skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Estonia has personalidentificationcode@eesti.ee and registrycode@eesti.ee, which you are supposed to set up to forward to your actual email aadress. Unfortunately these are restricted for use by governmental agencies for important official notifications (e.g. you're being conscripted, your marital status changed, something has changed in regard to a property you own). [0]

You could create a public alias of the form firstname.lastname.n@eesti.ee, but creation of those was ended in 2018 and they were shutdown in November 2023. [1]

[0] https://www.eesti.ee/en/using-the-state-portal/terms-of-noti...
[1] https://www.eesti.ee/en/closing-alias/closing-alias
Suppose you wanted to train an LLM to do addition.

An LLM has limited parameters. If an LLM had infinite parameters it could just memorize the results of every single addition question in existence and could not claim to have understood anything. Because it has finite parameters, if an LLM wants to get a lower loss on all addition questions, it needs to come up with a general algorithm to perform addition. Indeed, Neel Nanda trained a transformer to do addition mod 113 on relatively few examples, and it eventually learned some cursed Fourier transform mumbo jumbo to get 0 loss https://twitter.com/robertskmiles/status/1663534255249453056.

And the fact it has developed this "understanding" as an ability to learn a general pattern in the training data enables it to compress. I claim that the number of bits required to encode the general algorithm is fewer than the number of bits required to memorize every single example. If it weren't then the transformer would simply memorize every single example. But if it doesn't have space then it is forced to try to compress by developing a general model.

And the ability to compress enables you to construct a language model. Essentially, the more things compress, the higher the likelihood you assign them. Given a sequence of tokens say "the cat sat on the", we should expect "the cat sat on the mat" to compress into fewer bits than "the cat sat on the door". This is because the latter is far more common and intuitively more common sequences should compress more. You can then look at the number of bits used for every single choice of token following "the cat sat on the" and thus develop a probability distribution for the next token. The exact details of this I'm unclear on. https://www.hendrik-erz.de/post/why-gzip-just-beat-a-large-l... this gives a good summary.
In practical terms the government-issued option would be provided by a corporate player. Option 4 is option 3.
> My 10 year old laptop is still getting OS updates

Microsoft is trying to fix this. Win 11 wants a TPM. /s
I think there are more effective ways for governments to intervene. There are essentially two separate issues:

1) Permanent allocation of names and numbers

2) Interoperability standards and rights allowing us to link names and numbers to service contracts.

Once these issues are regulated in a consumer/citizen friendly way (like they did with phone numbers in the UK), governments could provide some sort of default service on top of it, but in my view this is not the most important part.
> about information that are available in primary sources.

Can you give an example?
I'm pretty sure one of those tiny media operations managed to cut one of the EU's countries out of the herd, so they're a problem I'd like to solve, if possible. Or at least inoculate against, before it happens again.
There can be, because there are, multiple real boogeymen.
The Guardian in the UK is an example of an alternative: It is owned by a trust, which funds it.

Norway has substantial public media funding across the political spectrum, but as you point out it always comes with conditions, even is less so than the funding for the state owned broadcaster.

Combining the two models and putting public funds into several perpetual trusts intended to provide funding from their profits at arms length from any sitting government similar to the (private) trust funding The Guardian might be an interesting alternative.

(EDIT: Norway also has its own variation over The Guardian model - the second largest media group was founded by unions but is now majority owned by the combination of two public benefit trusts)
It very much is on the web, if you are sending it to the origin server.
> These are your sources?

Indeed.

> And please, the leader in information technology and psychology warfare is known to the whole world.

I am not arguing against USA doing psyops. I am simply stating that Russia is, too. You keep downplaying it.

> On the grand scale of things, the troll farms of Russians are a joke.

I disagree. See the linked sources as to why.

> Can you imagine the logistics?

How is that relevant here?
> That is a orthogonal to the discussion we were having. The topic was whether people should have free access to news, and how should it be financed, not the quality of that news.

