skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Certainly a lot of people seem to believe that many Mastodon instances are better moderated than commercial social media.

Certainly some kinds of right-wing hate are suppressed but there is very little pushback about widespread misuse of the word "fascist" to describe your local police department, or people in women's sports who use period trackers to prevent ACL tears, mainstream milquetoast politicians, or just about anyone.

On the other hand a lot of it seems like BS, there are two Mastodon instances that seem to be at war with Hacker News, I think I understand why one of them is mad at HN, I don't know if the second is mad out of sympathy with the first or they have some other grievance.

Many mastodonsters were concerned that Threads would be poorly moderated (might allow posts about how period tracking prevents ACL tears in female athletes I guess) but Threads pretty much dropped everybody's radar.

---

One angle is that a system like this should have "defense in depth", like you try to create a culture where hateful speech is not welcome, where people don't try it because they know they'll get disapproval, where people know they'll get confronted if they call Keir Starmer a fascist, where people know you just don't boost hateful things, etc.

In that sense you might just want to cultivate a lot of positive and neutral stuff and encourage people seeking negativity to go elsewhere. I think this is what Instagram was going for with Threads and it might be one reason why people should be asking "whatever happened to Threads?" but they don't because they've forgotten all about it.
> That's literally the point of optimization. If Search was still the same as it was in the late 90's, Google wouldn't be able to do half the things it does.

That'd be great. The newer half of it is terrible.

> Are you going to make similar gripes about autocomplete, or GPS that reroutes when you fail to make the planned/"correct" turn?

Absolutely valid. I never use autocomplete as it is vapid and incorrect. Also I don't use gps routing because it does this.

The "smart" rotates and "smart" zooms around the screen ignoring my input isn't desired.

These systems presume the user is profoundly, unbelievably stupid and can't, for instance, understand cardinal directions.

It's why when you enter a url like "http://somesite.com.:80/" it will be like "well I think you meant https://somesite.com" and then just ignore all your very explicit protocol and port instructions and whisk you off to an https, even if it's broken and doesn't work or similarly if you explicitly select a subsection of a url that starts at the first character, it will invisibly tact on the protocol to the beginning of your selection to be helpful ... as if the user is helplessly befuddled and perplexed by the protocol syntax.

These aren't optimizations or improvements. They're diffusive and reductive interfaces that disempower the user, they're everywhere now and it's why everything sucks.

Here's what you're advocating for in the physical world - a smart flathead screwdriver that can't be used to pry or wedge anything. In fact, if you try to do that it will have special built in motors and then work against your intentions, wobbling around looking for a flathead screw and then refusing to work if it can't find any.

Presuming the user is a completely incompetent clumsy dumbfuck and ONLY working under that modality is not an improvement. This has somehow become a core design assumption in the SV and it needs to die.
I searched and don't see it.
> Car companies make their money from selling new cars, not keeping old ones on the road.

I'm interested in how this could be realistically changed. I'm convinced most of the environmental and societal problems caused by economic activity is inevitable at scale, where an organisation's behaviour becomes dominated more by underlying economic rules than any principles it's originators may have had at a younger age or smaller scale.

It also shouldn't necessarily be so specific as "must maximise vehicle life", it really depends, because it's not impossible that with the right manufacturing and recycling techniques shorter vehicle life could bring down the total environmental and societal cost. The question is how to make that economically interesting to the manufacturers, e.g what if each manufacturer was responsible, end-to-end, for the recycling of it's own vehicles... shorter vehicle life could mean more sales, but could also mean more recycling. If the process is optimised for that then it could be profitable and cheap for the consumer and good for the environment, but if not it will hurt their bottom line.
First off I have semi-jokingly described all these recent advances in machine learning as Automated Bullshit Engines - and that's often useful, like with these image generators where we want it to bullshit up a picture. But now more and more they're making them into Deceit Engines and it's not great.

