skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're completely wrong.. My reasoning:

- Highly energy efficient non-mobile computers (mini, pro, etc).

- They already run a huuuuuuuge server park on AWS for themselves

- They've been (successfully) transitioning their revenue towards "services" for almost a decade

- I suspect they want a piece of the LLM market as well.

- They acquired Fleetsmith for device management in the enterprise

- They implemented nested virtualization in the M2+

- The cloud is highly profitable, and I suspect they want a piece of that cake

- They spent a lot of resources creating a boot policy that allows booting other/unsigned operating systems on Apple Silicon. (asahi). This is not present on iOS

- They already offer "cloud runners" for XCode (cloud). This is a very contained service, to start offering cloud services

- The timeline for iCloud platform:

- 2016: Azure -> Google. 2018/2019: Google -> AWS. This $1.5B contract will end this year. It seems like a prefect moment to switch from AWS to their own platform and later-on offer more generic services to companies.

- They need to 4T or 5T marketcap somehow. Options are - LLMs, Cloud servers, the Enterprise, (Vision), or something completely new, but the Vision Pro is the last major category under Tim Cook, so I don't think anything new will happen for consumers.

All in all, it seems like Apple will go back in the (cloud) server business.
Making larger and larger datasets works fine for text and images. The internet has so much of that we can scrape superhuman quantities of the stuff and shove it in to a next token predictor and the result is pretty good.

But what about for tasks where datasets don’t really exist? I do a lot of PCB design and it’s extremely time consuming. But it’s a niche field compared to text and images. No dataset exists that says “these were the engineering requirements of this PCB and this is the result and by the way the board actually worked”.

So how will we train AI systems to replace a human doing PCB design? It’s probably going to need to learn PCB design from first principles (along with massive help from large transformers when possible, like collections of chip datasheets). Even then, understanding PDF datasheets is something these big companies haven’t really pulled off yet, though I suspect in 5 years that will change.

But my point is that there must be loads of tasks, even on the computer, for which suitable datasets don’t exist and it would be infeasible to create them. Another big thing I do is machine design and again it’s not about designing one mechanical part it’s about pulling in the right parts from all over the world and assuming certain manufacturing processes, and then knowing those processes and then designing all the parts and the assembly. There’s so many different pieces of knowledge in there that are not captured on text or images on the web and would be hard to encode in to datasets.

At some point we’re going to need machine systems that learn the way people do, and that’s going to take a long time to figure out. That’s what LeCun is saying.
I had to debug a program that did just that once, long ago, and the fix was to not free on exit. The program's behavior had been that it took ~20m and then one day it ran for hours and we never found out how long it would have taken. Fortunately it was a Tcl program, and the fix was to remove `unset`s of large hash tables before exiting.
How a baker survived the Titanic by getting drunk (2022)
The worrying part is that the winning entry would bust immediately if someone wrote a single test to check if the computed numbers are correct.
I'm not sure what I find more disconcerting: That the judges considered this a feasible attack or that they are probably right.
Isn't vertical farming just multistory greenhouses with artificial light?
this is a cultural problem. in asia and africa people take their kids to work all the time. part of this is because parents can't afford childcare, but part of it is also: "why not?".

i find our western attitude towards kids disturbing. after living 15 years in china i have come to realize that western, and even more so the european, and especially the german and austrian attitude towards work and school is much more conservative than i thought.

and as a parent, i find that very sad.

i wish every parent the opportunity to spend as much time with their children as they can. and if that means that they play where the parents are working, then i am all for it. rather that than sending them off to daycare. (there are exceptions of course where the environment is not safe for kids to play)
The function:

if [[ -n ${ZSH_VERSION-} ]]; then
# ZSH doesn't split command over multiple variables
preexec_custom_history() {
echo "$HOSTNAME:\"$PWD\" $$ $(date "+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z") $1" >> "$CUSTOM_HISTORY_FILE"
}
else
preexec_custom_history() {
echo "$HOSTNAME:\"$PWD\" $$ $(date "+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z") $*" >> "$CUSTOM_HISTORY_FILE"
}
fi
# Add it to the array of functions to be invoked each time.
preexec_functions+=(preexec_custom_history)

It's harder to search for multiline but I haven't gotten to fixing that yet. I've thought about putting it into sqlite (pwd makes the file large) but since everything is on network filesystems I don't think that's a place sqlite has any guarantees; screwing up a single line of a bare log doesn't break anything.

