skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> to those killed by extreme weather caused by climate change right now.

FYI, the number of deaths attributed to climate over the 50-year period from 1970 to 2019 dropped to a third[0], even as the world population more than doubled and atmospheric CO2 went from 325ppm to 410ppm at the same time. That's one-third of the absolute number of deaths, not one-third the rate.

This can be attributed to the increasing capacity of those in developing countries to deal with the vagaries of their natural environment, enabled by cheap energy from fossil fuels.

[0]: https://library.wmo.int/idurl/4/57564
That was true until the cable companies themselves bought networks. Comcast owning NBC Universal, the various cable associations with the artists formerly known as Time Warner, the various local station and sports station roll ups for the various providers, all make them entwined.

And the networks were already offering online access to their content via TV Everywhere. They didn’t want to do the geolocation thing, that was all requirements of the cable companies (the issues with the network broadcasters like ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox are much more complex).

In fact, you could (and I would) argue that it was the cable companies insistence on maintaining their defacto monopolies on who could get what service where (because there was never consumer choice in who your cable provider is, unless you count satellite, which I do not) that pushed the networks hands into creating their own competing OTT services based on the content they owned. Because as people cut the cord, the networks weren’t going to watch their businesses completely go up in flames. Now, should they have done that sooner and more aggressively (HBO did it best and earliest with HBO Now as a companion to HBO Go — a move that earned them the ire of the cable industry, the same industry who often refused to let HBO Go subscribers who paid the cable companies directly for HBO, do things like access the service on an Xbox b.c they didn’t like the idea of people not paying a $5 a month fee for an extra box), yes. 1000%

But let’s not pretend like the cable companies were without leverage. If they’d acted decisively and disrupted themselves early enough, they were the ones with the direct relationship with the customer, not the networks. They were the ones who could have created their own bundles of OTT content. But no, they refused until it was too late and got to see the whole industry bleed itself and for live content to essentially die.
No[1], but the people writing the audio drivers and DSP firmware absolutely do. Kernel preemption isn't a feature for top-level apps.

[1] Actually even that's wrong: for sure there are teams of people within MS (and Apple, and anyone else in this space) measuring latency behavior at the top-level app layer and doing tuning all the way through the stack. App latency excursions can impact streams too, though ideally you have some layer of insulation there.
An impressive technical achievement, yes - but the presentation/marketing of this is absurd.

The generated videos are aesthetically horrendous. I don't know what kind of mental gymnastics are going on that they can confidently describe something where the body shapes are nonsensically in flux with every change of frame (look at the eagle's talons, or the dog's leg movements as it runs) as "high-quality video".

Is generative AI hype blinding them to how hideous these videos are, or do they know and they just pretend like it's something it isn't?
Mistral 7B finetunes are extremely good. More than good enough for an AI friend app, with long context to boot. I would suggest Toppy-M or OpenHermes 2.5, or one of the new YARN extended models.

And, there is the potential to run the model on the user's device with MLC-LLM and whisper, to save on API costs (and privacy concerns) for users with newer phones. This could give the app a true "free" tier to help it proliferate while making charging for API requests kinda doable. I'm not sure if any good TTS models have been ported yet, but I'm sure its a matter of time.
Doing things to keep voters happy is their job.
Passing text through a popular llm might throw off stylometry, too
Why do you think thieves should be treated with respect, and respond well to diplomacy?
No way are we giving nuclear reactors to container ships. It makes more sense to build big, safe nuclear plants near airports and ports to manufacture fuel from air using the nearly limitless power from the nukes.
And wrangling CRDTs into a client-server architecture is actually extra work. The basic design assumes you can trust every peer -- making sure that jes5199 actually was the peer who added a comment that is marked as author: "jes5199" is not trivial.
Vattenfall is fully state-owned anyway.
Show HN: Beta test Execute Program's interactive "Python for Programmers" course
I'm Gary Bernhardt, founder of Execute Program, an interactive platform for learning programming languages and other programming tools. Our "Python for Programmers" course is in a free open beta for the next week or so. We don't normally do open betas, but the infrastructure behind this course is new and very complex, so we want to stress test it.

https://www.executeprogram.com/courses/python-for-programmer...

Today, "Python for Programmers" contains 581 interactive code examples covering the core language. It's aimed at established programmers, not beginners. We don't explain basic language features like `while`, but we do show them briefly and note anything special about how they work in Python. We pay special attention to foot guns. For example, we have an entire lesson about Python's mutable default argument foot gun.

This is the first of two courses, with the second coming in 2024. For this course, we drew the line at __dunder__ methods: if a topic requires a dunder method other than `__init__`, then it'll be in the follow-up course. This beta is concurrent with the tail end of our editing process, so you may see the course grow by another 17 lessons (214 code examples) during the beta.

