skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Iran is using the Houthis to apply pressure on a regional rival, Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis used to be a close American ally against Iran, but purist progressives in the Obama and now Biden admin pushed them away, and Iran was able to bring them to terms by wielding the Houthis in their backyard against them.

Iran is also using the Houthis to flare up a conflict that will prevent the Saudis from normalizing relations with Israel; Iran used Hamas to execute the 10/7 attack toward the same goal.

Finally, Iran is using one of its proxy (the Houthis) to preserve another proxy (Hamas). The Houthis are disrupting one of the world's most important shipping routes, which will eventually drive up prices (read: inflation) in an election year. Biden doesn't really want to get into an intense military operation in an election year, and his main alternative is to pressure Israel to let Hamas survive - as the Houthis demand.
They've launched hundreds and failed to sink a single ship. Getting better all the time!
There was a Usenix paper examining this.

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events%2Fvee05%2Ffull_papers/p... [2005]

(Hey, I seem to remember tha an Anton Ertl posts to comp.compilers.)

Spoiler: they claim that with their sophisticated translation from stack to register code, they eliminated 47% of the instructions, and the resulting code is still around 25% larger than the byte code. The size advantage goes to stack-based byte code, but it may not necessarily be as large as you might think.

So more or less in line with your findings or intuition?
Yes, our ancestors were simpler…clearly.

We aren’t the only species with the placenta…horses, for example…

One species among many.
Doesn't make sense to underestimate their capabilities.

Anti ship missiles are really 1930s tech, there's not necessarily much modern electronics involved.
https://www.amazon.com/Never-Ending-Challenge-Engineering-Ad...
there's an even simpler solution to the war in gaza: have hamas release all the hostages.
> but purist progressives in the Obama and now Biden admin pushed them away

Autocratic rulers like MBS deciding to cut up journalists/opposition political figures into tiny pieces with bone saws inside Saudi consulates didn't help matters. The whole Khashogghi incident really illustrated exactly what the Saudi regime thinks of rule of law and human rights of their own citizens when it's boiled down to the the barest essentials. US senators, congressmen, foreign service career people have taken note.

It's still worth noting that the Saudi military/air force/other armed forces are extremely large customers of US/NATO spec equipment and UK origin equipment.

It would be worth remembering that something like 85% of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia and there were very clear financial/funding connections from wealthy persons within the Kingdom to the pre-9/11 training program. Highly reputable journalists and intelligence sources have also extensively documented the Saudi funding sources that supported (and still support to this day) wahabbist madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the "V1.0" of the Taliban in the 1990s, and other fundamentalist salafist jihadi groups.

Invading saudi arabia for regime change instead of iraq in 2003 would have been much more logical if anyone in the US and UK had the fortitude to do it. It would have also been vastly more messy.

It's well known in people who study foreign affairs that Iran funds and arms Shia and shia-adjacent armed groups (Houthis, Hezbollah, etc). But this doesn't happen in a vacuum - to some extent this is the IRGC and Iran's reaction to the well documented and widely known Saudi support for salafist jihadism.

It's also well known and documented that the saudis have been investing vast amounts of their oil wealth in the US stock market, real estate and other equities since the mid 1960s, so the financial and interconnected realtionship between the US and Kingdom would be extremely difficult if not impossible to dis-entangle at this point in 2024.

Despite the Khagoggi affair and other problems descrived above, I think it's pretty clear that US decision makers still consider saudi arabia a much more trustworthy regional "partner" compared to Iran. Ongoing US/UK contractor support of all of their armed forces (and US/UK relationship with Saudi Aramco) and ongoing exports of munitions to saudi arabia back up this theory.
We used our Echo daily for years until one day I factory reset it and couldn't get it to connect to my network. After that it got unplugged and never replaced. I really liked having a home assistant, and wished for an even-better TNG-type voice computer. The shopping list app wasn't very good (bad sync). Now I use Siri on my Apple watch, and most of the time it works fine. My demands aren't complex.

