skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Truman by David McCullough: https://www.goodreads.com/zh/book/show/2279

Really amazing biography about a man who became president by accident and guided country during the initial years of the atomic age. He was perfect, but the book depicts him to be a great person and a good president .

The End of the World Is just Beginning: https://www.amazon.com/End-World-Just-Beginning-Globalizatio...

Uses lots of data to back up his hypothesis two events

1. the US no longer policing the world 2) demographic shifts in most countries not reproducing

have create a situation where the the world as we know it is changing, and things are only going to get worse, the peace we know and the supplies we rely on will no longer exist soon.

Countries like China and most of West Europe are completely fucked because their populations are going to decrease by > 50% in the next few decades and they do not have the workforce or immigration policies in place to solve these problems. Ironically, he claims the US is in the best position because we have all the natural resources we need, we are not dying demographically, and Mexico and Canada are not threats.

We should expect to see less peace, more nationalism and overall a lot more instability in the future.
Time to patent (and lobby to mandate) bongs with a 1m³ air filtration system attached to them. Who's in?
Twitter rebranding: Online auction featuring memorabilia, art, office assets etc
You’re underestimating the utility of the lever machine, namely the precision/accuracy is just as good as you can personally make it. I’ve been fine tuning my Flair technique for over 1000 shots at this point. I know the precise pressure profile I like, and I can make fantastic espresso every single time. Even in the middle of the wilderness on a propane burner.
> overestimating low-probability events is not irrational — it's optimal

It can't possibly be more optimal than estimating them correctly.
Smartphone Processors Ranking
It’s only for a Gaggia. It’s one of those projects that you only stumble into if you already have a Gaggia.
They don't explode anymore because we have decades of experience building safe vehicles. We're not there yet for EVs.
It’s more common now but Debian was the first distribution that really opened Linux up for beginners like me. No offence, Slackware.

Many derivatives have been able to expand in other directions because of the ability of Debian to create beginners.

HBD!
I'd like to add

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.

Borrowed from wikipedia:

The book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate primarily in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops.
Definitely accessible to anyone who can write code. Very little ML knowledge is necessary. And all of this can be done reasonably on a laptop depending on how large your corpus material is.
For an opposite story, my family emigrated from the Mid East to Europe then USA and it was by far the best thing that could have ever happened. My QOL would have been so much worse in Mid East, and even in Europe (developed, Northern Europe at that), vs. what it is today in the US. It's the number one thing I am most grateful for.
lest -> unless ('lest' means basically the opposite from what you probably mean)
I see. That's interesting. It might be expensive to deploy in production but I can give this a shot in generating synthetic training data. Thanks for the tip! :)
At this point there's basically 3 clouds, and then everyone else.
I think you might want to give this a go: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1927594591
China's building more coal plants than anyone, and also building more solar panels than anyone.

And a lot of these poorer countries don't have the industrial capacity to build all this stuff even if it was open sourced.

>Instead US tells them not to take loans from China but offers no alternative

Well it depends why. The west tried this and it just ended up bankrupting multiple countries. Eg for hydro, which is also high cap ex, low op ex.
Doesn't that just increase the amount of time the bots have to remain as "sleepers" to embed themselves in the network before turning evil?
Thanks for the interesting question!

From what I've observed from both academia and posts from a number of top organizations (with seemingly the exception of OpenAI) - all the models are trained on test data. That's why OpenAI seems to report poorer results than the rest but perform the best in practice - they seem to have their own curated dataset.

I have arguably the opposite opinion here - I don't think we can "prevent" cheating but we should instead put in the work to create new exam questions and make it easier to do so. I feel "learning" the exam questions is (IMO) completely fine and should be expected (why should we have a static dataset if it diminishes the quality of the results) - much like having new exam papers every year for students.

What I expect going forward is for the next version of foundation models, there will also be smarter ways to synthetically create datasets from ground truths themselves (we made our first pass at it here - https://docs.confident-ai.com/docs/quickstart/synthetic-data... ).

I feel that data labelling companies will hold an edge and that the cycle of finding new edge cases, labelling, continue training will continue in the foreseeable future (see Karpathy's data engine flywheel in 2021/2022 Tesla AI day).
Private lenders used to do this.

The Federal interest payments gave a stream of income to the lender.

But I thought in decades past someone used to assess the risk of someone not repaying, and limit the amount.

Or was it always a small amount no matter what? I remember not being able to afford even the state schools, even with the loans and meager scholarships.

This is in the early 1990s.
More important than the size, I think, is the angle of impact... Still huge numbers we could just fathom....
(from a research paper by F. Dörre and V. Klebanov)

The bitcoin theft incident.

