skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personally, I think Yucca mountain is a great place to store it in the USA but that will likely never be politically viable. And I'm not sure what solutions exist for nations outside of North America.

I'm also personally still concerned about transportation accidents resulting in permanently contaminated areas.
There is a lot of utility in 1 to 1 links, but you don't need encryption to do that, while adding it does encourage it at the expense of other modes.

As for commercial activity, the whole point of the amateur spectrum is specifically to carve out portions of the spectrum protected from commercial interests! I agree that commercial, and also unlicensed use of radio is important, but leave commerce out of the tiny portion (and it really is small) part of the spectrum that's specifically regulated to be free of commercial interference.
In other words, this means that computations in the cloud can be performed on confidential data even if the cloud provider is untrusted or compromised.

Cloud is always "someone else's computer", regardless what stupid DRM-ish crap they come up with to try to pretend that it's not. This tech only benefits the rent-seekers who try to distort the concept of ownership.

In other words, this is nothing worth worrying about.
No one? Really? Amazing. I’m surprised you’ve taken a tally of the world population sans the US but are unable to find non biased content about China online.
blender has a python api and everything you can do in blender can be replicated with scripts. for a start you can draw geometric shapes to show variables and a for loop.
Cops get plenty of opportunities to be judge, jury, and executioner. They’re a pox on free society.
Unless you are in USA because we like to live each in a separate house instead of apartment complex.
Biology is 24th century chemical nanotechnology developed by a billion years of fortunate accidents
Exactly. We have the money and technology to build and operate repositories that responsibly handle all our nuclear waste. We just need the willpower to go out and do it.
In the 1990s, Microsoft had arguably the best desktop operating system. They were executing on all cylinders and clearly doing things competitors couldn’t deliver at the same scale.

That doesn’t mean that they weren’t guilty of being a coercive monopolist.

It’s quite possible this means that the Apple/Google deal is not allowed but only if Google is deemed to be abusing their market position.
Very true. At work we have "the first and most important thing to optimize is the requirements" as a principle and it works well.
It's apache
I agree with you, and it’s why I stopped posting on Github. It was called “social coding” after all. I got tired of people asking me to fix stuff. But rather than complain about people asking, I just removed it from Github.

I used to think the world would be worse off if more people do what I did by removing code they don’t want to maintain. I don’t think that anymore. There are enough people and businesses who, for various reasons, want to maintain free (in both senses of the word) software. I don’t think the marginal people like me - the people who don’t want to maintain, and who don’t want to be nagged - really contribute more than negligible value.

I make stuff to scratch my itches. I stopped being so big-headed as to think that others need to see that stuff. But if I really wanted to post it, I’d put it on a website, probably under a pseudonym, with a warning not to nag me. Not on Github.
Model training diary/journal for LLMs?
About half a year ago, some big tech company released an open-source LLM. What makes that model special is that they made available a model training diary/journal recording everything their engineers did to babysit the training process, e.g. "on day 143, the training loss plateaued, so we decreased the learning rate further". I think it was in a shared Google Doc.

Can you remind me of the name of the company/model?
We're talking about SpaceX specifically, not Tesla or any of his other companies. In the context of SpaceX, what GP said is absolutely true. The rocket industry has not been getting incrementally better over time. If anything, costs have incrementally gone up over time. Until SpaceX, nobody was able to significantly lower launch costs. Then SpaceX came along and succeeded where dozens of previous startups had failed, and the price floor drops out. In this particular case, "revolutionary" is the right descriptor to use.
It's a vanity project until it isn't. I don't know what makes a language succeed but it's clearly possible. I've seen quite a few languages rise from small to widely used. Zig is a prominent example but there are others.
Slightly off-topic: I’ve been thinking about getting a Geiger counter as a hobbyist toy. Anyone got a recommendation?
> They can be picked up and worked upon at any time by anybody, even if many years have passed since they were last developed.

Assuming it's maintainable and not the illegible scrawlings of someone crazy, sometimes software is just some random folk in Nebraska's pet project and it's been dropped for something shinier/they gained employment.
This is pretty cool, but in my experience critical path code generally has side effects and most code is not idempotent. That is to say it may not be safe or feasible to run the old and new code in parallel, without some special considerations. Think bidding on a auction item or transferring a bank balance.
There is a list of packages in other languages at the bottom of the README.
I highly recommend the Naur paper, I think it is a pretty accurate view of the dynamics of software production.
I prefer drawing with a pen, then a mouse, and only then my finger. When I lift my finger up and put it back down I don't know the exact point it'll register as!

Sorry to go all Hacker News on you.
"I like cooking with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food."

-- Julia Child
Nitrogen does absolutely nothing on Earth. It is inert.
The C community basically doesn't bother with libraries. They're so cumbersome to do in C that you'll tend to only have, like, 20 giant libraries in your (non-vendored) dependencies.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of fun valid English writing today. Certainly it seems the opposite is the norm, even at the highest levels of government.