Edit: The fzf is kind of hacked together but is here: https://pastebin.com/sTxsvZAf . It has a few bugs but nothing annoying enough to have made me fix it.
Their ability to superficially mimic cognition, in a way that not only raises significant philosophical questions but also seems (rightly or wrongly) to bring the prospect of "true" AI tantalizingly closer.
Ahh I see now! I thought they were only doing what you're describing for shell builtins. That does seem like a big effort though, now that you mention it...
Bash works well in https://exaequos.com. It is compiled in WebAssembly
This is a joke, yet this is basically a very rudimental form of malloc() auditing tool. Because at the end of the program, it could show you all the stuff that is yet allocated, and even scan the program whole memory for the pointers and report only the ones not found.
I don't understand that, IMO it's more than only high cast/class men could reproduce, others were used as slaves/living tools. Isn't the main change brought by the Neolithic?
Dang I did the math in my head wrong.
Did he speak about the pandemic much? I think the responses to the pandemic from anarchists are interesting. They seem to range the entire spectrum: from the anti government conspiracy theorist to the enthusiastic state coercion supporter. Maybe the academic theorists were more level headed? He seemed to be saying "lets see what good can come from it afterwards", but I'm curious if there's more he said.

I did see a paper he wrote in 2020: https://davidgraeber.org/articles/the-museum-of-care-reimagi...

"Imagine that the experience of lockdown and economic collapse actually allows us to see the world as it really is and we acknowledge that what’s referred to as “an economy” is simply the way we collectively keep each other alive, provision each other with the things we need and generally take care of one another. Say we also reject the notion of social control."
> The main reason testing is more common in the public sector is not that drugs are bad but that the optics of people using drugs has negative political consequences when political leaders are waging this war on drugs.

I always thought companies that do drug testing got some kind of discount on their own insurance rates for it.
Give Marta a shot. It gives Total Commander a run for its money imo. Free.

https://marta.sh/
As an intentional non-parent who lived for a decade in several Asian countries: work calls are for doing work.

Serious people don’t let their kids talk over their meetings.
To disconfuse: the "displayed" in the final sentence is a mistranslation from "anzeigen", which means pressing charges.

"Thank you for saving us from liability hell and damages by helping us fix our shit. Police officers should arrive at your door shortly."

I hope this company ends up paying dearly for this. Anything else would be a devastating precedence for information security. A business like that has no business staying in business.
The average human can do plenty whilst sitting at a computer, far more than a computer can do on its own, and in fact the entire knowledge economy is based on that fact. Fortunately, your assertion about most humans is demonstrably false. If you can entirely automate what they do already, feel free to start a company and capture most of the world’s wealth creation.

Why replicate AGI? Wealth creation determines living standards and AGI would vastly increase wealth creation. That’s one reason.

What you want from AI is a different conversation. I agree the ultimate point of AI research is not necessarily to make AGI as per the above definition. It might be to say understand the universe or greatly accelerate technological progress. That’s a subjective call. But orthogonal to the problem of choosing a good definition of AGI.
It takes a super special set of conditions to be able to bootstrap a >10 billion dollar company like Valve. Most >10b companies need immense capital injections to work
Colorado pastor charged for cryptocurrency scam he perpetrated at God's command
Anyone else avoid Lenovo as its made in china and worried that the drivers/parts they use might be spying?
Stallman, for his selfless dedication to the idealistic idea of making computing more free, despite the lack of appreciation.
> If it is running 24/7 for years, watts add up. Running cool and quietly is another benefit.

