skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who has actually worked for both the US government and the private sector - this isn't true:

> There is no difference in the potential for waste, inefficiency, fraud, corruption, laziness, and outright stupidity between government and private systems.

The inefficiency that I saw in the government was far greater than that of the private sector.

To some extent, it had to be - the government has to be extremely reliable and accessible (while most companies content themselves with 99.99% website uptime, or only serving people with a mailing address, or whatever - the government has to serve everyone and be available as much as possible), and that's a good thing.

But beyond that, factors such as extreme risk aversion (which generally grows with the size of an organization), gross incompetence, and outright corruption made the government far less efficient than what I experienced in industry - to the point where it was an old-and-not-funny-anymore running joke among my government colleagues.

Moreover, the government also holds massive influence over your life that corporations do not and cannot: taxes, monopoly on violence, control of the legal system, ability to enact and enforce regulation, and many more.

It should be pretty clear that separation of powers is a good thing, and only an idiot would decide that it's better to consolidate as many things as possible into a single central entity that also uniquely holds all of those powers.

> There is a difference in (1) my (and my fellow citizens) ability to influence between that two

Ability to influence? Yes, you have ability - but the amount of actual influence exerted on government in the US is minimal. Public opinion in the US has almost zero correlation on the law[1]. The political process is overwhelmingly dominated by a small amount of wealthy and powerful individuals and special interest groups.

It's absolute insanity to take this mess and put more things in control of it.

> (2) not having to pay for profit and the costs to me resulting from necessary profit on top of the rest of the shit sundae

Well, as we've already established, the government is significantly less efficient than industry - and even if it wasn't, the extra margin that you have to pay is a trivial price to the utterly insane alternative of the government controlling all private industry.

[1] https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba
I'm not terribly surprised that the director of Avatar has "updated" his previous movies to look more digital than filmlike. Some people embrace the limits of the medium and some don't.
The context you omitted is:

Turns out there are 2^64 possible YouTube addresses, an enormous number: 18.4 quintillion. There are lots of YouTube videos, but not that many.

Let’s guess for a moment that there are 1 billion YouTube videos – if you picked URLs at random, you’d only get a valid address roughly once every 18.4 billion tries.

I mean, sure, they did reduce that a little:

Jason found a couple of cheats that makes the method roughly 32,000 times as efficient, meaning our “phone call” connects lots more often.

With that in mind, how many attempts did they make to get a hit every three minutes?

It's surprising that they weren't throttled back for making excessive requests.
Your company had remote embedded devices but didn't keep one "locally" for debugging issues?
Or DNS for the hostname, which becomes 253 characters for us meatbags.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1035#section-2.3.4
So if youtube is worth 180 billion, with 14 billion videos. Each video is worth $13.

The average length of a youtube video is around 13 minutes. My napkin GPT math values video per minute at $35 per minute.

My napkin GPT math values each video closer to $455.

This leaves me with one unanswered question… Where’s the beef?
>IPs are opaque and meaningless.

Get a sheet of paper. Draw a line down the middle. Put the IP in one column. Put the thing on it on the other side. Tape to wall, or put in binder.

>...but I can’t and wouldn’t even if I could.

>DNS is rarely the problem.

People that can't even be arsed to remember where their bits are on the other hand...
Capture Snapshot Showdown
Just show your score and how long it
Takes you to guess the number
Thanks! I remember that cover now! The article has both the hex and the asm listing. I think I did an update to it to use the bank switched memory on the 128K to get 8 16K Spectrums.

Of course with something like a MGT +D with the 8K ROM and 8K SRAM it would have been possible to use the NMI button to switch between two 48K Spectrums on a 128K and have them run a game in one and BASIC in the other.
Well if you take the name literally, it’s enuff to buy ramen for a month to eat a meal a day :)
I do similar things with mmap and dumping raw structs to get insane speeds one wouldn't expect to get from traditional databases.

Perhaps you could even pause the operations, snapshot with dd and resume everything back in order to get a backup.
This was such a fun thread to read. I love seeing people just come up with solutions however inelegant. I do this myself: get something working and then circle back to make it more maintainable etc.

While as a new DBA for Microsoft SQL server on a team of very seasoned DBAs with decades of experience each I wrote a small Python script to fix a replication bug that MS refused to fix.

The bug iirc was something related to initial snapshot settings such that by default a setting was set to off so replication would fail. They would normally go and edit this file manually when this happened. When it really blew up it could be editing this file in tens of locations! It was just something they had consigned themselves to doing since it happened just infrequently enough for them not to invest time to fixing but when it did happen it could take an hour or so to do and yeah my noob self thought that’s far too tedious I am
not doing that.

The bug really should have been fixed by MS and the flag should have been set to on and my script would just find the relavent unc share and text file and basically do a find and replace of that line and toggled the flag. And then replication would work again. I could point the script to a server and it would figure out the path and do the work. All I then had to do was enumerate the servers that were affected and it was fixed in no time.

