skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was like the perfect HN recommendation -- something I never would have thought of, with enough context to show why I should care. Will read both these, thank you.
> This guy is a ... "doomer" ...

Whatever your feelings about his pessimistic tone, regularly debunking the latest popular media baloney is a reasonable pastime, which society could certainly use more of.

> Fusion is obviously monumentally hard ... steady march of gains toward higher ... There is no known fundamental physical reason why ...

True. And limestone can be mined by hand, on top of Mount Everest. The cost per kilogram would be enormously higher than any normal commercial limestone quarry, but if we just invested enough...

Meanwhile, "aim your solar cells roughly toward the sun" fusion energy is available at scale, now, and is orders of magnitude cheaper than there's any reason to believe possible for a commercial fusion reactor. And human society does not have infinite resources, to invest in sounds-cool stuff with massively negative ROI's.
After a short search for Dr. Robert Glover I'm getting all kinds of "red pill", "pickup advice", "men's rights" links etc, all of which are red flags to me for "incel" kind of stuff.

Is that also what I can expect from the book, or did I come to conclusions too quickly?
I should invent a statistical distribution for scores in 5 star rating systems. There should be peaks at 5 and 1 with a spread in between. Deviations from this distribution would be a fraud indicator, and the 5:1 ratio the rating.

With moves like this Amazon are trending towards the same discoverability quality in their marketplace that Google has achieved with the web as a whole, which may hint at another unknown fundamental law of internet economics.
There are plenty of items that have been replaced with a different one but maintain the previous product's high review volume. Also there are those with a huge number of fake reviews. I look at the 1-2 star reviews. If they are dumb ones like box was damaged or shipping slow, that is good. If there are 4000 reviews saying "Great product" and 30 saying it went up in smoke with pictures, I am not buying it.
Why would we want to spend so much money to transition to driverless transportation? Just take PT if you don't want to drive.
LLVM code generation bug. Imagine loading gdb and reproducing the crash, only to see a stack trace where every frame is `????????` and raw assembly (because the upper half is generated code and the lower half is corrupted). Then you finally determine a global variable (field in a struct pointer) is responsible for the crash, run rr and find a C function which modifies said variable…except it’s modifying a completely unrelated local variable (like, of a different pointer type) which happens to have the same address as this field.

Also, it’s hard to find a minimal example, and the range of code where the bug could be is very large.

Perhaps LLVM is compiling an allocation which somehow allocated memory in the same place as the global’s allocation? or perhaps somehow the global is getting assigned to the variable (though it seems trivially not, maybe LLVM is compiling arguments wrong)? I don’t actually know, I haven’t fixed the bug but it’s not currently an issue.

How do you even fix something like that? I’d probably insert logs in the generated code to minimize the location where the bug could be found. But I have no idea how the local variable gets the same address as the global’s field…
I concur: Hydrogen is a "bad" fuel in terms of practicality: it's extremely reactive and it leaks easily.

To make a parallel with rocket science: there are extremely efficient liquid chemical propellants, much better than what is in use today, like Chlorine Trifluoride, that nobody uses anymore because they are just too dangerous to work with.

Or the fact that hydrogen airships will never come back: nobody will ever, ever switch from helium despite the cost and lift difference.

Hydrogen has its uses (e.g. steel plants). Transportation is not one of them.
Amazing how people can be elevated to such high positions without any acumen or business knack. Almost all amazon devices have been a failure in terms of generating profit. Somehow this guy got to keep his job despite all that, instead of trying to nab someone at apple. That's why the layoffs in Alexa were so disruptive, Alexa never made any money, they always poured money into incredibly stupid ideas, and overnight decided they didn't want to do that anymore, despite it being the M.O. for like past 10 years. No idea why he didn't leave like Bezos or the other guy who headed retail right as the pandemic challenges arose.
>Marseille

The US has Detroid, LA gangs, SF with the streets filled with homeless people...
I think a sparkline bar chart would be more useful.
Charon didn't get as far north, his jurisdiction was mostly in the Mediterranean
The model is a model. It's part of a compression algorithm. The compressed data would be the prompt + choice of which predicted tokens to accept (e.g. when not always choosing the most likely next token). The end-user is supplying the prompt and the choice function is randomized/not being used to store data, thus the end user is providing the compressed data.
There are bike lanes all over the US? Since when?

Also, isn't Musk setting up Hyperloop, or was that another publicity stunt?
Because some people still have a knee-jerk reaction against any insinuation of vaccination not being as effective as they have been told it is which makes them attach a 'fake news' label to articles which give the impression of questioning this premise.
I will recommend this book highly as well.

