skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Physicists have been pondering that for a long time.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/are-the-laws-of-physic...
> In my life, I nor anyone I know has ever gotten a counterfeit product. I've gotten obviously opened, returned, and repacked shit, low quality AliExpress shit no one would buy if they inspected it in real life, but nothing actually fake.

I got a fake Google Pixel case for my wife. It looked identical to the real one, but didn't fit the phone.
PE & profitability is tricky because of its short-term nature. PE in tech often comes in as post-VC money to gut everything, including r&d, as part of reselling/bundling/etc as a more efficient thing at the expense of a growing & innovating thing, and often worse for jobs in the primary host country. When I hear about a PE buyout, my thought is generally not, "oh great, this makes me want to finally work at X, they're serious about growing again!" but "oh no..".

As easy early-stage growth tapers, which is typical, the more r&d is needed to figure that out. The company likely still has that in their DNA. But... that also makes it easy to flip the books on margin & profitability by firing all those seasoned product, dev, r&d, etc people, which can easily be 20-40% of the company. Likewise, replace much of the remaining expensive staff with folks not from the home company country. Founders cashing out and PE & replacement CEOs taking over changes a lot.

I'm not sure that kind of profitability is all that great from a taxpayer and economics perspective. Replacing cultures of excess and immature management does sound like value... but that is a fig leaf over what is going on in reality. There are similar questions about VC pump-and-dumps also not being good for society, despite similar reasoning. It's a hard topic - I couldn't find it, but Matt Stoller's newsletter on modern anti-monopoly economics & legislation news touches on these areas periodically.
FWIW I shall post here, for the mutual benefit of the audience, the relevant entry from the beloved & trusted website, etymonline.com:

> embarrassment (n.)

> 1670s, "state of being impeded, obstructed, or entangled" (of affairs, etc.), from embarrass + -ment, or from French embarrassement, from embarrasser.

> As "a mental state of unease," from 1774. Meaning "thing which embarrasses" is from 1729. Earlier words expressing much the same idea include baishment "embarrassment, confusion" (late 14c.); baishednesse (mid-15c.).

It is natural in a language that words are being used in older alongside with newer connotations. "He was embarrassed by the embarassment of riches on display" is maybe awkwardly worded but possible nonetheless.
If we could bend gravity enough in the “opposite” direction (eg “negative energy” if such a thing even exists), and we could somehow manipulate magnetic fields enough to get all close and personal to neutron stars without getting sphaghettified and somehow could sample their inner core and see whether they are made of strange matter.. well we’d have an answer.

But this for example is so freakishly absurd that it seems impossible even for scifi.

A type 3 civ, if it exists, could potentially do that; but it’s one thing to extract energy off stars, type 2 and 3 and another thing to manipulate the inner core of neutron stars.
If you've got an nvidia graphics card with 8GB of vram made in the last decade, AUTOMATIC1111's stable diffusion web ui [1] will crank out a few thousand images every 24 hours. Depending on settings and how fast your card is, naturally.

And there's a large ecosystem of downloadable models available online for specific looks and concepts, like models trained for photorealism.

[1] https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui
Yes, people underestimate how important consul and vault are in modern infra. There is no direct replacement for vault or consul in how versatile and powerful these tools are.
That would technically be a pescatarian
Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii into a Tinderbox
Gift link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/climate/hawaii-fires-clim...

>Declining rainfall, rising temperatures and invasive species have left the islands more susceptible to wildfires.
Nixexpr: Nix Expressions for JavaScript
Last time I checked it was only for maintainers convenience but the idea of using it by some tooling was already being discussed: https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/all-patches-must-incl...
It just needs to be in the title, even here on the site.
Show HN: Analyze user feedback at scale – Essense
Hey everyone!

Yahia here, wanted to show a product i recently built. Essense handles analyzing user feedback at scale with just a few clicks.

1- Paste in a url from appstore, playstore, trustpilot, g2, or connect your intercom, hubspot, or typeform account in a single click.
2- Select type of analysis report wanted
3- Insights!

It includes a 1 month no credit card required free trial right off the bat.

I'd love to know your thoughts!
Thank you for the link to the talk! I'll watch it for sure.

If I am interesting in using functional languages (currently F#, Elixir, and Racket) to explore GUI systems, graphics, symbolic math, numerical computing like machine learning and swarm algorithms and automatic differentiation, agent-based modeling, fractals and general chaos theory stuff, etc., is Shen a good match for that type of exploratory, almost from first principles but towards something that is actually usable work?

Is Shen closer to Scheme or Lisp? I typically fall in the Scheme side of things a la Racket.