On the contrary, the quality of the news is very important to the discussion. There is no point in making trash freely available to the public, after all.
Bricks Builder on the WordPress side is really interesting for this.
The obvious response is that if you don't like news and think it has no value then you don't have to read it.
I’ve seen this sort of reaction quite often from people who are/were used to native (desktop) applications and grew professionally in that paradigm.
What happened is that there was a paradigm shift to web programming model, where a server and a browser interact and each has a specific role and a well defined interface to interact.
Then to address software compatibility/versioning/configuration/predictability came the paradigm of containerization.
Both paradigms are dominant now and that’s how younger programmers grew and still are growing professionally.
The overhead the paradigm introduces in terms of used resources is an acceptable and affordable price to use the paradigm but is likely to seem overpriced for people used to earlier paradigms.
A 1960s programmer may be appalled that a larger COBOL compiled binary is taking several times more memory than a hand coded Assembly equivalent.
Next generation of programmers may be doing everything with tell chatGPT a long story of what they want it to build in terms of code.

Point is - paradigms shift, unacceptable prices become affordable.
Generational gaps manifest themselves not just between parents and children.
No.

I'm stating that to date all mining and processing of resources involves deaths, multilations, long term disease, etc.

I'm asserting that to date the cumulative deaths from the nuclear power industry do not yet equal the deaths from a single Bhopal disaster (pesticide processing, half a million people exposed, many dead).

I'm putting forward as a simple fact that as wind, solar, batteries, etc continue to scale up from the small sliver of total global energy they currently are to ideally matching the current percentage of coal there will need to be a substantial increase in the tonnages of nickel, copper, lithium, and more that are mined, concentrated, processed and extracted and that comes with substantial increases in the wastes associated with these industries and the known risks to human life.

I would suggest that anybody making a human risk argument on any single portion of the energy industry look broadly at the risks across the board.

It's perfectly fine to chest beat about safety, I'm for it.

It's callously indifferent to only give a damn about a few deaths in a sector not approved while ignoring those in sectors liked.
Just use the actual title: it is not "Russians" who are snitching, its is Russians.
Iraqi WMDs were most certainly not universally believed by "the West".
The real answer is it totally depends on whether your product grows to $10,000,000,000, and whether you pays part of it back. Search engines pay with referral traffic.
Although not quite as spectacular as that, here is some funny codegen in POSIX shell I wrote; `sh` doesn't have a `repeat` command, so I wrote a script to implement it without forcing any loops at all. Along the way I uncovered some interesting segfaults for most sh implementations (including, sadly, dash), which is the reason for the somewhat convoluted code. Have fun!

#!/bin/sh
#
# Usage: repeat TIMES COMMAND
# Repeat COMMAND a given number of TIMES.

eval_full_quotes='
s/\\/\\\\/g ; s/\"/\\\"/g ; s/</\\</g ; s/>/\\>/g ;
s/\$/\\\$/g ; s/\[/\\\[/g ; s/*/\\*/g ; s/?/\\?/g ;
s/|/\\|/g ; s/&/\\&/g ; s/~/\\~/g ; s/=/\\=/g ;
s/;/\\;/g ; s/ /\\ /g ; s/%/\\%/g ; s/`/\\`/g ;
s/(/\\(/g ; s/)/\\)/g ; s/{/\\{/g ; s/}/\\}/g ;
s/#/\\#/g ; s/'"'"'/\\'"'"'/g'

errorx() { printf 'Error: %s\n' "${*:-"unknown error."}" >&2; exit 1; }

_rep() {
rep_times="$((2 * $1))"
rep_string="$2"
output=""
while [ 0 -lt "${rep_times}" ]; do
test 1 -eq "$(((rep_times /= 2) % 2))" && output="${output}${rep_string}"
rep_string="${rep_string}${rep_string}"
done
printf '%s' "${output}"
}

{
times="$1"
shift

test 0 -lt "${times}" || errorx "First argument must be a positive integer."
test 0 -lt "$#" || errorx "No command given to repeat."