This book taught me how to meditate, and my life really changed for the better.
> From a user experience standpoint, the new rating display system isn’t as glanceable as the five yellow stars. Additionally, the mention of “5-star” and the use of just one yellow star in the new arrangement could mislead new users, at least briefly.

It's overcomplicated enough to have 2 different star indicators.
It's an idea that's a few decades old. The late 90s had Bizrate.com managing millions of star images (via java apps) for retail ratings.
It wouldn't be a HN thread without the top comment being something like a middlebrow dismissal (the comment you're replying to).

Of course there are cases where the company can influence a certain type of behavior, but I've seen several of these stereotypes in companies which definitely did not "cause" it. Pretty much everyone can be difficult now and then, but there are definitely quite a few chronic cases out there.
The government could drop funding of fusion that can't be commercialized and give grants to other fusion projects? Funding between government research agendas is rivalrous too.
Not quite a bug, but I think typing 'shutdown -h now' on the wrong tab (which I thought was a test box) of a bunch of tabs monitoring live systems wasn't my best moment. Worse so because it required an actual trip to the DC to get that box up again.

3 hours of downtime on a very busy service...

The very worst bug I've ever encountered (and that still bugs me to this day more than 20 years later) was an occasion in a hosting facility called 'Webcity' in Hoofddorp, NL. A machine called 'chopper' would periodically register as 'down' according to the watchdog and then it would be automatically power cycled. This happened frequently enough to be a real problem. Investigating that showed that the 'ping' packets that were supposed to test whether or not the box was up would randomly disappear (the responses).

After many, many hours of head scratching, changing out all kinds of gear and cabling (coaxial ethernet) we finally had one part left that we had not changed out. The BNC 'T' connector at the back of the machine. We all looked at each other and said 'that can't be it' and went for another round of verifying everything. Then, upon completion and just before again coming to the conclusion that that couldn't be it my colleague J suggested that maybe we should swap it out any way. Crazy idea but still. Problem solved.

Long story short: the BNC connector was a near perfect sink for a part of the bitstream that made up the ping packet. I still can't figure out how that could be the case but the signal dropped low enough that there was a good chance that the receiving machine didn't decode it properly. And once three packets in a row had been mangled it would reboot the box.

Total elapsed time was many hours and the fix was $1 or so. We ritually destroyed the old splitter.
Not very hard.

I recently had to reinstall Win11. I don't use it, but I needed to keep it around.

Windows Update does not update packages from the Windows Store, or vice versa.

Aside from the dozens of external driver packages you need, and even using Ninite to get a basic set of working apps, you still need 2 totally separate tools to update Windows.

It says a lot about how bad Linux on the desktop still is today that some poor misled fools still think that Win11 plus WSL2 is a better Linux than Linux.
As I heard one engineering leader say, "it's okay to make mistakes — once". Meaning, we're all fallible, mistakes happen, but failure to learn from past mistakes is not optional.

That said, a challenge I have frequently run into, and I feel is not uncommon, is a tension between the desire not to repeat mistakes and ambitions that do generally involve some amount of risk-taking. The former can turn into a fixation on risk and risk mitigation that becomes a paralyzing force; to some leaders, lists like these might just look like "a thousand reasons to do nothing" and be discarded. Yet history is full of clear cases where a poor appreciation of risk destroyed fortunes, with a chorus of "I told you sos" in their wake.

It is a difficult part of leadership to weigh the risk tradeoffs for a particular mission, and presenting things in absolute terms of "lessons learned" rarely makes sense, in my experience. The belt-and-suspenders approaches that make sense for authoring the critical control software for a commercial passenger aircraft or an industrial control system for nuclear plants probably do not make sense for an indie mobile game studio, even if they're all in some way "software engineering".
Amazon has always been the leading company in the word for rapidly shipping and testing changes. Fumbling around incrementally is their strategy. They made A/B Testing and Multi-Armed Bandit household terms.
When I looked into this briefly my impression was that it's extremely hard to do mechanistic interpretation beyond very simple cases like CNN classification or toy problems like arithmetic in transformers. Not to say it's not a worthy pursuit, but I think the difficulty isn't justified for many researchers since the results won't make a big splash like a new model training result.
You’ve ironically stumbled upon thenphilosocial argument in favor of copyright! We do want these industries to exist. Without copyright protection in a world of zero effort reproduction, it becomes impossible to make a living this way. This the industries cease to exist. And people stop crafting anything other than the most dogshit of media and programs and writing. If you have to work a different job all day, you’re gonna have no time to make that next good song/video/etc.
When you read technical books for fun, do you do the exercises and projects at the end of chapters? I have found that when I read and don't actually use the concepts learned, I tend to forget after some time.
Demand shaping - Germany pioneered this by dialing aluminum smelter usage up and down in the early days. They didn't talk about it much, I think because it functioned as a kind of hidden subsidy and they didn't want to attract undue attention. There's LOTS of scope for stuff like heaters and vehicles batteries to use electricity when it's plentiful and cheap and turn it off when it's not. The UK has a special electricity tariff for this already which is very popular with electric car drivers. Demand shaping is, relative to storage, really cheap and usually gets forgotten about in skeptical renewable energy models.