I wish the voice assistant field got more complex and better. It was a neat tech diversion.
Human beings are 99.9% genetically similar to each other. Also, we're about 99% genetically similar to chimpanzees.
I worked on an early 1970s computer with out-of-order processing. I got an interrupt due to a faulty instruction which caused a core-dump (aka a huge
pile of paper containing a memory printout delivered by a very angry machine
room operator). The message was that the failure occurred sometime in the
last 16 instructions... which could have been branches from anywhere.

The only effective debugging technique was omphaloskepsis.

Sigh.
Additionally Instruments for Metal, and AGI on Android.
The plan was the results of unavoidable logic: you have to strike where the capabilities had been placed, and it was the logic of the Moscow empire to place capabilities away from places it favoured.
That's exactly what a Pakistani like you would say!
There was a documentary covering electrical theft and the guys doing it for a living. It's crazy the risks they take.
https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/powerless/
You could probably do the same thing with bacterio-rhodopsin. I used it to
build a form of rewriteable paper. It switches states based on two different
laser frequencies.
Hhhhh
8uhga
>They're each extremely complex

Yes. Now. Not when they first emerged.

>but useless without the other two

Unsubstantiated assertion.

>How would evolution slowly build a heart with no blood or blood vessels? How would evolution slowly build blood but no blood vessels or heart? How would evolution slowly build a network of blood vessels but no blood to carry or heart to pump?

You start with a fluid-filled body cavity where oxygen is transported by dissolution from the outside to the inside. This fluid already contains oxygen-transporting cells. Then you section off part of the cavity to enable oxygen-transporting cells to move more efficiently. At this point the OTCs are completely separated, so the fluid inside the conduits can be called blood. The animal can pump blood by squeezing its body during its normal locomotion. Eventually muscle cells are added to the circulatory system to enable oxygen circulation independently of the animal's movement, as well as to circulate it even more effectively. Later on the muscle cells become centralized as it's more efficient, not to mention that a big single muscle can pump more strongly than a distributed system of tiny muscles. Each step of the way you have a functional organism and each form performs the function of transporting oxygen more effectively.

I know you're going to say that this is a "must have" explanation, but you merely asked for an explanation. The above is a plausible series of events that could have led to the circulatory system as we see it today, so if you want to argue that the circulatory system couldn't have evolved, you'll need to argue why this explanation isn't plausible.

EDIT: Also, I can't help but notice you ignored the question I asked in my last paragraph.
Super awesome group of people.
I don't think that structure is the issue. In this case, where you want to preserve creativity and spontaneity, continue to make lists but only refer back to them when you have time to do something and you need ideas.
“Bullshit jobs” was one of the poorest researched and thinly veiled biased judgements in a supposed academic work I had ever read.

After reading it I couldn’t take any of his work seriously at all as he misunderstood basic concepts of productivity.
They don't really talk about why. When would you want to switch to this over using 3D printing for prototyping?

If you just need a few parts (likely at home), waiting for the 3D printer seems a lot easier?
Ridiculous tone policing. Respond to the worthwhile content
I've seen something not quite that dangerous but still pretty bad in downtown Toronto and I was quite amazed. One of those partially in-ground transformer boxes with the lids removed. What really got me about it is that it seemed that I was the only person that thought that this was kind of dangerous, everybody else thought it was just fine. And those things are old and in a crappy state of maintenance, enough so that they blow up with alarming regularity and when they do they spout flaming oil around them. You wouldn't get me to go near one.
I just want something with sata ports and 10G ethernet so I can make a cheap, power efficient home NAS.

Right now I'm using an old office PC that costs $7/m to run. Using the USB port on my router is too slow (maybe I need more expensive HDD enclosures) and can't RAID
And yet they've held out for years.

The biggest problem is that there is no solution that is both effective and also morally satisfying. The moral injury makes it very difficult to talk about effective solutions - which might include steps towards normalizing relations with Iran and other soft power interventions that would make people angry because they are not harsh enough.