repeat_command="$*"
command_length="${#repeat_command}"
max_arg="${ARG_MAX:-"$(getconf ARG_MAX)"}"

if [ "${max_arg}" -le "$((times * (command_length + 2)))" ]; then
: "$(( block_size = max_arg / (20 * (command_length + 2)) ))"
: "$(( blocks = times / block_size + 1 ))"
: "$(( remainder = (block_size + (times % block_size)) % block_size ))"

eval_string="$(_rep "${block_size}" "${repeat_command}; " | sed -e "${eval_full_quotes}")"

while [ 0 -lt "$((blocks -= 1))" ]; do
eval eval "${eval_string}"
done

eval_string="$(_rep "${remainder}" "${repeat_command}; " | sed -e "${eval_full_quotes}")"
eval eval "${eval_string}"
else
eval_string="$(_rep "${times}" "${repeat_command}; " | sed -e "${eval_full_quotes}")"
eval eval "${eval_string}"
fi
}
exit
I think it is better now. It reflects the theme, you know. Пусть всегда будет солнце!
The site builder, Uriel [0], was like those of us in his circle, strongly opinionated.

Sadly he suicided in 2011 with Sodium Pentothal he bought mail order from China. My final Skype message to him was "goodnight, don't drink the pentothal!" and Skype used to show it to me under his username every time I logged in.

He, and his acerbic nature, are sorely missed.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/user/uriel/
> Which 10 year old phone is more safe / secure?

Windows Phone ? I bet nobody writes exploits for it anymore. /s
I had covid in late spring of 2020. It took about a year for my energy to return to a reasonable level. Intellectual endurance took a big hit too and has had a longer tail than the physical but it's hard to know how much was due to covid itself and how much has been due to changes in the social environment because of the pandemic response. Each person is different so I can't tell you that things will get better for you, but I can say that it did get better for me over time. Exercise to the degree you can, both physically and mentally, because even if the effects of the infection goes away completely, you will never get back to 'normal' without building up your system again.
I'd buy this (and gift it to everyone I'd think would like it) in an instant. Especially if you somehow included and refined the analysis you have in the blog posts.
Largely because it's a melting pot of ancient and modern coding standards. Got the C Win32 API along COM style and then whatever AMF is doing. Makes things very verbose and explicit.

I've seen worse Python.

Personally, I think it's charming. :)
I still dabble in ASCII art a bit, mostly in HTML comments and email headers. It’s kind of a difficult art-form to practice now, given that monospaced text is relatively rare.

Here’s are my pets in ASCII, who go out in the headers of my emails:

.-"-.
^...^ |\./| /|^ ^|\
(=^I^=) )) =(^,^)=)) {/(_O_)\}
/ " \ (( | | (( _/ ^ \_))
( |"| ))) (|||))) (/ /'\ \)
==m m== =m'm= ""' '""
Good observation. I now wanna start commenting with pirate links to other media, but HN would tear me to shreds real quick I guess.
As a nomad, and someone who does run a self hosted mail server for fun, I don't think that's such a good idea. As mentioned, phones can be stolen or broken or just off. Do I want to increase dependencies on phone further by it being the primary store for all my mails as well? Each platform, which is not using TOTP MFA would still depend on email OTPs and so with a broken phone one completely loses access. With TOTPs atleast I get to save a few recovery codes.
The cost of losing a phone would mean losing all that data as well. Now, one could say we could and should keep backups. Then, comes the cost of losing access to new mails while the phone is incapicitated. Then, even setting up of email server on a phone with dynamic IP is a whole can of worms in itself and let's go with the easiest solution of using a VPN. So, now we need a VPN, a backup solution and a device to quickly accept emails when the primary device is down. Aren't we just building remote mail servers now? I do have a cloud instance serving my own email but do we expect most users to handle the infra? So now for making it easier for everyone and amortizing the costs let's start offering a solution where multiple people can run email accounts in a single server. Now we have gmail and other providers.
After the pandemic, kitchen coffees and lunch meetings have slowly been in decline. The world has shifted from mandatory on-site labor to remote working, which has made employee communication that much harder.

With mundane tasks, routine meetings, and occasional offline events, the gap between co-workers, HRs, and C-levels can easily expand. Considering all of that, employees may lose touch with the company culture, leading to demotivation and unproductivity.

That’s when an HR newsletter saves the day.

