skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I’d guess they are preparing for their move onto Taiwan and would like to have more production capacity to remain operational once the war starts

I wish there was more of an attempt at analysis re China on the internet that just spitting out whatever the official Western line is, it's not that interesting or insightful.

IMO China does not want war with Taiwan, not at present, it doesn't feel ready for it at the very least. From what I can gather it would just prefer to keep the status quo as is.

As far as secret labs to build semiconductors, if anything that argues against your theory. It's much more likely China wants to catch up re semiconductor industry and is likely using various methods that all countries developing their industry used, that now they've sufficiently developed themselves they strongly oppose, mainly in the IP realm
I am using tape for archiving my data and the break-even point with hard disks, the last time when I have checked, perhaps one year ago, was somewhere between 200 TB and 300 TB of stored data, after buying a tape drive for about $3000.

For larger amounts of data, the money savings vs. HDDs increase quickly.

The break-even point vs. HDDs is lower for long-term archiving than for short-term backups, because the lifetime of tapes is much longer (it is limited not by the degradation of the tapes but only by the risk that compatible tape drives might become hard to obtain), so you need multiple HDDs to store data for the lifetime of a single tape.
I took a quick look at Shapez. It may end up being addictive (to me) when Factorio was not. The reason being that Factorio's world is a bit dystopian in my view. A good game, but I like more cheerful things in my life. The abstraction of Shapez and the upbeat music seem to accomplish that.
Yeah, don't pay people that write back end javascript more than firemen. Let's start with that.
Anyone who believes that this completes their understanding of automatic differentiation is tricking themselves.

When your graph is a TREE, then everything is very simple, as in this post.

When your graph is instead a more general directed acyclic graph (e.g., x = 5; y = 2x; z = xy), then the IMPLEMENTATION is still very simple, but understanding WHY that implementation works is not as simple (repeat: if you think it’s ‘just the ordinary chain rule’, you are tricking yourself).

One of the earliest descriptions of this was by Paul Werbos. He called the required rule “the chain rule for ordered derivatives”, which he proved by induction from the ordinary chain rule. But it is nevertheless not immediately evident from the ordinary chain rule.

I welcome anyone who believes otherwise to prove me wrong. If you do I will be very happy.
Ask HN: Mosquito Killing / Preventing Innovations
Last night I had mosquitoes in my bedroom. While I don't like getting stung the worst thing for me is the buzzing sound they make. I can't sleep when I hear this sound.
I closed the windows and doors and went hunting and after killing one I thought I was done. I wasn't. I was up dozens of times, tired and angry, hunting and killing and listening for buzzing sounds. I also sprayed myself and my bed with anti-mosquito spray but that did not help, they still came close enough so I could hear the dreaded buzzing.

I know that the open window was a mistake. I know I should have installed some form of net or something like that. I will do this soon.

However, I wondered also if there isn't anything new in the fight against mosquitoes. A new life hack, a trap or spray that actually works, a sacrificial offering to keep them occupied or preferably something like this:

A few microphones (e.g. from an ultrasound distance sensor) that can triangulate the position of the mosquito and then use this position to direct a death ray of some kind (laser, microwaves, whatever) directly at the mosquito (without killing me if the mosquito is close).
> Signals indicate whether the next segment is occupied, not whether any given train will fit in there (and potentially block a segment or intersection behind it.)

That's what chain signals are for. If a train waiting at a signal causes issues, replace the previous signal with a chain signal to prevent the train from problematically waiting at the signal.
My understanding is that the aliases are still free, no? There's no mailbox, the mail is just forwarded to whatever address you provide.

They've done a horrible job of communicating these changes so perhaps I'm mistaken.
Four things that doing six months of CBT-i (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia) taught me are:

- Routine is EXTREMELY important (I.e. getting in bed and waking up at the same time, every day, even weekends)

- The best way to associate the bed with sleep (and, thereby, falling asleep more quickly) is to ONLY use the bed for sleep and sex,

- You're gonna have bad nights, but the key to preventing the insomnia from spiraling out of control is to remember that "you WILL go back to sleep; it's natural," and

- Sleep drugs (zzzquil, trazodone, seraquel, ambien, etc.) used daily are a bad deal for most people

Two visits with a bona fide sleep doctor taught me is:

- it's probably sleep apnea, and
- lots of people have it!