This fix was so popular when I showed it internally that they asked me to turn it into a GUI application. It was awesome. I learned a bit of C# and from what I heard a few years back my little tool was still in USE! Huzzah
What he wrote was not just a devils advocate position. I encourage everyone to read it in full. Also his 'Horrors of SPIR-V' article a year later[0] which has this conclusion:

> I had a chance to work with SPIR-V rather intimately, and I’m becoming convinced that most of the defenders of this format (who like to criticize WGSL in turn) have little experience actually doing anything with it [...] I was one of them. SPIR-V is probably a good format for what it was made for: driver compilers. It’s not as good for the intermediate portable representations of your shaders.

[0] http://kvark.github.io/spirv/2021/05/01/spirv-horrors.html

> Apple's other stance, very strongly stated, was that no binary IR of any kind was acceptable, full stop.

Very strongly stated /where/?

I linked my source, in which kvark clearly stated two things (not as part of his 'devils advocate' position) that directly contradict your claim:

> There is much more to it than just "Apple cannot do X" that often shows up.

> the group agreed to [...] take the semantics of SPIR-V where it makes sense

If there really is a source for it, I'd love to see it (genuinely).
This kid’s got a future.
Probably IPC.
Can we attribute the decline in quality to the decline in informative content proportional to garbage content?

Garbage content seems to be making massive gains year on year, while informative or high quality content has stagnated or even declined from data decay
Sorry! Its expensive to run and thought it to be fair to at least ask for a login.

Once I find a way to run it cheaper, I'll post it again in login-less. Hopefully, you'll give it a try then.
With quartus pro only?
I rip my physical media into my digital library and I know right away when I’m dealing with a film transfer, compression goes to shit. All the grain and noise inherent to film doesn’t compress well. So I imagine all these AI upscaled film weren’t done for our benefit but to save streamers a bit of bandwidth.

Also film was expensive, directors shot a tight 90 minute movie and called it a day. Now, we have 2,3,4 hour movies that meander endlessly.
That's ridiculous. There's nothing "unrealistic" about 4.5 seconds of stopping distance - how could there be, are you thinking that the highways physically wouldn't fit all the cars spaced at that length?
It's hard to imagine worse mismanagement than this. The amount of arrogance signals that no one should ever trust Musk's word again.

There are those who I respect who said that Musk built great companies, at least in the past. But now I wonder, how much is Musk and how much is it that Musk just raised a ton of money and the companies were run by people way smarter and more competent than him? And now, in his latest fits of, well, whatever this is, he can't even bother to grift off their better judgement?

Such a shame. So much wasted empire for no good reason.
Is the Miyoo Mini worth getting?
It's definitely you who has to read again the thread.

I did and I've gotten the nth confirmation that you're not really reading what I write, and maybe not really here for a discussion
> In my mind you'd be required to ssh into the machine to upload, and if you're ssh'd in, why not just cat the log?

Ssh on remote IoT class devices is works. The problem is rarely ssh, the problem is always some form of key management plus NATs in-between.

If you've got a few thousand devices in the field, public key management can become a a real pain, especially when you want to revoke keys.
Thanks for referencing some data. Unfortunately, on page 10 it looks like they are specifically excluding the impact of constructing rail lines ("construction infrastructure").

The high speed rail line from LA to San Francisco (~380 miles) was estimated to cost $128 billion. The Orlando to Atlanta route is longer (~440 miles), but lets pretend it could be built for the same cost.

A one-way plane ticket from Orlando to Atlanta is about $100. For $128 billion you could buy 1.28 billion plane tickets. It looks like ~3 million people current fly between Orlando and Atlanta each year.

For the cost of building a new high speed rail line, you could fly everyone for the next 426 years. It's not hard to imagine that the fuel expended during construction of the high-speed rail line would be greater than the fuel consumed by all the planes flying between those cities for decades.
> https://redditmap.social/

This is the best thing I've ever seen.
Went to Europe a few months ago and experienced this checkout method in Uniqlo and Zara. It was mind blowing at first and I was trying to figure out wtf was going on. Was it AI?, maybe some complex algorithm based on item weight and other variables?