In this blog post, we’ll share 20 HR newsletter ideas that will entertain, engage, and motivate your co-workers.
Wappler and Pinegrow are the closest, I think. Desktop apps with visual authoring capabilities, while also supporting plain code.
I wouldn't say it is an unexpected behavior. I remember reading papers about this memorization behavior few years ago (e.g., [1] is from 2019 and I believe it is not the first paper about this). It should be expected from OpenAI to know that LMs can exhibit memorizing behavior even after seeing the sample only once.

[1] https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2019/08/13/memorization/
How random is xkcd? (2015)
I believe GP was referring to payments to the writer, not the publisher.
The Iraqi WMDs were never universally believed, neither in the US nor in Europe. There were widespread protests against the Iraq War (before it started!) in the US and the rest of the world. France, Germany, and the Benelux vehemently opposed the war, to such an extent that (some) Americans even renamed "french fries" to "freedom fries"!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20_March_2003_anti-war_protest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fries
> tanpi is now defined. It computes tan(πx) more accurately than `tan(pix)` (#48575).

unescaped * caused website to italise text between formulas
Which new nuclear would you suggest instead? Hinkley C will cost about $160/MWh, right in the range given by Lazard.
??? I think you’re thinking of US roads, which are generally shoddily constructed and poorly maintained compared to chinese ones.

No, what you meant to say was “and only 47 people died constructing it!”
Why two variables? Can't you always encode two arbitrary-width integers into one arbitrary-width integer?

For example, using 0b0001 as a split character, to end up with the pseudocode left, right = memory.split('0001') and then encoding everything else without using any 0b0001 pattern. It might be awfully complicated, but you can always use a fixed but arbitrarily large part of this arbitrary length integer as scratch space to implement this encoding.

Edit: for an easier time, put one integer in all the even-indexed parts of the binary number, and the other in all the odd-indexed parts of the number.
Semantic versioning is a mistake
> War is Bad

Compared to what?
I'm pretty sure all of EUs countries would be more democratic and sovereign "out of the herd".
Job qualifications and requirements have gone crazy. Companies have unreasonable expectations and overwhelming interview processes.
Postulate: I don't believe they are essential for operating in modern society. They're a nice convenience, but not essential.
Americans didn’t seem to care when Russia invaded Georgia (or Chechnya).

It’s only when Russia started protecting its GDP by eliminating its only meaningful competition for selling shale gas to the west did it become geopolitically critical to turn public opinion against it.

Russia’s GDP eventually collapses if Ukraine remains intact, as the west will buy gas from them instead. There are no meaningful quantities of petrochemicals in Georgia.
Then why not 2014? Why don't a dozen other wars around the world get the same reaction? Why not the Uyghur genocide? Why this one?

Yes, it's normal human behaviour, but it's normal human behaviour with a propaganda pump behind it (IMO). Of course, I can't prove this. Maybe it was all just completely organic and I've just watched one too many Adam Curtis documentaries.
You can’t realistically host an email server on your phone, which is what is meant. For that to work, your phone would need to be able to be woken up (to handle receiving a message) by arbitrary parties on the internet at any time, which is generally considered undesirable, quite apart from the bother caused by your phone ever being offline (sender’s server will keep retrying every so often for a couple of days, sender will generally be notified of this each time—and note the problem of the sender’s phone-hosted mail server being offline too if that’s what you were doing).
it's similar to how easy it's to subscribe NY times and then how hard it's to unsubs. They require extra steps and it's well known. So They get what they deserve? Do you see the poínt. They are lie spreaders, nothing else
don't feel dumb, your chuckle made me chuckle...
There is a well known comment regarding another Adobe format [1]:

> PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format.

> Having worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.

> If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different places....

[1]: https://github.com/zepouet/Xee-xCode-4.5/blob/master/XeePhot...
The author hasn't forced you to import their package. What's there to ban apart from maybe polluting the common namespace?
No it is not, it is editorialising. Keep your opinions to yourself and let HN readers make up their own minds.
To be fair, a democracy with open media and protections of free speech will always be harder to defend against foreign psyops attacks. Instead of having to influence enough people to revolt, you only have to influence enough to change the election outcome, which typically is close to parity anyway. And with non-state-run media and free speech protections, you have many pathways.