Pumped storage and batteries for short term energy storage - hours to weeks. Australia is already building one pumped storage battery which should provide them with roughly 350GWh - roughly half of the short term storage they'd need if they had a 100% solar and wind based grid. With one plant. You can't do this in, e.g. Florida but the geography to build this is more than plentiful enough in most of the world (this topic is pretty well settled: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14555-y but for some reason people keep disputing it).

Hydrogen for seasonal storage - for weeks when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. Roughly 2-3% of power will need to be stored this way on a 100% solar/wind grid. It's not efficient and expensive to generate hydrogen from electricity and then turn it back into electricity but still cheaper than generating and using nuclear power at the point of generation. It is cheap to store enormous amounts of power for long periods this way though.
> It’s not hard to imagine a new type of safety cone that has an explicit sign for autonomous vehicles to stop far far away.

Isn't that kind of defeating the point of autonomous vehicles if we need to build a world that will accommodate them?
I'd think that both distros work with upstream as much as possible when bugs are found. I'm too lazy to do it, but you could check both distro's bugtrackers for activity to know if one really generates more checking than the other, but I'd be surprised if in practice there's a big difference. Maybe pick a few packages, see how fast fixes are merged?
I'm not the author, but obligatory "not sure why this is being down-voted." I've been wondering about Graeber for a while, since his work seems suspiciously close to "messages certain people desperately want to hear" and I have strong priors against those accounts, regardless of which "side" they come from.

Would love to hear perspective on this. The book would be a serious investment.
ACE TAO didn't, but it was a long time ago and I was probably holding it wrong.
Are You Rich? Calculate the Best US Cities to Live in for Your Salary
That's not accurate. The trade off is always change the character with more density or change the character by changing the economic makeup of the people that live there and it shouldn't even be a question which to choose. The choice is very obvious because the outcome of preserving character at the expense of accommodating the needs of the people living there is pretty much always having the place turn into a rich guy playground (with or without lots of homeless people depending on how authoritarian the place is) and the poors to middle classes that used to live there being displaced to much poorer commuter quality of life situations or into outright homelessness. The only people that blocking progress does anything for is the entrenched owners of the real estate, everyone else gets screwed.
France is really far from a planned economy.

Marseille's worst neighborhoods are really chill compared to the bad parts of any American city.

The streets are pretty safe.

Your comment is kinda ridiculous, stop watching TV.

Yeah there are lot of taxes, but those taxes come in handy when you can get 2 years of unemployment benefits when starting a company. Or when you know, get a cancer that would cost a few millions to treat.
That's the old way but it's only on the single item page.
The owner of the car initially. The passenger(s) and maker may also be liable depending on circumstances.
That "net gain" comes with a lot of a caveats. 400MJ to produce a 2.1MJ laser burst that resulted in 3.5MJ of fusion out is pretty far from a total net gain.
ChatGPT free was always just a demo. Plus carries significant features - plugins, a much more powerful model. The code interpreter is well worth $20/month for certain groups.

The API is the other part of the funnel. It's been quite revenue generating from the beginning. Enshittification is more likely to happen to companies with terrible ARPU, like Reddit or X.

Then again Sam Altman was on Reddit board, and during that time, defended that it was fine for Reddit to lose money, because they still had plenty of money in the bank.
> Not a big fan of someone being able to evade all sorts of gun laws by 3D printing their own gun.

It's been legal since the dawn of the USA to manufacture your own firearms.

A criminal who is otherwise not legally able to acquire or possess a firearm is not going to care about 3D printer laws. This only impacts the law abiding.

> There's already far too many nutcases who own far too many guns - allowing them to print their own guns and ammo to avoid being on some sort of watchlist is just a really slippery slope.

There's no federal requirement for a "watch list" for owning a gun. There's background checks for transfers of firearms, but even those are not applicable in all cases (e.g. a father can transfer a long gun to his son in most States without any paperwork at all).

Manufacturing your own ammo is legal across the entire country. There's no registration requirement or any paperwork whatsoever needed.

> I'm all for people owning guns, I support the 2nd amendment vigorously,

Let's be honest here, you clearly don't.

> but there's a reason the words "highly regulated" appears in the 2nd amendment.

The words are "well regulated" and they don't mean what you think they mean. In 18th century American English, the phrase "well regulated" means well equipped.

It's saying that people should have lots of guns!

