skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If and when we detect extrasolar technological life it's highly unlikely we'll do it by detecting planetary emissions. It'll also be a whole lot more obvious. Let me explain.

The future of humanity is likely to be in orbitals. With existing materials these are likely to be 2-3 miles in diameter and 10-20 miles in length, producing EArth-like gravity by simply spinning. You then cover the surface with solar panels. If graphene ever becomes viable as a mega-engineering material, you can scale these up 100x+ larger. Why? Lots of advantages:

1. You can produce this with existing materials. No magic theorized materials are required;

2. No magical new technology is required. Even something like nuclear fusion power generation, which I'm not yet convinced will ever be commercially viable, isn't required;

3. Spin gravity is identical to normal gravity. Earthlike gravity means we don't have to worry about our ability to live in microgravity or even low-G (eg Moon, Mars);

4. You can largely be shielded from cosmic radiation with water tanks beneath your feet;

5. You get to harness the full output of the Sun for energy. For reference, only about one billionth of the energy of the Sun hits Earth. This is a Dyson Swarm;

6. This is incredibly efficient in creating living space per unit mass. Roughly 1% of Mercury's mass is enough to create a Dyson Swarm with billions of times of the living area of Earth.

So, by looking for technological signatures from exoplanet atmospheres we're essentially hoping to find the ~1000 year window where there are detectable signals and we're not looking for a Dyson Swarm instead. SETI has the same problem with a much smaller window.

So why is this much easier to detect? Because of thermodynamics. You absorb a star's light output and you heat up in anything less than perfect energy efficiency (which is impossible). The only way to dispose of heat in space is to radiate it away. Technically you could eject mass but then you have to replace that mass. And the frequency of the radiated heat is determined by the temperature of the radiating object. For any reasonable temperature, that's in the IR range.

The Sun is less than a million miles in diameter. If we were looking for a Dyson Swarm around a star like our Sun, we'd see an object that was more than 200 million miles across (ie the cloud of orbitals) that is producing much of that energy as infrared. It would stick out like a sore thumb.
The Commonwealth has a rather different history; I don't think it is a good analogy for the EU.

Substantial political union isn't required per se, just enough common interest. That at least was the original thought behind the predecessor of the EU, and it seems to have worked through sharing economic interests.
Android already supports enabling kCFI[0], and says they saw negligable performance and code size impact. Even if it was 5%, security mitigations with a large security impact probably make sense to enable for a lot of usecases.

0: https://source.android.com/docs/security/test/kcfi
The upthread point of controversy was whether this scheme would be a negative for anybody. I think I've shown that there are people for whom it would be a negative (at a minimum, increasing the risk/uncertainty of a current holding with no offsetting increase in return in the success case).

If you disagree, that's OK, but there's probably no way to make further progress in resolving that disagreement beyond a back-and-forth of "nuh-uh, yuh-huh".
Nope. The 350 million was supposed to be from money saved from not being in the EU.
Is the DBEngine Database Ranking Fair?
Given what "VPN" is an abbreviation for, I'd say "still good".

But I'm an old corporate IT guy - so assume that I don't know squat about any consumer / branding / marketing angles to this.
It was mostly a long time ago so the details are a bit hazy now. Generally it went something like this:

The domain expert (our internal customer) has a badly specified procedure for picking the correct configuration for some sub-assembly. It depends on a number of different parameters some of which are continuous variables and some are discrete. Which continuous variables are relevant depends on which combination of the discrete values are chosen; for instance choosing nominally equivalent parts from different suppliers can mean having to express the specification in different terms. So the customer asks for a user interface that will make it easier for the end user (not the domain expert, a less qualified person) to explore the database and a few simple tools to do some calculations so that they can decide which parts to order.

While writing up my proposed solution I realize that a lot of what the domain expert has expressed as matters of fine professional judgement look suspiciously like they are in fact rule bound from the point of view of the actual end user. When I quiz the domain expert about this they tell me that they though that the task was too complicated to automate. When I finally extract from them the actual rules I see that the actual end user has no real freedom of choice, that the rules change about once a decade, and that all that is requires is a small form to gather the two pieces of information that are not already in the system and a fairly small set of database queries. All the rules can be encoded easily in a couple of small database tables that the domain expert can update when the conditions change.

I point out that this is actually less work, can be delivered sooner, and is most likely more reliable. The domain expert agrees and we are both happy.

Over the decades that I spent writing applications I frequently found that customers failed to ask for what they really wanted because of mistaken beliefs about the relative difficulty of various kinds of computing tasks. Instead of asking for what they needed they asked for what they thought we could provide. This frequently caused more delay than if they had simply asked for the best solution from their point of view.