Everyone should feel free to disagree, but think about the reaction to military interventions - more recruitment.
Yes, MBS is terrible, and his regime is autocratic.

Also, intelligent mature people make policy based on real-politik and the aggregate sum of its consequences. They don't just respond to whatever moral sentiments they experience in the moment.

The decision to push the Saudis away is destabilizing the whole region and will allow a violent, aggressive, revolutionary Iran to start and escalate extremely bloody conflicts throughout the region.

While it's a shame that one journalist was killed, was alienating the Saudis really worth the many thousands of lives lost as a result?
This is probably stating the obvious but being able to compete with low energy rifles is a must for inclusivity in the sport. Gas rifles are legal and available everywhere.

The limit in the UK is 12 foot pounds for an air rifle. Oddly, comparing that with a bow (draw weight of 40 pounds firing a 30” arrow) makes archery seem pretty lethal.
Because the "honored rule" isn't honored well enough, as "about 57% of car crashes involving pedestrians happened because drivers failed to yield to people in all intersections", quoting one of the listed study results, and "crashes increased by more than 20% in states that allowed RTOR" quoting another.

Some rules are more honored than others.

Consistent rules are more likely to be followed than ones that differ by state and even by city.

Rules which require more situational awareness - you may turn right if the light red, traffic is clear from the left, no people are in the crosswalk, and no one from the right is about to cross - are harder to follow than ones which require situational awareness - you may not move if the light is red.

Rules with personal choices are more subject to peer pressure. You aren't required to turn right on red, but if you don't, you may get honked at. This may encourage people to make the wrong decision, and turn even when not clear. If RTOR is illegal, honking is no longer peer pressure but only an "I am an asshole" indicator.
If it could really do all that stuff then wouldn't amazon just earn a commission on all those purchases and call it a win?

Also funny how all of the capabilities noted boil down to "Alexa can spend your money more easily and quickly".
But how will Amazon sell all those Echo products without Alexa?
What is anarchist about cartels?
That won't stop the hostilities. Israel has two stated objectives: free the hostages and eliminate Hamas. The Israeli government is very unlikely to agree to a ceasefire in return for the hostages.
Ads in prime video is a recent example
If you want to do collision detection in something like a game and you don't want to be constantly debugging collision issues, you have to be way way more aware of numerical precision issues than this article is.

For example, even a basic "point in sphere" test can return logically inconsistent results if the point is right on the surface of the sphere and you swap the x and z coordinates.

Ignoring issues like precision can result in players falling through the world or walking through walls.
A cruise missile is 1930's tech??
Explain Diabetes Visually – An Attempt
All of life is built on dependencies on systems people don’t understand.

This is a ridiculous position to hold.

Also it’s not complicated. The fed issue money and people buy it. The trust it because it’s backed by the largest military and economy in the world and that combines into an ideology most economies want to support and be a part of.

A dollar is a debt investment in the America ideal. The day we aren’t strong enough or liked enough the system will collapse.
>> Ultimately the biggest wins are when big appliances and heating/cooling respond to self-production

I think the parent post is pointing out that just measuring usage has limited value. The real value is when you are generating your own alternative.
Then simple changes, that you barely notice, can have z big impact.

Some are obvious, hot water, laundry, dishwasher, pool pump, etc.

Between things like cooking can come into play. Lots of dishes can be prepared in advance, and consumed later. An air-fryer uses less electricity than my oven (and despite the name functions in the same way as an oven).
Yeah, whisper is the closest thing we have, but even it requires more processing power than is present in most of these edge devices in order to feel smooth. I've started a voice interface project on a Raspberry Pi 4, and it takes about 3 seconds to produce a result. That's impressive, but not fast enough for Alexa.

From what I gather a Pi 5 can do it in 1.5 seconds, which is closer, so I suspect it's only a matter of time before we do have fully local STT running directly on speakers.

