skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I only know what googol is because Google exists.
You're not a ninja, people just have better things to do than call you out on your bullshit. I also walk past security guards all the time, and it's because I have places to go.
Get multiple AI products, one login, one price, Simple and elegant.
A fellow reader of "The world behind my shadow" (original: Schattenspringer)?
My dream Linux filesystem is a distributable ZFS with automatic tiering and advance notification of cache invalidation.

I guess we have different dreams.
Turning something that we're already able to do into something we're able to do very easily can be extremely significant. It's the difference between "public records" and "all public records about you being instantly viewable online." It's also one of the subjects of the excellent sci fi novel "A Deepness in the Sky," which is still great despite making some likely bad guesses about AI.
Heating homes during the winter is more carbon-intensive than cooling homes during the summer.
Government shutdowns that made it more difficult or impossible to shop outside of big stores or online would be as big or bigger issue here.
Every time elmo finds a fence he doesn't like, he immediately has it torn down. Later, when G. K. Chesterton comes along with the consequences, elmo puts up a new, shittier fence somewhere else.
The fine line between bravery and stupidity is understanding the risks. Somebody who understands the danger they're walking into is brave. Somebody who blissfully walks into danger without recognizing the danger is stupid.

A technological singularity is a theorized period during which the length of time you can make reasonable inferences about the future rapidly approaches zero. If there can be no reasonable inferences about the future, there can be no bravery. Anybody who isn't afraid during a technological singularity is just stupid.
It's really not even a compliment. We could not cover even a thousandth of Texas in ~30 feet of carbon per year.

That would only account for ~10% of global emissions.

It's not really worth considering solutions that are going to maybe move the needle by 0.001%. Honestly, hope seems like a better strategy and less a waste of time than that.

If you really want to discuss it - you should preface very discussion with - "This isn't going to make the slightest difference at all in the grand scheme of things, but hear me out anyway..."

Carbon capture is propaganda from the fossil fuel industry to pretend like there is any viable alternative from phasing out fossil fuels almost entirely.

The fossil fuel industry has already won as much as they could - much to the younger generations detriment.

Economics alone should phase out ~60% of fossil fuel usage by 2050. There is nothing they can do to change that at this point.

Unfortunately, depending on the curve - the planet could get way hotter by then.

But, I'm also optimistic that a hotter planet is not going to spell disaster like most people think.
Mutability is a big one for correctness. In Python, any function you pass any (non-primitive) object to might be mutated right out from under you and you have no idea it's happening. In Rust, you have to explicitly provide mutable references, or you need to hand over ownership, in which case you don't care if the callee mutates its argument, because you no longer have access to it.
Vandalism on OpenStreetMap (Tel Aviv)
That's just shallow.
Off topic:

> Your 30+ year old body

Hey, wake up call, not just to parent commenter but anyone.

If you feel this way in your 30's chances are good you should probably spend more time focusing on your physical health. Start getting more exercise and working on your diet.

You don't need to go crazy, just make small improvements and try to stick with them as much as you can. Start simple: Go for a short walk in the morning when you get up. Cut back on refined sugars, alcohol and sugary drinks.

I'm in my early 30's and my capacity to push hard and be durable is stronger than ever. But I made small but steady steps on my diet and kept up a modicum of conditioning throughout my 20's. I love backpacking, so "durability" is something I'm very interested in.

For example, this weekend I was easily able to stay up and game with friends in their early to mid 20's(UFC 5 release) until the wee hours of the morning. I then slept curled up in a ball on the couch(it was cold and that position kept me warm) and bounced up first thing in the morning after like 3 hours of sleep feeling great.

I don't do things like that often because it runs counter to being healthy. Sleep is when your body repairs itself, and it is constantly taking damage. My experience also is that when you are young, you are just less in-tune with your body. By the time you are 30 most people are actually able to recognize how detrimental sleep deeprivation is in the moment.
But, going the other way, I worked for over a decade on Goldman Sach's SecDB system. It's a quirky steampunk alternative future that branched from our light cone around 1995. There's a globally distributed eventually consistent NoSQL database tightly integrated with a data-flow gradually-typed scripting language (and a very 1990s feel 16 color IDE). I'm sure in the late 1990s/early 2000s (before globally distributed NoSQL was popular and before gradual/dynamic typing had a resurgence) it was more like discovered alien technology than steampunk alternative future. (Also, with source code being executed from globally distributed immutable database snapshots, deployment is much nicer than anything else I've used to date. After release testing, set a database key to point to the latest snapshot, and you're deployed.)

There's a service that watches the transaction log of your regional replica so that you can make long-poll HTTP requests that return when any change matching your filter is committed. (Edit: usually the HTTP result handler is used to invalidate specific memoized results in the data flow graph, letting lazy re-evaluation re-fetch the database records as needed.)