I used to have a really hard time falling and staying asleep. My sleep patterns looked something like OPs, with lots of time asleep but even more time in bed.

CBT-i fixed that.

I needed to do it with a therapist to get the most out of it, but there is a free app in the App Store (CBTi Coach) that guides you through it.

I have no issues falling asleep now, and my total time in bed (TTIB) is very close to my total time asleep (I.e. my sleep efficiency is very high).

I still struggle with maintenance insomnia (staying asleep). As far as I understand it, this kind of insomnia is usually invoked as a protection mechanism against something that one's body perceives as a threat.

I am (finally!) getting a sleep study done to verify whether it's sleep apnea or something behavioral.
There's a pump which feeds into the water softener tank. We don't use softener, so peroxide is the only thing which goes into it.

To the other guy - we drink the well water. It's fine after the peroxide treatment.
In either case, I chose to make business decisions that are good for the target demographic that I want to go after.

Do you also complain that there isn’t a number that you can call to get an Uber ride and you have to have a cell phone?

Or that you can’t call Amazon to place an order like you could when they first came online in the 90s when people were afraid to pay over the web?

If either company misses out on few Luddites on HN wearing tin foil hats, their business will go on fine.
At the PB scale you start running robotic tape machines that eliminate much of the human labor involved.
Repeat after me: "Chain IN, Rail OUT" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZDmzFKhPI0

It's basically a visual version of the classic deadlock conditions. Chain signals create dependencies between locks, and the locks themselves (the rail signals) have to be granular enough to keep large sections of the rail network available to acquire. The confusing part about the chain signals is the blue state: the train will use its pathfinding to read forward of the signal and it will move if the path it needs to take is available. You have to look forward of the signal to see if the rail signal for the path the train wants to take is green or not.
I wonder what instabilities he has experienced?
I think that depends on what "it" refers to. If I claim that "it" is the end of the world, and that it will happen no later than 2024, I suspect that most scientifically minded folks would have no problem considering my claim as having a low probability of coming true.

First of all because so many predictions of the end of the world have been made and we tend to have a hunch about the kind of person who makes them. Which is stereotyping, sure, but at least it's a heuristic, not a straight-up abandonment of evidence-based thinking.

I agree there's uncertainty about the future of AI development, but it's true that we have no idea how to create AI, right now, so the uncertainty is about whether it will happen, not whether it won't. If that makes sense.
When fabs were common, in 90's southern california, wafers were either cut or uncut and packed into boxes for shipping. Every now and then you would hear about the trucks getting robbed at the lab, usually from the pickup bay. Security started to tighten (although it didn't matter much against an organized group). 25 years later, the fabs are gone and the lessons are going to be learned all over again, I suspect.
Show HN: Sling – Powerful Data Integration CLI Tool
Has the infrastructure in Bhubaneswar improved in recent times? I have seen only bad news like a boy swept away in open drain in 2021 and a tourist falling into open drain in 2023. Sources: https://outlookindia.com/website/story/india-news-15-year-ol... and https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bhubaneswar/citys-o... .
Just do both. You could easily do it with the lisp machines of the late 70s and it’s even easier today.

Use an interpreter to execute code interactively. That’s what the user wants anyway.

Compile code in a background thread or process. When it’s ready map it into memory, and swap your interpreted references for the compiled version. Make the GOT writable and update it as necessary — sort of like the UUO mechanism in ITS or CP/M syscall table.
Did the settlement involve an admission of guilt, or was it purely monetary?
I am. Once you get past a certain point in DSP there’s just no point in continuing. I’ve two playthroughs that ended roughly when I can sends ships on interplanetary errants without worrying abou how many warp cores I consume.
I was also confused since to my understanding "mainline" is usually the release candidates, i.e. Linus's master branch. Here "(stable) mainline" appears to mean the latest stable release without distribution-specific patches, what I'd call a "vanilla kernel".
I like that show also. It's interesting how some people seem to be able to go into a semi-hibernative, almost meditative state and others aren't.
I thought the Amish were strictly non-violent? Isn't it one of the Christian tenets of "turn the other cheek"?