Turns out they were “simply” RFID chips. It’s amazing how magical technology can be. I hope the tech spreads because I hate the checkout experience.
Crazy to see you! Some time ago, I was actually looking to add Eksi to Touchbase (www.touchbase.id) since several users reached out and wanted to add it alongside their other platforms to share on their profile, but we couldn't find out the URL convention for user profile feeds! It seemed to be "https://eksisozluk1999.com/{{username}}--{{7 digit value}}", but we couldn't find any rhyme or reason to the 7 digits. Are the integers random, or do they even go back to stemming from a convention from the previous codebase?
Twitter thread by one of authors: https://twitter.com/ishaan_jhavs/status/1738240404787548386
Some products are too niche to be sold locally. If no local brands exist for a product I have to buy it from someone oversees and import it myself. Even if it is sold locally it may be overly marked up compared to buying it from the original seller because there is no local competition to keep the price in check.
Filezilla server + client is very fast and has a resume option
You just gotta gauge your lobes out enough to fit a smartwatch.
This is a little different than what you are asking but when I was a kid my C64 would crash if it was on too long and I would lose all of my work. If I ran my mother's vacuum cleaner plugged into the same outlet as the C64 then it would not crash. No I cannot explain it but it worked so that vacuum cleaner would get turned on before I started to save my work to tape.
"Newpipe does occasionally stop working, but..."

If I can write utilities that almost never stop working, and this is not difficult at all, then why should I tolerate that.

I just checked to see id SoundCloud is working and sure enough it isn't. This app like is not dependable.
Why are they dumb? Free tag.
Here in Colorado (Denver metro) I frequently get items same-day, though most items are still 1 or 2 days.
The answer with a rare, offensively over-aggressive application of HDR, if using Vudu (once these hit digital/streaming), is to switch from UHD to HDX. You will still get the 4K file streamed, but without the HDR. Granted I’ve rarely ever been disappointed enough in a 4K transfer to have to attempt this but one time, with Once Upon a Time in the West. Most 4K HDR looks fantastic. It’s rare for a transfer to be so awful as to have to do this. Haven’t seen True Lies yet so we shall see..
That's a design decision. Apple doesn't trust developers in general not to abuse this background API. They expect lots of aid requesting it, unknowledgeable users granting it without thinking much, and iPhones getting a crappy reputation for battery performance as a result.

I dislike this decision (taking a choice away from the user) but from a business point of view it makes sense.
In some ways this is also a “nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution.”
This system is so good I have no idea why it’s not everywhere. It’s magic.
Scammers are ruining Facebook marketplace
> What's odd is that you are telling someone who actually wrote it what was intended...

What I am saying here should be clear to someone such as yourself, who is invoking our theory of mind in his claims: I am making a distinction between what you are now saying you meant all along, and what other people will recognize as having been your intent when you first wrote the passage in question. We cannot present proof, but nevertheless we know, beyond reasonable doubt. Your explanation does not pass the sniff test.
It wasn’t CompuServe that had the patent. The gif format uses LZW, which was patented by Unisys. I remember having to get a special option on some vendor’s toolkit to unlock the GIF handling. Either an add on or you had to go license from Unisys.
How do you stream the media on your devices?
Sigh. I haven't seen the True Lies transfer so I won't comment on that. But I have to take issue with that 4k 60fps clip ("The lumiere family goes on a trip 1895") and They Shall Not Grow Old.

The author calls both "disgusting" and "really fucking bad". I'm sorry, but I think they're both incredibly impressive feats of engineering and super impressive. Both films have done something which is otherwise impossible with original, grainy, out-of-sync b & w footage: Given us viewers a sense of immersion and realness that we'd otherwise be unable to experience.

None of us know what it was like to see the world of 1895 or 1914. And grainy black and white footage doesn't change that. But 4k 60fps footage gives us a true sense of "being there" and in that reality and I think that's damn incredible (and I'm thankful for it).

I think the author err'd using documentary footage as an example of what's bad about this. Taking an old film (a piece of art) and upscaling it is one thing. Taking real-world footage and making it more real is another thing entirely.
I’ve been hit by two Ubers while I was in the crosswalk. Any self-driving taxi co would have held data and assumed liability while the Uber drivers run away and Uber says they’re not employees so.
Shared: cypherpunks@sharklasers.com / cypherpunks!
I meant to say 1000 nested loops. You're right to call me out on it though, as that is a huge difference in meaning.

I still think it would be bizarre to have to nest a loop n layers deep, where n-1 is not enough, but n layers is sufficient for really large n. Like what extra info would you get on the 1000th nested loop that you didn't on the first 999.

Of course there is nothing formal about this, it just feels like it would be wrong to me (and hence personally i would consider it the most interesting result). Of course gut feelings dont really count for much and i have nothing more than that.

I suppose my intuition is that increasing the exponent gives diminishing returns to how much more power you really get , so it doesn't make sense for problems to be in the n^1000 range. My gut feeling is they should either be easier or harder. I certainly can't think of very many non-exponential algorithms in the > n^50 range.
'Tax the billionaires' is a red herring. Nobody should use that or engage with it. The issue is that they exist in the first place.
Typically invites are used by people who are inviting people they know, in which case it's advantageous for them to be able to find each other.