But seeing these instruction lists leak time and time again I'm flabbergasted at how they keep trying to do their work on the "outside" of the machine, basically using the consumer controls. Are they trying to go faster than their supply of knowledgeable people can sustain? Or does this field have even less of an idea what's going on than I think it does?

It seems apparent to me that working like this will fail to impose restrictions - the AI company has some tens to thousands of clever individuals trying to write clever prompts that keep things secret or whatever, but the world has millions of clever people trying to find clever holes.
Yeah, it looks like mostly cheap junk. But do they have an infinite advertising budget? I've been seeing tons of their ads for months.
the concept "if a little works, a lot will work even better!" is pretty much a given in everything. nobody ever does the "small moves, Ellie". it's "but it goes to 11" on everything. with the painlessness of mass sending of email, there was no pain to cause someone to slowdown. it was an immediate "take of and nuke it from orbit" from the word go on everything.
The app crashes on Pixel 6 pro
Installed on my M1 Mac. So it's an automated way to ask them to delete your account. If you have ongoing business with the company this is the only recourse the app offers you (perhaps it's by jurisdiction - I'm in CA).

Useful, but I'd love a way to tell these companies to stop assembling a profile of me without my consent instead (ideally as a threat).

Also would be useful if the app could suggest less invasive alternatives in the same market. Perhaps an idea for v2.
Paywall, go to https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2F...
How to get a Google Knowledge Panel for a Google search on your name
If want to get a Google Knowledge Panel when someone Googles your name or company, this is how to do it.
Plus it'd let people use a JavaScript engine other than v8 and JSCore, and one which (in theory) would be memory safe.
Ken: big fan of your and Marc's work, would be so great if you guys could give the Ken&Marc treatment to the "Nortronics NAS-14V2 Astroinertial Navigation System", The R2-D2 unit from an SR-71. Well, here's hoping.
I had a lot of fun with Dog's Life!!

"The software development was chaotic. The chaos provided a lot of freedom and opportunity but caused some serious problems too."

Love this insight.
https://github.com/civboot/civlua/tree/main/metaty
This sounds great and I'd love to help test. Kevin at silent planet dot com. Thanks!
The first payments in bitcoin were not the pizzas. Malmi sold bitcoins for money prior to that.

The first people using Bitcoin were not ransomware users; the first bootstrappers were not involved with Silk Road at all.

It is quite the insult to those people, many of whom were highly ethical, to insist that their efforts, development, and research were motivated by illegal intent.

Mining on broken-into-computers is not possible.

Satoshi predicted significantly specialized mining operations, which is exactly what happened. He didn't predict pooling, which happened to be a massive accelerator. Pool mining is also not criminal in nature, intent, nor progress.

There is no coercive force in Bitcoin. The use of Bitcoin by people is entirely non-coercive. If ransomware were its only use, and were not merely a parasitic opportunistic drain on Bitcoin momentum, then its overall value would be zero; thus, your assertion that ransomware is some kind of driving force which imparts value to Bitcoin is self-inconsistent on its face.
If that were the case we could do a later experiment to establish that factor. “We’re doing ‘something’ that makes people survive” is good enough for a first attempt.
It for example faciliated a genocide, the rise or confirmation of authoritarian and bloody regimes, and kept consciously doing it if you read the article.

The reference to Nuremberg was more for an example of an international trial than for the nazis, although faciliting a smaller scale genocide does somehow seem to have a relationship with the nazis...

Given the havoc they willingly caused to nations worldwide, an international trial for Zuckerberg and the other responsibles does not seem so inconceivable to me...

And that's not considering a lot of other probably less important things they did
Yeah that’s the whole problem really. It’s not arbitrary land they’re fighting over. It’s that land and it can be no other land. I don’t know how it resolves in any way we find tasteful by modern standards.
Browser fingerprinting, probably network fingerprinting as well. Neither require client persistence.
Attacks will originate from some cross-section of [country with many broadband connections] and [many outdated / unpatched OSes in use]. But no humans in the loop other than command & control, or people wondering why their device is slow / acting up.