Ideed, but I think one would be best served to actually do the math. I like having my own router on which I can segment stuff, for example, having my smart TV on the network but not allowing it to phone home and deliver me ads.

I have an old 6th-gen i5 I salvaged from work, which, I thought, must draw a lot of power, so I started looking at newer low-power models, like n5xxx or n100s. Well, if you want one with multiple network ports, it quickly costs around 2-300 Euros. You can also forget about having 10 Gb ports, although such Internet speeds are becoming common where I live, and you can get a 30 Euro dual 10Gb adaptor off Ebay which fits in the PC I already have.

Anyway, I don't actually need 10 Gb right now, so it's not really an issue in practical terms. But 300 Euros isn't exactly pocket change for me, so I sat down and did the math. I'd need around 3 years to break even on electricity costs. Then I went and bought a watt-meter off Amazon. Turns out, the horror-stories of older computers drawing around 40-50 W at idle didn't apply to my specific box, and it only drew around a third of what I had estimated, which means an 8-9 year break-even. Of course, rates will most likely increase over that period, which would bring it closer.
I doubt that the fun is ended with that X1 Carbon in hand. You maybe able to install Libreboot on that T430, and it might make the machine boot faster.

> even a laptop as durable as this can _get damaged_ after six years of heavy use

One day I read a post on r/thinkpad, the poster praised their old Thinkpad, claim it was a solid machine, but a hardware failure killed it and the poster were "too exhausted" to get it fixed (something like that).

The hardware failure don't sounded hard to diagnose, but then on the picture attached to the post, I noticed a crack on the top right corner of the plastic keyboard frame, near where the screen hinge is installed underneath. I realized that the crack was probably what actually killed that laptop, among all other (smaller) things.

Cosmetic is very important too, I guess :D
That's unrealistic in practice. What if the camera manufacturer or an employee of the camera manufacturer messes with it?

I don't believe it will be possible in practice to "granularize" trust like that. You trust a person or an institution (a person is already more ideal though). Going even further will not work in practice.
I know what you're saying, and for sure existing models can be difficult to force into the really weird corners of the distributions (or go outside the distributions). The text interfaces are partially to blame for this though, you can take the images into Gimp and do some crude naive modifications and bring them back and the model will usually happily complete the "out-of-distribution" ideas. The Stable Diffusion toolboxes have evolved far away from the original simple text2image interfaces that midjourney and dalle use.

The models will generalize (because that's the most efficient way of storing concepts) and you can make an argument that that means they understand a concept. Claiming "it's not learning concepts, only statistical probabilities" trivialises what a modern neural network with billions of parameters and dozens of layers is capable of doing. If a model learns how to put a concept like line width 5, 10 and 15 pixels into a continuous internal latent property, you can probably go outside this at inference at least partially.

I would argue that improving this is at this point more about engineering and less about some underlying unreconcilable differences. At the very least we learn a lot about what exactly generalization and learning means.
[video]John McAfee claimed that porn sites install keystroke on your device
Ha, pretty fun (and poignant) game.

Started out with a few wins and an ecstatic board (even though I barely turned a profit in some years, but I guess the other years made up for it?). Unfortunately, lost to a few patent trolls, which put me in so much debt I couldn’t afford anything. To make matters worse, the economy tanked. Had to fire everyone to keep the profits from going in the red, but it was a matter of time before it was my turn on the chopping block.
> passed them without ever following up to see if the benefit is worth the cost

Pretty much the same for all the work UKGOV does to try and combat "fraud", sadly - they always end up spending multiples of the amount they'd save[1]