But you're right that there's an argument that it could work differently. We're planning to get rid of invites shortly, otherwise we might consider enhancements to the invite system to e.g. make this optional.
It was impressive. I was definitely blown away by how quickly the city and the peninsula was cleaned up. Really made me wonder why they don’t do it for the rest of the time if it could be done so easily.
Scraping output meant for a printer from old software/systems for "ETL" purposes has been very useful. A few of the uses I can think of during my career:

- Apple II-based database used by a choir teacher to track the school music library

- MS-DOS accounting software payroll reports to generate W-2 forms

- Patient records from a pediatric office

- Receipt printer on a gas station pump controller

- Customer transactions and balances from a home heating propane supplier

- Customer transactions from unattended fueling site controllers

You might think this only applies to old software, but often "printing" to a Generic/text-only printer in Windows gives good results.
Oh I didn't know that!

I'm sorry if I mischaracterized anyone.

Thanks for the clarification!
https://archive.is/ms1ke
not sure what you mean but i'm glad to hear from you again
Not sure if this qualifies as a “game”, but AI robots have been destroying human records for solving a Rubik’s Cube for a while.

https://youtu.be/nt00QzKuNVY
> Most 16-year-olds don't have servers in their rooms

..but some have mainframes [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJyiHsfJLEI
You definitely could but it's pretty technically involved and not as easy as it will be in the future. And it would have to be siloed off from the production Bluesky/atproto network at the moment.
This is easy to detect, though, at least for public videos. Click through to the channel on a different IP and find the video link, or search for the video's title and description, or find a canonical link to the video by any other means. If the IDs don't match, it's been faked.
Oh, I did something similar. I built quite popular local (non-english language) gaming forum with an Access file hosted in a Windows server and a VBScript ASP file, which had just been released. That's the original version, before ASP.NET. I was 13 or 14 years old at the time and didn't know better. It was no SQLite, so I had some weird concurrency problems. On top of that I ran into the some size limit (was it 2GB?) pretty quickly, but at this point it was time to look for a bigger server and figure out real databases anyway.

It eventually stopped being popular under my administration, so I transferred the domain to some people around 1999. It was rebuilt with PHPBB or something and got a new life. It's still on, surprisingly.
I TRIED to debate the core of the issue, and you haven't read what I said.

This branch of the thread was just about a mention of some ideas that I have no intention to discuss right now.

Not that you offered any support for your ideas, other than "I think that my constitution says so".

If you're for freedom of companies corrupting politicians and politicians lying to everyone, you're free to be, maybe you're on the side who benefits from it.

I was hoping to have closed the discussion about eight messages ago, I'm not really here for this.
Indeed. It is a fascinating journey and he even notes it in the article:

"...even though from an economical point of view this project was an absolutely terrible loss the amount of satisfaction of seeing a dream like that come true is truly amazing"

I hope he sees the post hit the front page and shares any updates on it.
I'm in the middle of such a story right now. I'm doing research on a data set of COVID-19 hospital patients with multiple blood samples over time from each patient. The obvious thing we want to do with this data is to line up all the samples on a single timeline so we can see how the data changes over the course of COVID-19 from infection to resolution. Unfortunately, as with most infectious diseases, no one knows exactly when they were actually infected, which means we can't just sort them by time since infection and be done with it.

So, we set out to find some way of inferring the timeline from the data itself (RNA-seq and other molecular assays from the blood, in this case). The first thing we tried was to apply some standard methods for "pseudo-time" analysis, but these methods are designed for a different kind of data (single-cell RNA-seq) and turned out not to work on our data: for any given patient, these methods were only slightly better than a coin flip at telling whether Sample 2 should come after Sample 1.

Eventually, we gave up on that and tried to come up with our own method. I can't give the details yet since we're currently in the process of writing the paper, but suffice it to say that the method we landed on was the result of repeatedly applying the principle of "try the stupidest thing that works" at every step: assuming linearity, assuming independence, etc. with no real justification. As an example, we wanted an unbiased estimate of a parameter, and we found one way that consistently overestimated it in simulations and another that consistently underestimated it. So what did we use as our final estimate? Well, the mean of the overestimate and the underestimate, obviously!

All the while I was implementing this method, I was convinced it couldn't possibly work. My boss encouraged me to keep going, and I did. And it's a good thing he did, because this "stupidest possible" method has stood up to every test we've thrown at it. When I first saw the numbers, I was sure I had made an error somewhere, and I went bug hunting. But it works in extensive simulations. It works in in vitro data. It works in our COVID-19 data set. It works in other COVID-19 data sets. It works in data sets for other diseases. All the statisticians we've talked to agree that the results look solid. After slicing and dicing the simulation data, we even have some intuition for why it works (and when it doesn't).

And like I said, now we're preparing to publish it in the next few months. As far as we're aware (and we've done a lot of searching), there's no published method for doing what ours does: taking a bunch of small sample timelines from individual patients and assembling them into one big timeline, so you can analyze your whole data set on one big timeline of disease progression.