skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A sincere best of luck to you all. At the same time these sentences are unwarranted

> Public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud made life easier for start-ups and enterprises. But they are closed source, have you rent computers at a huge premium, and lock you in. Ubicloud offers an open alternative, reduces your costs, and returns control of your infrastructure back to you. All without sacrificing the cloud's convenience.

especially when you say:

> Ubicloud is in public alpha. You can provide us your feedback, get help, or ask us to support your network environment in the Community Forum.

while I agree self-hosting at a philosophical level, please note that there are lots of good reasons to use public providers.
You realize that somebody wrote that lib and maybe they want ppl with skills to build stuff instead of just reusing?

People always make weird arguments about lc, but whats the point?

Just put effort into it or not, no excuses needed
Thanks for the suggestion, I went on a bit of a WW2 binge recently and went through:

The Second World Way by Anthony Beevor (it's a tough but very interesting listen)
SAS: Rogue Heroes by Ben Macintyre (very enjoyable, assume slightly exaggerated)
as well as Double Cross

All great books.
> can you make wires from cermets?

Yes, but the minimal bending radius would be far from impressive.

> Thats the point. we need a substance that is malleable(?) enough like copper wire that electrons can pass through.

So many assumptions here. Copper wire is but one form that is useful for energy transport. But superconductors don't need a lot of thickness and parallel layers of tape have enough flex in one dimension to be very useful. Usually they allow for complex routing by adding twists, like flatcable, but given the magnetic fields involved you don't want to do that in free space but firmly tied down to something (preferably something non-magnetic!).

> Pottery ceramic wont work like that.

Ceramics are a vast class of materials, which includes pottery ceramics but also many others which have a very large range and diversity of properties. They are essentially a whole branch on the tree of materials science that range from Tungsten Carbide to diamond to ordinary clay and a whole raft of others.
I normally consider these discussion to be more about the people reading the comments than the people writing them. You've clearly made up your mind, but others presumably haven't so I think it's good he makes these arguments, even if it looks like tilting at windmills to you.
businesses use photocopiers, there’s Xerox shops, etc.

Again, LLMs don’t copy so it’s not a good metaphor.
Nice work. I also learnt by doing instead of following endless tutorials and videos, took me 9-12 months and got hired in Dec 2021.

Personally, I'd consider taking the joke reference to extreme pornography out of the article.
Supposedly, one of the biggest distributors of CSAM is US military networks. If you have access to them, you're not supposed to go trawling around just looking being curious because there's officially "need to know" stuff out there (and you don't need to know). Which makes it a great place to hide that sort of stuff.
How do you know my political position? I am not a conservative and never vote for them if that's what you mean...if anything, I dislike all political parties.

But anyway, I was merely stating a possible root cause of the problem, hyper lip-service to a political ideology.
Copyright law includes many exceptions explicitly for libraries.
IANAL is the dumbest abbreviation the internet has come up with. I believe I first observed these things on the Groklaw discussion threads discussing the SCO legal battle against the world.

Not-A-Lawyer NAL instead of the full IANAL.

I just had to say it.
Other way around. AMD's early efforts were hard broken and needed a new CPU, SGX has never been as far as I know. Even when not technically "broken" AMD SEV was broken by design because it didn't protect all the necessary state. SGX was correctly designed from day one and was always patchable via their TCB recovery process = software upgrade, sufficiently well that it could be patched to recover from Spectre attacks despite nobody knowing about them at the time SGX was designed.

But that was just an example. Intel have introduced a quite a few interesting CPU extensions and special bits of hardware that AMD had no answer for over the years.
The Christian practices here in the Balkans had (maybe still have) a lot of Manichaeism involved in them which people further West might not call that Christian to begin with.

It's a very peculiar type of Christianity, that's for sure, and even the local high-placed Christian men are quite hesitant to talk about it. Bogomilism is, of course, its most famous form, but it has circulated in one form or other for many hundreds of years, no matter the official repressions it has faced (ever since the 10th century [1], maybe even earlier).

Back to the article, the strzyga and strigoi which are mentioned there are basically Romanian words, and Romanian most probably took them from the Latin strix [2]. In fact a local species of owl is called strigă.

And now back to the local Manichaeism present here, a grand-father of a friend of mine (in fact, his corpse) was unearthed at some point after his death (I think it was 7 years) and a spike was put through its (the body's) chest, so that his spirit would stop wandering among the living. Granted, that was happening in a Romanian region a little bit on the more traditional side, you won't find that in Bucharest or Cluj anymore. Also, up until very recently there was a tradition at the church in my parents' village where the most "wealthy" family in the village would have to bring a black rooster on Easter inside the church, let it loose, people would catch it and then give it to one of the poor families, so that that poor family would cook it as an Easter meal. Black roosters are, of course, not that Christian to begin with.