[1] whilst at the same time enabling fraud of their own like the fast-track PPE contracts, etc.
Sorry I missed you mentioning relaxed. I'm pretty sure that relaxed atomic access is not sufficient.
I have an impeccable valley girl accent and just shy of thirty years of production sysadmin experience. Debiasing is hard work, but it’s worth it.
Bringing this advice up again because (unlike a lot of what I say) it’s actually something that I have personal experience with and I think it will greatly improve your life: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33187749
Except it was worse:

1. The module that failed actually was no longer in use for that part of the flight.

2. The acceleration for the part of the flight where it was in use was within the parameters.

3. Instead of just ignoring / clamping the out-of-bounds values, the no-longer-needed module sent a big error dump.

4. That error dump was sent to the next module in-line, which was expecting...I think numbers, but certainly not big textual error dumps. And so that failed as well.

5. I don't know if that second module was needed.

So had the module just (a) processed the incoming data normally or (b) clamped the values silently or (c) dropped the out-of-bounds values silently, the Ariane 5 would not have exploded.

Instead it did the "make it impossible to represent invalid states"-thing and exploded.

While I understand the appeal of that idea, I think it is overrated with any software that has to interact in some way shape or form with the real world, however indirectly. Because programmers tend to have a pretty limited understanding of what states are valid or invalid in the real world.

(See also: the "falsehoods programmers believe about XXX" series)
interesting, as far as i remember, in germany any benefits towards employees are treated as income and taxed accordingly or even worse, to the point that it is better to pay out benefits in cash only. i think this comes from companies trying to save on taxes by taking advantage of benefits that previously were taxed differently (or not at all)
Ask HN: How do I learn to build a wood-frame house?
I recently found out that I love building and doing manual labour, like digging or anything really. It's been a blessing, psycologically, to free my mind from SWE stuff.

Recently, my wife and I bought a piece of land to get out of rent. Now I want to build my own house (with professional help, for sure).

What are good resources to learn the wood structure part of it? Ideally, detailed videos showing how-tos, but anything would help!
Race to the Bottom, race to efficiency
You may disagree but IMO this guy is a sometimes unhinged distributor of manufactured rage, conspiracy theories and flat-out lies. This kind of content should get no space on HN.
Fun fact: if you don't want to put a command in history, prefix it with a space. This works in many shells.
> Some, such as Justice Louis Brandeis, described the concept as the "race to the bottom" and others, as the "race to efficiency".

I find this interesting because it shows that these race to the bottom often stem from situations with arbitrage opportunities.
I think the main speed increase of American machines compared to European ones is due to much higher water consumption.

A modern European washing machine uses 30-50 litres per wash, vs 75-100 for a modern American one.

That's also halved the time required to heat the necessary water, so another reason a hot water connection might not be so useful
Salt Doesn't Melt Ice–Here's How It Makes Winter Streets Safer (2019)
Cool project but it’s completely impossible to navigate back. Something on that page is spamming my browsers back button history
On Windows, try Altap Salamander. It's free and open-source.
I'm always fascinated by how humans end up discussing these things.

Like in this case, who has the burden of proof?

I'm an outsider to this field so all I can glean is that apparently the vast majority of summaries I can find cite 200-300 kYa and one reference citing an "unambiguous" find that places the technique at 400 kYa.

So if somebody says that "there doesn't seem to be enough evidence for a claim that the levallois technique is 500 kYa" (I'll soften the more incendiary phrasing of "no scientific basis whatsoever" because after all that's just an emphatic raetoric device and I think filtering them out is conducive to more fruitful discussion), do they have to back it up with references?

Or is the person who claims 500 kYa that has to provide arguments as to why that number is not yet part of the scientific consensus?

I mean, there could be simple explanations like "yes I know, the result is relatively new so you may still find a lot of references to 200-300 around until stuff gets updated but working scientists in the field are mostly on board with 500 kYa". I mean for me, a casual reader, this kind of argument would be enough for a thread of HN.

