogenous JSON data structure and a good dataframe library. It prefers the stack so strongly that dynamic data structures (sequences and tables, basically its lists and dictionaries) are pointers on the stack to heap data, where the lifetime is managed by the stack frame. I don't think I have any dynamic references anywhere in my program, and don't have to worry about GC at all. The type system is simple, sensible, and guides you to correctness with ease. Nim also defaults to referential transparency; everything is passed immutably by-value unless you opt out. Generics are powerful and work exactly as you expect, no surprises. Universal function call syntax is ridiculously powerful: You can write the equivalents to methods and interfaces on types just by making procedures and functions that take a first parameter of that type; not needing those abstractions greatly simplifies and flattens code structure. It's just procedures and objects (functions and structs) all the way down.

It's been a real joy to work with and reminds me of when I discovered D back in the day, only it's even better. If you imagine native-compiled type-annotated Python where nearly 100% of your code is business logic with no cruft, you're getting close to the Nim experience.
I had a math professor in college, whom I had for Real Analysis. He told us that one thing that helped him learn was to ask somewhat-obvious sounding questions to try to make connections to things to check understanding. There are at least two good reasons for this: (1) if you don't understand the basic (unsurprising) things, you probably won't understand the more nuanced things, and (2) what counts as surprising varies with the audience.

If someone were to come to me looking for advice along these lines, I'd say: sure, focus on the surprising thing, but it has to be grounded in the familiar, and what counts as "familiar" depends on the audience.
Congrats to all involved.

I find Nim to be an absolutely fascinating language. I've been trying to find a reason to use it on my job (my work is mobile-adjacent so the idea of compiling to JS and to ObjC is fascinating) but haven't gone beyond playing around with it so far. I've been comparing it to Rust and it's just so much simpler to get started with.
Whats the problem with electric aviation?
Ri of those is typically 1 Ohm or thereabouts, which at 500 A develops 500W in the battery itself and a large multiple of that in your 'load' (in this case your soldering iron :) ).

When working with large battery arrays I use tools that are taped in all the way except for the business end, just in case. All you need to do is drop a wrench in the wrong spot and it's party time.
Heads up, when reheating leftovers, be cautious with glass containers - regular glass like soda-lime glass can explode in the microwave. This is because soda-lime glass contains additives that make it unable to withstand sudden temperature changes from microwave heating. Glass cookware sold specifically for microwave use is a special borosilicate glass that can handle the heat.
Check any glass containers closely before microwaving - soda-lime glass is often clear glass like drinking glasses, glass baking dishes, glass Tupperware, etc. Look for labels indicating microwave-safe or borosilicate glass. If unsure, transfer food to a known microwave-safe dish instead.
HeyHalo is the leading forehead reduction surgery service, crafted by esteemed Harley Street surgeon Dr. Greg Bran. It offers a perfect solution for women who prioritize their hairline, providing a remarkable transformation to empower them to embrace their unique beauty.

Dr. Greg Bran, a pioneer in facial plastic surgery, designed HeyHalo with a focus on patient safety, aesthetic excellence, and individual empowerment. The procedure begins with a personalized consultation to understand each patient's concerns and goals fully. Dr. Bran's surgical precision and advanced techniques ensure a balanced and natural result with minimal scarring.

Beyond the physical transformation, HeyHalo instills newfound confidence and liberation in women, helping them break free from insecurities associated with a high forehead. The HeyHalo experience continues with dedicated post-operative care and support.

With HeyHalo, women can step into a new chapter of their lives, embracing their uniqueness with confidence and self-assurance. Discover the empowering transformation of HeyHalo, designed to unlock your true beauty and set you free from hairline worries.
I associate that with bad-faith attempts to prove a point, which I don't think this is.

It feels more like a communications problem where a finding like 'Most (65%) cases respond favorably to X', followed by lots of hype around X, only to see a bunch of surprised pikachu faces when a subsequent paper looks at the 45%.

Maybe it's just hype cycles, but it feels like there's gotta be some professional obligation to proactively consider the outliers/edge cases/minority group(s), rather than waiting several years for the "woah wait, turns out not all X are Y" paper.
> the line between AI and consciousness would be pretty blurry at that point

This is like saying the difference between Cillian Murphy and Oppenheimer is pretty blurry because, look, we can watch Murphy do do all the same things Oppenheimer did!