<Insert usual suspect here> high up can be read just as "many internet users there, whose PC or other device is infected with malware that tries to spread itself".

As the article states: originating device can be silly IoT device like a router, TV, printer, Ring-style doorbell, etc etc etc. In fact, chance of random IoT device being vulnerable and/or been 'recruited' in a botnet, may be bigger than the same with random PC / tablet etc. Many IoT devices are junk that rarely see firmware updates (if any).
If they just would cap the fees it would be viable. But I’m not paying a $200+ cleaning fee on top of the nightly rate and other fees.
Flexoki: an inky color scheme for prose and code
Yeah, I don’t really know what the author expected Apple to do with the options they had.

They couldn’t have used an existing language without some serious compromises. The solution didn’t exist. The only choice was to go into uncharted territory.

> Swift didn't have to "earn" its place, prove that its benefits outweighed its downsides. The writing was on the wall, Apple was saying this is the future, which threw the entire community in to chaos

Italicized emphasis mine…I think that saying that the community was thrown into chaos is a bit of a stretch and a dramatization. There was no rug pull, you can still make Objective-C apps if you want to.
I’m an architect at my company but we’re in a bind with a particular project that I had started a couple years ago, so they temporarily assigned me to basically one-man it over the finish line.

Aside from the stress of the deadline and knowing that I’m going to get stuck being the expert on this project forever, it’s been pretty nice (and productive) just working in peace and quiet with no bullshit scrum ceremonies and navel gazing as distractions. Actually reminded me of why I like programming, and that the things I hate about my career is the fact the organizations spend a lot of time keeping you from actually performing it for some reason.
The switch to Windows NT happened with Quake 2, the original Quake was still NeXTSTEP.
Some services just don't stop at night. Healthcare has trends but it never stops.
I really wish people wouldn't lump Autism and ADHD together. This is like lumping "cancer" all together. "Autism" isn't even a single disease just by itself.

For autism, the correlation on age and diabetes status is real, but weak.

The counterfactual is that autism in minority populations is growing much faster than it is in the non-minority population. The only good correlation is health care coverage and the correlation is very strong. That tends to suggest that the "increase" is mostly increased diagnosis and treatment.

And, in my personal experience, "weak" ADHD is being HUGELY over diagnosed (for various reasons--some of which are non-medical) while "stronger" ADHD is being significantly underdiagnosed (because dealing with it is expensive on multiple fronts).

However, note that none of these things are absolutes. Weak correlations do exist. The human organism is highly variable--some things work for some of the people some of the time. The problem is figuring out which things work for which individuals most of the time.
Very sensible comment, agree with it.

I still think that the big cos. (Google, MS, Oracle, ...) will win the AI race in the medium/long term as they have a huge momentum behind them, so they didn't really "miss" anything.

ChatGPT is much better than Google Search, though!
The 407 is actually a pretty good example of government inefficiency when it comes to planning and building highways.

It exists because the 401 wasn't built with sufficient long-term capacity, even after it was widened significantly.

I wouldn't really consider the 407 a true "private" highway, though. It's more a case of the private sector rescuing the government from a typical government-created debacle, and last I heard, the highway is now majority-owned by the CPP Investment Board (a Crown corporation).

Have you ever actually driven on the 407, by any chance? It's a much nicer experience than the 401, although having to pay a toll while also paying significant taxes can be annoying. Under a proper system, there'd only be usage tolls, and no taxes involved.
Hmm, I commute by bike, but I think the people in their cars are being 'punished' in the sense that they were sold on the idea that having a car would make them free somehow, and now they're stuck in a traffic jam. In the US we allowed lots of city centers to decay and built suburbs, all far flung enough to require driving (since decent public transit would be tantamount to socialism, apparently). So it's a disaster of our own making., really.
Sorry, working to get it available in other regions, will probably release to the UK and Australia in the next week or so!
Is it really worth the effort to do more than email and maybe IP? It's not perfect, but nothing is, so you might as well not burn too much time/money/code on it.
> And what about our current president? Most historians – and public opinion – do not give President Trump particularly high marks after 15 months in office. Yet his predicted greatness score (score=33.53) is one of the highest of all presidents – surpassed only by George Washington (score=34.37), Thomas Jefferson (score=34.70), Lyndon Baines Johnson (score=35.77) and Abraham Lincoln (score=37.51).