Thanks for all the information and help!
The many issues plaguing Nix
The current news cycle makes it seem like people are eager to find new physics. Interesting
Good news is folks are working on better tooling, for example fluent[0] by mozilla.
The bad news though is adoption.

---

0: https://projectfluent.org/
You can’t blow a bubble with bullshit
MDN: What can be done about the “ugly” elements?
Today we were discussing the usual issue of how designers want a select to look and how the web standard applies it.

When searching for some references on why things are as they are I found this page to be quite interesting as it really shows all of the elements that can cause issues with styles in a straightforward way.
Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that’s why I shit on remote work company time.
Parameter estimation on its own isn't real science. Hypothesis should be statements about reality, like that a given material is a superconductor.

With enough lawyering, one can argue that statements around whether model #53sa7r describes a phenomenon accurately qualify as hypothesis. But the success or failure of such hypothesis rarely make for interesting papers to anyone but statisticians.

And they don't often contribute to the human ability to reason about reality, build new things or predict the future. Like econometric models that never forecast with accuracy >10 years in advance.
Just let these corporate propaganda outlets die. Quit subscribing, quit reading.
What's the story with DynamoDB?
> Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

Does everybody in Japan uses X(twitter) ?

I would expect that disaster warnings use some cell broadcast, not an obscure service.
Would SF be able to increase the penalty of blocking or interference with emergency responders by vehicles?

It seems the companies haven’t taken that issue seriously so they apparently need some more incentive.

That would seem an adequate compromise, penalties that ramp up each month with each subsequent occurrence to a point they cannot be ignored.
Is that really the case though? If we rank phenomena along the energy scale the accuracy of the description starts fraying at the low energy ends.

Tangible ambiguities and loose ends are mostly evident in cosmology,eg in the form of this or that "dark stuff" but it is conceivable there are other very subtle phenomena hidding in plain sight (e.g., accessible with desktop experiments)
This is because physicists have mathematical models, then try to generate conceptual models based on those which is like trying to describe language to someone by describing the architecture and weights of a LLM.
iTerm2 updated itself for me either yesterday or today (I didn't actually pay much attention to the update, just checked now whether I'm already on 3.4.20 and that was indeed the case).
I have worked with legacy apps in the 500 kloc scale that are still more enjoyable than reading the Fairie Qveene
Anecdotally this happens to me every time I omit an edge case. Now I try to always write a unit test for the special edge case being deliberately omitted. I just wish I could catch everything that way.
Just look at the latest commits, issues and PRs.
It's a lot harder than it used to be.

People today are fatigued by the bombardment of so many shiny new things and the starry-eyed fools peddling these things. It's not just consumers who are feeling it, but businessmen too.

I feel the best way to get opportunities is to already have good relationships with people who would be your "in", where they might server as a direct customer or as a connection to a customer. Opportunities are more likely to present themselves over lunch or golf rather than a cold sale attempt, whether it be email or playing the social media game by trying to hook people in some digital "community" by offering them CONTENT!, people see right through that nowadays.

I say just get involved. Get part-time jobs in-industry, make friends serendipitously - don't tryhard, and beware of your intent. Don't go "networking". That's cringe, unauthentic. People see through it. Don't fool yourself either. Don't go out and say, "Ah, I'm going to go to this event not as a salesey networky guy, wink wink, of course not! Just looking to be a fun nice guy and offer value to the community! Wouldn't it be convenient if I made 'friends' with someone who might also be my customer! haha what if that happened! That'd be such a nice coincidence haha!". People like authenticity and you can't really lie about it, not even to yourself, it bleeds through.

Just get out there and do things and opportunities will present themselves. Be patient, be real, and don't force it.
Thank you so much for trying it out and for the feedback!

The plan is to offer different models. The open source ones will be free and the closed sourced ones will require you own key.
Selectable filter lists isn't close to uBlock equivalency, that's just table stakes for any adblocker. As far as I've been able to determine, in Brave there is no way to view a list/grid/matrix of which domains are being blocked and which sort of content is being blocked; this is a feature I use in ublock origin / umatrix a lot and don't wish to go without. (For this matter, ublock origin in advanced mode is claimed to have equivalency to umatrix in this regard, but if that's true I can't figure out how.) Also missing from Brave adblocker, as far as I can tell, is an interface for creating cosmetic filters. I use these frequently for removing things like floating headers and footers, and other obnoxious first-party elements that aren't ads but nevertheless degrade websites to satisfy some web designers random whims.