The presumed genesis of the attack is as follows: Bitcoin operates a public database of all transactions, the block chain. Each transaction is cryptographically signed by its initiator using the ECDSA scheme. Creating ECDSA signatures requires a per-transaction nonce. Partial predictability of nonces allows for one class of attacks, but using the same nonce for two transactions signed by the same key---which is what probably happened---constitutes a catastrophic security failure. Anyone can easily identify this case from the information recorded in the block chain, reconstruct the victim’s private key, and divert their money to a bitcoin address of choice. No intrusion into the victim’s system is necessary. A loss of seed entropy in the PRNG used for
generating nonces increases the probability of the breach.

This ultimately caused Google to replace the Android PRNG, which was only providing 40% of the requested entropy for this particular use.

-----

I also recall someone had discovered an online poker service's shuffle algorithm was something common (maybe Fisher-Yates?) based on java.util.Random with system time as a seed. Once you see your own hand and part of the board, you get a fairly accurate idea of what could be in someone else's hand from the small-ish sample of possible deals around system time.
A platform shouldn't dictate details like what programming language to use to create applications for that platform. It's already bad enough with iOS and ObjC/Swift or Android with Java/Kotlin, but at least there are escape hatches on those platforms. WASM is the escape hatch that was needed on the browser platform.
What's ironic is the tangential threads complaining about humor on HN throw far more noise and entropy into these threads than the jokes themselves. People could have just ignored it, or downvoted it and moved on, but no, someone made a joke and now we need to stop the car and have discourse about how HN is turning into Reddit. Knuckles must be rapped. Fingers wagged and pearls clutched. Again.
Why would Gaia try to sequester carbon back into the ground? It’s useful to her (but not to us).
Portugal and Holland have decriminalized consumption and associated posession, but nothing else. Sales there are already in a legal gray area, e.g. because the Netherlands do not allow production or trade, so all the places selling cannabis there have to get their product illegally. Sales in coffeeshops are actually illegal, but not punishable, if done following certain rules. I don't know the details about Portugal, but in the Netherlands, Cannabis is still an illegal drug overall, just with the aforementioned plus medical exceptions. But even that is against EU laws, there just hasn't been any action from the EU comission to enforce that yet. So the hope for Germany is that maybe the comission will continue to look away even for a wider decriminalization.
Recently a friend of mine hummed a song to shazam and it did actually work!

I seem to recall that Apple announced || demoed this a couple of WWDCs ago. I didn't realize it was already deployed. I assumed it was going to be part of Siri/HomePod.
I saw it last year while I was doing a project for school - and clicked off the page as it was appearing. Never seen it again.
Ha ha I read his earlier article about whether we could survive going back to foraging etc. and I think he is too optimistic! I think we have created enough pollution and wrecked ecosystems that 8bn people cannot go walkabout and survive simultaneously. Let alone people’s skill. Food will be the last
concern: human predators and acess to water would be! But that is my take.

That said I am more optimistic we wont need to go back to hunter gatherer en mass.
So basically how to "manage" pretty much every person regardless of what they are doing professionally..

Also find it funny how a person who doesn't act and do stuff exactly how you want is considered "difficult".

We definitely need more "difficult" persons.. That is not a virtue by itself but ironically is the only thing that will save us from this depressing "corporate" bullshit.
Not sure what you're talking about re: "criminal justice reform" - we've had an experiment on that in the last decade that has led to absolute disaster. Low level crime has increased, and now violent crime is increasing.
> I am allowed to at least read the copywritten material, from which it goes into my brain to become mixed up with everything else, and spit out to produce something 'new' or 'newish'.

Yes, because you're A) human and B) that is how copyright is supposed to work.

AI doesn't enjoy the rights of people. AI is a "talking book" and copying, storing, then repeating someone else's work from your talking book would (likely) run afoul of [US] copyright law.
Lasers could help make the electric grid greener
Does the Prime but shipped yourself get to distort any other policies?

Hopefully not, if this really is just a programme to allow bulky items to fall under the same sort of policies as Amazon, including shipping and returns, then I guess I don't really have a problem with it.

They are just paying a 2% fee to get the Prime badge.
I love VR but this seems so stupid to me. It’s funny when people take what seems like a cool idea- digital presence- and just go off the rails (eg, hapifork [0] takes a cool thing-quantified self- and adds absurd cost and user experience) and I think are an overall negative for driving adoption of a new technology.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/reviews/hapifork-bluetooth-enabled-smar...
Even that is both browser and OS dependent, in my experience.
AFAIK the plaintiff would have to show that it's not true. That wouldn't be anywhere near enough but would be a start.