> Probably anathema to the space, but if the devices leaned into the ~five tasks people use them for (timers, weather, todo list?) could probably tighten up the AI models to be more accurate and/or resource efficient.

Yes, this is the approach taken by a lot of streaming STT systems, like Kaldi [0]. Rather than use a fully capable model, you train a specialized one that knows what kinds of things people are likely to say to it.

[0] http://kaldi-asr.org/
Polykeyboard: OLED Display Keycaps
Just discovered this gem of a project and thought I'd share it here. It seems like the perfect keyboard for polyglots.

This is what the author says at ko-fi.com/polykb :
You will help me developing the PolyKybd - polylingual keyboard with tiny little OLED screens in each keycap to display just any language(s) you need. Of course it can do even more ;) I hope to get a dev kit ready at some point. Any keyboard layout is possible, no matter if it is a macropad/stream deck, 60% or 100% layout.
Adderall does not have different effects on people with or without ADHD; it gives everyone better concentration.
Paper that discusses similarities between the envelope glycoprotein of retroviruses and syncytin: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3758191/

This field is called paleovirology, and the paper also discusses in some more detail how fragments of viral DNA can end up in human DNA.
They last as long as they are supported.
> =128 bits

Notice that this alone is more than a lot of positions with my "naive" implementation - 36 bits per side for the best case, with only the king, and at most one queen: 6b for the king, 6 bits for the queen, or its absence, 6 bits each for the absent rooks, bishops, knights and pawns.
I live in Boise, Idaho. I can confidently say that the behavior described is not unique to NYC scale. I don't have the context to say it's not worse there, but I can confidently say that license plates coming from more rural counties don't appear any less aggressive or careless than local plates.
I have recently switched to using Nushell as my default shell. They were also writing their own but recently decided instead to begin incorporating github.com/uutils/coreutils (Rust rewrite of GNU coreutils). They target uutils to be a drop-in replacement for the GNU utils. Differences with GNU are treated as bugs.
> Iran’s government has a sense of being under siege / surrounded by powerful enemies, the US, Isreal, etc.

The well-educated government of Iran does not at all consider this. They are an autocratic, theocratic dictatorship. No one has any interest at all in annexing Iran. Like all governments of such a type, there must always be external, powerful, and yet weak enemies at the border or they cannot retain power. Iran has nothing the world wants except hydrocarbons, and their current level of production can easily be replaced by their fellow OPEC members. Anyone actually invading Iran would get nothing but 30 million citizens that live in abject poverty, with the UN expecting another 40% (!) of the country to fall below the poverty line in the next 2 years. Without China (40%) and Turkey (20%) importing from Iran, the country would fail overnight.
Just yesterday I learned of steerable bullets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMwWQktNlPk

These could potentially nullify any ship-bound missile threat if they can be miniaturised and incorporated into CIWS.
No, but you need to have working industrial capabilities and without Iran that just stops. This is an Iranian proxy.
Here's a maybe more mobile friendly comparison:

https://i.imgur.com/zUVn8rt.png

But now that I double-check, I was comparing with the images zoomed to 200%. On desktop the artifacts are also noticeable at 100%, but not nearly as bad as in my previous comment.
Technically a V1 is a cruise missile if you stretch the definition a bit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb
1944 v-1 is I think the first cruise missile. In ww2 the Germans had guided anti ship missiles and the US had aa shells with very simple radar.
No, if anything, the above comment is saying the opposite by advocating the bitter but moral vision of a smaller economy with fewer seats, and in this case less anime. We can say that the anime might be better, and that maybe the anime which dies is shitty anyway so good riddance, but we can also say that we're envisioning a smaller economy with fewer artists and less art.

Similarly, maybe we should have fewer musicians and less music, but at least we have an absence of the slave economy you mention. Maybe the medical profession is doing something right by limiting the flow of the pipeline.
Oh, I have been aware of the Houthis and their agenda since their rise as part of the Yemeni revolution and subsequent civil war. Whether we like it or not, the Houthis are now a major player in Yemen.