Well, that pretty much does it for this "greatness score".
Does anyone know how this compares to incogni.com ? I've seen a few sponsored slots for that from vloggers who seem to be pretty on the level. It's always possible that enough slick marketing and paid search results could thwart reasonable good-faith attempts at due diligence, so you can never be entirely sure. But it's a tempting idea.

(Of course ideally, we'd live in a world where we wouldn't need either, and that kind of service wouldn't be limited to those who were savvy enough to have heard of it, or well-off enough to afford it, but we don't live in that world right now, so I'm willing to consider it.)
Yes, the Apple Watch is what provides the sleep stage data. If you only have an iPhone there's no in-depth sleep stage data which is what the model uses to predict a sleep quality score. The disclaimer didn't show in the video since I had closed it already.
Do we even know if it is the risk of it or just a correlation? E.g. older parents could have more resources to get their kids to therapist where they get diagnosed?

And so older parents will have higher likelihood of having kids with autism?

Or maybe it is hereditary and fathers prone to autism are less likely to get children earlier in their life. It makes sense if you consider social awkwardness part of autism.

Everytime I see research on those subjects it seems like those correlations could be explained away by also 1000 different factors.

To me intuitively it feels like ADHD and Autism in many cases are largely just natural variance because of evolutionary process, seen as something wrong due to environment having been changed. And a lot of the research seems to make claims on just correlation.

I have ADHD diagnosis and I almost got Autism diagnosis and multiple doctors have noted I have autistic tendencies, but I think it is just trade offs. It is where you direct your limited mental resources to. Sometimes it is acceptable to current society, sometimes not.

To sum up both diagnosis for me seem to be because I have easier time to focus on other things that most other people can't while I have harder time focusing on what is easy for most.
I was occasionally working on Facebook applications around 2008–2010 and even back then Facebook had clauses in their terms and conditions forbidding using a person’s social graph to build them a new social graph or mirror their data elsewhere. LinkedIn had the same. The restrictions started coming in a long time before the Cambridge Analytic scandal. They stopped it because they didn’t want the competition, not because of privacy issues.
A variation of this has been done using Intel MMU fault handling. Behold: https://github.com/jbangert/trapcc

This is a proof by construction that the Intel MMU's fault handling mechanism is Turing complete. We have constructed an assembler that translates 'Move, Branch if Zero, Decrement' instructions to C source that sets up various processor control tables. After this code has executed, the CPU computes by attempting to fault without ever executing a single instruction. Optionally, the assembler can also generate X86 instructions that will display variables in the VGA frame buffer and will cause control to be transferred between the native (display) instructions and 'weird machine' trap instructions.
I recently was looking at one place and started the process to book it when I realized that the cleaning fee was $279/night and the stated rental rate was $179/night. The cleaning fee was significantly larger than the rental fee!
Should have it out in Australia within a week or so!
Wow, what a rabbit hole...

I started by searching for "turbine air impedance". Seems to be a common topic, but maybe just for design modeling? And maybe an outdated parameter to use? One of the front-page hits is a recent (2021) paper from Whittle Laboratory [1] "Modeling Turbine Acoustic Impedance" [2]. Abstract says in part

"Impedance boundary conditions are an influential yet uncertain parameter in predicting the thermoacoustic stability of gas turbine combustors...A parametric study of turbine stage designs using the analytical model shows acoustic impedance is a weak function of degree of reaction and polytropic efficiency. The design parameter with the strongest influence is flow coefficient, followed by axial velocity ratio and Mach number. We provide the combustion engineer with improved tools to predict impedance boundary conditions, and suggest thermoacoustic stability is most likely to be compromised by change in turbine flow coefficient."