What if somebody claims that the technique is 10 million years old, and somebody replies "there is scientific data backing that up", would it be reasonable to counter that with "please provide proof for your dismissal"? Obviously not, because the claim would be so outlandish, right? But 1M, 800 kYa?
Imagine drawing your ancestry tree, parents, grandparents, etc. you will of course have as many male as female nodes. The higher variance of male reproductive success makes it likelier for two given male nodes to be filled by the same infividual, than for two given female nodes.

Ed. Of course this only works if some males have more than one reproductive partner over their life span. Serial monogamy, escapades, and polygynie are the obvious probable factors in skewing the symmetry. I might have missed some less obvious ones, but can't think of any right now.
Tell HN..?
Method Chaining in Pandas [video]
> Azure was owned pretty hard a while back, very little was ever heard of it again.

From what I recall, it was a Chinese APT (designated as Storm-0558, which I think means they could not reliably attribute it to any group: https://malpedia.caad.fkie.fraunhofer.de/actor/storm-0558), that was sitting on developers’ workstations long enough to get access to master signing key from a memory dump that ended up on one of the workstations. They then used it to access US government officials’ emails (Department of State if I recall correctly), which supposedly gave China a strategic advantage and a better understanding of inner workings of US foreign policy.

You will not see it in news that China got favourable terms in some negotiations with a country in Africa (are of Chinese interests) and US got least favourable terms than they could’ve gotten because the Chinese negotiators knew something.
That I 100% agree with.
Those who build the product should have a significant input and decision making power on how to improve the product. No doubt!
Do note that recent advances in electrolytic carbon fixation exceed photosynthesis efficiency when coupled with solar panels.
So a multi-story farm building who's roof is clad in solar panels would be able to exceed the output of a farm that directly uses the sun, with no utility hookups.

Granted, most nice plants still seem to require some light, but the efficiency advantages over photosynthesis still apply. So maybe use transmissive solar panels to mildly shade the plants, plus hydroponics to deliver the synthetic nutrient solution to them.
I went to Microsoft's store and found the entry for Windows Pro. It's the actual price.

Other comments have pointed out why G2A is also more or less piracy except you pay someone for an illegitimate key instead of using a cracking tool to generate one.
Definitely was not expecting somebody claim so hard they are not using Electron and being native, then use Flutter
I wonder if it would be possible to simplify the task further, by removing cell reproduction processes? As far as I understand, an "immortal" non-replicating cell does not exist in nature, but there is nothing that prevents an artificial one from existing, especially if it has ways to repair cellular damage.
Zzzzz tired about this heavily outdated article. Let it RIP for good sake, POS that the author never updated what a joke.
Indeed. But it seems widespread.

The issue seems to be that many people don't consider their situation in absolute terms, but tend to look at how others have it.

An interesting book on the subject is Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (original German title: Der Neid: Eine Theorie der Gesellschaft) by Helmut Schoeck.
Linus Torvalds on LLMs and other topics
I think this depends on who you are.

If you're the person who uses the same password everywhere, using SSO is a great idea: you don't spread the one password to that shady system that stores it in plain-text. You have control over the session token at your identity provider (assuming the RP service rechecks tokens as they should.)

If you value privacy, and have a good password policy, you probably benefit nothing security-wise from SSO. You're still at the risk of MITMs or domain hijacking ruining the experience on that one site, which seems unavoidable. The question is where you store your passwords. You'd want it somewhere centrally for all your devices to share, and then you have a single master password. Depending on who you are, that might be OK.

Passkey/WebAuthn has similar issues with how to share credentials.
Which is certainly a form of piracy.
Not a single word on the actual BOM cost of DRAM. I could only wish we have technology to make the current $1/GB sustainable and profitable.
Take a standalone feature of a product and make it free

Indirectly this also forces decomposition and building loosely coupled features even at a product level. The speed for delivery and iteration acts as a force function to build pipelines and systems to adapt the new feature into the product should it be a runaway success.

May be the small engineering benefits for a building obsessed dev.