Their predisposition for non-violence may change when they encounter roving gangs of wasteland bandits (from New Jersey) venturing about but that's not guaranteed.
RustScan – The Modern Port Scanner
The truth is, it doesn't necessarily have to be a book long, but much like setting up PKI, it certainly can be.

What we really need is simple tooling that handles just the case of "I want to sign kernels for my own machine(s)".

Of course, some tools do exist for this case, but I'm not aware of one that is totally generic. Lanzaboote for NixOS seems interesting (disclaimer: have not tried.)
Should the title say (2021)?

The last release (or even git tag) is from July 2021.
My grandfather was a "well witcher" (Appalachian roots here). Many believe that's woo woo or some kind of super power. The man was incredibly intelligent and resourceful and he had a reputation for finding water every single time he dropped the drill into the ground.

When I was a kid I used to go to sleep listening to stories of my dad and his dad driving around on a 2 ton truck with a 3 ton drill and how the brakes always went out. Somehow they always lived to tell the tale.

Haven't thought about this in a long time. Good memories.
Or we become multi-planetary; and the latency between planets is enough to let their cultures drift so that we can have the "some subcultures decide to have kids" without the "others repress them".

Dunno if Mars is far enough away for that, tho.

edit: Just imagine the first interplanetary war being fought to bring freedom to Musk's Martian baby factories, which use either artificial wombs or enslaved surrogates as you like.
Define "affordable". Lots of LTO-6 drives available for less than US$ 1000:

* https://www.ebay.com/b/LTO-6-Tape-Data-Cartridge-Drives/3997...

Here's an eight-slot SAS library:

* https://www.ebay.com/itm/385724855188
How deep can that go? Can you fit yourself and shovel in the
ring to go deeper? Is there any danger of collapse?
Two British Teens and Their Audacious Hack of Nvidia, Grand Theft Auto and Uber
Tangent but if you 'value' your time but don't use the time to entertain yourself I'm not sure you're using it right.
You think Intel, AMD and NVidia aren't?

It's a carrot not stick model over here, but they're absolutely arms of the government and this is squarely in the realm of industrial policy. Everything else is pretend.

Intel is supposed to capture how many billions from the CHIPS act (alone - then add in state subsidies) and NVidia can't sell it's most powerful GPUs to China (they have capped memory bandwidth of 600GB/s).

AMD tiptoed around x86 designs in "mainland" China through a complex subsidiary agreement - and none of those designs were the most complex (they were reduced in various ways).

The gloves are off and we've stopped pretending it's a free market.
Hmm. Off the top of my head, mind, but:

- The bad API to foreign code that all the extensions depend on.
- The nuts scoping rules, though I suppose throw enough static analysis at it and you might be OK.
- Reference counting, which people depend upon.
- locals(), globals(), though you could do some tricks with deoptimization there too I suppose.
- Its metaclass system is pretty wacky.

In general, just the overall ugliness of the design. It'd be jolly difficult to get beyond a toy operational model of the language, for example. There are so many corner cases to get right. Compare, say, Smalltalk, where there's an actual aesthetic to the metasystem (in all its 80s glory), and a full implementation can be remarkably small and simple; or anything else where you could plausibly capture an operational semantics without too much fuss.
YES I LOVE YOU WUBE
Here's my MacOS Nix environment that also works on NixOS:

https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config
[OP/author here]

Have you filed a bug report?

I can't read Arabic so I am not sure what to make of your screenshot, although I can see there's a problem.

But I don't know what OS that is: it looks like Win 7, with the theming turned off, or something similarly old -- where I might expect breakage. (If it's ReactOS I am surprised it runs at all, TBH.)