Often the customer asks for what they want rather than what they need. Very often what they want is rooted in solutions or partial solutions that they have seen or implemented themselves. They think that they simply need a better version of their own home grown tool when in fact their tool is the way it is simply because of the limitations of the tools they had to hand, usually Excel programmed by someone doing it instead of the engineering that they are actually competent in. Using the appropriate solution, often an SQL database and a very simple front end, simplifies the task dramatically and makes the tool both easier to use and much simpler to maintain.
> I do not want to get into another type of bs with this CEO assistant job

What's the context here?

Tbh this post seems kinda bizarre without context. Aren't company names like this really common?
I've always found it odd that people have such guttural reactions to cryptocurrency. It's a technology. Calm down. It's become like politics now. "Fuck Republicans, fuck conservative nonsense." is what I'd expect to hear, not getting pissed over an algorithm. Kinda brings me comedic relief.
This is actually a good thing. Ad-supported software needs to die
> Molecules touch your nose and you smell things. Air vibrates your inner ear hairs and you hear things. Photons hit your eyes and you see things (not sure if this counts but it seems like it could).

You can see things in the dark with your eyes closed, you can hear things in a vacuum sealed isolation chamber, you can smell things without any there being anything smelly and you can feel things without touching anything.

Rather than every sense being touch, every sense seems mental.
Can all the hype around AI and ChatGPT die right now? ChatGPT 4 is a brilliant forgetful moron. Trying to have a conversation where it spits out code is an exercise in frustration. As you interact and tell it to change/fix things, it forgets a bunch of stuff. Then it starts only spitting out fragments, then you ask it to spit out the entirety of the code it's generated and it creates an extended fragment, but still not the whole damn thing. And I'm paying for this abuse!
The alternative is pass through voting rights so control rests with the people purchasing the index funds.

Blackrock & co shouldn’t be exercising any control/influence over companies by using your ownership.
This is largely impossible in Germany due to government pay rates being a fraction of what a competent person would earn in industry.
There is very little flexibility in this due to equality principles. Sports is an exception, so they could fix it if they wanted to.
Founder vs. Investor: The Honest Truth About Venture Capital: Author Q&A
Over a decade ago, he was kinda mentor to a founder cohort I was in. I remember him as a rather introverted geeky one and my friends were surprised why I keep talking to him, with a keen interest in tech-talks. Most people didn't know how awesome his work was/is.

We stayed connected; he is currently doing a Blockchain + Climate company.
It's funny that Teams web app works flawlessly for me in Edge browser, but I can't get the native client to even start properly. I can't say whether the web client is a parity match for the native client, but it suits my needs, so I just always use it instead.
Open source when running LLMs locally is...kinda the entire point.

Thank you for this!
The problem with the USA isn't actually the lack of data protection itself, that can be handled through contract law. The problem is the lack of protection from the US government through the PATRIOT ACT and its successors.

The laws themselves exist to a certain extent, but the government places itself above the law in ways that aren't acceptable inside the EU and the other states who implemented the GDPR.

This is because Europe is not part of the USA, which means the protections against tyrannical government interference don't apply; those protections only apply to Americans.
I love Heaps! In general, game engines without builtin GUI clients aren't as "popular" on these lists.

I do recall Heaps initially not having a huge focus on beginner-friendly documentation (and lots of warnings about stability in general). I'm not sure if this is still the case. Other than Nicolas, there aren't many other devs working on it that I've seen.
It isn't. Look at the words you quote: "Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024." The new installs are new instances of the Unity runtime.

I'm really sorry they are screwing you but words have meanings, and this is not retroactive. One legal scholar writes:

"A retroactive statute is one that operates as of a time prior to its enactment. A retrospective statute is one that operates for the future only. It is prospective, but it imposes new results in respect of a past event. A retroactive statute operates backwards. A retrospective statute operates forwards, but it looks backwards in that it attaches new consequences for the future to an event that took place before the statute was enacted."

And of course retroactive and retrospective changes cannot be made to contracts (vs law) without the agreement of parties, or a court decision. Unity is saying you have already agreed to these terms for existing licences, and must agree to new terms for new runtime licences. Something you can dispute in court, but not without significant financial risk.
Companies Stall Climate Action Despite Earlier Promises
It's had downstream benefits in the hardware, IoT, cybersecurity, devops, missle research, and aerospace segments just off the top of my head. I don't want to dox myself but a lot of GovCloud can be attributed to the F35 development cycle.
> Data Broker increases avenues for data collection from global populace
Fixed it for you
Office Space

https://youtu.be/yZjCQ3T5yXo?si=xGGrxafG2zzA0IIR
These digitization/paper-work/wait problems, 1000x for immigrants.

Added bonus of uncertainty and significant stress, you never know how these delays in processing are going to impact your status.
I personally like and use CC licensed material, even contributing very small bits here and there. To your point this is probably Lessig's greatest accomplishment.