As I said, lots and lots of Manichaeism beliefs around these parts of the continent (in many, many folk tales the Devil is on the same level as God), Middle Ages or not, it's quite fascinating.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Treatise_Against_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strix_(mythology)

[3] https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strig%C4%83
You may also like Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
One thing that strikes me as missing is the suggestion of people having trouble in general with their lives, whether mental health, personal relationship problems, or financial struggles. This is especially the case when going over the “unreliable” worker.

> they lack commitment, discipline, or time management skills

They could also need time or space or latitude to resolve something that’s going on. When you have someone who is a high performer one year and a poor one the next, often something is going on that isn’t any of the offered reasons. Offering leave, a lessened workload, or something a little more human centric is a way to invest that person in working with you - browbeating and adding pressure doesn’t always work.
Ok, now I'm curious. How is it riffing on the communist manifesto?
I came across the example of the "bounded halted problem" recently, which I found quite intuitive for understanding P=NP https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8Af3X8b7f5piqtqZx/computabil...

We're given a program P of length n, let's say it's a Turing machine with binary symbols on its tape. We want to know if P halts in fewer than n steps for all inputs. Notice that only the first n bits of those inputs are relevant (since it would take n+1 steps to reach the n+1th bit, by which time we'd know it hasn't halted in fewer than n steps). Hence we can answer this in exponential time: run P(000...) for n steps to see if it halts, run P(100...) for n steps, run P(010...) for n steps, etc. There are ~2ⁿ bitstrings of length < n, so it takes O(n × 2ⁿ) steps to check all inputs.

This problem is in NP, since we can check a candidate input in polynomial time, e.g. checking `P takes at least n steps on the input 01010101` requires running P on that input for at most n steps. It's also NP-complete since we can translate other NP problems into it (see the link for details)

The reason I like this example is that it gives an intuition for how "overpowered" a polynomial solution to it would be: able to infer seemingly-arbitrary information about any program, without having to actually run them. This is similar to how an oracle for the (usual) halting problem could be used to quickly prove/disprove arbitrary mathematical statements, just by feeding it a dumb, brute-force proof searcher. (Of course, we could state the same more directly, since theorem proving is itself NP-complete: checking a proof of size n is easy, but finding one seems to require exponential time; however, that seems more abstract than the running of a program on inputs)
Yeah but in this case there are extremely influential forces on both sides of the issue.

I think when this happens it is normally easier to block a law than to push it through, so I expect the current laws will remain for the short/medium term.
The precedent people should be paying much more attention to is sampling in music. When it first arose, it really wasn’t clear what status it had. There was at least a decade when people basically thought it was legal to use small samples of other recordings because they were small and the new use turned them into something unrecognisably different. Which was kind of logical, actually, but turned out not to be true!

The current legal requirement to get clearance for all samples only arose after a bunch of court cases in the late 80s/ early 90s, mostly involving quite obscure musicians.

There are a lot of people on here who assume that ‘logic will prevail’ in the courts on questions like use of copyrighted data in training data. History shows that this really isn’t a safe assumption. The courts have historically been extremely favorable to copyright holders. It would be foolish to underestimate the legal risk to openai et al here
I see how this statement makes sense for some, but many people in Germany, especially in big cities, drive a car only a handful of times a year, if they even have a license.
I do a lot of BLE reverse engineering and this pisses me off endlessly. The only place I find standard characteristics are some sensors and the occasional light switch. The VAST majority of devices are doing custom protocols over RX/TX characteristics, with the occasional "BLE Mesh" being thrown in, I'm guessing just to drain my will to live.
I agree, virtualization layers always add a bit of overhead by principle, but in 2023 we use plenty of those and the hit is small enough to ignore it for most uses. Either some bad coding/lib dependencies or lack of direct access to better hardware as you mention, but then browsers should allow this, with some good permission process.
I have, many many years ago. Thanks for the suggestion, I'm sure it's time for a reread.
The people who should be put on PIP are the dead weight (non-technical management). Fire them and most of this "difficult behavior" magically disappears. They're the biggest source of miscommunication, worthless meetings, wasted time, bad estimates, imprecise language, and flat out lies.

If the software engineers were left to actually do engineering instead of also having to spend half their day silently picking up the slack for these figureheads, maybe shit would actually get done.
Polygamy was the norm for most of ancient/imperial China, Ottoman Empire, Mongols, Ancient Jews etc.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it was the norm for most people at most points in history, but considering the populations of the above civilisations it wasn't uncommon either.
Get a LLC per job and sign on its behalf, then if sh*t hits the fan - declare bankruptcy.
This is a generic term. It does not imply that there has to be a single cause.
> I just haven't got enough spare money to make any of these choices

No, you haven’t got credit. Solar panels pay for themselves like 3 or 4 times 9n their lifespan. We had a period of zero-interest rates, we could have bought everyone solar panels.