I think they would also have to show that either the defendant knew that it wasn't true, or was reckless about it. They also have to show that it was likely to be believed as a factual claim, so expressions of opinion or hyperbole are not defamatory. This isn't legal advice, just what I think from years of reading Popehat.
The varda shards found to be responsive to magnetic fields had trace amounts of iron impurity as well which was given as the expected reason in that case. Not sure about every other case of course.
I feel the same, as someone who has a Gaggia Classic collecting dust and has long considered splurging on a near-$1000 option because I want all these features...

This is so vaguely written as to seem far more daunting than it probably should, it's unclear how much money or time it would cost me, I don't even know where to start with it. Cool idea, but totally unapproachable to someone without extensive related background.
Yes. I hate this article. It presupposes "the norm" doesn't need anything special and everyone else is "difficult."

But supporting people is the manager's job. You can't do that if you pathologize literally everything messy or nuanced.

Some of these categories are people learning to estimate for the first time, or responding to pressure to say "yes" to impossible things by saying "yes" to impossible things. Also notably absent is any mention of air cover. There's usually a reason people get burned out or start sounding the alarm about a project. But rather than get to the bottom of that and help with the root causes, in every single of one of these cases he assumes the problem is basically their personalities.
No worries, what gives courage is facing up to reality itself :)

I agree that the hard guardrails really cut off huge swatches of utility.

Would love to hear about your project too and we can motivate each other!
Meant to say 00s. Oh wel.
> Article 6 (para II and III) of the SREN Bill would force browser providers to create the means to mandatorily block websites present on a government provided list

Why would this ever be done on a browser level? Any nation with internet censoring intentions can already do this by blocking it on an ISP level.
There is zero training evolved. The workflow is no different really compared to normal search. Compare to the high level flow of implementing elastic search. The only difference is you are encoding the data using vectors based on a model that best meets your criteria. Tons of howtos out there already on generating embedding a search for LLMs. I think even openai has some cookbooks for this in their docs.
friendlymail: an open source, email-based social network. Email a new post to yourself, and the app generates an HTML version and sends to your followers. They can comment and like via email.

I tried a self-hosted blog, but comments and likes were a mess. Email was my solution.
Democrats are in a weird position where they're relatively moderate in terms of economics, but arguably the furthest left major party in the world in terms of social issues. The latter is turning off non-college educated of all ethnicities.
My company started a sales org shortly after I arrived, which was disappointing as it was extremely engineering-heavy initially.

My fears were correct, as it has been steadily going downhill from an engineering perspective. But hey, line goes up and to the right so it must be a great idea.
I live where Cannabis is completely legal and towns decide whether to approve or deny retail locations. In my view the benefits of legalization have mostly to do with counteracting the various downsides of enforcing laws that prohibit it. E.g. arresting people, harassing people, and creating a taboo-mystique that makes and keeps young people interested.

What I don't see is any significant change in the way marijuana is perceived among adults. Few people will judge you harshly if you are a marijuana user, but it's not like people are now passing around joints at parties. In my group of friends I know a mom who is a bedtime stoner and a dad who eats a gummy most weekend days. I have a stash that I usually only break out when people are visiting from out of state - one $60 trip to the weed store easily lasts me a year.

The 'new market' for marijuana is basically about regular users, people who desire and can tolerate marijuana on a daily basis. The product in the recreational shops is all about highest-potency, maximum-impact and that's what is driving the retail side of things. I don't see the market growing, in fact I think it's a race to the bottom as supply greatly exceeds demand.

I used to think that over time marijuana would just wind up behind the counter at the gas station, but I now think it's most likely to remain roped off the way some US states only let special, single-purpose stores sell spirits.
This would be a much more sensible criticism of commercial fusion if anyone was doing NIF-style commercial fusion. As it is, it misses the point entirely and repetitively. The reason to be excited about NIF reaching ignition is scientific.

For sure a lot of people don't know obvious truths about fusion, but a lot of people don't know obvious truths about a lot of things. That doesn't cause all CPUs to ignite and planes to fall out of the sky.
Kubernetes 1.28 is out and with it MicroK8s brings you some really exciting features!
The two futures of high tech civilizations are determined by who prevails: lifeforms may become "machinized" or machines may become enlighted with life. The first future is the doom of civilizations highly intelligent, but selfish and not gifted with intuition for this reason.
maybe those were the days they set off, taking two days to reach the island? ;-)
1) You're making a category error; comparing HN to Reddit makes as much sense as comparing a scalar to a vector.

2) People have been saying this since approximately day one of HN; it's this site's equivalent to social decay / "kids these days", which is a sentiment that dates back to antiquity.
It's important to remember that science isn't a bunch of data or experts, it is a way of thinking.
That said, many don't trust the scientific system anymore. It seems like a double edged sword. We (collectively) are finding a new set point in the spectrum between "doing our own research" (eg searching inter webs or podcasts for answers), and "blindly trusting the elite experts". On complex technical things, neither one of these extremes seems optimal. The approach I strive for is to
try to always question, and to try to know what I don't know even after 'doing my own research'. it's hard and sometimes I have to defer. I think we all do. Who we defer to on a given topic is the crucial point.
Indeed, but genetically engineered agriculture technology scales quickly at negligible cost. Note, people have already cultivated food-grade Spirulina for many years.