It makes a lot of sense for a financial risk system, where you end up calculating millions of slight variations on a scenario. The data flow model with aggressive memoization makes this sort of thing much cheaper.

However, I saw plenty of systems written where you'd attempt to write your request to the next key matching some regex (and retry with the next key if it already existed), where your request would contain some parameters and the database key and/or filesystem path where results should be written.

Under-experience with databases easily results in rewriting a database using message queue/bus. Under-experience with message queues/busses easily results in rewriting a message queue/bus using a database.
You don’t find it hilarious that to avoid acquiescing to demands to not return to office, you replace those employees with contractors who also won’t be in that office… because they’ll be overseas
I think the thing people normally miss about microservices is that the goal of microservices is usually to solve organization and people problems and not technological ones. There's some tech benefits like allowing services to scale independently, but the biggest benefit is clear ownership boundaries and preventing code from becoming overly coupled where it doesn't need to be.

If you're a team small team working on a single product you probably don't need microservices since you likely don't have the type of organizational problems that microservices solve. Microservices are likely premature optimization and you're paying the price to solve problems you don't yet have.
Hey I’m happy to share some things I do in case it helps. I work about 12-14 hours a day. Sometimes more. Rarely less.

First, I have a timer set for every 30 minutes on my phone that I refresh each time it goes off.

When it goes off, I stand up and look outside. Gives my eyes some rest. I do some stretches. Sometimes I do a plank for 45s to a min. This really helps offset the back pain from sitting for me. Then it’s back to work. I do this pretty much the whole day.

Another thing I do is a stroll after eating my lunch. I usually order food or meal prep, so takes about 20 min to eat (chew don’t rush). Then I have 15-20 min to take a stroll around the apartment complex. Look at the sky. Listen to the birds. Think about no stressful things.

I try to never miss sunset. Not sure why but taking 10 min to see the sun set is fulfilling to me. Makes me feel like saying bye to an important friend until tomorrow.

Finally before going to sleep I take another stroll. Here I think about what went well today. What I want to accomplish tomorrow. I write this on an index card back and front side. If it doesn’t fit on index card it’s too much work for the day.

I shred the previous days card lol.

On weekends I exercise by hiking on Saturday for a couple hours in the am.
Last I checked, it only works for whole disks. You can't mount a linux partition on a disk sharing your Windows install.
Unfortunately not: https://youtu.be/_pNRuafoyZ4?t=434
There were static site generators and server-side includes and even "bad old" FRAMEs (which were fine at the time; the browser chrome for frames being ugly was a browser issue that eventually shifted) before blogs if you wanted to keep a personal site with a consistent header/footer pattern.

I think blogs took over from personal websites because of the "Living Site" patterns this page describes. The easiest way to keep a website appearing living was to pay for a "Guestbook" or "Forum" script or service. The cheapest way to keep a website appearing living was to have a "History Page" that documented the changes to a website in reverse chronological order. Blogs were sort of the inevitable living merger of the Guestbook/Forum and the History Page: reverse chronological order, interactions and comments, feels like a "living page".

I know my blog certainly began as a "History Page" of sorts well before the word "blog" existed or dedicated blog software. (In High School I even wrote my own proto-blog engine that I thought was simply a Forum engine to make keeping my "home page" easily up to date and living.)
Each post start with "1". Imagine that it's your own vote. But that is not added to your total karma.

When someone else upvote the counter says "2", and your karma should increase.
Seems like a legitimately good reason to get a tourniquet on that thing now.
And faster than humans can police.
> acting like AGI is almost here because they think LLMs are a lot smarter than they actually are.

For me, it's a bit the opposite -- the effectiveness of dumb, simple, transformer-based LLMs are showing me that the human brain itself (while working quite differently) might involve a lot less cleverness than I previously thought. That is, AGI might end up being much easier to build than it long seemed, not because progress is fast, but because the target was not so far away as it seemed.

We spent many decades recognizing the failure of the early computer scientists who thought a few grad students could build AGI as a summer project, and apparently learned that this meant that AGI was an impossibly difficult holy grail, a quixotic dream forever out of reach. We're certainly not there yet. But I've now seen all the classic examples of tasks that the old textbooks described as easy for humans but near-impossible for computers, become tasks that are easy for computers too. The computers aren't doing anything deeply clever, but perhaps it's time to re-evaluate our very high opinion of the human brain. We might stumble on it quite suddenly.