For some reason with "AI" we get all mystical and act like imitation = the real thing. Just because I can convince you I'm a doctor doesn't make me one
The spelling ‘mistake’ makes it easier to web search.
I don't think this is actually compatible with the browser security model – specifically, CAs are required to revoke certificates for known-compromised private keys, according to point 4.9.1 here: https://cabforum.org/wp-content/uploads/CA-Browser-Forum-BR-...
TinyTV Teardown – It's got an RP2040 inside [video]
>safe replication via rsync, Dropbox, or distributed file system

Neat. I've been leaning more and more towards systems that are dumb-sync-friendly because I can throw them anywhere with anything and they just work. Always glad to see new things doing this!
That sounds similar enough to the concept of a "fixer-upper" in North America.
What Uber is doing is more similar to predatory pricing (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/predatory-pricing.asp) rather than enshittification. Their plan seems to have always been to survive on VC money to drive out competition, and then raise prices, rather than carefully degrading the platform experience to extract more money per user.
I got a similar impression from the XRD spectra, but I don't think it's correct to focus on the shifts. That could easily be a minor calibration issue. The biggest difference I see is in the peak around 44 degrees, which is very pronounced in the original work and much weaker in this work.

There are strong similarities between the XRD patterns, but considering the theoretical paper yesterday about selective site substitution being necessary to achieve superconductivity, it's reasonable to suspect that these "minor" differences may be critical.
We started off as a time travel debugger for Java coders and failed to gain any traction. (our hn launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31286126)

Pivoted to record and replay. Developers can put assertion + mocking around the replay. We are working on a feature that shows what _value_ each variable contains. Check unlogged.io

Disclaimer : I am the founder
Perhaps related:

Aristotle (Pol. 6.5.4 = 1321b31, 7.11.4 = 1331bl5) records ύλωροί "forest-keepers," but does not specify the area or their duties.

Sometimes I think about this.
Too many developers put too much emphasis on the "A" (application) and too little on the "P" (programming, which should really be thought of as "programmer").

An API is a user interface in every sense of the term. Programmers, not abstract "applications," are your users, and so the same care taken for graphical UIs should be taken in designing APIs — e.g., account for your user's mental model, consider the outcomes your users want to achieve, consider the outcomes your business wants to achieve
> But it is not conscious

How can we tell? We don't have a single working definition of what "consciousness" is, rather we have at least half a dozen wildly different definitions, some of which aren't testable[0], some of which include VHS players[1], some of which exclude many humans most of the time[2].

If consciousness exists purely in working memory and not short/long term, then LLMs may have it within any given context window, even if they're effectively amnesiac between contexts.

Possibly. Like I said, we don't know what consciousness is.

> But engaging with people who are clearly talking about whether AI is conscious by responding as if they're talking about whether it is useful could very easily be seen as engaging in bad faith.

It may seem clear to you, but it didn't to me; furthermore, the singularity doesn't seem to me to require any of the many definitions of consciousness that I'm aware of, merely the capabilities for problem solving that LLMs increasingly demonstrate regardless of if they're conscious or not.

[0] what even is qualia

[1] can record sensory experiences in memory and change responses based on this

[2] rational/logical reasoning
For folks who aren’t familiar with OpenUSD, it’s a 3D scene format created by Pixar and in use across the film industry. The majority of high end films with 3D elements that you see will have used USD.

USD is also used by Apple for all the 3D objects you see, like the 3D models on the product store or in the making of apps for Vision Pro.

NVIDIA use USD for their industrial collaboration application called Omniverse , and of course Adobe and Autodesk for creative use cases.

I work with USD a lot in my job in the animation industry, so it’s exciting to see these companies come together to push it further.
> Yes, many.

Thanks!
The OCaml-WASM Organisation
> each time it’s demonstrated that end of the sample is the end that moves and the rest of it looks like it’s hanging down

It's quite possible that the entire sample is reacting, so the part with the largest "reaction area" / weight ratio goes up, while the part with the smaller one stays down and provides extra sustenance to the entire thing.

If that's the case, breaking it down won't make any difference.
You know you’re onto something when you get HN comments that say, “this can easily be done by just <list half a dozen tools and processes>”…

Very clever, if I weren’t leaving the industry I would for sure grab a copy.
Ooh, that's me! As in the comment, please don't do this.

It's been a while since I worked at a place doing this, and I'm on my phone, so some details may be fuzzy or wrong, but when I was figuring all this out, I remember this SO comment being really helpful:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/23806990

Basically, there's two different APIs, and neither of them are designed for ignoring config files (but both of them happen to do things that look like ignoring config files, therefore get misused).

`assume-unchanged` is an optimisation tool that tells git that it shouldn't both checking files and folders that are expensive to check but never changed. If changes do ever happen, and git realises this, then git will remove the assume-unchanged flag - because clearly it wasn't true!

`skip-worktree` is a more aggressive version of this that tells git never to touch certain files or folders at all. But now it changes do happen to those files, it's not clear what git should do. Overwriting the files would cause data loss, but ignoring the files completely means that you miss out on upstream changes. And because you're telling git that these files should never be checked, there's no good way to handle merging and conflicts.

What typically happens with both of these flags is that they work well about 80% of the time, and then cause a lot of confusion that last 20% of the time.