Here is an example of Brave's filtering falling short: http://0x0.st/H_YB.jpg

Do you see that wide gray box that says "Youtube Featured, RELEASED this week!" I consider that an ad for trashy commercial popculture slop, I hate it and want it gone. How do I remove it with Brave's blocker? I have ad blocking turned up to aggressive but it's still there. I can't figure out how to create a new cosmetic filter, Youtube is unusable to me without this. If I scroll down further I see similar boxes for "Trending", "Shorts", and "Celebrate World's Indigenous People's Day." All of this needs to go; in Firefox I don't see any of it because, with ublock origin, I created a cosmetic filter for ytd-rich-section-renderer. "Rich section" indeed...

Anyway, I didn't downvote your above comment, which is now flagged as well. Near as I can figure the "modern godwin" accusation leveled against you is either because you mentioned brave (is Eich claimed to be a nazi now?) or because you said Mozilla is being woke. Either way, a very stupid reaction to your inoffensive comment. This place is becoming orange reddit.
Reminds me a bit of Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought concept where our galaxy is divided into various zones which supports different levels of technological and cognitive capability. All sophisticated tech fails at the core, FTL is impossible in the Slow Zone (where Earth is) but works in the Beyond, and past that is the Transcend where god-like superintelligences live.
Seriously, there's an amazing amount of shooting from the hip happening here.
This exactly. Or at least it seems this way to me, as a non expert with some knowledge. Add another particle, or term, or whatever to make it match. Feels very inelegant. I like your description of overfit, which hadn’t occurred to me before, ironically though I spend a lot of time with ML.

When teaching ML I talk about adding loops to the Ptolemaic planets-orbit-the-Earth-model - and how it actually worked pretty well because they spent a lot of time adding loops to the orbits to make it fit. It was overfit.
Yeah, I haven't looked too deeply into LiteFS yet. I need the replication to work well with SQLCipher and the ability for the Covert server to completely control the master encryption key without passing it over any network or language barrier (this means I would have needed a Rust rewrite of Litestream even if it still supported streaming replication). Thanks a lot for releasing Litestream to the public. I have learned a ton about SQLite from reading the codebase!
Commenting on DNS records is now available
Speaking of, some recent papers who that we can use pulsars to make galaxy scale gravitational measurements. By obseeving changes in pulse frequency and we can track whether a gravitational wave is going through it!
Jim Cramer is – – – kicking ass?
Here comes the coordinated media campaign trying to tell us that WFH is not good for businesses…

I wonder how much corporations paid to get this article planted so that CEOs can point to it as the reason they want RTO?
The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
Honeypots are fun. I documented how I ran one here: https://the-empire.systems/how-to-run-honeypot

The TL;DR is that I deployed heralding[0].

If I recall correctly, I think within two days of the server being online, there were over 50,000 attempts to login.

[0] https://github.com/johnnykv/Heralding
HN regular conducts DDoS attacks on small weak websites.
I couldn't find any direct references to this anywhere, believe me I spent a long 30 minutes looking... >.<

But thank you anyway <3
I thought they used portions of Terraform's code.

Clearly, based on my downvotes, I'm mistaken and should be ashamed.
Complaining that fire safety is bad for the economy. Wow, now that's a take I don't think you'll see in many places other than hackernews
How does this new license work in terms of either a bug is found in terraform post support date or a new feature is added to the Hashicorp version.

Can the patch / new code be copied to this version without violating anything or does it have to be some sort of “clean room” patch where you only read the bug report and not the actual fix
> maybe time to consider multiple CDN providers

Yes. While Cloudflare is generally rock solid, we can't let this happen again.
> Socially this arrangement is kernel-like. The tech lead of the project runs the repo from which releases are done and merge in from teammates, which in turn can merge in from their teammates and so on. Ownership is always clear because the act of merging is also the act of taking responsibility. You can't get a tragedy of the commons where juniors keep picking other juniors to review their work like you can in more conventional free-for-alls.

I think the way you work is very interesting. We once discussed about having a process that is more kernel-like.

The fact that everyone has their own remote clone of the (or all) git repositories, does that not introduce overhead? We did that long time ago when we started with git, but thought it introduced extra overhead without any benefit. I assume you do it to make the ownership clear? And I also assume that everyone in your team is very comfortable with git? (yes, I do think developers should know their tools inside-out, but that is sadly rarely the case)

Can you explain in more detail the steps for a code review process? Is it the author that creates and deletes the review branch in the clone of the reviewer? How does the author know that the reviewer finished the review? Is it always the author who pushes his code to the technical lead for merge into master?
> If the engine doesn't do a full analysis up front but instead checks every time a type is used, you end up with, at best, roughly the same performance characteristics that current JIT engines already have.