As for the current situation, my point was to clarify that the Houthis didn’t just randomly wake up in the morning one day and start attacking commercial ships for no reason. They communicated their reasoning and demands from the very start, and made it clear that this was their response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The US response was to simply ignore their demands and just bomb Yemen. This is a mistake. The Houthis (and Iran by proxy) are no strangers to conflict. Bombing Yemen will do nothing to stop attacks on commercial shipping - in fact, it probably will escalate them. Worse yet, starting a new conflict doesn’t help the negative reputation the US has built up over the past few months in the eyes of the so-called global south. Instead, this gives China an excellent opportunity to step in as a (actually) neutral power.
There are a dozen countries in that area with people sympathetic to their cause. I'd not be surprised if the majority of their logistics is privately sourced.

This is the reason they still exist, it's just easy to blame a single villain and call it a day.
A pedestrian won't be given the the walk signal while the turn light is green. I'm not sure if this feature would ever appear on an intersection with pedestrian signals.
It was absolutely the intention for traffic/urban planners to prioritize motorist travel times, which is why you see long delays on "beg buttons" at intersections, or making peds wait for a cycle or more of the lights, and so on.

Some cities like Cambridge, MA integrate a default pedestrian cycle at all phases of the lights, sync the lights to not provide a "green wave", and have an extensive arrangement of one-way streets to discourage drivers from using residential roads as shortcuts.
> Presumably, Darwin would be pleasantly surprised to learn how his fame grew after his death, in 1882. From what he could see when he was old, however, the world had passed him by, and he had become irrelevant.

Wow he really fucks it up too. Darwin didn’t die some obscure pauper. He was already pretty famous in scientific circles when the Origin of Species was published and by the time he died the theory of evolution was the prevailing theory by a longshot. He was as close to a house hold name as a living scientist could be in that age.

He was only “irrelevant” in the sense that an entire generation had taken his ideas and developed it to such an extent that he couldn’t keep up as a single human. Centuries of study in naturalism was recontextualized in the span of decades.
They've held out for years against the most notoriously incompetent militaries in the world. After what happened with the Ukraine and Russia, who knows what's going to happen here, but the Houthi track record is a little built up.
That is a wierdddddd set of comments.
Alexa is almost entirely cloud-based. The devices are mostly just a speaker, a microphone, and a power supply. That s why they’re so cheap and why Alexa has been added to so many different form factors and device types.
My recently purchased truck came with Alexia. I think they wanted $10/month to enable it's full functionality. Today I figured out how to hide the Alexia button from the main UI, and I celebrated.
This is entirely false, you must be blocking the requests on the network level or something.

For one the getfirefox.com redirect includes tracking parameters in the destination URL, then there's Google Tag Manager, there is Sentry, some pages with their first party analytics solutions like Glean and more.
Think this should be highlighted in the article, because that's actually pretty cool but the article gave me impression that it's a simple sugar over child_process only.
Ansar Allah was targeting commercial shipping in the Red Sea long before the Gaza crisis.
Cruise missiles are for targets many hundreds of kilometers away. These just have to make it from the shores of the Red sea to the middle, a considerably shorter distance than what cruise missiles are really meant for.

These are more like howitzers with self propelled projectiles. These are much simpler than cruise missiles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-propelled_artillery
> I would much rather someone use this tool and buy a ticket to a show or an LP that stream over Spotify.

Sure! But at the end of the day, most of the people doing this will listen to hundreds of artists who they don't purchase tickets from, or buy their music directly.

The fact that royalty payment are so low is sad. But if you use this tool, you're lowering them even further to $0.00
We use Alexa every day for lights, weather, and timers for cooking. It understands us correctly 98% of the time. The compelling thing about it is that it works purely by voice. I don't have to push any buttons. We have 4 Echos in different rooms so I don't have to have my phone on me all the time.