Some details about how the course works internally, and why we need a beta at all:

First, all Python code in the course runs in your browser via Pyodide. (Reality continues to look more and more like my PyCon 2014 talk [1].) You'll feel a pause when the first code example runs, as your browser loads and boots CPython (around 12 MB). After that, it should be as responsive as a local app.

Second, if you look at the course page, you'll see that it's structured as a DAG, similar to a "tech tree" in Civilization, Age of Empires, Stellaris, Satisfactory, etc. (Some of those games have true trees, but some of their "trees" are actually DAGs like ours.) You make progress through the course by traversing one graph edge at a time. Our courses have always been structured as graphs internally, but the raw graphs are simply unreadable due to the number of edges [2].

This year, I taught Execute Program to simplify its own course graphs by breaking them into the level subgraphs that you see on the page, so we can finally render them. It automatically turns the mess that I linked above into the clean graphs that you see in the course. The graph for this course is currently a bit dull, but it'll fill out as we finish editing the remaining lessons. I like Everyday TypeScript's graph [3] the best.

Please try the course and use the "Give Feedback" entry in the menu to tell us what you think! I'll also stick around in this thread today.

[1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

[2] https://executeprogram-misc.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/pytho...

[3] https://www.executeprogram.com/courses/everyday-typescript
With opportunity cost its multiples more. We don't hire people to break even on them right, we hire to make a profit.
Most of the world is landlocked, besides, you're not going to dock your precious nuclear plant in the middle of a busy harbor one accident, tsunami or other event away from a serious problem. Big reactors have both an efficiency and a security benefit over smaller ones.

But they're still not cost effective which is why the biggest question with nuclear plants always is 'how much subsidy can we get'.
It's great when you don't need instant elasticity and traffic is very predictable.

I think it's very useful for batch processing, especially owning a GPU cluster could be great for ML startups.

Hybrid cloud + bare metal is probably the way to go (though that does incur the complexity of dealing with both, which is also hard).
Bandwidth would need to be compared and considered between EC2 and what they were able to negotiate for bare metal co-location.
Silicon Valley is not the only place to find engineers who know what they're doing. Some of us want to stay in our home country and/or don't want to jump through the hoops that American tech companies demand.
To put this in perspective, though, much of the problem being discussed is about the pitfalls of short-term thinking.
I still use Signal a lot, since most people I frequently talk to use it. However, this was extremely frustrating. Having 1 messaging app for so long was incredibly nice.
Even if they do spend 1 person-year of effort in maintenance they still may have made the correct choice. Having a good engineer on staff may have additional side benefits as well especially if they could manage to hire locally and that person's wages then contribute to the local economy. As you said though it's definitely not clear cut especially from a spectator's point of view.
I use to colloquially call this game "slap deck" as a kid. The general approach taken was to add a ton of house rules, such that it was a large test of working memory to keep all rules in your head. We kept some simple rules to keep the game approachable for younger children, and older children/teens would continue to add house rules to make the game more complex. In addition, game play would be very fast, and often times patterns would be missed because no one recognized it quick enough.

Some of the rules that would sometime appear that I can recall

* Put 1 or 2 jokers in. Jokers are slappable

* Doubles are slappable (3, 3)

* Three (or four) face cards are slappable

* Three (or four) cards of the same suite are slappable

* Three (or four) consecutive cards are slappable (2, 3, 4, 5) or (5, 4, 3, 2)

* A player without cards can 'slap in'
I recently bought a used vehicle from a dealer. I immediately took the vehicle on a 3 hour car trip. The car broke down at near the end of the trip, surging engine, then died, then wouldn't restart. It restarted after a few minutes and I limped (under 60) the rest of the way to destination. The dealer had 2 drivers bring me a (free) loaner car for 5 days while they fixed my vehicle for free. I used to work at a few other car dealerships and at least at those places as well as the one I bought from, this is pretty standard operating procedure. Amazon going to do that?
You mean like the Titanic. That might work.
People should be aware that Signal may be able to provide good e2ee and methods to make reading your messages or calls a challenge, they don't do to enough to obfuscate. Therefore censors can identify who is using signal and even block it.
https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/63

Privacy tools can make you stand out. Unless methods are used to obfuscate your data.
That's the first step.
I admire Signal and everything they do. Basically Software-as-Charity, for the greater cause. Now knowing this charity is actually millions drives me nuts. I hope the less expensive solution can be achieved in decentralization of the whole thing. Im sure it is possible to sustain it ourselves as a public service forever if everyone involved will have to pay with his personal computing resource - just like we are able to sustain decentralized finance now. And of course - the idea of a phone number as identity is very much flawed and unsustainable on itself, hopefully Signal team will be able to break through this problem as well
Isnt that the reason sandboxes exist? I just feel like these thins happen way less often with Signal and [shudder] Whatsapp...
I'm good at detecting manipulation now, and the more someone tries to manipulate me the less I will give in.