It's, at least, not a good time to be dismissive of anyone who is trying to think clearly about the consequences. Maybe the issue with sci-fi is that it tricked us into optimism, thinking an AGI will naturally be a friendly robot companion like C-3PO, or if unfriendly, then something like the Terminator that can be defeated by heroic struggle. It could very well be nothing that makes a good or interesting story at all.
Living in Cyprus, the government made it a legal requirement for businesses to accept digital payments in an attempt to fight tax evasion. As a consequence I haven't used cash locally for the past year. I just carry my phone.
Misleading is omitting the axis label, or cherry-picking a disputably-appropriate range to let you use a misleading window (with or without labels). I don't think it does either?
Calibration is more than a button press, there's a calibrated target that needs to be set up (and at least some minimal skill in setting up the target correctly). Whether it's worth the $300+ that shops and dealers charge is open to debate, but it's not just a simple button press.
To say that disabled people's lives have no value is vile, but that is not what he's saying. It's the unnecessary prolonging of suffering that Ivan Illich speaks against, the pressure to do everything humanly possible to eek out any extra week on one's lifespan, even if that extra week is a miserable one spent in agony. Now that is not to say that we should just jump off a bridge at the mere sight of suffering, but rather discern how our life is meant to be lived while letting go of our need to control everything.
It always strikes me as odd that the geoengineering experiment that got us into the predicament (dumping boatloads of CO2 into the atmosphere), the politics were so much easier.
I feel like Andrew Ng has more name recognition than Google Brain itself.

Also Business Insider isn't great, the original Australian Financial Review article has a lot more substance: https://archive.ph/yidIa

I've never been convinced by the arguments of OpenAI/Anthropic and the like on the existential risks of AI. Maybe I'm jaded by the ridiculousness of "thought experiments" like Roko's basilisk and lines of reasoning followed EA adherents, where the risks are comically infinite and alignment feels a lot more like hermeneutics.

I am probably just a bit less cynical than Ng is here on the motivations[^1]. But regardless of whether or not the AGI doomsday claim is justification for a moat, Ng is right in that it's taking a lot the oxygen out of the room for more concrete discussion on the legitimate harms of generative AI -- like silently proliferating social biases present in the training data, or making accountability a legal and social nightmare.

[^1]: I don't doubt, for instance, that there's in part some legitimate paranoia -- Sam Altman is a known doomsday prepper.
Except that generalized deflation is one of the largest and widespread economic disasters that can be brought about; you are disincentivizing immediate consumption to on the basis of future larger consumption, you're disincentivizing investing in the economy instead of just holding capital - both things that will make a economy stop working in the long term.

It's the reason why most central banks really want some minimal level of inflation going on at all times.
".. will only respect competence and good personality traits, not authority."

Thanks for this phrasing. Very much same here, I guess. For me, the added emphasis is really important, though. I tend to feel deep distrust towards competent people without good personality traits.

Even though... thinking about it (when they're not around!), I almost always conclude that they probably cant help being arrogant. It seems to be a generic lack of empathy of some sort. But I still tend to avoid them.
AI-enabled biotech startup analysis
Not even close. I want a two seats or a bench and a big truck bed. If I can’t haul a piece of plywood and some 2x4’s what’s the use of a truck?
There's been a free Windows ext2 driver since the Win2k days[1]. It's not remotely perfect, and doesn't look like it's much maintained any more, but I've used it many times. There are numerous other offerings, both free-ish[2] and commercial[3].

Of course, now you can mount ext[234] on Windows using WSL these days, so it's kinuva moot point.[4]

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd/
[2] e.g. https://www.diskgenius.com/
[3] e.g. https://www.paragon-drivers.com/en/lfswin/
[4] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/access-linux-file...
Honestly, for the topic at hand, none of these are useful.

What we need is a bright horizontal line that says ">50% chance your society collapses in the lifetime of your children", one that says ">50% chance your society collapses in your lifetime", and one that says ">50% chance your species does not survive 100 years." To properly frame the stakes and the significance of the numbers.
Designers Tap Generative AI for a Chip Assist
Scales too short
Came to say that, I hate graphs that don't start at zero.

I understand that for line graphs, where you are looking at variations rather than absolutes, this is acceptable, but in this case.

- This is an interactive graph, at least give us the option of starting at zero.

- CO2 went from 280 ppm to 420 ppm, it is significant enough to see the variations even on an absolute scale.

- Don't make the bottom line (x axis) stand out as it does now, especially considering that the y axis doesn't stand out.
> I'm sure the editorial staff at The Register are brainstorming a headline at this very moment.

They're "disc"-ussing it.
Until/unless people start writing their own operating systems, developing their own hardware again and educating Congress to force interoperability AND SECURITY standards, this will definitely remain a Thing.

[ There is a pervasive feeling, dating back to the late 1970s, that engineers are not business people/risk takers and have therefore volunteered for a safer, but financially asymmetrical, symbiotic relationship with the platform OEM (and are history if they "get in the way" --much like the plant watering person who pulls up out front in a van and maybe spills some water on the floor while servicing the geraniums in the boardroom). The conflict, of course, is that many engineers aspire to be business people/risk takers and rarely understand why the platform OEMs won't directly support their efforts. ]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9XyXLiTpI4
The reality of this situation is that the tool everyone is using to build microservices is Kubernetes. It imposes a huge tax on communication between services. So your aspiration as to improving performance fly out of the window.