So democracies have to harden themselves. And I think the only way to harden the populace is education. General education. Education in the scientific method. And also education about psyops.
The katakana tsu along with the high horizontal bar makes that unicode art. I guess ^\_(''/)_/^ is valid ASCII ART although kinda looks like the guy's getting robbed.
Hiwonder Robot Kit with Lidar Depth Camera, Mapping and Navigation
Hi, thanks!
I have added a licence file to it (MIT licence).
> The admins' job is to facilitate that process. This does not involve declaring what the truth is and imposing it on those who disagree

I mean, you’ve detached comments from threads for “creating a risk for an inflammatory discussion” (paraphrase), without detaching the opposing view’s comments.

This might come from the good intention of keeping HNs spirit (“protecting the vessel”), but the net effect is still that you are picking sides / who’s voice gets to be heard. Either everyone gets detached or no one does, otherwise you do not get to lay a claim to neutrality.

The same happens with the rate limit crap. I’m pretty certain most people who get hit by it aren’t actually spamming or causing problems, they’re just telling facts or viewpoints that (a subsect of) HN is uneasy with.

I am very aware modding is mostly a thankless job with no reward, so I guess like in open source I don’t really get to complain unless I put up effort or money. So if you feel like ignoring me that would be completely fair.
Just skipped his wiki page, again, and I don't see anything concerning economics, finance or the history of those. And before I take anyones opinion on a subject as trailblazing or a gold standard, I like to see actual competence in said subject. And yes, that includes actual education and training as well as experience in that particular field. Or experience in adjenct field relevant to the subject, e.g. what Gaerber did with his anthropological view on kingship. That makes for an interesting view, but still not for a gold standard or a leading opinion.

And especially history and finance are fields with so much ill understood concepts without proper training, that opinions are just that opinions.
I don't think we need to put the Uyghur genocide on Russia. Syria sure.
The movie/tv show and music business can keel over and die tomorrow - it wouldn’t affect the value of art produced by humans at all. I see those more as exploitative leeches than as contributing anything positive.

If only piracy would actually harm these businesses but alas as often demonstrated it has zero effect on their bottom line, if anything it increases their profits.
> For Russia, China or other SCO Nations it doesn't matter what kind of fake information they spread. As long as it keeps us busy, it worked.

One thing that has bugged me for so long, and no one seems to be talking about, is, for example, how many state actors are lurking on Reddit news, specifically /r/worldnews, to control the narrative.

There are some topics where a great number of comments are from, let's say, "interested parties". That is, people whose comment history is strictly about that particular topic. They might have 5+ year old accounts, and have only commented about that topic. They don't even need to hide it, as both them and the vast majority of well-meaning ignorant passerby can shut you down with either being a conspiracy theorist or pushing an agenda for the opposite side.

This is the first time I mention this anywhere on the Internet, and I know how well it's gonna go down. Everybody is aware of state-sponsored troll farms, but any mention of it is drowned down by people that still believe either this is fiction, or "does not happen in my corner of the internet." To avoid making myself a blatant target of such responses, I will not mention which state or group is most active on that subreddit, go see for yourself.

What I can openly say, is that USA psyops is not really a thing because most of the Western Internet is US-based, and US-centered. The US government doesn't really need massive troll farms because their own citizens and companies indirectly and involuntarily do their work for them. When one's own propaganda has become part of popular culture, is it propaganda anymore?
This isn't specifically about Honda quality, but I think it's a nice Honda anecdote.

My wife bought a used Accord before we got married. Eventually it died on the highway and we had it towed to the dealer. The engine needed to be replaced because of the failure of a part that had been recalled (when it was owned by the previous owner) had not been replaced. Since it was due to a recalled part, Honda replaced the engine for the price of the oil.

We bought Hondas for the next 20 years after that. We still own a 2012 Accord that my son is running into the ground. Our current car is a Volvo, lots of nice features, but I think our next will be a Honda.