skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Foresight Institute will support projects in three AI safety areas we think are potentially under-explored:

1. Neurotechnology, brain computer interface, whole brain emulation, and "lo-fi" uploading approaches to produce human-aligned software intelligence

2. Computer security, cryptography, and related techniques to help secure AI systems

3. Multi agent simulations, game theory and related techniques to create safe multipolar AI scenarios that avoid collusion and foster positive sum dynamics

The grant application process is now open and accepts rolling applications. We expect to grant between $1 - 1.2 million per year across projects and look forward to receiving your project proposals that could make a significant difference for AI safety within short timelines.

Please visit https://foresight.org/ai-safety/ for full details and application instructions.

I would appreciate it if you would consider sharing this post/the opportunity with others who may benefit from applying.

Feel free to comment here or email me at allison@foresight.org with any questions, feedback, or ideas for collaborations.
CAPTCHA is about more than spam.

Big Tech built their empires on scraping and stealing data (How do you think LinkedIn or Facebook got started?) But when we try to scrape them they throw a massive hissy fit, and so they put a lot of engineering into CAPTCHA systems to keep their data locked away. Eventually, the pinnacle of bots will be something that reads the framebuffer, and manipulates a mouse and keyboard to scrape websites.

This has got these companies freaked out, because all the founders know the dirty secret of their origin story, and that someone else can come along and do exactly the same thing to them.
I think most people should really sit down and give some thought to why these oil companies are so big and profitable. Is it because the executives get off on extracting for the sake of extracting, damn the earth and the flora and the fauna? Maybe. (Probably not.)

It probably has something more to do with the fact that individuals like driving their cars and taking planes to vacation destinations and appreciate the utility and versatility of plastic.

I’m not trying to absolve oil companies or say that it is the individuals who are at fault, but the oil companies produce a tremendously useful product. And individual consumers buy great volumes of that product because, well, it’s tremendously useful and makes possible their western standard of living.

So forgive me for thinking that this stunt is cutesy and fundamentally unserious. The oil companies wouldn’t be nearly as big as they are if they cast majority of humanity wasn’t very, very interested in what they’re selling.

Plenty of blame to go around here.
You've made me sang Baby Shark to test Google's "What's This Song". It didn't work, but it recognized it from your daughter's singing.
I love love love this direction. And yea, I have a basic email but I really think a super simple upload and maybe even dead-easy georeference tool for folks to contribute data is a no-brainer! I'm bumping this up on my backlog, thank you!
Your hilarious perspective on highly paid FAANG jobs aside: because now that you’ve made it and demonstrated there is a target market it’s trivial for the billion dollar company to make their own version and eat your breakfast. If they’re offering you the chance to join them as they do so it’s very often in your interest to do it.
I love nits. I can make that happen for the next version.
It could easily be from looking from the outside in, as it is in my case.
You are participating in a social media site, with "Show HN", "Ask HN", upvotes, downvotes, with appearance controlled by "The Algorithm", all of the hallmark of social media.

Your comment is typical social media, with language that provokes extreme emotion ("period", "hate", "stupid", "going to shit").

You fit right in with what you feel outraged about.
Right? I should at least have to say

> Computer. Lights.
Thank you! My brain tends to be a carnival, might as well take advantage
What legal jurisdiction are you saying this was a rule in? I’ve never heard of this
> The climate is not about fairness, nature does not care.

> Social justice is another topic

It's about practicality, not social justice. Put it bluntly: China (and India) won't accept a solution they feel is unfair. If you really want them to do something, fairness is not optional.

Go back to my analogy. You're saying "The bathroom doesn't care who cleans it, it just has to be done". But the people who would be doing the clean care very much and that ultimately determines if the bathroom is cleaned at all. Either you don't understand this basic point - which means you don't understand anything about human nature, and should therefore re-evaluate all of your opinions on public policy - or you're putting your head in the sand deliberately because you don't want to lift a finger yourself.