I just put my money toward people who don't do that crap, and I want the manipulators to see that I'm giving money to their non-manipulating competitors.
> "you don't need to trust us"

you literally don't. It's a fully encrypted service. The literal purpose of encryption is to move data securely through insecure or even adversarial channels. Which you can verify, it's audited and open source.

They refuse to build the app in a decentralized way because decentralization is an ideological obsession that is useless in this context, and because centralized organizations can actually ship polished software that works for normal people and move quickly.
And these savings will be passed down to your customers too? Or....?
Exactly. A more accurate figure would be the difference between the work hours spent maintaining bare metal minus the work hours spent maintaining AWS. Impossible to know without internals but at least a point in favor of bare metal
It shouldn't take 4 hours to drive off the lot with the car after agreeing on a price paid in cash. My experience.
Please check out the blog post at:

https://commoncrawl.org/blog/oct-nov-2023-performance-issues

And the new status website at:

https://status.commoncrawl.org/
Grok has an API looking for use cases.

Just let Elon know the pricing... "I'm all in"
https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/11/16/apples-flavor-of-...

Huh, pleasantly surprised Apple is taking up the mantle on something cross-platform. Nice.
> You can’t inspect your model represented by the CRDT without using the CRDT library to decode the blob, and you can’t just store the underlying model state because the CRDT needs its change history also. You’re left with an opaque blob of data in your database. You can’t join on it, you can’t search it, you can’t do much without building extra features around that state blob.

So use the CRDT library when building your indices? Or better yet use a CRDT-aware datastore. This doesn't seem like a real problem.

> Locking for safety

Please don't. You're inevitably going to have lost locks, lost updates, or most likely both.
Good point. I think I've seen some subreddits with a bot that does that for YouTube links.

Title: Making Beads That Vibrate To Cheat In Chess

Length: 18min, 54s

Channel: MixMorris (102k subscribers)

17,364 views

Oct 23, 2022 #chess #engineering

Description: "This video speaks for itself." (sic)
This got me so intrigued that I built https://github.com/vlameiras/tranquiled in order to have similar behaviour but in the screen itself. Nothing fancy, just curious to try it out!
Perhaps Signal is not the right choice for you? It seems odd to be so concerned about data retention from a system which prominently features support for disappearing messages!
Hetzner randomly shuts down one of my servers every 2-3 months.
previous commentary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32430395 (2022; 189 comments)
I can recommend the Bose QC45 or the Bose Headphones 700 as a less overpriced and more compatible alternative to the Max. Very good audio quality, comfortable fit (although the Headphones 700 tend to be rather tight depending on your head shape), and great noise canelling.
Might even be good entrance music for you if you're into that kind of pageantry/high up in the hierarchy
I help run some websites with many links. I estimate that more than 90%, possibly close to 99% of our traffic is crawler bots, even after blocking some of them based on behavior.
>An LLM can't tell the difference between fact and fiction, because it can't apply logic.

Not true. They can differentiate it just fine. Of course being able to tell the difference and being incentivized to communicate it are 2 different things.

GPT-4 logits calibration pre RLHF - https://imgur.com/a/3gYel9r

Just Ask for Calibration: Strategies for Eliciting Calibrated Confidence Scores from Language Models Fine-Tuned with Human Feedback - https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14975

Teaching Models to Express Their Uncertainty in Words - https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.14334

Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know - https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.05221

The Geometry of Truth: Emergent Linear Structure in Large Language Model Representations of True/False Datasets - https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06824
I learned the real meaning of the word "thinking" the first time I was at 4400m and had to pitch my tent. Thinking really does use oxygen and effort.
And as a bonus Session has the best line ever: "Send (encrypted) Messages, not metadata".

They've given Signal quite the fork.
Hmm. A $1200 generator I bought on Amazon was a lemon; the control board somehow didn't work properly and it wouldn't start reliably. After a local rep attempted repairs the manufacturer told me to obtain a refund from Amazon and they would take the bad unit.

Amazon refunded every cent, sight unseen with one phone call, and placed no obligation on me to return the original unit; "dispose of it as you wish." Shortly after, the manufacturer said they were shipping me a replacement. Despite being told about the full refund the manufacturer didn't care and freighted me the replacement.

Free 9KW Westinghouse generator.
Well sure, if we can make completely safe in a completely uncontrolled environment(floating in the ocean), small, mass producable by automation and operated with no staff fission reactors, everything would be fine.

Currently any one of these features is either still in its infancy or not even being attempted at all. Expecting a reactor with all of them to show up in time to compete with renewable and conventional nuclear seems fanciful at best.
That depends on how the incentive structures for your corporate purchase department are set up - and there's really a ton of variance there, with results ranging from everyone being happy in the best case to frustrated employees quitting in droves or the company getting burned at employer rating portals.
It’s possible the recliner is just mitigating the problem by allowing you to not sit as straight

I had the same issue of tight hips/pain when sitting up straight and I found doing hamstring stretches and some core work a couple times per week fixed the issue for me

Something I learned was that a lot of time tight hips or lower back pain is actually due to tight hamstrings
Thank you for your input :)
huh, say wut?

