skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, let's just irrevocably pollute ourselves and our landscape until proven unsafe. This strategy has never failed us before.
If they violate their own terms they will lose customers and money. If they violate OSS nothing happens.
Official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37295764
Elixir is easier out of the box; Erlang, or rewriting small parts into 'pure' Erlang would be an option if needs be, but it's generally better to go with the easier of the two.
Bootstrapping a 7-Figure Ghostpublishing Business
It got considerably worse with the advent of flat UIs.
Official post/more discussion over here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37295764
Yeah or even to have a bit of pride. To think something like “this is Google, we can’t release this weird inconsistent UI”
Let's take the Pixel 1 then.

You can still update the play services [0] or straight root it and install another OS

[0]: http://google-play-services.apk.watch/23.06.17%20(040400-511...
> Surely nobody is reading entire books on a laptop screen?

At least one person is doing any incredible thing that other people can think of.

Actually I don't care much about eink devices because I don't have one. I don't read ebooks on a computer screen. I read them on my phone. From my point of view an ebook reader is pointless if it doesn't run on Android.

If it syncs the current page to some server that I can self host, great, but that's a combination that I didn't find yet.
that is basically a fringe issue considering 80% or so of plastic pollution in the ocean comes from mismanaged waste streams in the third world. fix that and I’m sure marine animals will have a much easier time avoiding the rest

certainly the question is: every plastic alternative tends to have higher impacts with regards to emissions to produce it or transport it. knowing that netting is only a minor contributor to plastic pollution, it is worth trying to solve plastic pollution by worsening the problem of carbon emissions? everything is a trade-off, to solve one problem you have to contribute to another
A one sided argument with sweeping generalities and something about minorities being killed in the process. Got it.
There hasn't been a major engagement, period.
I mean you're not wrong; they built working software in Python, solved a problem, scaled it, and learned about the problem it solved. Once they understood it, they could monitor it. Once they had numbers, they could look into improving it, taking their learnings on the problem and picking a different language / architecture to solve it.
I don’t tend rewrite Python code any more often than is needed due to feature changes or occasionally refactoring to pay off some maintenance friction caused by design that has in practice turned out to be suboptimal.

What are you talking about?
Top biggest companies in the world by market cap in 2023
Drew DeVault confirmed Urbanist Bro

Completely unserious comment but I enjoy the Alan Fisher reference, it's funny seeing my online spheres intersect.

EDIT: serious comment.

The whole post is a bit of a doomer one, the thing is in the maximalist bad world that Drew DeVault poses, human interaction (customer support, human written articles and opinions) becomes a premium, meaning the pendulum will swing as people realise the mistake. A lot of people will hurt or even die in the medium term which is true but the world he posits seems one that leads to an unstable maximum.
It should not use a lot of memory when the login prompt is displayed and even when bash is launched
I am another AI pessimist. Can I please ask the optimists to list the good things LLMs can do for humanity as a whole?

I don't mean banal stuff like Copilot, which is a double-edged sword that might be used against junior developers. I mean world-changing benefits, one step closer to the techno-utopia.

Because on paper, the net benefits vs net negatives, for me and other AI pessimists like the author, are not worth the amount of spam, customer service bollocks and lost jobs LLM will cause to basically make mega-corporations richer.

So please tell me, what will LLMs ever do for us?
I'm not sure why that would be too surprising to you. In the enterprise organization I've worked with over the past few decades IT strategy is always long term and always cost based. 10-15 years ago organizations moved from the basement to placing their owned hardware in rented racks in data centers that were run by 3'rd party organization because it was cheaper. Then Azure came along and made it sort of a "no-brainer" to move into Azure because you already had a lot of Microsoft products and Azure was cheap. Now with so many Azure price hikes and those 3'rd party data centers improving their business models, the pendulum is swinging away from Azure.

That doesn't mean that the move into Azure wasn't the right one at the time, or that it was more expensive than not going into Azure. It's simply that the market evolves.
I posted the list, so people can also see when it was commented the most, I am not advocating "do not post duplicates", just making an effort to show that this specific site/article had been discussed more than once so if you are interested maybe you'd like to check the old threads.

(btw, I thought that in the past "duplicates" would be converted to automatic +1 to older entries of the same item? Has this changed? am I misremembering?)
> The modern space business is accelerating our big problems on Earth, which are biodiversity loss, climate change, and energy (all of which have a single common cause: abundant energy and our use of it).

Earth observation satellites are incredibly useful for monitoring sea levels, tracking atmospheric CO2, identifying methane emissions, measuring deforestation, levels of sea ice, etc.