But our bankers are too busy playing with fictitious derivatives instead of providing favourable credit to honest homeowners for renewables investment.
Junkies? Stop trolling.
I loved that puzzle site. I don't think I have ever been as hooked by programming as when I worked on those puzzles. Managed to get thrown out after completing level 5 by requesting another puzzle and forgetting about it. I even sent a support ticket begging to be let in again. If someone at the team sees this, I'd appreciate it :)

The last level for me was to write a function that evaluated

sum([floor(i*sqrt(2)) for i in range(1,n+1)])

for 0 < n < 10**100. It was the first time I ever had use for my Knuth books.

It was quite detrimental to work performance though. Never heard from a recruiter, but I guess they don't employ developers in Norway.
thats exactly what i do...theyll ask for a time estimate and then whether it can be cut by half because issues...i then say yes of course it can and proceed to delivery way past the deadline
Humans can be sued for plagiarism, so AI should be as well.
> also never had a bad one

Consider yourself lucky. I had one, breaking them into the bowl for the scrambled eggs and one of the batch was foul. I was ~8 at that time and if my parents weren't there I would probably just run away never to get back to that kitchen, house, city.
Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan

It kinda feels like an alternate history fantasy novel, but it's actually real. It tells the history of the world, but from a central asian perspective.
And quite often the person who causes these circumstantial stresses can be the same person for whom this guide is intended, but I'm not able to find a lot of acknowledgement of that fact in the guide.

I had a manager who pretended they could manage our product-consultancy team the same way they managed their previous research-code-monkey team. They had trouble because of their inability to do much besides say "replicate this paper". To them I probably looked like all of these archetypal "difficult engineers" at various times. From my perspective I wasn't getting the pay nor the time and respect from higher-ups to go through the hard slog of managing up, but I was getting paid enough to stick around, so I just ended up burning out super hard.

I guess my point is, sometimes managing others starts with managing yourself. This insight extends far beyond the context of a day job.
So which espresso making device does HN prefer? I've bought myself a Kamira but looking to try out others as well.
This is amazing. Didn't even need any documentation. It works with how I track money, mostly in evernote and not spreadsheets.

I wish it did other periods like weekly, daily, annually. Weekly is useful for tracking food. Annually is useful to decide whether to cancel those subscriptions, or converting them to monthly.

Might use this for taxes too and change the formatting of how I track money to match this.
Well, I think it's a bit more complicated than that. There are certainly religious nuts and conspiracy theorists on the far right. But, there are also some pretty cultish people on the left too. Both are based on ideologies, not facts. In fact, if you try and question certain leftist dogma, you can get quite an irrational response close to witch-burning.

If one were truly going only on facts, one would not identify with any political bias or party. Instead, one would examine each situation and idea independent of any ideology. Political groups change and vary over time with trends, so by identifying with any one group, you automatically put facts in second place.
That's an exaggeration. It's pretty safe to assume P ≠ NP, in practice. In theory you'd have to be more careful, but people have relied on weaker assumptions in math proofs. But for statements about super-mario, it's more than reasonable to assume.
On the opposite side, James Lovelock suggested that life controlling the planetary conditions, is a necessary property for long term survival of life.

For example: Too little oxygen, too much CO2 in the atmosphere: CO2 feeds more plants, oxygen below 16% makes wildfires difficult. So plants grow more. Too much oxygen enhances wildfires, and huge wildfires would burn off parts of plant cover. Atmospheric oxygen concentration would go back down. [1,2]

Lovelock's argument is, that on dead planets the environmental parameters vary in time, and in time they would randomly fluctuate outside of the zone where life is possible. But early life taking control of the planetary environment by establishing feedback mechanisms, is what the long term survival of life in that planed.

Of course, Lovelock doesn't specify intelligent life. Even microbial life could establish feedback mechanisms and maintain planetary homeostasis.

[1] https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/flammable-planet-fire-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis#Regulation_of_...
Yeah I agree that legal personhood for LLMs at this point is far-fetched.

This would be a separate argument, though, from the notion I responded to above that the difference in the processes of a human mind and LLM are the reason why "learning" from copyrighted material is a violation of copyright in one case and not the other.
From memory the reason given was test machines topped out at 40 pins. Anything bigger was much more expensive to test. IC Testers 40 years ago would apply inputs sequences to devices and check that the outputs were correct. Works for simple logic but already was a problem for processors.