On top of this, you need to consider that most of the software you are going to write will be based on existing components. Many of these have no desire to communicate over network, and your micro- or w/e size services will have to cave in to their demands. Simple example: want to use Docker? -- say hello to UNIX sockets. Other components may require communication through shared memory, filesystem, and so on.

Finally, isolation is not a feature of microservices, especially if the emphasis is on micro. You have to be able to control the size and where you want to draw the boundary. If you committed upfront to having your units be as small as possible -- well, you might have function-level isolation, but you won't have class- or module- or program-level isolation, to put it in more understandable terms. This is where your comparison between the actors model and microservices breaks: first doesn't prescribe the size.
That's a tiny amount, relatively. But is that "just a little more" or is it "just a little more, but in a really inconvenient and difficult to reach altitude"?

What kind of infrastructure would be required to put it where it needs to go?
I feel if we get to the point where we have to do that, humanity will just give up.
> You could say the same about Google.

Can you though? Googol is word to describe a large number few people would ever have need, or want, to articulate. It's not generic at all.

X is super generic. So much so it's the defacto choice for the placeholder when discussing general things, or the first variable used in maths problems. It's among the most generic a name one could come up with.

When speaking about X, you really need context to determine if we're talking about things in general, or the service formerly known as Twitter.
I'm going to summarize Physicist, Caltech President, and Obama DOE appointee Steven Koonin on climate change:

1) Climate is an extremely complicated phenomenon
2) It is extremely difficult to model beyond a limited time frame.
3) The models we have, running on the most powerful, purpose built, computers rely on massive aggregations because there are otherwise too many interactions to handle. These aggregations are too large to be reasonably interpreted.
4) There is a large industry of well paid scientists, researchers, and policymakers who have built careers on Climate Change. Alarming news keeps them in a job, so they have an incentive to bias towards worst case outcomes. " It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
5. Efficient and clean technology is worthy of pursuing regardless of its climate impacts. We can do more for the planet creating market based solutions in those directions than trying to manage CO2 directly.

Finally, I must acknowledge the Yale paper and climate scientists who have criticized his work. Rather than fire from the bushes, they should debate Koonin directly. He isn't a Fox News kook, if anything his credentials are superior to theirs.

Remember, one of the oldest ruse of charlatans is promising they can change the weather.

https://youtu.be/l90FpjPGLBE?si=6KfwkEH8HVb3GtXV
IANAL but they could also just pull out of the UK, and they have no jurisdiction on Meta in the USA.

They'd still be able to have users in the UK, since the UK isn't the type of country that is going to put up a national firewall.
I disagree that constructive criticism is against the rules.

If you want to say something, say it, if you don't, don't--why would I care? I've said my opinion and posturing that you're better than the discussion doesn't persuade anyone that you're right. It hasn't been my experience that when people self-censor, they later reveal they had some brilliant counterargument that we were all missing out on.
Last time I checked my statistical model book didn't have the ability to write Python code.

And a nuclear bomb is just a bunch of atoms. Do you fear atoms? What the hell.
No it does not always.
Recently I played a game of Civilization 1. It actually did take a me back to that feeling of awe that I had as a child, except now the sound worked and I was able to read English so I actually knew how to play, which enhanced the experience.
Yeah, this article comes off as holier-than-thou and politically charged. It does not attempt to justify its assumptions (Why should improvement be centered on a community? This isn't a truth about the universe or anything like that.)
I wish there was always an option to user zero based graphs.
It costs a million dollars to run a service that essentially “uploads a 2KB CSV to a database” on Snowflake?

And you can cut this in half by changing some defaults in instance lifetime?

I’m starting to understand why Snowflake’s market cap is something like $50B. This sounds like a nice money-printing business if you can convince enterprises to use it.
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/brief-history-nuclear-accid...
The sci-fi scenarios are a long-term risk, which no one really knows about. I'm terrified of the technologies we have now, today, used by all the big tech companies to boost profits. We will see weaponized mass disinformation combined with near perfect deep fakes. It will become impossible to know what is true or false. America is already on the brink of fascist takeover due to deluded MAGA extremists. 10 years of advancements in the field, and we are screwed.

Then of course there is the risk to human jobs. We don't need AGI to put vast amounts of people out of work, it is already happening and will accelerate in the near term.
Apparently this is the title of a movie about nuclear war.
It will never stop being funny to me that people are straight-facedly drawing a straight line between shitty text completion computer programs and nuclear weapon level existential risk.