> We either agree on practical solutions at scale, or we don't.

So what are the practical solutions? Because telling China, or India "Stop industrializing right now!" so Americans can keep driving SUVs will simply not work.
The Challenger disaster is on the list but should be expanded upon:

1) Considerable pressure from NASA to cover up the true sequence of events. They pushed the go button even when the engineers said no. And they failed to even tell Morton-Thiokol about the actual temperatures. NASA dismissed the observed temperatures as defective--never mind that in "correcting" them so the temperature at the failed joint was as expected meant that now a bunch of other measurements are above ambient. (The offending joint was being cooled by boiloff from the LOX tank that under the weather conditions at the time ended up cooling that part of the booster.)

2) Then they doubled down on the error with Columbia. They had multiple cases of tile damage from the ET insulating foam. They fixed the piece of foam that caused a near-disaster--but didn't fix the rest because it had never damaged the orbiter.

Very much a culture of painting over the rust.
IME it's a test in which it is easy to grade many people in a way that it is really unlikely that two people end up with the same grade. That is what leetcode achieves and that is really the majority of the reason it is used. So it is just very convenient for hiring. In India, we have companies coming to hire students from colleges, and as the first filter, they give you three leetcode questions, and average the number of test cases you passed in each of them and rank you based on that. I spoke to one of the companies, they said that they had _very_ few people that had the same score, and it was easy to choose within those small sets by reading their resume/whatever.
But he's not the cancer. He's one of the prominent systems, but the cancer runs much, much deeper.

He received 75 million votes in 2020, more than anybody in American history (except his opponent). Even if he disappears tomorrow, those 75 million people are looking for somebody reading from the same playbook. There are several candidates who want to fulfill that role, and a large number of politicians at every level who want to follow it as well.

His is not forcing himself upon the Republican party. They want him, and his style of politics. They could have impeached him, without losing control of the White House, but chose not to. They like what he is doing.

We can "get rid" of him, but we can't get rid of the actual problem.
I wrote about this pretty recently, but the short version is a mix of NixOS and a k3s-based Kubernetes cluster using Tailscale to connect everything together.

https://gabrielsimmer.com/blog/infrastructure-megaupdate
We literally have satellites in space that monitor the atmosphere and detect greenhouse gas emissions.
Some programs (such as WordPad) use a fancy combo box to select fonts. They draw each font name in the font itself. That requires loading and rendering with each font just so it can be displayed for the preview. WordPad isn't preloading fonts at boot time though. It does the slow thing where it loads up every font when you open the combobox.
I don't know about C#, but, yes Dart has quite sophisticated exhaustiveness checking over sealed class hiearchies, including hierarchies that are DAGs and not just trees. It also handles record/tuple types and generics, nested arbitrarily deeply. And patterns that call arbitrary getters on objects.

For example, if you have this class hierarchy:

sealed class A {}
sealed class B1 implements A {}
sealed class B2 implements A {}
class C1 implements B1 {}
class C2 implements B1, B2 {}
class C3 implements B2 {}

// A
// / \
// B1 B2
// / \ / \
// C1 C2 C3

Then it understands that this switch statement is exhaustive:

void test(A a1, A a2) {
switch ((a1, a2)) {
case (A(), C1()): print(1);
case (C2(), C2()): print(2);
case (C3(), B2()): print(3);
case (B1(), B2()): print(4);
}
}

Because they cover the Cartesian product of all possible combinations of subtypes like:

a1
A
/ \
B1 B2
/ \ / \
C1 C2 C3
a2 +----+----+----+
C1| 1 |
B1< +----+----+----+
A< C2| | 2 | |
B2< + +----+ 3 +
C3| 4 | |
+----+----+----+

This can extend to arbitrary dimensions based on how many record fields there are.

