skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SPACs, in theory, democratized access to late-stage private markets, aiming to give retail investors an early seat at the table. but like many financial innovations, they're tools that can be wielded wisely or poorly. the high failure rate suggests a misalignment of incentives: founders and sponsors capture immediate liquidity, while long-term outcomes get obfuscated by the structure.

I once had a chat with a founder who merged his startup with a SPAC. He mentioned that the allure wasn't just the capital but the perceived simplicity of the process, compared to a traditional IPO. But looking back, he felt that the rigorous scrutiny of the traditional path might have forced his team to address underlying business challenges they'd later face.

in any event the real question here isn’t whether SPACs as a vehicle are intrinsically flawed, but if the market’s appetite for risk, combined with the allure of quick liquidity, blinded many to fundamentals during the 2020 bubble. With any financial innovation, there's often a cycle: initial excitement, over-extension, contraction, and then matured understanding. Perhaps we're in the contraction phase for spacs, but they might still find a place in a more judicious market
Vanilla JavaScript Reactivity Patterns
I would not predict a peak if I didn't predict this rise (which most people didn't?). A new crypto that requires GPU mining, continued AI boom, GPUs being used for something else?, etc.. Their price could go infinitely up.
The Invention of a Neighborhood
it says here that you work on nfts?
A way to add even more random is to generate a list of N random primes, then shuffling it M times before multiplying the elements. N and M are of course random positive integers.

To add maximum random, sometimes I like to return a string with a random Gertrude Stein quote, segfault, or make the PC speaker beep instead of returning a number. So random!
Ask HN: What is an simple logging aggregator?
I'm running a NodeJS server that currently prints nice logs to the console using the `debug` package. As the server gets more busy, I would like to print my logs as pretty graphs (N users on the platform at Y time, etc.)

It seems like the correct thing to use is Grafana + Loki, or something like the elastic stack. But these are far too heavyweight. Is there some dead simple solution I can use to visualize my logs well.

Anything that runs in a docker container should be OK.
nvidia deserves their monopoly and it's in the US's best interest to let it continue.

the other companies have to up their game to compete with a company that has been executing well for 20+ years.
That's why I think open source LLMs are the ones that will actually persist throughout the commercial enshittification and reign supreme at the end.
Many older formats, ZIP included, didn't standardise on an encoding, so they just use whatever the local 8-bit encoding happens to be. And if your system charset is different from the ZIP creator's, you could get messed up filenames.

This is just another cost of sticking to legacy formats.
SQL is definitely an old technology. However it is still the main language for interfacing with structured data, even for newer tools like Clickhouse. Down the road it is conceivable that it will be replaced with something else, but the cost of migrating existing data to those will be so high I imagine no-one will take the step to proactively move.
In emacs land “tramp” is the thing that does this. It is pervasive enough that if the files you are editing on some remote host are in a git repository, then magit just works, same as on the local machine (mod latency). Tramp is the modern-ish version of this facility, I think a little more than 20 years old now? There was a predecessor that I used back in the 1990s whose name I forget, which allowed remote editing of files and browsing remote filesystems with dired, but not remote commands as needed for features l
like compilation-mode.
Does someone preferring being shot result in a response?
Twitter is one of the few that does RTL properly.

RTL has really bad support on the web, and RTL folks are constantly having to input into and read RTL text in interfaces designed for LTR which makes things really awkward to read.
> the theory that free-market competition rapidly drives down prices and breaks up monopolies on its own

You mean a theory that no economic school actually believes? Not even Austrians would sign that.
It's no more possible for me to believe that than it would be to believe the earth is flat or that god exists.
WebKit implements canvas noise injection
All this discussion shows that the real value is in maintaining the software, not just the software itself.

What these companies are doing is basically abandoning the open source code they developed with the support of a huge community. They're developing new software, using OSS contributions, giving a middle finger to the OSS community.

If you don't care, fine. But to me this is a considerable deal.
I remember meeting with them in the mid aughts when they were first talking to HPC folks about using their cards for science. I'll never forget what the chief scientist from nVidia said. "What is the color of a NaN? That is, when you render a texture with a nan value, what does it look like? I'll tell: it's nvidia green."
It is indeed an old problem (small fixed size buffers) but it hasn't really been fixed, they only increased the buffer size. You'll only run into this on high bandwidth, high latency connections, e.g. between NYC and AMS - you'll be limited to about 300mbps with stock OpenSSH.

https://www.psc.edu/hpn-ssh-home/hpn-ssh-faq/ has a patchset that fixes the problem.
You may be thinking of YouTube's "increase strictness" feature, which helps flag spammy comments so creators can delete them more easily. This new policy is different: it doesn't allow the video creators to post links in comments or descriptions. That's much more restrictive.