Does it do what you want on Win10 or Win11, or on Linux or macOS, in a recent-enough-to-be-supported version? Does it make a difference what system locale you are using?
Nice. Can anyone estimate the impact on global GDP growth?
I am a mild LLM skeptic. But I find the response of "oh, it's all just post-crypto scamming" really weird. Crypto was a total scam. There was never a concrete, non-criminal (important caveat) application where crypto was easier than just using PayPal or whatever. LLMs are very imperfect and still have a lot of work to do, but they do actually do some job related tasks today. If I have JS snippet and I wish it were in Go or vice versa, I can ask an LLM and get a good translation. If I have a document, I can ask the LLM if there's something I should add or simplify. Are these world changing capabilities? No, not yet. But they do exist and they are real and they are new. So yes, of course investors are interested in a new technology whose future limits we don't know yet.
Classical Latin is to Italian as Middle Egyptian is to Coptic. If the former pair are distinct languages, so are the latter. Yes, knowledge of Coptic is what unlocked the Rosetta Stone. But the differences are substantial. Old Egyptian (even if we knew the vowels) and revival Bohairic would be nowhere near mutually intelligible.
Trinità and Bambino will fix that.
It's tough but feels worth it - I never feel like I've missed out on anything with my daughter since I'm always around. I think if I can just structure my day better it'll all work out a lot better, just haven't figured out how yet!
I'm the EU, most homes are terraced. There may be a back and front yard, but they will be tiny compared to a US home.

Single family homes are both expensive and uncommon as land is generally more of a premium.
It's time to install Factorio again, winter is coming.
Absolutely?
This game is crack. A masterpiece.
Should protect against warm boot attacks since the key is supposed to be reset on CPU reboot.
That's in the same ballpark as HDDs. It takes me ~24 hours to fill an 18 TB HDD.
Why does The College Board have Facebook and TikTok pixels on it's website?
As I understand it, rotating the image is not the same as inverting your head via bending. The issue is purely biological, if it exists at all.
So if they are this stupid, why are they trusted to administer these tests?
I'm another fan!

One of my observations, not sure if an artifact of editing or accurate, is how everyone progressively talks about missing their families more and more right before they decide to tap out.

The winner from last season(?) mostly seemed to win by keeping relentlessly positive, whatever happened on a given day, thinking of his family fondly, and keeping his mind engaged with hobby crafts (i.e. making a fancier X for his shelter).
Guess that must be an old definition from back before we lived in one?
Lua is used because it is dead simple to drop into a project as an extension language. It was designed to be easy to interoperate with C. Lua/LuaJIT is one of the fastest scripting languages available.
The US Chips and Science Act gives $52bn in subsidies and $24bn in "tax credits" to semiconductor companies.
Imaginative != imagined
Chart: Global renewables deployments to hit record levels in 2023
> If it can generate enough energy to be dangerous then it probably has an economic use if enough of it can be gathered in one place Like the sun - as I recall per-m3 it isn't all that energetic but there is enough sun that it provided the energy for ~99% of all life on earth.

The sun is also a third of a million times the mass of the entire planet, or about 1.4 billion times the mass of all our oceans.

And the power output being in the form of ionising radiation is really bad: the power density of the core of the sun is 276.5 W/m^3, but in a form which will, if you leant against it for a minute and given reasonable guesses as to your body mass and shape, give you a remaining conscious lifetime of vomiting, diarrhoea, seizures, bleeding everywhere inside and out, relieved only by being followed with a coma after about an hour then death within a day or two.

(That's ignoring the fact that it's also hot and dense and would immediately explode, it's just the effect of the radiation coming from it).

> If humans are exist in 100,000 years we'll be using that century-long half life material for something important.

There are three possible futures: business as usual, collapse, transcendence/singularity.

With business as usual, there's a fairly good chance that everything from our era will be forgotten and dismissed as myth and legend.

With collapse, all of society might of forgotten how the abstract concepts of "money" and "writing" work, reinvented them, gotten up to our level, and then collapsed again 50 times over.