Sure rocket launches are dirty, but their environmental impact seems pretty minimal; whilst the benefits for monitoring and model-calibration are huge.
Allowance is the new indulgence?
I think it's not perfectly black and white, and we shouldn't really put some arbitrary line here. Would be nice if more worker-owned businesses shared details about their ownership structure, though.
Share your favorite materials: intersection of LLMs and business applications
There have recently been some some nice early surveys on progress, pitfalls, future research directions:

- A Survey of LLMs https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.18223
- Challenges and Applications of LLMs https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.10169

and there are plenty of excellent blogs, articles, and github repos describing almost every possible technical aspect of the field. But I've found it much more difficult to find useful, in-depth articles as you push further into the practical use case side; objective white papers, long-form articles on business applications. The space is kind of dominated by short blurbs and marketing vibes.

It would be great to find some deeper reading on this topic, even if it is still largely speculative.
Python is fine to build a first version; you should never pick a language or architecture because you THINK you may need its performance, that's cargo cult. Pinterest could not have predicted they needed 200 servers for this workload - and they probably didn't for a long time.
Yea I'm just saying it's not like all hardware projects that Google does are "great research but not actually manufacturing anything." as claimed by OP.
So the answer is no, you are unfamiliar with Certificate Transparency. You should check it out! It basically solved this problem a long time ago.
>Would be curious to know how they tried to optimise the Java stack

They say "The combined effect of better architecture and Elixir".

So the post is mostly useless.
> Isn't this what we should use AI for?

Nah, this is just data collection and statistics.
Two Generals Problem
I wonder how many people would just stop using the internet (or use it in a very limited fashion) because of the explosion of LLM generated content.

On a similar note, I watch little TV because of the exact same reason, because I have little control over what I want to see and most of the interesting stuff that I may want to watch may be spread across different channels and broadcasted at nearly the same time. Perhaps I should take the same step towards the internet, given that it’s becoming filled with junk that I don’t want.
Some other related visualization pages that have come up in threads over the years:

http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~galles/visualization/Algorithms.htm...

https://bost.ocks.org/mike/algorithms/
An individual can be expected to be moral, and should be judged if they are not.

A population or corporation should be expected to be moral. Collective behaviors are a function of incentives and penalties, of pure economics.

If your plan to fix the problems in society relies on every member selflessly cooperating and fails if one member defects, if you create a system that is trivially exploited by rich amoral sociopaths behaving like rich amoral sociopaths, then the defector is morally to blame when it fails, but that's still the expected outcome.
I sometimes imagine that also.

Although I think me from the past would be pretty excited and me from the present would be pretty envious to stay in the 90s, when computers were boring but made for helping users in their tasks instead of trying to influence them into what corporations want them to do.
well it’s only been 70 years or so since we’ve started using plastics at scale, and at least half that we’ve had some form of microplastics widespread in the environment. any day now
They just stopped coding lambda... This is not a matter of a language. Lambda is costly.
What's with all the deluded techno-hopium? Do you just prefer the safety and comfort of your echo chamber to assure you that everyone in the world shares your opinion, while at the same time you get to pat yourself on the back for being smarter than everyone?
>...AI companies will continue to generate waste and CO2 emissions at a huge scale...

Oh come on.
> You mean when Microsoft, Google, Apple, Cloudfare, Verisign, Digicert say "Trust me" ?

No, because that's the opposite of the point of Certificate Transparency. When someone shares a technical term you haven't heard before, you could at least Google it, or ask ChatGPT to explain it, including explaining why it removes the need to trust large corporations to perform cert issuance correctly.
It is interesting to see an oil company standing among a group of tech giants.
Just because you like it doesn't make it good, either. :)
Clearly.

But the broader point beyond my specific snipe -- which is personal and driven by deep anger over a serious problem affecting me personally -- the broader issue is not only that Pinterest is on the whole an anti-social actor because of its garbage moderation and promotion of harmful content in its algorithms, it is more broadly a bad actor in the web ecosystem generally.

They hijack search results by scraping and stealing content, hiding the original link, and try to trap you in their circle of links.

In this day and age of people getting sued and slapped down for legitimate webscraping, it boggles my mind that Pinterest gets away with what they do.

On the whole a swamp of an unethical company. F*ck pinterest.

(But love that the commenter couldn't help but turn the thread into an underhanded comment against "fat people". Oh so typical.)
Some previous discussion a few years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27192626
Sure rocket launches are dirty, but their environmental impact seems pretty minimal; whilst the benefits for monitoring and model-calibration are huge.

So this argument is kind of made about everything? "x isn't really that bad, so many benefits...". What we would benefit from is an understanding of absolute necessities and things with immense benefit to our quality of life, and then work back from there. Probably tax usage appropriately. Then we can judge how far from the mark "x" is and maybe consider if it's worth polluting or whatever for.

Starlink, very cool tech, is it really required? I'd say no. Save that for once we've decarbonized 95% of the economy by 2030, for example, then we can go launch a thousand rockets maybe.