In any case, YouTube should allow links in comments as long as they're not spammy. YouTube used to redirect external links to a page that said, "Are you sure you want to leave YouTube?"[0] This seems like a reasonable compromise to help inexperienced users while still allowing external links.

Instagram also forbids links,[1][2] which is bad for the open web.[3] This policy change by YouTube looks like more of the same: walled gardens and disempowered users. Cross-domain links are what make the Web the World Wide Web.

[0] https://www.thomasvanderberg.nl/blog/diving-into-userscripts...

[1] https://stonecreate.com/the-reason-instagram-doesnt-allow-li...

[2] https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/102761/why-instagram-...

[3] https://www.anildash.com/2019/12/10/link-in-bio-is-how-they-...

Direct link to the policy: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9054257?hl=en

Related post with article from The Verge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37079331

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/10/23827231/youtube-shorts-c...
OK, now does that work OK for sites that are vertical input? ;)

http://khumuunbichig.montsame.mn/index.php?command=newsall&r...
It is very dependent on the market. Right now in many parts of the US, the market is still flaming hot. Minimal effort is required.

It sure isn’t worth 6% of the sale price, especially considering that the sale price is literally double what it was 2 years ago.
how can we verify that the server side code they/they will publish is what they are running on their servers?
PaaS - Primes as a Service; spun out of the IaaS, Integers as a Service
something about this doesn't quite sit right when I consider my experience with negotiating for roles at startups. I agree with the approach for big tech, but it sets a weird tone for working closely with a team if you just spent a week stressing them out and shaking them down. I've done that negotiation for myself, tried to hire people who did it to me, and I've watched others go through it. it always leaves a funny smell with the team, because at the startups I've been involved with it's kind of rare to play hardball.

just my experience. I am more on the mission-driven end of the why-do-you-work spectrum, it's not just the money for me. and I've gotten bitten in the ass by the sharks who sit on the board and hand down layoffs, I know it's how the world works. just speaking about the small teams where you are negotiating with the overworked hiting manager.
This feels like the "if you have nothing to hide..." argument for DNA.

It looks decent on the surface, but the more you dig in the more issues arise. Thinking about it for 30s:

- profiling is a direct use of DNA. Police had access to private dna banks and used the information extensively. Who else is using these same dna banks ?

- the same way people don't want AI farms to ingest their content, you might not want dna bases to ingest and process your dna for profit. You might actually eish a more ethical entity gets sole access to your information.

- you don't leave your dna everywhere. Getting a full dna sequence from hair or fingerprints is a myth at this point.
There is a way to use apples Rosetta translation layer, through the vm, to run x86 binaries on arm Linux.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
Related, more recent submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37103348
Every couple of years since I got into the IT business, someone trots out some 'miracle tech' that's going to let you automagically convert all your nasty COBOL code into whatever is cooler on something that isn't a mainframe and save you oceans of cash. This is at least the second time I remember the target being Java. Maybe this time?
I'm with you but I'm yet to find a solution that isn't both rocket science and requiring rocket hardware.
> Why though?

If you say 210, are you going to absolutely refuse any offer that's less than that? If you would, then you picked a bad number: you should have said 220. Or 230. Or 250. You've already hypothesized that the manager's actual range is 200-250; given that hypothesis, you should be targeting at least the top of that range, not the bottom 20%, if you're going to give a number at all. And if your objection to that is that you don't know the manager's range, yes, that's the point! That's why you shouldn't be risking anchoring the conversation in the wrong place.

If you wouldn't refuse an offer less than 210, then the manager is not going to lose the placement by negotiating with you for less. Yes, 210 is "within budget", but that doesn't mean negotiating for less has no benefit. That's still budget he could now use for something else.

In my experience any number you give is not going to be interpreted as your absolute minimum. It's going to be interpreted as the first step in a negotiation--one in which you should have waited for the company to take the first step, but you didn't and the company will feel no compunction in taking advantage of that.

But in any case, even if you get 210, you have, as I said, foreclosed any chance of getting more. See below.

> You also might get less.

But you're not going to get more, and that's what you should be thinking about.

You've already said the manager's actual range is 200-250. If you say 210, then, as noted above, you're restricting yourself to just the bottom 20% of that range no matter what.

If you give no number and the manager offers 200, when his range is 200-250, that probably means he views you as a baseline hire and you wouldn't have gotten 210 anyway if you'd given that number first. In any case you're no worse off not giving a number; the key point is that the manager views you as a baseline hire.

If you give no number and you're a good enough hire that the manager would give you at least 210, he'll probably offer 210. And then you can negotiate from there.
The larger language models now employ a trillion parameters. This is faster when memory and computing is tighter, not distributed. Cerebus's million core super-wafer addresses this.
Voyager's programming just brings joy to me to think about.. I mean it's the system as a whole (of course) .. but the fact that they've been capable of flying through the environments they have been, using points of light to align themselves, among other things.. for decades .. and recover from incidents.. is just something I marvel at.
Right, but they've been working on the new Dragon Age game for something like eight years at this point, and it's still nowhere near release. They've released nothing since ill-fated Anthem, now nearly five years ago.