Many search iterations later [5], I found a recent paper discussing "fuel flow rate fluctuations which depend upon the air side impedance at the fuel injection location" [3].

Maybe it's for controlling inlet shock waves? However, I couldn't find anything obiously linking "Air inlet control systems" to "air impedance". Here's one paper discussing such a system, with an extremely detailed transfer function [4]. Maybe it's using another term for impedence, or something close?

Edit: Considering this was cutting-edge control hardware for military equipment, I guess some lack of public details is to be expected. On the other hand, on Ebay there's a Fuel Control Unit for a J-79 engine as used in the B-58 Hustler [6].

[1] Yes, that Whittle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittle_Laboratory

[2] https://www.mdpi.com/2504-186X/6/2/18

[3] "Analytical modelling of flame transfer functions for technically premixed flames" https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17568277221094...

[4] "Complex Control System for an Aircraft Supersonic Inlet" http://www.wseas.us/e-library/conferences/2009/rodos/SYSTEMS...

[5] Just so you know, "b-58 engine computer" only brings up automotive stuff.

[6] https://www.ebay.com/itm/325676156863?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DI...
The digital nomad lifestyle is becoming increasingly popular among remote workers and online entrepreneurs. As a digital nomad, you have the freedom to travel the world and work from anywhere with an internet connection. However, to sustain this lifestyle long-term, finding affordable destinations is key.
Being picky about a CSS reset for fun
Merely being aware of your issues does not magically solve them.
For someone who complains about web stuff so much, it's weird that you don't have a better understanding of the technology. No amount of pipelining can fix HTTP/1's request-per-connection model enough to make it competitive with HTTP/2.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole
The iPhone requests permission to HealthKit, which comes through the Apple Health app. You will need an Apple Watch to record the sleep stage data during a sleep session, which the ML model then uses to calculate a sleep quality score from 1-100. All of the sleep quality scores are estimates, which is why I made it so that users could review and update their score based on how they felt in the morning, which in turn would tune the ML model to their sleep preferences.
From the EULA:

“We do not sell your personal information in a way that most people would think of as a sale. However, we do participate in online targeted advertising and use analytics which allows tech companies, in exchange for our use of their services, to use user information collected from our App to improve their own products and to improve the services they provide to others. Under some laws, this is considered our “sale” of your user data to third parties. You can opt-out of this as provided in the “How to Submit a Request” section below.”
I haven't stayed (in Europe) in an Airbnb that didn't have shitty internet.

Nowadays they're all made exclusively as investements, not as people sharing their own apartment anymore, so they get the cheapest connection they can get away with.
More heavy rain is on the way to the Northeast on Saturday
I dont trust google to watch me sleep.
Ask HN: Fermat's Last Theorem with More Terms: Why Does It Stop at 3?
Everybody knows the Pythagorean theorem (a^2 + b^2 = c^2). And everybody knows of integer solutions like 3^2 + 4^2 = 5^2.

And most people know of Fermat's Last Theorem, which says that there no integer solutions for powers higher than two.

But that's not true if you allow more than two terms. You still have solutions with squares, such as 3^2 + 4^2 + 12^2 = 13^2. And you get solutions for cubes as well, such as the surprising 3^3 + 4^3 + 5^3 = 6^3.

But you get no such solutions for the fourth power, either with three or four terms. (At least, you get no solutions for small integers, which I have checked via exhaustive search.)

Why? Can anyone explain why that should be?

(I know that you can get a trivial solution with 16 terms, each one 1^4, all added together to give 2^4. I am ignoring such trivial solutions, though I don't know of a good way to state a rigorous exclusion condition.)