Cost effectiveness is just part of an optimization problem, that will be constrained by desirable traits: temperature resistance, replication rate, and viable fuel content. In many places, uncontrolled algae blooms are already a naturally occurring issue in the run-off from large cities/farms.

There are several firms already working on this biotech. Note, a algae biodiesel would solve the issues with clean efficient generation, energy density, repurposing distribution, and repurposing storage.

Thus, a Goat cart is a safer bet. =)
I, too, thought of the Titan when I saw that photo of all the leaks under only espresso PSI.
Ive found way more difficult managers than difficult employees in my career.

Difficult managers need to be terminated as well.
I found that stemming the text before generating vectors helps increase recall and the vectors still capture context, etc. However it does hurt precision because some information is lost by stemming. The more recent vector training algorithms are better able to capture semantic, syntactic, and contextual similarity without a lot of preprocessing. So I have found that vectors can replace all the nonsense that used to be needed to increase recall: stemming, manual synonym lists, etc.

However vector similarity search only helps with the literal text search not ranking. Tf/idf, bm25, page rank, learn to rank ML, etc are still needed to rank documents. Whenever I find a new vector search engine, I always look to see what ranking features it has beyond vector similarity.
Why would carbon need to go back into the ground? It’s really good for plant life in general and only bad for humans who want the earth to remain in the same state it was in 1700 indefinitely.
Still remember being introduced to it in 2005 while working in the UK as sailing instructor for a summer job. An older guy showed me how he automated cataloging his grandma's possessions for auction with it, which deeply fascinated me.

Back home, after lots of trial and error, I used it to run a mail- and webserver for my first business.
You could call that a feature making payments easier for customers! All 3DS does is protect the banks by inconveniencing consumers since banks are responsible for fraud.
> I view myself as intrinsically optimistic, so I am unsettled by my growing concerns about the viability of our future—such worrying is not consistent with who I am.

From his about page. Not exactly what I'd call doctrinaire.
15 years ago, I was working on a CRUD system in the automotive industry. It had an ORM, but custom SQL was hard-coded. I was really sick during the winter and had brain fog for weeks during this time.

I accidentally left of the last half of an update statement and whenever anyone logged into the system, it was continually writing to all records.

Luckily, we had hourly backups for production.
Any long-lasting exceptions? I’m wondering what characteristics/personalities were more resistant to power trips, if any.
Yeah, I had the same experience, but I found video series on youtube where they discuss each chapter which I found very helpful.
https://xkcd.com/1708/

I often heard really exaggerated advice about how much water to guzzle every day. It got crazy.

One day several years ago, a nurse was taking vitals on me and told me to drink, I don't know, 48 cups per day or something? It was huge. And I regarded her with incredulity. So upon being taken in to see the doctor, and this was a physician that I really trusted and had a good long tenure, I repeated the advice and I said, "That's BS, right?" and she said yep, and I'll talk to that nurse...

I am especially wary of my fluid intake because I live in an urban desert. Therefore I must constantly drink fluids when it's hot to stay healthy and hydrated. However, I must also gauge my ability to find a bathroom while out on the road, and when you ride the bus, good luck with that! It might be 3 hours, or you're forced to make a small order at a restaurant to become a customer. So it's really a delicate balancing act of how much to drink. And also, remembering to use the bathroom at every opportunity!
> In the US. Everywhere else, that's incredibly unusual. 5x the average wage in the UK is 150k plus - that's _very_ unusual.

I am in Europe and it's normal here. Maybe not the UK, I'm in continental. Looking at it in detail, high taxes seem to mess with this a lot. I'm in a very low taxed region (my full income tax + health and social insurance combined was 9% of my income last year).

> This is nonsense.

No, it's not. I've just helped a junior friend get a job that pays 1.5x the average wage, the only thing they know is the very basics of HTML.

I helped other friends too, those knew a little more (basic programming skills - variables, conditions, cycles) and immediately got 2x the average wage.
Curbing Connection Churn in Zuul
Steve Albini was born in 1962. He's a boomer.

Also, a higher percentage of Gen X voted for Reagan than did the boomers in 1984 (Gen X wasn't old enough to vote in 1980).
The most important feature of Debian has been its governance and focus on community. That's the difference between it and CentOS or its derivatives, and why I'll keep using it forever - it's fundamentally sustainable. Here's to 30 more years!