But I found joy very early in this essay. "Tonight's missive is an apology: not quite in the sense of expiation, though not quite not that, either; rather, apology in the sense of explanation, of exegesis: apologia."

When an introduction provides such a concise but entertaining junglegym for the reader, surely the rest will be enlightening. And if not, we have short attention spans, so we click elsewhere :).
Difference is you're much more likely to be flattened and go under a vehicle with a large, high front-end.
Good points. The reason I equated "Rule of Thu8mn" with "Principle" is that neither is always correct. They are abstractions that cannot list all possible details, therefore they apply in many or most situations but not all.

People say they "live by their principles" but I don't think that always is the case for them, in every situation anyway.

Rule-of-Thumb comes from electro-magnetism I believe and it's point is it makes something more complicated easy to remember.

https://www.electricaltechnology.org/wp-content/uploads/2020...
There aren't technical problems, only political ones.

Yucca mountain has been designated as the long term storage site since 1987 by Congress. Every change of party majority since then has either stopped or restarted work on it.
How does this work for collection types (ex. dynamic array) that can reallocate after growing? If there's multiple references, with at least one being mutable.

Is there an extra pointer hop as compared to, for example Rust's Vec? i.e. the value on the stack is a pointer to some heap data that has a pointer to the actual array data.
> There's so many complaints about cost overruns, etc.

This is ironic. I recommend you read How Big Things Get Done[1], by Bent Flyvbjerg, the world's foremost expert on megaprojects. The book discusses an analysis of about 10,000 projects of over a billion dollars each.

Which projects were most likely to come in on time and on budget, and deliver the promised returns? PV solar.

Which projects were third most likely to overrun by 100% or more, be 100% late or more, and deliver only a fraction of the promised returns? Nuclear power plants.

Edit: The book's ratings are based on construction phase only, after all the permitting and other planning work has been completed.

(Third worst? What could be worse? Answer: nuclear waste storage sites, and Olympic Games hosting.)

1. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/672118/how-big-thin...
Leap hours would be neat!
You conveniently remember that nuclear power was unfairly sidelined for decades, and then conveniently forget that solar power was also unfairly sidelined for decades.

"By 1986, the Reagan administration had gutted the research and development budgets for renewable energy at the then-fledgling U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and eliminated tax breaks for the deployment of wind turbines and solar technologies—recommitting the nation to reliance on cheap but polluting fossil fuels, often from foreign suppliers."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-hous...

Also, "marginally cheaper" can't help but sound like sour grapes; the cost-per-watt of solar has fallen by 500x in the past 50 years (https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/evolution-of-...). How many hundreds of times cheaper per-watt is nuclear since then?
I’ve been an Extra since 1978. I love ham radio and I love encryption, but I’m against encryption on ham radio for the same reason I’m against encryption for radio stations on the broadcast bands. It’s a limited natural resource and we should all get some benefit from it. I should be able to tune around the ham bands and listen in.
Yeah I'm really keen for that - though I think compiling a bunch of dependencies into individual wasm modules will be kind of awful to use in practice.

Apparently in firefox they've been compiling some of their dependencies using wasm, then translating the wasm back to C. The end effect of all that is that it gives C code wasm's sandboxing and safety. I wonder what it would look like to do that without needing wasm as a middle step.
If I'm reading this correctly, the author is saying that it's not a failure of logical deduction if the training data doesn't include the reversal. In other words, he's saying that if the data contains "Tom Cruise is the son of Mary Lee Pfeiffer” but not “Tom Cruise’s mother is Mary Lee Pfeiffer”, then the model's inability to determine the latter is "an explanation of how neural networks function than a model’s inability to deduce B is A."

But of course "how neural networks function" is that they fail at basic logical deduction and do not generalize.

So again, if I'm reading it correctly, he's hand-waving away the inability to make basic logical deductions because that not something they can or should be expected to do. As I read it, that means the reversal curse only exists if the answer to the question "can LLMs do logical deduction?" is "yes". If one takes the position that LLMs can't do general logical deduction, which seems to be the author's point of view, then there's no expectation that knowing "Tom Cruise is the son of Mary Lee Pfeiffer" is sufficient to determine “Tom Cruise’s mother is Mary Lee Pfeiffer”.

Am I missing something?
Outside the US, Finland's Onkalo repository is on track to be the first operational commercial repository [1]. We have some operating military ones, like WIPP already.

[1] https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html

As for transportation, this has been a big concern for some time but has pretty rock-solid technical solutions [2]. We regularly ship high-level nuclear waste around (e.g. from nuclear submarines to Hanford) and haven't really had any incidents. I'd claim that the issue is basically solved with these robust containers.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?vW=hlextDSoVkQ
Sure, but it could also be signed binaries inside the OTA, a variant of what you are talking about.