Another one is driving the kids to soccer practice in an ICE powered SUV, absolute lunacy given where we are with the climate crisis and a great way to contribute to a shit future for your children.
> 2. The EU has no honest respect over the people's privacy as they fully surveil their citizens

What is your source for that? Because that would be illegal in most EU countries.
As with much of this author's content this is a strong opinion that lacks nuance, but I basically agree with the fundamental assertion: that the lasting impact of this AI bubble will be to further centralise power, taking it away from workers.

My hope is that a desire for authenticity prevents this from happening – whether that's a strong bias towards human content creators, towards speaking to a human on the phone for customer support (already something companies try to win customers on), or even winning customers on well-paid humans cooking their food for them (something that seems to be increasing).

Unfortunately, I suspect we will get a two-tiered system, where the "middle class" (whether that's disappearing is another question) can afford human content/human support/etc, and the working class are forced to endure poor experiences with AI generated content and so on. This may even get worse over time if, say, AI hits education and provides a worse quality education, but that's probably no different to what we already have with public school funding issues in the US/UK and many other countries.
re2c is a better alternative to flex imo. Also lemon (from the sqlite project) in place of bison/yacc.
Talk about goalposts.
With that, can I say it's the perfect demonstration that data is the new oil.
Yeah, I've recently found some ~20 year old CDs where I had burned some music I produced in my 20s with a friend. I ripped all of them but it took ages and there was a lot of corruption.
No, you can't. That would most certainly involve modifying and then redistributing a modified flatpak, which is certainly not going to fly in the face of binary-only proprietary software like the one most likely to benefit from a stable ABI over the years.

Not to mention, flatpak would still add nothing. Just additional annoyances.
I don't know where you're living but in Copenhagen, yes it is, 100% the same COL as LA or Seattle.
Not to mention the influence of random and natural events (e.g. volcanic eruptions, the end of the ice age...).
Infinite Intelligence and Secure Connection: W3C China's Web Tech Forum Report
An even less significant rounding error; on the order of ~0.002% relative to AWS carbon footprint at best using FY23 forward net sales as a rough proxy.
> I thought that in the past "duplicates" would be converted to automatic +1 to older entries of the same item?

You are definitely correct about that. Several times recently, I have submitted articles and found myself on a recent submission of the same article (which presumably got a +1 as a result).

Maybe enough time elapsed since the last submission of this article that this didn't happen?

In any case, we can all enjoy this cool site that documents so much aviation history.
In what planet?

This has absolutely no bearing to the Python experience. And I'm using the stuff for 20 years.
I mean he’s a mouthpiece for Thiel, not really that surprising. His livelihood depends on viewing the world in a very specific way.
IME it is usually mental health related.
Before ChatGPT-4, I thought GitHub Copilot was very good. After, I think GC is brain-dead. Suggestions offered by ChatGPT-4 are far far superior. For me, GC has been more annoying than helpful lately. I may need to look into canceling the service.

I do wish ChatGPT-4 had access to more recent data. Being stuck in 2021 is bad when you are using libraries and frameworks that move very fast.
I highly recommend Fastmail [0] for this purpose. I have been with them for 5 years, and they're rock solid. I have ~10 domains on it, they support wildcards (send/recv at anything@you.com), the composer has sane defaults for multiple domains (e.g. replies are sent from the address it was mailed to) that can be overridden when you need, and you can easily create masked emails using your own domain.

$50/yr for all that is a steal. They don't charge you per-domain or have any funky tiered pricing for the stuff that matters.

Disclaimer: I am not related to them, just a happy customer :-)

[0] https://www.fastmail.com/
There are too many variables to predict the future.
Yet, I believe that it will empower more 1-3 person businesses to compete with the big incumbents.

Imagine you could run teams of marketing/sales/support ai-agents and focus on your core business. "The next 1B, 1 Person companies".

Just 15 years ago you'd need teams of 10+ people to do basic ml tasks you could do today. Now you have an LLM or a SaaS service that outperforms those teams for the fraction of the cost.
> Irrespective of vaccination and/or prior natural infection, SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections and reinfections remained highly infectious and were responsible for 80% of transmission observed in the study population, which has high levels of both prior infection and vaccination. This observation underscores that vaccination and prevalent naturally acquired immunity alone will not eliminate risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection, especially in higher-risk settings, such as prisons.
The problem isn't plastic, the problem is everyone throwing it onto the oceans. And blaming the "third world" isn't gonna help
It's still a separate entity with different legal departments.

To be fair, my experience dates back to around 2005 to 2010.