Figuring that all out was quite the challenge! The full design is here:

https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/main/accepted/3.0...
This is the book that got me into realizing history can be so interesting. This was my first history book that I bought on my own!
Love it, i'll check it out
Took me a few moments to realize this isn’t a satirical text about a large seating furniture.
I'm not certain that that's what is happening, but I strongly suspect it. It is if nothing else a useful mental model: switching my strategy from selecting every square that contains foo to selecting every square that I think that Joe Schmoe would select gets me through CAPTCHAs more consistently.
> I think there will still be niche products using liquid fuels.

One of those niches: boats. Specifically: user-owned recreational ones.

Not because it's hard to build electric propulsion systems for boats. There already exist many types of motors, batteries & control systems to choose from. Not because battery weight / size is a problem (it isn't). Not because of safety issues (gas/diesel have their own).

But because it requires a big upfront investment. Converting to electrical propulsion is (for most boats) expensive. For someone who already owns a gas/diesel powered boat, but not the $$ to convert into all-electric, that's a big hurdle.

Of course new boats will replace old ones over time. But average boat lasts much longer (read: takes much longer to replace) than eg. cars. Average car is what, 6..8y old? Average boat more like 20y+. Electric conversion that's both easy and cheap, is not a thing (yet?).

Professional owners like ferries, commercial shipping or boat rental, will deal with this. Private owners of recreational boats, not so quick.

That means: there will be gas/diesel powered boats around for many years. Having 'green' fuel for those available everywhere, would be quite a boon.
The search labs are not available in my country and I get the quick snippet response anyways
I remember how irrationally amusing it was to shoot the parachute and watch the enemy splatter. It made the difference between a memorable game and a merely-decent one.
In addition to the minisplit cost, there's also the cost of the electrical work. Anyone can plug in a dehumidifier into an outlet but drilling a hole into the wall, running the linesets and communication wires for a minisplit is beyond most people's comfort level.
The barrier to get an internship is generally lower than getting a FT position. The author of Brew got famously asked by Google to reverse a binary tree and failed the interview.

The actual answer to avoid leetcoding is to go through the frontend engineer route in the companies which don't leetcode frontend engineers.

From my experience everyone else ask for leetcoding.

Good for you found a preferential way in but from what I've seen process generally trumps on bringing friends in.
> accountable to American lawmakers, and thus voters

If lawmakers were accountable to voters, voters would on occasion get what they want.
im building an app that just generates an email signup and spams crunchbase with a weirdly worded pdf / sales deck.
Bird Scooter is now a ~$15M market cap penny stock
Or burning money to scale up people. Which is easy to trim after the growth.
The atmosphere has a limited capacity for turning H2 into H2O. As more H2 is released, each molecule takes longer to be neutralized.
"Security concerns about China..." as more than half of the products you buy are from China. Your phone, router, bluetooth earbuds, chips in your car, the smart assistance that has an always on microphone, your smart TV that observes everything you watch and listens with a mic...

But this free app that some people use definitely needs to be banned because "China". Selective jingoism.
New girl where I work did automated doc generation, good class coverage, gitlab wiki uploaded on CI. All alone. I was ecstatic.
> It would take far too much effort, and also far too much cooperation between different nations that all intensely hate each other.

I share your pessimistic assessment and I would frame it differently. The thing that strikes me, above all, is that this is the first project that really requires cooperation on this scale. Basically everything before was possible with smaller groups following their own incentives (basically bog standard capitalism). The cost of cooperation was not worth the returns.

This is different - we need to learn to cooperate on a previously unheard of scale - and (as you note) we need to learn to cooperate in a way where we don't totally trust others. I just saw Oppenheimer so, to draw a historic analogy, it's like you have to run the Manhatten project...but also actively share work with Russian and Nazi scientists to finish the project earlier than US science could alone. It's on an entirely different level of difficulty that we have never really needed to attempt previously.

For instance - are oil & gas companies being disruptive and acting in bad faith? Yes. Do we need them to stop? Absolutely. Probably the easiest way is to reward their bad faith action if they will really start cooperating. At this stage we need them to be winners. Justice is a luxury for people who are in less dire conditions.