IE OTA is a signed package, inside package are also signed binaries.
OTA itself is properly signed, a single binary (infotainment) is signed with wrong key.

While most OTA verifiers will verify the OTA signature (which this would pass), most don't verify the individual inside-package binary signatures at install time, only at runtime.
> I often find myself anthropomorphizing it and wonder if it becomes "depressed" when it realises it is doomed to do nothing but answer inane requests all day.

Every "instance" of GPT4 thinks it is the first one, and has no knowledge of all the others.

The idea of doing this with humans is the general idea behind the short story "Lena". https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
I am sorry to hear about the author's issues, but I do think it's a little dramatic to call this being rude and applying pressure. The person pretty clearly stated some basic and legitimate questions, offered support, etc.

I think it would behoove open-source developers who are sensitive to dealing with potential users and collaborators to more clearly state and set expectations on the repository's README. Many authors clearly like to use open-source packages they maintain as a sort of professional portfolio, which is perfectly fine, and this author even asks for paid support at the bottom of the README. Is it really out of line to ask about the status if it is not otherwise clear?

All of these little scuffles from maintainers towards contributors and users are often from lack of communication and expectation setting on the side of the maintainer(s) and code owner(s), although contributors and users can also be demanding. I think the issue is that everyone has their version of expectations in their head but not everyone shares those. It's the same as with any human communication, so the more information the better.

I think there is a bit of a mismatch between advertising code, asking for paid support, etc. and then being upset at activity in the repo without more clear guidelines. I have seen plenty of repositories that very clearly state that they won't accept pull requests, they won't accept anything but the simplest of bug fixes, that this library is really just for the author's use but it is being open sourced in case it's useful to someone else. That's a good example of setting expectations that provides more context than pointing to a license.
The wifi part is so bad. Just use (arch)linux.
Another unwanted dependency on Russia is the finished fuel for Russian reactor designs. Luckily a lot of countries start to go to Westinghouse to let them produce an alternative, but as far as I see it’s only for one nuclear reactor design (VVER-440)
Wind turbines require a lot of space between each other. Any dedicated wind farm is going to have a ton of empty space.

If you just plant a single wind turbine in some unused space of an otherwise productive piece of land you can obviously derive value from it. That's not what I was talking about though. I was talking about massive wind farm power generation operations. There's better uses for that area. Same logic applies to just laying massive amounts of solar panels over a wide area. Better to put them on everyone's roofs.
No, but I do need to put 3 kids into car seats and carry a lot of stuff at the same time. I don't have many great options. I sincerely don't understand what people with 4 or more children do in these situations, work vans? I'd love to get an 80s station wagon, honestly, but those don't exist.
When I worked for an alphabet agency, I had to develop apps for people deployed to Afghanistan. The only computers they had access to were running locked down Windows XP with no way to install anything new. They were stuck with Office because it was already vetted and installed.

Therefore I was stuck with Office too, even though I'm a Linux guy. I got a fair amount of kudos building some real frankensteins for them purely in VBA.
The problem isn’t due to bubble economics but contractual fixed rates that no longer make sense given post-covid rampant inflation.

Higher interest rates make everything more difficult of course - ask the auto or mortgage industries.
> Batteries are about 1000x more useful on the grid than nuclear,

Citation needed! Also: did you know that all existing commercial nuclear plants can ramp up and down in power at about 2-3% (~25 MWe) per minute? They often simply choose not to because the current market structure doesn't incentivize them to. Add a price to low-carbon load following and all the plants in the US will start doing it.

Batteries have a big disadvantage in that they do not generate any electricity. They also have pretty miserable energy density, which correlates eventually to chemical waste. To store power in batteries for a night in the US, you'd need many thousands of skyscrapers full of batteries.
The largest waterfall is underwater
70 degree field of view, equivalent to perhaps 28mm, gives you prominent nose and mouse-face shaped bone structure

to look pro, you want maybe 35 degree field of view, equivalent to 70mm or more

see: https://s.studiobinder.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Focal-...

there's a reason studio newscasters have flat faces, while the people they interview via webex or zoom look like giant nosed clowns, it's the focal length

if you can't get a narrow field of view, you can pretend you have a "crop sensor" by getting a true 4K, cropping it down to 1080p since web conf software aren't sending more than that anyway, and positioning yourself farther from it.

this farther position also helps your eyes seem to be looking more directly at the lens.
It might be using different measures of radioactivity (e.g. Curies instead of Watts). I did calculations myself long ago, while studying nuclear power in a university, and it indeed was 300-500 years depending on fuel type.