There is also an anecdote of the "Halogen" mod which wanted to recreate Halo as an RTS (years before Ensemble Studios announced their Halo RTS). Of course they got a cease and desist.
Given that most cases never go to trial, and the possibility of long prison sentences and large fines are used as threats against individuals, the idea that a jury might find it "reasonable" is small solace to someone facing multiple charges of violating the CFAA, with corresponding jail time and fines. Weev was sentenced to 3.4 years of prison time and a fine of $73,000 for the crime of downloading a sequentially numbered unprotected data set. Though the sentence was later reduced, he still went to prison for a non-zero amount of time.

The prosecutor has a vested interest in making you look like a bad person. Even if there is no evil in your heart, they will dig into your history and find some dirt, then lie and twist your words to make you into some sort of evil hacker, so that the "reasonable" people on your jury, seeing the prosecutor's version of you, is going to think you deserve prison time.
Never seen those names before this week, apparently there are new translations in 2023 : https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-beetle-in-the-anthill...
It's been about 4 years since I tried WSL (really hoping to replace macOS as a unix workstation with a robust commercial software market) but my file access and socketed-app experience then was definitely anything but seamless.
What is the point of Pinterest other than annoying people in search results?
This gets under my skin for perfectly encapsulating the know nothing blogger type.

> Today, we are in a crisis.

No it's fine.

> Armchair philosophizing on Twitter is a bad quest.

That's literally what you're doing.

> Log scale.

There's no scale on your axis.

Also, this peice seems to entirely fail to define what a good quest is. They define what a good Thing is. Is it good to solve aging? Obviously. Is it a good quest? I don't know, if you look at Bryan Johnson it sure does look like ridiculous ego driven mid-life crisis rather than a Good Quest. All the historic examples are Good Things that succeeded. Space Flight was a great quest! Well would you have advocated for the Wright brothers to stop mucking about with airplanes and get on with the better quest of space flight? Or advocated for someone in the 15th century to focus on building airplanes?
Not buying this. People choose their quests by societal pressures and what's rewarded. Dumb money loves VC. They eventually find even more dumb money in pension funds. This is what society rewards. These are our heroes. Want to change this, come up with a different societal game of rewards
> It's a question of the degree you trust that part performance predicts future performance versus written policies.

Personally, I trust past performance much, much more than written policies.

After all, the written policy doesn't promise the updates won't slow down the phone, or fill up its storage, or drain the battery faster, or introduce new ads and tracking - so in practice you're trusting past performance anyway.

And if I've got a written guarantee of updates and the company doesn't deliver, am I going to sue them? That sounds like a lot of hassle.
> According to the World Health Organization, up to ⅓ of the global population suffers from allergic rhinitis,

Has anyone yet figured out why so many humans suffer from an allergy to many natural plants which we have lived around for millions of years?

It looks like the first documented case of Hayfever was March 1819[1], and at the time it was considered a very unusual and rare affliction. When and why has it now become so common?

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3110966/#:~:tex...,
just a typical degrowther take

downvoters: is the video game industry unethical for making billions of players expend exponentially higher compute (= emissions) for something as frivolous as slightly better graphics?
It could be a black PR effort of a competing company. Remember Scroogled? That, but a bit more subtle.
>Elixir is slower than plain PHP according to the techempower benchmarks. I'm not even sure how that's possible but it is.

You're "Not even sure how that's possible" as if implying PHP is slow?

Even old pre-7 PHP was much faster than Ruby, Python, and others. And most PHP libs are just wrappers over C code.
> Pollen data presents a unique opportunity for businesses–whether it’s an opportunity to build brand loyalty and trust, increase engagement and product value, or become a catalyst for a more resilient community.

Such a perfect example of Google-speak. Every data point is an engagement hack.
How has it “not panned out”? Julia has been in a useable state only for a few years, and is still rapidly developing. Prior to Julia 1.0, I would have said Fortran (which I have 15 years experience with) was the most productive language for scientific computing. Today, Julia is, by a wide margin. In fact, our benchmarks show Julia matching or beating Fortran’s performance, to say nothing of the mich increased flexibility.
it’s not everyone, it is specifically poorer countries that contribute the vast majority to plastic pollution in the ocean via waste mismanagement. if you want an issue to be solved, it helps to look up and understand the specifics first!

e: since you basically asked

https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution

https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade
>It fits into my thinking about the Long Now. Working in formats that can be opened in 100 or 1000 years.

This is a real problem for old stuff from decades ago, but much less so now: as long as the data is in some format that uses open-source code to read (i.e., open-source A/V codecs), you just have to make sure the source code is available for it. A lot of data from ages ago is really hard to decipher because it was stored in proprietary formats, and the specifications and code for those are lost or difficult to find. Data stored as PDF or h.264, for instance, probably won't have this problem.
A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free.
How's the quantization?
If am rewriting python, I d like yo switch for a typed language though... It makes further refactoring easier, everything else aside
Holy shit someone _paid_ you to write V!?? Incredible!