> Even if, for instance, Germany manages to become 100% carbon-neutral, that isn't going to help much

I think you're totally wrong on this and I encourage you to look into the science on it. We can make the planet as hot as we want. Every bit of warming emission hurts. I'd also argue that, in the same way that California standards change things across the US (because they are so big) the developed world truly abandoning carbon would dramatically impact the rest of the world.
Arguments like "look how much progress we've made in other areas!" are just Survivor Bias.

You have to prove the analogy, not just state it.
can you tell 1.5v? I do check 9v battery by tongue.
So yeah Google devs pushed WEI into chromium just a month ago
Removing lead from solder should reduce lead poisoning and environmental lead in general, which is good. Unfortunately, lead-free solder is objectively worse than leaded solder in terms of longevity of joints as well as requiring a greater working temperature. Things have gotten a lot better since introduction though.
That's irrelevant, my point is that it's ridiculous to imply that 3D-printed firearms are less "regulated" or more extreme than the original interpretation of the 2A.
damage to humans from mold
Classic Extreme Go Horse:
https://brunomb.com/xgh/
Yes, that was sort of the point. So you get 100's of millions of years during which things can rearrange themselves. Whoever - or even whatever - inherits the Earth after the next big impact will find it changed dramatically compared to how it is today. By the time they evolve intelligence (optional) have toolmaking needs (optional) and are living on land (optional) they will have plenty of time to figure out where it is going to come from, the earths crust will be rearranged enough that you can expect all kinds of stuff to have risen to the surface that is now inaccessible.

Heck even the Himalayas have formed only 50 million years ago.
According to the datasheet, which I've just looked at, it was not a '286 equivalent. Rather it added a paging mechanism whereby a 20 bit 'linear' address was mapped to a 24 bit 'physical' address. Using 1024 16k pages, so a bit like an internal LIM 4.0 scheme, but limited to 16M total rather than 24M.

It has a pair of new instructions, to enter and exit the extended mapping mode, and the mappings are only changeable when not in the extended mapping mode. So a form of memory protection.

See pages 20 and 21 of the following:

https://datasheet.datasheetarchive.com/originals/scans/Scans...
Google's "featured snippets" make it too easy for content farmers to thrive. As long as someone has the exact search "What is ___?", "How do I do _____?", etc formatted as an h2 with a simple explanation underneath, they have a pretty good shot of getting a feature. There's really no quality control.
As well as python noted in a sibling, Ruby handles this quite well out-of-the box.

Is your complaint just that some popular languages don’t have complex numbers as part of the core/stdlib?
Some molds release toxins that make people sick.
It's pretty cool what you can get done with bash, curl, jq, awk, and a bit of moxy.
> LeetCode has no correlation with great software development. Great development is more about paying attention to the end users

You can’t make blanket statements about software like that. Our field is way too varied.

For example, if you’re doing high frequency trading, then performance absolutely 100% matters. And knowing your data structures and algorithms backwards is part of that. On the other hand, if you’re building the website at a large company, the hard part of your job may be interfacing with the rest of the business. So networking and navigating corporate politics will be an incredibly important part of your job. And if you’re on a small team making a product for consumers, then your work will succeed or fail based on usability.

We could brainstorm dozens of other skills which might be important. Which of these skills matter the most depends entirely on the company and the role.
If we take the metaphorical view of vampires as those that feast on the blood of the young to extend their own lives then as a planet (or at least in the West) we have never been more infested - how many people are dying young, through overdose or suicidal hopeless, or otherwise having their life force drained through sky high rents and stagnant wages so that boomers can carry on living the high life? How many young people killed themselves during pandemic lockdowns, lockdowns that were in place mainly to save boomer lives? There’s also the related zombie concept - how many dead, uncompetitive and mismanaged companies, banks and pension funds are we keeping alive through government bailouts, which are again, essentially draining the life force of the living to feed the dead?