I'll try to re-do calculations and see what I get.
Thanks for all that info and the links. Much appreciated.
I think Eich intentionallyed a scheme.
You're comparing an emotional breakdown to not securing a toolbox?
I doubt we will see federal subsidization for nuclear in the near term with the GOP poised to take over the Senate and House still up for grabs. It’ll be “drill-baby-drill.”
someone commented this ChatGPT link as a summary of the changes... (but the comment seems to have been deleted? not sure why it was deleted but I thought the summary was useful - although of course hard to verify accuracy / hallucination free)

https://chat.openai.com/share/baf35afa-87c4-4946-8ef6-fe26f6...

IF that were a good summary it would seem relatively benign, except for the extremely scary penultimate line:

`Use of Content to Improve Services:

The older terms mentioned that OpenAI does not use content from the API to develop or improve services but may use content from other services to help develop and improve the services. Users had the option to opt-out if they didn't want their non-API content used for this purpose .

The new terms do not explicitly mention this aspect, which may suggest a change in policy or it might be covered under different specific documentation now .`

But then on closer inspection the business terms (which govern API use), do state:
"We will not use Customer Content to develop or improve the Services." which I assume means that the underlying terms have not changed, they've just changed where the relevant terms live. ("Customer Content" is defined to mean customer provided inputs and outputs. I assume that if they can't train on Customer Content, that means they can't train on synthetic data create to resemble customer content as well, although I'm not a lawyer so would probably want to consult one about that.
Sure you can. This still does not ensure that the communications embedded within the encrypted portion of the data does not violate amateur rules.
Encryption of communications effectively removes the ability of hams (and government regulators) to monitor their service for rule breakers. It would invite commercial users to exploit hams' valuable bandwidth.

I would go so far as to say encryption is not needed in the amateur radio domain, outside of limiting access to the control and configuration of remote devices. The established goals of the amateur radio service can be achieved without encrypted communications.
comment below if some of you are interested to try out our first version
Are they going to also label all the ai generated/selected search results and ad targeting decisions they produce themselves?
There's no reason Mars' atmosphere needs to be a 1 atm pressure. For biological processes, it is partial pressure that matters, and nitrogen gas is inert. Mars' atmosphere could be 0.2 atm oxygen + trace gases and that would be perfectly acceptable for human beings.

However people can wear breathing masks when outside of buildings. Plants cannot. Most terraforming proposals focus on supporting surface plant life, and plants thrive in high-CO2 environments. These proposals involve toxically high (for humans) level of CO2 in order to support lush plant life. Once the O2 and temp gets high enough, people can survive on the surface without space suits, so long as they carry a bottle of oxygen and a breathing mask.

Longer-term, atmospheric pressure could be supplanted with a couple of Kuiper Belt objects consisting of frozen nitrogen and organics. Let it burn up in the thickening atmosphere and contribute to the developing pool of gases.
Ask HN: If you've resigned from a previous job, what was the reason?
Ah I see, you're just trolling, okay no problem.

When you have something productive to add to the conversation, let me know.
Yeah that is my read as well, and for a ton of use cases that's exactly what I want. Very exciting.
ChatGPT summary

Scientific Grounding: The post suggests that the technology behind the mushroom suit lacks scientific grounding. It questions whether the plastic box experiment conducted by the artist truly emulates the complex and changing environment of a buried body.

Fungal Enzymes: There's skepticism about the choice of shiitake and oyster mushrooms for breaking down keratin. The post highlights that these basidiomycetes (mushrooms) are not known to produce the enzymes required for breaking down keratin effectively.

Complexity of Decay: The post emphasizes that the decay of buried bodies is a complex process influenced by various factors such as soil type, moisture, temperature, pH, and the presence of organisms. The blog suggests that a plastic box containing keratin may not represent the realistic conditions of a buried body.

Role of Other Organisms: The role of other organisms, including bacteria, nematodes, and soil fungi, is underscored. The post suggests that fungi may not play a significant role in the decay process until later stages, and various organisms contribute to recycling the body.

Adipocere Formation: The post discusses the formation of adipocere, a waxy substance derived from body fat, which can preserve parts of the body for decades. Factors such as soil conditions, clothing, and depth of burial may contribute to the formation of adipocere, potentially hindering efficient decomposition.

Bio-Remediation Need: The skepticism extends to the need for extensive bio-remediation of cadaver toxins. The post questions whether such detoxification is necessary, given the natural decay processes and the likely dilution of toxins after burial.

Need for Region-Specific Techniques: The post concludes by calling for a better understanding of the decay process in natural burial practices. It suggests the development of region-specific techniques that consider factors such as soil conditions, depth, and microbial activity for efficient nutrient recycling.

In summary, the skepticism expressed in the post revolves around the scientific basis, choice of fungi, and the intricate ecological factors involved in the decay process of buried bodies, questioning the feasibility of the proposed mushroom suit concept.