The alternative is almost always some sort of configuration file that is directly referenced in .gitignore, and that therefore never gets checked in. (In addition, it's often useful to have a (e.g.) config.json.default file for getting new developers up and running quickly.) Any system that needs to be configured (database connections, API URLs, IP addresses, etc) should use this configuration file. Alternatively, I find environment variables, along with .env files for local development, to be really effective, because most things can already be configured that way.

This typically takes sightly longer to set up the first time, but will work very reliably from then on.

See also these changes in git's official documentation, and the commit message that explains why it was necessary:

https://github.com/git/git/commit/1b13e9032f039c8cdb1994dd09...
This is 99% conjecture. The current climate models do not predict those kinds of changes and most don’t have the fidelity to do so. Even the best models can’t account for simple things like aerosol pollution and they don’t have the resolution to determine the behaviour of ocean or atmospheric currents.
Barbieheimer: Across the Dead Reckoning
I want kids but my wife doesn't
1. "easy to use once you figure out this hard thing" is another way of saying hard.

2. Some people look at those rants as toxic, and I understand that, but there is also value in expressing and seeing people's true feelings. Rust does this to people! Can we fix it?
Potential for staffing -- finding talent, and competent talent.

Established best practices -- this is still being sorted out in Rust in various domains.

Third party library support -- again, immature in some domains but not all.

Managing and tutoring junior devs -- a bit trickier here.

I think there is potential big win in using Rust. I want to see it propagate. I work in the language, and love it. But also a big fan of right tools in right places. For most web service ("full stack") type projects a GC managed language with a pile of existing code and a larger potential hiring pool just makes sense.
While I understand for many people that may be a positive, I spend very little time watching shows on such a small screen. Thats what my TV is for! A 16:10/16:9 ratio on a tablet makes the balance in the hands quiet bad in portrait mode.
There is an /etc/hosts on Windows, just fyi.
Also, I can understand for some the cable being quite annoying. In electronics class in highschool, a few soldering irons got wrecked by students melting the cable insulation and sparks would fly.
The wiki does a bad job of clarifying what the relationship is (wth does "first cousin once removed" even mean?). Here's a family tree:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/jensen-huang-and-lisa-su-f...

Still, I always loved how immigrants to the US always ended up in high level positions, starting or leading top US companies, something that never/rarely happens here in Europe where maintaining the status quo and the "natural order" gets priority at all cost.
I bought one of the firmware-requiring soldering irons on AliExpress and thought exactly the same. But then the thing is so much better than the usual plug-in-get-hot irons that it's definitely worth it. Disclaimer: my soldering skills are about 3 out of 5, so not too good.
I've been following this on Twitter all week and I am _very_ excited but I must admit, I don't think I'm fully grasping all the ways that this could change our world.
> Where I can match pay rates, I cannot match lifestyle.

Pay is short for “pay to quality of life at work ratio”.

If alternatives with better pay to QoL ratios become available, the then either a business can increase the pay to QoL ratio, or it may no longer be viable.
>it would be able to prompt you (send multiple messages in a row after not getting a response)

This already happens. When you play around with local LLMs you'll run into the situation where the model answers your prompt. After that it will generate a new query as a response to it and then reply to that too.
It just seemed to stop working in London post pandemic.

I must have used it for 1000 rides before 2020. You would usually be picked up in less than 5 minutes around zone 1.

When I started using it again in late 2021, it became almost impossible to get anyone to accept the order and then not cancel.

It's strange how dramatically it seemed to crash and burn. From ubiquitous to basically useless.
Anyone have working experience with Nim and Zig? I'd love to hear how they are similar and contrast. I'd also would like to see some idiomatic web server benchmarks between the two (now with Nim v2).
> I find moving to even Python to be an inadequate answer, because the shell does two crucial things very very well - it manipulates the filesystem and runs commands in their most native format. And even Python is very cumbersome at those two tasks.

Thankfully Perl exists.
I think the author has missed a pretty large segment of demand. Non-cloud/non-tech enterprises are also buying large quantities of H100s and A100s for their own machine learning and simulation workloads. Where I work, we are going to have more than 1000 H100s by the end of the year, I am very excited to start benchmarking them soon :)
Many orders of magnitude so.

The last generations of vacuum tube processors were the size of large multi-story office buildings and had 50k tubes.

Compare to your smartphone, it would take billions of tubes to duplicate it.
Perhaps some day we will live in a society that does not allow exploitation because we can’t think of what those who are exploited would do if not for the exploitation.
Ask HN: When does reading become procrastination?
I have a long list of books that I'd like to read (classic novels, famous nonfiction, etc.), but I often find myself wondering whether I use this booklist as a means of "productive procrastination". Should I be spending this time working on projects / learning new technical skills instead?