This really has to be put into perspective: It took them less than five years to release all three Mass Effect games, and it took less than three years to release the complete Baldur's Gate Series.

So Bioware is a lot like NASA: No longer able to do the things they were once capable of. In Bioware's case -- via mismanagement or poor corporate direction -- they've forgotten how to develop and ship games. Now, at this point, it's really quite surprising that EA has kept them around for so long. With these layoffs, it might be that their patience is beginning to run out.
Tivo wasn't helpful for anything live, but yeah, it was amazing that we had it.
Free ad-supported TV streaming and it’s impact on usershare
It seems like there’s been a new wave of much smaller free video streaming services on the rise for a while. Apps like Pluto and Tubi seem to have proven success without the need for paid subscriptions.

While they’re both testing grounds for both Paramount and Fox, what market impact will these services have on their paid counterparts, Hulu, Netflix, and D+?

It’s become apparent there’s no ideal streaming service for the average household. Even with two, there’s no guarantee every user will always get the ideal catalog, that’s something Cable had, albeit far more expensive.

What I like about the ad-supported ones is there’s no subscription that you likely will forget about. So when they don’t have what you’re looking for, you just bounce to the other one.

Do you think this style will be more adopted by the larger ones, is that not practical because free services are typically compensated by lower quality/valued content, or something else entirely?
The hardware being cheaper only matters if they truly want to improve the product, which it's not clear that they do.
Lowering the number of FLOPs needed will always reduce the cost, as the hardware gets cheaper the cost is just reduced faster.

The question is, would improving Siri sell more IPhones? If not, then why bother?
Is it just me or does that seem really scummy on the part of the company??
I don't think that machine has a single nic with that bandwidth- I'd guess it's 8 400Gbps cards or something similar.
Not that I disagree, but as I've said before, it's easy to be a theoretical contrarian, as in claim something is BS but not stake anything on it or profit from it (other than book deals).

We're in a housing bubble, at the peak of a multi-century economic mega-cycle, we're overdue for earthquakes, tsunamis, asteroids, the caldera under Yellowstone, flu pandemics, etc etc. It's super easy to say all that and demand people should listen, what's hard is committing to any actionable prediction.
I backup my Linux systems to Backblaze using restic on a daily basis and I pay per storage used (and some cents for number of operations).

It's nice because I get zstd compression, smart deduplication, encryption, snapshots, multiple sets of backups to the same repo, daily random verification of backup data, etc.

I also do the exact same backups every day to (admittedly, underpowered) dedicated servers using borg but the restic backups always complete much faster.

And it's also pretty damn cheap.

Never had a problem, highly recommended, five stars***** (no affiliation).
Very much so. Nvidia was lucky with the perfect sequence of video and compute farms, then cryptocurrency and model training, and now the model training direction is flowering into application (hopes) left and right. But they did great with their luck. And now they are yet again in the position of selling tools to soak up everyone else's capital investment power. They are still now (and yet again) at the perfect spot for a giant new market.

But that's still a high valuation - that is even if that new market grows to the sky, it's not clear that it can justify that new valuation.

Is Nvidia failing anytime soon? No. Is it the best investment you can find? That's harder to tell which is why the complaint of "very high valuation already". It's not in doubt that it's a great business. It's less easy to decide whether it's a great investment to get in right now.

But everything is relative a PE around 40-60 is NOT historically crazy high for the verge of a giant new market. And yet it is very high for a trillion dollar market cap. This is exciting: a trillion dollar market cap at the verge of a giant new market!
Sort of. Having perfect data engineering is a requirement if you want to connect an LLM straight to your data warehouse. For real world scenarios, you need a way to add context over time (including examples of how to answer questions from messy data). The same way a new team member would need to be on-boarded the tool needs to learn the context of the data and business logic, store it under supervision from an admin and be able to retrieve it in generating the SQL.
I'm in the same boat, I've found a job but that wasn't easy - cloud experience is needed everywhere. I'm gonna build my next project on kubernetis/aws (side project with a hope that it'll make some money, not just a pet project, so I'll list it as a professional experience) although there's zero need for it technically.
> Plus, I love the disconnectedness of a sketchbook. I can sit and think and plan in a sketchbook, and it doesn’t distract me from what I’m doing.