> Sick and tired of fringe nutcases (supported by the gun lobby) saying any and all regulations are a threat to the freedoms we all enjoy as Americans.

The problem with new firearm regulations is multi fold, but the main problems are:

1. There's plenty of existing regulations in place that are not being properly enforced.

2. The majority of new regulations are bans on cosmetic features or simply make things more inconvenient for law abiding gun owners.

3. Anything that was previously considered a "compromise" turns into a "loophole".
Naive method is O(n^3).

Strassen algorithm drops it to O(n^log2(7)) = 2.8074 because it divides the process into 2x2 matrix multiplications that can be multiplied by 7 ops instead of 8. Strassen is practical algorithm.

You can still optimize and get to 2.371552 with complex trickery, but these are galactic algorithms, meaning that matrices are so big that you can't even construct them on Earth.
If I use a Photoshop filter is the output subject to Photoshop's EULA and/or the copyright of the photo I started with?

If you get my image from the internet then you resize it in Photoshop you can't claim you created some original art, you just used the resize/crop/color filter function.
> Most noise you hear in the news is about something generating more heat than power is put into the plasma.

Unless you consider ITER commercial, I don't believe you. Most news about commercial fusion is ‘X had a big investment round’ or ‘Y made a really hot plasma’, and if we were in the world where a startup's tokamak hit ignition (we're not), we'd be in a world actually qualitatively pretty excitingly close to net energy, even if it didn't break even end to end.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35421034
There’s an unbelievably vast difference between a human’s creative process and the mechanical reproduction of reweighed training data. Machines don’t create, people do.
A healthy marriage of two people treating each other as equals takes a lot of communication, and that almost certainly can't be scaled 10x, nor do the same principles apply when someone is only getting 10%.

In traditional polygamy, the man with 10 wives would be the head of household for 10 wives with competing interests, so it does start to sound very managerial.
>How do you power the grid with 90% solar when the sun only shines 40% of the day during the winter?

Maybe not the national grid, but there are plenty of places in the US where the sun shines a lot more than 40% of the day during the winter. Start there. If Southern CA, AZ, NM, TX, FL, etc.. which all get a ton of sun no matter the season can reduce their reliance on the federal grid, that's a hell of a start, and we should be celebrating that as a great first step and building off of that.

I thought the whole point of alternative energy sources is acknowledging that certain locales have potential for different energy sources (solar, hydroelectric, wind, etc..) and we should as a society should take full advantage of that? We know oil isn't going away any time soon, but why aren't we saying "oh City XYZ or State ABC is abundant in (alternative energy source), let's make use of that as best as we can"?
What limits are you willing to place on this? Majorities can and do vote for monsters.
In those countries, what fraction of the population goes to a university?

Sure, we could do that in the US, too. Maybe not for 60% of the population, though. (In the US, 62.7% of high school graduates attend some additional schooling - though fewer graduate from college.)
In 17th century was it better to be a religious Jew in Belgium or non-religious Jew in Belgium?
The way to measure this is based on distance. If say a phone emits 3 watts of RF but it’s set 1 meter away the area that 3 watts operates on is 4pi1^2. If the 3 watts is being emitted right next to you then maybe the size of the antenna stars to mater. This is why if your really worried about RF using wired headphones and never taking a call with the phone pressed up to your ear is the best thing you can do
I'd wish people would not through the word "censor" around that casually.

Take a deeper look into e.G. cold war Eastern European countries to see what censorship is.
Efficiency has a huge impact on the cost/economics, something that you've highlighted. If significant more energy is needed, it'll likely be more expensive. Hydrogen is sometimes only a third as efficient as other solutions. It's pretty logical to assume it'll be

> In the early 1900s, gas was less efficient than electricity too

I think you mean gasoline instead of just gas. Hydrogen requires huge amounts of energy before it's easy to transport, which is what you responded to. In any case, in the early 1900s, gasoline had a huge amount of stored energy. It was a matter of using it efficiently, you're comparing apples to oranges. With Green Hydrogren too often people say that some technological improvement will solve the drawbacks. While ignoring that for e.g. hydrogen it's not so easy, for other options it is/was.

Same for the often suggested "solution" of using surplus energy. A factory that doesn't work 24/7 is more costly. Aside from that I understood that hydrogen is best produced continuously for it to be efficient.
What I want to see in a claim like this, and I don't (or missed it) is that cases of cancer for parts of the body where cellphones are commonly places (head, hip/groin) are increasing. Otherwise it seems like the external view of this theory proves it false.
F# has something called Fable. It originally just compiled down to JavaScript. Recently they've added Python and Dart.
That makes no sense. You just need an undocumented binary interface to keep most humans out, no need to create an HTML page and add a reverse-CAPTCHA.
That’s idiotic. You believed the lie.