His desire for government intervention on the internet at every level is a bridge way too far though.
Nah. I think you're trying to reference the "assassination coordinates" nonsense followed by journalist bans that were rescinded. Please be fair to Elon, he's in the arena.
Journey Through the Cosmos with These Breathtaking Astronomy Images
It seems imperative to establish potential safeguards to prevent misuse of this technology.
N64 JavaScript Emulator
An N64 emulator written completely in javascript, so you can play N64 games in your browser.
A year or two of abusing "bill and hold" should have absolutely resulted in the execs being punished (beyond Nortel just firing the CEO at the time), but it didn't cause the company to go under. Massive IP theft on the other hand...
in this case: as a result of the conflict the UK received a better deal on the clawback terms and achieved exactly what it wanted on the NI border (which the EU had formerly said was impossible)

so I'm not sure that reality reflects your point
...which is why focusing on Windows translation works so well. Any questions?
That wouldn't cut it.

The linked summary is pretty explicit about the four things governing online behavior, and not society overall. Online behavior is not society.

The first point of the four relates to networking infrastructure. Is parenting part of society? If so, what does networking infrastructure have to do with parenting?
Turmoil is a framework for testing distributed systems
https://archive.ph/wpO4W

subtitle: "Cutting emissions is proving harder than committing to cut emissions"

'Climate progress at big companies is hitting a wall.

The world’s largest companies have committed to slashing their emissions to address climate change. Many of them have overpromised and underdelivered because of higher costs, slow advances in technology and political pressure.

One big factor is a lack of trust in voluntary carbon markets. Many companies had intended to use carbon credits to offset emissions that are hard to reduce, such as the burning of jet fuel by airlines.

Those credits were supposed to cover short-term commitments. Companies are now backing off of these goals while maintaining they are committed to long-term targets. It is a sobering conclusion two years after the 2021 United Nations climate summit in Glasgow jump-started several climate initiatives.

Mining giant Rio Tinto can’t hit a near-term emissions target without using carbon offsets. Delta Air Lines and other carriers are under similar pressure. Shell and BP dialed back green-investment plans under pressure from investors. Amazon.com recently shelved a target to slash delivery emissions by 2030.

“Many companies are learning that the beginning of decarbonization is easy,” said Günther Thallinger, a board member at insurer Allianz who chairs a U.N. climate-focused investor group. “The moment you really need to go into true transformation, the work becomes quite difficult.”'
That would be even more expensive with every company needing its own C suite
NetMeeting managed live conferencing over 56k lines and on Pentium IIs. A tragically underappreciated piece of software, Skype before Skype with directories and the lot.
As someone who works in fintech, my observation is not that the caveat is "as long as the errors are small enough" but rather "as long as whoever governs the business logic is aware of the impact".

The size of the errors almost always is a large factor in their decision, but ultimately the software we write exists to serve the needs of the business, and if the business decides that larger errors are okay for some reason, then so be it.
If your database has a MONEY or CURRENCY data type, use that.

Just as you should use proper DATE or DATETIME data types for time and not roll your own with strings, integers, seconds-from-epoch, or any other schemes at least if you want to keep your sanity.
Interesting take.

Could you cite some well-known artists that are postmodern and lack originality? Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Basquiat, Richter? I understand if you don't like postmodern art but not original isn't a criticism in my eyes.
You can make the same arguments against fixed precision decimal types. My systems represent currencies to 4 decimal places. At that level of precision, rounding/order of operations errors could accumulate much faster than with a 64 bit float.

Decimals are still the way to go, you just have to pick a level of precision acceptable for your application.

My management definitely does not want me spending my time chasing errors over fractions of a pennies. The only time those errors are discovered is when I compare the output of new code against old code.
Profitable, sure. But businesses that are poised for future success don't sell themselves, particularly to a has-been like IBM.
A precondition of Georgism being sane is that 1 acre in downtown Manhattan must be taxed HIGH and 1 acre in Nowheresville must be taxed LOW. One is more desirable than the other. No one argues this point but sometimes they lose sight of the fact that places can go from desirable to not, or vice versa.

Given this, if you improve your land, or everyone in the neighborhood improves their land, and desirability goes way up as a result, you've just raised the value of the land, improved or not. Anything you do to make the area a better place to live increases your taxes. This is a dangerous thing to put at odds. It's something a lot of pro-Georgism people ignore because they only think in steady state (Manhattan will stay Manhattan and Nowheresville will stay Nowheresville), but that's not a tenable assumption for a lot of places.
> This is very a specific and active involvement of a moderator in the act. Such interventions are a gross misuse of moderator privileges in any community.

Oh, they can't express themselves?

They can't express their sentiment of gender abolition because mental illness makes some people care a fuckton about gender?