There are definitely optimizations that JIT engines can do, pre-optimizing the "shapes" expected of objects, especially with respect to rare/optional parameters. In some of the current JITs an extra parameter that hasn't been used before/in-a-while drops code from a faster path to a slower one. Knowing ahead of time that parameter might show up eventually can lead to the faster path in more cases. You still get slow path penalties for type violations and other unexpected shapes, but that benefit of more "shapes" hitting the fast path sooner (less "learning time" for the expected shapes by the JIT, because it can assume the type is a correct description) may overall be a benefit over untyped performance.

Worst case, yeah, it is "roughly" the exact same performance characteristics, but best case it does buy some performance benefits.

That said, yeah the current proposal to TC-39 does not include that for a number of good reasons and it would need follow up proposals to provide type semantics that JITs could count on. Though if the first proposal succeeds, such follow up proposals become more likely. (We are seeing that a bit in Python as some follow up PEPs have converged some of the base type semantics, though still not yet with runtime performance in mind.)
The LHC leak repair: a short photostory
I think this is going to be one of the important uses of AI -- therapy bots. Just having someone to seem like they're listening (ELIZA was kind of on to something -- but this is the chance to actually have meaningful interaction rather than just conversational tricks).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
Mark Spitznagel says the ‘greatest credit bubble in human history’ is set to pop
Most of people do not want to work if they can get paid too.
And there is no need for employers if RTO makes the overall productivity worse. RTO is really a decision made by the market not from a particular employer or employee.
for some things you don't have a choice. Gravity is too weak.
Quite explainable when you just embrace that our simulation is sharded, literally like an MMO.
We can and did test that and the answer is: as far as we can see, the physics is the same.
1.5% of $2000 is $30.

My online bank will send any amount to a SWIFT coded bank account anywhere in the world for a flat $25 fee when paying USD. Delivery within 24 hours.

Once your family receives the crypto, what does it cost them to withdraw into local currency to actually pay bills? For example, Coinbase charges 1% plus "standard network fees".
The key word here is time.

Employment, depending on the job, should be about what the employer pays to get from the employee. And most of the time (ahem), it shouldn't be time that is traded. Naturally it takes time to accomplish things and fulfill your obligations, but the amount of time is rarely fixed. Instead, things like training, experience, skill set, tools, contextual information, and especially energy contribute to fulfillment.
> Isn't market intervention more like corporate socialism though? I mean that's literally not capitalism.

I mean I'd argue the "too big to fail bailots" are a particularly ineffective bit of market intervention in the long term, but generally speaking "market intervention to save the health of the economy" is bog-standard neoliberal, capitalist ideology. The only whiff of socialism comes from recognizing that without guardrails the fully freed economy will destabilize, possibly from angry with pitchforks, angry they can't afford food, shelter, and the basics. So—it is still serving the ultimate needs of the capitalists who run society by not ousting them when they do destabilizing things.

Plus, if this weren't capitalism, no society in history would have been capitalist making it a bit of a useless word for sticking to extant political movements.
In this I'm mostly concerned by the extremely vague description of what is it you can't do with this new terraform commercially. You can't "compete" with hashicorp. Well, if I'm doing devops consulting and I write terraform for clients is it competing with hashicorp? If not, what if they start offering such service tomorrow? Will it be competition them?

Personally, speaking figuratively, I think they just pulled a shotgun and decided to shoot both of their feet off. As someone doing devops consultancy since well before terraform became a thing I'd have no problem at all going back to custom python code with configuration in yaml if the clients decide its better for them.
Docker is a handy way to keep a hold on toolchains that might require a bit of arcane configuration, or the chaining together of a bunch of different tools.

The author's example isn't really the best at illustrating this as he's just apt-get'ing things like gcc. There are plenty of cases where you'll need some specific version of gcc or some other weird tool like openocd or gdb that's hard to hunt down, or is required due to some weird development ephemera you found.

Docker makes it a bit easier to compile these requirements and hang on to them painlessly - even across a few years' time lag.
How about some actual examples? This seems like a fluff piece article written in 10 minutes without much real content.
Yes. In a recent HN submission, ChatGPT was listed as a “scientific advance” of the past year. While it’s certainly some kind of advance, to me it seems to be more on the engineering side than on the scientific understanding side.
I'd add the biggest risk of over-engineering: Building the wrong thing. Very often, the needs we anticipate end up not being realized.
> The free market [...] takes the preferences of all the people and the government they elected and combines them.

Incomplete picture. The missing part is imbalance of power of the agents.

The case of the greedy manager or the price driving steel trader again...

Im out now. Have nothing more to say.
This becomes painfully obvious once the backend inevitably crashes at some point and the functionality of the editor is reduced to that of Notepad until you do a full restart