I guess before Amazon invented "the cloud" there wasn't any software companies...
AWS does require some expertise to master considering the sheet number of products and options. Tick the wrong box and cost increases by 50% etc.

Different solutions work best for different companies.
> I think lots of "cloud native" engineers are just intimidated by having to learn lower levels to keep things running.

Rightly so, because they're cloud native engineers, not system administrators. They're intimidated by the things they don't know. It'll be a very individual calculation whether it's worth it for your enterprise to organize and maintain hardware yourself, or isn't.
So if Amazon implements a driver's license verification step, would it be equally "safe" as a dealership purchase?
Sounds like exactly what happened in the UK. New nuclear was proposed in 2010 by the newly elected centre-right led coalition government, with the aim of it being privately funded.

Since then subsidies have been agreed but costs continue to skyrocket. Only one plant is under construction and the time to operation has shifted from 5 years to 10 years.

Meanwhile pretty much all private sector interest in investing in nuclear seems to have dried up.

We seem to be instead putting all our eggs in the SMR basket hoping that there’ll be the economies of scale to make it viable.
eh, to a degree, having to deal with failed hardware and worse buggy hardware is just a pain and really time consuming.
This keeps being repeated but it's nonsense, there are many technical and economical ways to reduce the auxiliary baseload requirement to zero or very close to zero. These include: HVDC to couple geographically distant regions, storage, flexible consumption, reduction of baseload consumption, hydro power for baseload, pricing based on source etc.
They did not misinterprete anything. They said it reduced the 'quality' of effort and increased the time to find a correct solution. It is you who misread the title as "Ritalin does not work for students".
If the internet historians are to be believed, Longhorn was pretty innovative for its time because Microsoft gave their devs free reign and let them go crazy with it to put all their ideas into the new OS.

Which was cool for show but apparently turned Longhorn into "the car Homer Simpson designed"[1], being plagued by endless cost overruns, constantly changing requirements, deadlines missed, a release date with no end in sight, and a codebase nobody could prune to turn into a solid shippable product, forcing Microsoft to scrap it completely and start over from scratch to create Vista in a ungodly short amount of time just to have something to ship to replace the now ageing Windows XP.

As what was supposed to be Longhorn was schedules to release just 1-2 years after XP but due to the Longhorn development fiasco, a half-baked Vista launched a whopping 6 years after XP, which was an eternity in tech back then.

Yeah, Microsoft really blew it with Longhorn and Vista, they tried to kill too many birds with one stone and ended up loosing all the birds and the stone. One wonders what Longhorn could have been if they hadn't messed it up from the start.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPc-VEqBPHI
It’s not about legitimacy but having a bootstrapped contact list to talk to along with other user friction reasons
Would anyone be interested in an immutable OS with built in configuration management that works the same (as in the same image) in the cloud and on premise (bare metal, PXE, or virtual)? Basically using this image you could almost guarantee everything runs the same way.
He's Chinese - makes sense to pre-censor himself, unfortunately.
Oh aye no worries, I'm familiar with the pick and mix when reading self help style books

Eat the fish, spit the bones! :)

Cheers!
The key point is per year - ongoing saving every year.
I think OVH might let your server burn and the backup which was stored next to it (of course) with it ;)
So you're angry about a dead man. Got it.

It's been eminently entertaining reading your responses lol. I used to live in the south and met many Tories who think and foam at the mouth just like you. Man, do not miss it at all.
Setting breakpoints to inspect local state means you have to catch every single exit. Back then, if you had a thirty second to one minute round trip to get back to the method you were inspecting, it became... frustrating. You probably didn't have to deal with those kind of start-up round trips in C++. With C++ you'd pay on the compile time.

If you wrote the code to have a single exit, the cognitive load was also typically lower, as the control flow could be thought of as one way in, and two ways out (return or exception). Good disciple also followed "the jolly good idea of Demeter" or whatever it came to be called; that being to only operate on the state (or preferably, values) passed in, where possible.
> Safe and abundant electricity is possible, but we have to invest in it.

We need the energy now, though, not in 15+ years. In my country nuclear (which we have none of) is just a dream, but often pushed with those having an agenda against renewables to muddy the discussion.

Calculations I've seen also places the cost of nuclear far above our hydro. As in the price a consumer would have to pay per kWh. Not sure if that even takes into account the massive government subsidies to build it.
Have you ever heard of pxe boot? You should check out Harvester made by Rancher (IIRC). Basically, manage bare metal machines using standard k8s tooling.