This is why I still keep pens and physical notebooks on my desk. It's so much faster to flip it open and start writing than opening a 99th browser tab and navigating to an empty page on Notion, all while more desktop notifications start popping up on screen. Another side benefit is the act of writing / drawing out stuff actually helps me remember things better. Sure, my handwriting is atrocious but I rarely go back and read them anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I love the mIRC design and would still use it but the developer rugpulled the ‘lifetime’ licences and requires you to beg him to give a free one or buy again.

I have no idea why they thought that a good idea.
The issue is that you cannot _guarantee_ it will get everything correct, the fact that it managed it in your case is largely a matter of luck.

In law, being correct 99% of the time is not really good enough.
You’re suggesting that perhaps allowing people to explore an urge that should be fought and suppressed might dissuade them from pushing that urge further resulting in real-world action? Fascinating, do tell me more.

Blatant disregard for children aside, the larger issue here is the presupposition that we should someone permit all urges. Not every thought that passes through your brain should be “explored”; some thing are just bad and should be fought.
Used to prevent browser fingerprinting, by detecting subtle differences in canvases.

Chrome implemented in nightly back in June/July. https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-platform/c/hPs...
The above advice is sound and addresses OP's post content as much as it needs to. Try taking a holistic view of the comment you're poking at by integrating it with everything else that's been recommended above and a path forward for OP and similarly concerned people clearly begins to show itself.
It's not really about "ai hype", it's about funding.

"In the last few months, there has been this increasing so-called rift between the AI ethics and AI safety communities. There is a lot of talk about how this is an academic rift that needs to be resolved, how these communities are basically aiming for the same purpose. I think the thing that annoys me most about the discourse around this is that people don’t recognize this as a power struggle.

It is not really about intellectual merit of these ideas. Of course, there are lots of bad intellectual and academic claims that have been made on both sides. But that isn’t what this is really about. It’s about who gets funding, which concerns are prioritized. So looking at it as if it is like a clash of individuals or a clash of personalities just really undersells the whole thing, makes it sound like people are out there bickering, whereas in fact, it’s about something much deeper."
You still don’t get it. Apple in no way shape or form had a monopoly on ebooks in 2013.

There is a huge difference between monopolistic practices and collusion. You and I could have two competing taco stands in Nebraska and if we colluded to fix prices that would be illegal collusion even though it isn’t monopolistic.

This is why HN users make bad keyboard lawyers.
The whole Prime Minister thing was bizarre to me .. He was like on the mission-control screen with his own panel .. it was just weird lol.. Even in the US where our presidents fancy themselves god's.. it still just had a weird perception from my point of view..

But I'm proud of the people that worked on and executed that mission for them. Obviously a moment of immense national pride, well deserved.
I kept using XP SP2 way, way later than I was supposed to. Everything later was plain annoying.
The Fastest Diffuser in the West
https://leptonai.medium.com/the-fastest-diffuser-in-the-west...
Very good idea. I was under the impression that most phone cameras these days can do very basic analysis and determine blood oxygenation. There probably is a glucose monitor as well and if there isn't then one probably could be built with a bit of AI.
I have done various kinds of book authoring in the past couple years. I loathed my time in PreTeXt. I have strong feelings about staying in Markdown from now on.
It's just marking the end of an era. Maxis wasn't the same after Will Wright left, and the writing on the wall was how EA put him in a box with Spore. Rare wasn't the same after the brother founders left and sold it to Microsoft. Origin wasn't the same after Richard Garriot and Chris Roberts left.
This is a first:
On refusing their cooking banner it immediately redirects to google.com, poof.
No it is not. Maybe you need to look up the definition of money laundering.
Can the real life script be shared?
A lot of stocks don't pay dividends at all. They are problematic with tax and theoretically the same benefit can be achieved with buybacks.
The sensor support added to watchOS 10 is really nice and the live displays of cycling stats in iOS 17 has made it so I can use my phone for stats and feedback while on bike rides
I would say default to min(affinity, system threads, 16) and let the user input a specific number to override it.

I had a problem recently where a library started a process per CPU thread I suspect the author didn't intend it to start start 256...

Affinity is only easy to get on some platforms but you should use it instead of the system threads if available.
^also Marketing Department.
Why wouldn't someone just make a C++ class that keeps some state and call a method that gives them as many primes as they want, but runs 100x faster than python? Why would python yield somehow be better than this?
anyone else wondering about the contents of the book might find this interview transcript useful/interesting

https://dcist.com/story/23/08/16/dc-ride-hailing-uber/
I get their fears about people slacking off WFH, but if they think that I will slack off WFH, but would work like a miner's horse because they are "supervising" me, these poor bastards are so deluded it's not even funny. There's no way they could supervise anybody to that extent, purely on numbers even. Nah, if somebody is prone to slack off because they failed to motivate and engage him, that'd happen in the office in the same way.
Enshittification seems to be the entire history of humanity.

Good things deteriorate. If we are lucky, parts of them will dissolve and reincarnate.