With the singularity: the planet itself and every star visible to the naked eye (and many which aren't) may have been physically disassembled in that time frame.

I think we should be the kind of civilisation that plans for how to minimise the damage of bad outcomes, even if only to make sure we don't mess up the "singularity" option.
took the words right out of my mouth.

compilation speed matters. it matters to some more than others, obviously, but it absolutely matters, and to some it matters a great deal.
Unlimited never made sense. The 1% will abuse it while the 99% will pay for most of it.
Somewhat difficult to find on the linked list archive, but this exact issue was dicussed there. See the followup mails: https://www.freelists.org/archive/luajit/08-2023?threads=1
It is not a fiverr video. Runme’s very own Lizz Parody wrote, recorded, and edited the video with input from the team. She did a fantastic job.
I'd like to know what the oldest mutually intelligible language would be.

With each spoken and written language that exists, from how long ago could you find a speaker (or reader) who could meaningfully have a conversation with an average fluent speaker from today.

I specifically say average, because vocabulary registers shift with time - even when fundamentals of the language do not, even an english speaker from after the great vowel shift might have trouble unless the modern speaker was especially well read.
Since U.S.A. is so good about nailing people for copyright infringement what if… PII could be copy written?
> Manual labour.

Big cloud providers have disk replacement robots, so it's not unfeasible for robots to perform the "unplug and store the HDD somewhere".

But another advantage tape has is durability.
There was an entire Post/Discussion on HN a few weeks ago discussing whether or not this Post from OpenAI was for:

"just trying to temper investor enthusiasm"

"trying to downplay AI threats to calm down regulators"

etc....

etc....

But it is not some 'Proof', that LLM's have reached a limit.

It is a self reported note along the lines of : "nothing to see here, we're at our limit, it's all good, stop probing us".
> We don't think about where we'd go to the bathroom.

It's nice to see an article bring up the shit-management problem.

Too many folks forget about how much they take toilet paper and plumbing for granted.
I grepped and did not find
Lots of progress in some areas, very little in others. Neither the pessimists nor the optimists got it right.

(Btw., a really hardened pessimist might even say your example is mostly things that were doable when there were not many computers around at all... taxi driver to drive you, a secretary to book a flight, meet in a club to discuss things, ...)
Very cool site you have. Windows 93 & 96 were inspiration of mine.

If you like desktop environments maybe you'd like to check mine out too as I've spent a ton of time on it.

https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS
Again, as per my previous response, you're missing the optimization timeline and how long it took nature to do it.

"Walking" at least on dry land has been around 420 million years or so. The locomotion part of the learning algorithms has been around a very, very long time, and it's going to be very hard to duplicate the efficiency that nature brute forced.

Nature has not hype optimized human level intelligence. Really human intelligence is at the limits of birth. Our heads can't be any larger at birth or we'll kill the mother too much of the time. Then the human body has a power budget that's been the defining factor of human/animal survival for just about forever. Humans were already 'smart' before we invented agriculture and excess fuel storage.

AI takes that a step further. We're not using reversible computing so the heat generated is pretty high. We've not been doing it very long and our algorithms are not optimal in any sense. But what we do have that nature does not is nearly unlimited energy, nearly unlimited cooling capacity, and a lot of computer systems working on the problem at once. In an evolutionary sense we're doing closer to the bacteria method, we have a lot of different experiments going on at once and at least a few of them are likely to be fruitful.

Personally I hope the AI development is no insanely rapid. Rapid and powerful changes in society can cause as many problems as they find fixes for, and the pace of society change is not that fast.
Same, quitting caffeine made a massive difference in my sleep. Daily consumer for 20 years, quitting suuucked and took me probably 20 tries but finally did it. My mind works so much better now.
Clearly if no such moral framework existed, LWN would not offer both prices.
The next pandemic could strike crops, not people
no, I think that cities and counties have de-facto rights to require a permit to gather for "planning" and that permit is sometimes not granted

corrections welcome