Surely reading isn't always a bad use of time, as there are an incredible amount of successful / famous people who swear by spending great amounts of time reading (Benjamin Franklin and Charlie Munger, to name a couple). But how much is too much? If I'm spending all of my free time reading, then I'm not spending it doing.

I'm curious to hear how others think about this, as it's something I wrestle with frequently. (For reference, I am a guy in my 20s who graduated from college last year.)
Firefox 116
I have considered perks and implemented as many as I can. The biggest lever I have found so far is flexible schedule. We are willing to fly the captains out to the boat and fly them back home on whatever schedule they want. All companies in the industry are doing this now. This has limits, of course, some voyages are simply longer than some crew want to do (and have no stops near an airport).

As for remote control, no, this will be one of the last industries to allow remote control. In port and at many points during the voyage, captain and crew make quick decisions that require situational awareness. The deckhands have to wrangle lines and physically interact with the tow.
Ah, I see. You mean we need some (implicit) theory to even detect what is interesting about a result.

Let’s say you measure a particle going c*2. Without theory you wouldn’t even notice this.

Is that your point?
Although i fundamentally agree with you, i will say that it is impossible to know which "tricks" will lead to a leap in cognition, even looking evolutionarily, the difference in genome between a monkey and human is very small percentage wise, yet the effects of that small difference are stark.
Use this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36955806
There's a lot of reasons, mainly that's a 1-way door type of situation.
Crappy CSS. Zooming out doesn't help either.
They might move to easy to entry positions where shortages exist though.
Major data analysis errors invalidate cancer microbiome findings
> But is it right?

Obviously it depends on your workflow. If you're working on one feature at a time and only saving things out of your editor that you want to go to the project you cloned, it probably is.

That's not my world at all. I have logging and instrumentation all over the place when debugging. I have multiple features in flight. I have tweak patches that I maintain externally I don't want committed. I'm trying things for someone else, etc...

The index is the tool that allows you to manage all that without hating the process. That's why it was invented, in fact. Now, if you don't need it it seems needless, like someone is making you type "git add" for no reason. And jj seems to be aimed at that demographic, and that's fine.

But jj then needs to jump through some odd hoops to get back the "partial commit" workflow that is natural in git. Meh. Not a win for me personally.

There's also the problem of "patch hygiene", which flows like this tend to do pretty badly with. It's routine in some projects (Linux is the flagship here, obviously) to demand clean commit messages and perfect bisectability. Pull requests in that world routinely need to be split/squashed/reworked during review and when moving across branches. You need tooling to do that.
Two things:

1) They may feel like a red herring to you, but they are a big part of what a lot of people are talking about, and coming into a discussion that is clearly talking about whether an AI is conscious or how we could decide if it was and saying "that's all pointless, you shouldn't even be having this discussion" is kind of rude.

2) I am deeply skeptical that it is possible to have anything we could reasonably deem an "AGI" without it demonstrating at least what appears to be consciousness. Certainly, the "singularity" that many people talk about as being either an inevitability or an actual goal seems impossible without an AGI that can self-analyze and self-improve, which seem, at least to me, like they probably require consciousness, at least at the level being talked about.
Uber keeps defying expectations and media media predictions of its demise, as far back as 2010. uber pivoted successfully to food delivery, and has survived anything thrown at it, including lawsuits, regulation and no shortage of bad media coverage.
Multiple, different solutions to the same problem, some paid, others free and/or open source? Inconceivable!
That's using the referrer header to detect if you clicked a link to their site from this domain. Totally different box of frogs altogether.

JWZ uses the same trick, and redirects to an image of a hairy ball in an eggcup.

Unless they're also doing some CSS stuff I haven't read about.

Edit: clicked through a bit more. a red banner got added to their site using something like this.
I did not write "quality of life". I wrote "lifestyle". I find that many young candidates do not want to be on a boat for a week or more away from family. Some do. Most do not. I, personally, enjoyed long voyages when I was young. They added quality to my life.
Every doctor's office could have an MRI/fMRI machine, brain scans become routine.
Maybe the Wikipedia page was just updated, following this post, but it's fairly clear right now. It says fairly clearly in the infobox, "Jensen Huang (表舅 or first cousin once removed)"
Has JetBrains ever discussed putting out some sort of generic LSP oriented product(s)?

I own a couple JetBrains product for very select things but as much as i enjoy the company i will never use them for my actual code.. because i'm a 20 year addict of Terminal based editors (currently on Helix).

I'd love to see the considerable effort they put towards tooling available to the Terminal oriented audiences. Yea, probably small audience.. but i just often see this stuff and think "What if this was an LSP? I'd purchase it in a heartbeat!"

Especially since multi-LSP editing is apparently viable. Eg Helix supports multiple LSPs for a single context, now. Though i'm not clear on the specifics yet, as i've not tried it yet.

I really want to give them more money. I just don't want to use their UIs for my code.