What cool logic
Discord's UI occasionally has me cursing but at least they've kept it consistent. And it is true that it doesn't have the same performance problems.
There's a major difference between forming an argument and simply touting an opinion.
> actually make the laws

But only in a few domains, and they always require approval. From wiki: "Most legislation needs to be proposed by the European Commission and approved by the Council of the European Union and European Parliament to become law." The former consists of the national governments, which usually has a popular mandate, the latter is chosen directly.
Have you ever done taxes in another country? US taxes are not known to be super easy but the sheer ease of filing them compared to filing German taxes completely blew my mind.
That was Bing. Chatgpt was always this short. If you're going to significantly finetune the model, you don't need the prompt to be complicated and detailed. Even a single token to let it know "you're in assistant mode now" could be enough.
Been using Bard, since it is always up to date, it's known about Go generics since launch
I think Google still sells ads against his videos, they just don't give him the money they make.
I'm pretty sure the thank-you-for-playing message is actually in Wing Commander 2
If rich people want to fund public transit infrastructure then let them.
Broken Alliance map on Heroes II (was map from demo) is something I still pull out every year or so to sink a whole weekend on.
I was wondering if Whiz was using agent-style planning prompts, but it's much simpler and passes a single `function` parameter named `shell` to the OpenAI API.

I thought that was clever, because shell commands are highly composable, so it's likely that something can be done in "one shot".

It will also be way more efficient with token usage.
Fear of change, mostly.
that did happen

NHS Funding Act 2020
Further bonus notes, the C++ behaviour is sufficiently controversial and disliked that there is a C++ 26 proposal to "fix" it: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2023/p28...

And, Rust's only actual loop is an infinite loop. Rust's "loop" syntax is an infinite loop, and both "for" and "while" in Rust are just syntax sugar which the documentation explains how to transform your "for" or "while" into the exact same "loop" that it's going to emit when you do that - they're not merely "equivalent" that's how it really works via a process called "de-sugaring".

Interestingly "loop" is categorically more powerful than "for" or "while" because it has a type, the type of a "for" or "while" is always the unit type, but the type of a "loop" can be anything, for example maybe the loop finds a Goose, and the value of your loop is a Goose, this means to exit the loop we need a Goose and we can't leave the loop without one.

Because of the C++ misfeature, Rust has sometimes run into problems where LLVM is like "Oh, that's an infinite loop, I'll just ignore it" but LLVM is not a C++ compiler. Clang is a C++ compiler so Clang is allowed to obey C++ rules, but LLVM is not, it's supposed to provide an actual infinite loop, for both C and Rust to use.
It happens to work but is not really supported. Mouse is super laggy, there are no guest additions and last time I checked it used a full CPU core at all times.
China's US Treasury holdings in June hit a 14-year low
If Thailand is like China, they were English names chosen by kids in English class. Not their real nicknames, just the names they use when speaking and writing English, and chosen with all the tact and creativity of a middle schooler without much knowledge about standard English names in the west. Also, since Chinese names often have meaning, they often go for English names with meaning as well (although unrelated to their Chinese name).

A famous English name in expat in China circles is Rainy.
> some crazy PDF reader exploit

One of those: https://6point6.co.uk/insights/abusing-pdf-files/
I find the opinions of Peter Sunde in this article quite interesting.

Even seven years ago he was saying that torrent sites had stagnated and there was necessity for innovation to protect against the vulnerabilities inherent in having only few large, popular torrent sites.

So, this 20th anniversary is somewhat of a bitter pill to swallow for at least one of the founders.

https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-piracy-scene-nee...
> But why did the CEO's salary increase more than the workers?

Has it? Sources indicate that the CEO of Ford's salary has remained quite steady at $1.7 million.

Perhaps you are confusing salary with total compensation?
Location, location: 535 ways to reload the page with JavaScript
I have the integration with google search enabled and now I only use GPT very rarely. Having it at the top of the SERP with zero effort is much more convenient. The fact that it gets many things wrong becomes irrelevant when it takes no effort on my part. Even when it is totally wrong, its feature to intersperse the output with links to its sources is quite nice.
Did Go address these issues or is it more fundamental?
I think news orgs. area going to pay for it anyway. Seems to be dependent on the site.
Floating point values are binary scientific notation with a fixed precision. All of the unintuitive behaviour of floats is repeated if you imagine conducting decimal calculations yourself in said scientific notation, with intermediate rounding at every step.

Floats are only ranges in that each real number (within the overall range limit) has a unique floating point representation to which it is closest, up to rounding at the precise interval boundary.

Floats can be extended to interval arithmetic, but doing so requires the extra work of keeping track of interval limits. When calculations lose precision (through cancellation of digits in the floating point representation), the interval of uncertainty is larger than the floating point precision.
Well...how do I get in with your kind of people? 'Cause they're the kind of customers I want!