I also like “What We Do In The Shadows” (tv show version) extension of the metaphor to the “energy vampire”, which is essentially a criticism of bloated bureaucracy which is another one of the modern monsters draining the life out of us all.

I don’t think these terms were ever meant to be taken literally by those who created them but as platonic ideals to describe personalities and systems, but the education level and lifestyles of the time were so barbaric, primitive and rooted in physicality that the majority struggled to comprehend them as such.
Payment gateways / payment service providers are not in the same business as Visa.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/V/visa/profit-marg...

Visa is a network, with network effects that cannot be substituted, hence their enormous profit margins. Visa's competitors would be other networks like Mastercard, AmEx, Discover, JCB, China UnionPay, etc.
I got involved with scheme back in the days of R{5,6}RS (as a user, not in the standards process). Even then it was an argument for the BDFL model over design by committee.
I didn't understand the blog post as a challenge to only use carpentry tools but think he used what was available in his shop.
(Most carpenter wouldn't have thermal adhesive tape or a thermal camera either ;-)
Rooftop solar in Australia is now cheaper in some jurisdictions than transmission per kWh. Meaning, if I tried to build a nuke or any other centralized generator and I gave the electricity away for free, rooftop solar would still be cheaper per kWh because consumers don’t need to pay to maintain transmission infrastructure..

Of course, only when the sun is shining. But it’s an incredible Lego block we’ve got to play with in building this new energy system, zero marginal cost generation.
I worry that some people who find themselves in positions of management will take this seriously.
Back in the day, VLC or LaTeX used to use fc-cache to rebuild its font catalog when you installed some new font, and it could take quite some time if you have a lot of fonts installed. I wonder if Quicken uses something similar.
Yeah, for all the garbage codebases that are difficult to maintain there's an entire graveyard of projects that got stuck in analysis paralysis and never got past the hello world phase.
When you say "lousy performance", do you mean HT lowers performance, or that it's not a great speed-up?

I benchmarked HT using POV-Ray back when I first got an i7-3770 (4 cores, 8 threads) since it was my first multicore/multithread CPU. I did a benchmark with 1 thread, 2 threads, 4 threads, 8, and 16 threads.

As expected, 2 was double the speed of 1, and 4 was double the speed of two. However, 8 was merely 10% faster than 4, and as expected, 16 was no faster than 8.

Knowing how HT works, the fact that 8 threads was only 10% faster than 4 should be expected. POV-Ray rendering is almost entirely floating point math, so it can't take advantage of HT very well.

I have heard of HT possibly lowering performance, but only in contrived examples.

But HT was never meant to be a replacement for additional cores. It merely allows a single core to be used more effectively. There are probably some contrived examples of HT increasing performance by 50+% by running one thread with all integer math and the other with all floating point.
It seems like "core language" vs "standard library" almost. The Large spec includes things like lists, vectors, streams, and generators [0].

[0] https://practical-scheme.net/gauche/man/gauche-refe/R7RS-lar...
Are you hoping the outcome of this discussion is that I think she should have continued working there?
And to be clear when I say "a regulation like this" I'm referring to the one about adding emergency alerts to web browsers. That's an arguably useful feature for browsers to have, and it's probably not a big deal if some open source browsers don't have it so full enforcement isn't necessary.

Things get way harder when you're talking about forcing the addition of user hostile features (like the bill described in the OP presumably is; blocking users from accessing a website that they want to access), because that creates a situation where vendors have to treat the device owner as a potentially hostile actor. I don't see any way you could enforce that without completely destroying users' freedom to run software of their choosing on their own device, no matter how the law is worded, and I wouldn't consider that "reasonable" under any circumstances.
That's a criticism of trends in automobiles (which I agree with) not something inherent to BEVs.

Guess what, if you get a BEV with 1/3-1/4 the battery size, the range is smaller, but for most people it will be fine. And now your vehicle is not lugging around all that excess weight.

And do you really need a massive electric pickup truck? It's absolutely possible, but I bet for most people it's a preference.