The 8086/8088 multiplexed the address and data busses to get the pin count to 40. Which wasn't bad when using DRAMs since they're also multiplexed. Again to save cost.

Advantage of the 8088 was the 8 bit data bus. So you only needed 8 DRAM chips. Which was a big cost savings. And extra 16k of DRAM could be hundreds of dollars.
The falling observer is burned by the Hawking radiation before it reaches the horizon.
You probably want to cover your bases, IMO. If they're a vampire, ok no worries we have the little sickle over their neck. If they're not - a couple of złoty to help them on their journey in the afterlife.
100%. As someone who likes to sleep in the dark and used to travel a lot I can't tell you how many times I would arrive, exhausted at some hotel and then have to spend a further 30mins unplugging stuff, clipping the curtains shut using the clippy clotheshangers and covering every damn light on every thing with a postcard, a postit note, some of my clothes etc, only having to repeat the charade daily after the cleaning staff would "fix" my room and undo all my careful endarkening.

Not everything needs to have a goddamn light on it. Seriously it doesn't. I quite like the feedback that phones have started to do where if you put something on a magsafe charger it initially does something so you know its charging and then darkens itself. It doesn't just sit there glowing like a magical item in some hellish RPG.
Expand your last paragraph to apply to almost all human beings in any industry. There are burned-out doctors, know-it all priests, negative nancy teachers, perfectionist lawyers and silent type librarians.

Perhaps what's special for Software Engineers is that it's a profession with a skew towards younger workers, so you might see larger groups of people who are still emotionally immature, and thus displaying these traits, than in other industries.
> something that will work(and in my opinion, extremely well) in a highly developed society

I don't see the point in changing what I said. I said I think most systems can look good if there's enough money sloshing around.

My point is - e.g. in the US, who also never had a king, most people live in cities. If there were direct democracy then those people could vote for very pro-city policies, and neglect rural. Given there's representational democracy, that's much more difficult, and national rules need to be more balanced.
I'm not particularly interested in arguing the specifics of a solution, my point is that on a larger team especially where an individual does not get to define the approach, I'm surprised that you haven't run into issues with context switching or hunting.

But regarding one of your specifics, for example you said "the kind of help/solution that should be implemented first" before frameworks are added.

On the teams you've been on, was it easy for a developer (especially a junior) to say "Hey, we should really be implementing X, and we should have done it before I joined the team, can we restructure at this point?"
I will argue .NET's Windows Forms is an easier and so much better successor to VB in all aspects. It has even survived through the .NET Core and .NET era.
Dating apps have created a kind of dynamic polygamy in the West, where a minority of 'single' men have many sexual partners per year, women have fewer, and the majority of single men have very few sexual partners.
Ah yes, you could pay the people who are hitting you to stop hitting you.
Not personally, but if I was training to be a journalist then yes.
My worry is that by applying quick fix bandaids we avoid tackling the real problem and are not forced to decarbonize. Then we're stuck with more and more fixes in the future and who knows what side effects it'll have.
The smartphone is the single biggest piece of regressive technology ever made. We would all be better off without them.
I find it somewhat cute that according to this article, $500 is "grows on trees" kind of money. In the espresso hobby, $500 is barely enough to get a decent grinder.
Mullvad Browser
The part openai will have to argue is that it's not mererly compression but an irreversible transformation.

Which is hard, best hope they have is trying to put the burden of proof on the nytimes to show you can make the model regurgitate their articles (with some nudging).

If they manage that then nytimes is going to have a lot of trouble showing the model actually breaches their copyright, because just the information contained in their articles is not enough to constitute a copyrightable work.
i aspire to be "The Unreliable One"

> "They will need to spend time thinking about ways to work around them rather than work with them."

managing expectations and simply not caring about most things are very under rated skills imo.
>It's quite different, is it not? I don't get the analogy. These models are scanning, storing, and ingesting more material than any one human could. Not only is the method completely different, the end goal and applications are as well. The analogy basically isn't one, at all.

So you'd be fine with it if the model only ingested a humanly plausible amount of data? I suspect that would only make their legal issues worse, since the LLM would be much more likely to repeat tokens from the training set verbatim.
The Case for God by Karen Armstrong.

It's an interesting read about history of religion and how much is misunderstood nowadays.I would recommend it to both atheists and believers.
It does sound fishy, but why a honeypot? Why not a place to hide traffic? With populair large up/downloads, it's practically impossible to trace all of it. Or perhaps it was a communication board for some shady, rich organization.
The ethics and consequences of dodging paywalls
We Know Where New Weight Loss Drugs Came From, but Not Why They Work
Does reading news articles not benefit you? If not why continue reading?