skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, there are limits. I didn't have access to some cool hardware. On the other hand, a lot of hardware today is available in the cloud.

But that's not the key point. The issue isn't "I can't do LLM because I don't have a super-gpu-cluster." The issue is "I stepped out of doing just enough work to pass, and found areas I can play in, while staying inside my budget constraints."

As students we all have budget constraints. I built my (my actual own) computer using parts discarded by companies. My first hard drive lived in a cigar box. Of course it was an xt when 286s were already mainstream - but I put it together.

It taught me not to focus on what I couldn't buy. But to learn whatever I could with the resources I could lay hands on. And there's lots you can do today with bottom of the barrel hardware.

There's a bottomless pile if excuses out there. And no shortage of candidates telling me them. The guy who looks past the excuses, and finds a way regardless, that's "experience" I'm looking for.
Someone I know dressed up as Drago (Dolph Lundgren), boxing shorts and gloves and all. He's blonde, too, so there's no mistaking who he was dressed as.

He is, however, like 30cm shorter. Dolph is tall.

So at the con he goes to Carl Weathers for a photo and autograph. Weathers immediately lights up, smiles, extends his arms, and exclaims "you've shrunk!!".

Seems like a great guy.

I'll try to find the photo.

Edit: https://fnalbum-cf.habets.se/bucket/2k.webp/FC9D1104-62DA-47...
> They both work perfectly well without any connection to anything, and not once have they even tried to get me to connect them.

Is there an open Wi-Fi network nearby?
Deep analysis of Pocket and other crapware would be nice.
> I either will be informed some other way that doesn’t involve unwanted propaganda, or I do not care.

These people said they didn't care, and they're literally in the news saying "why didn't anyone tell me?"

> similar behaviours in the physical realm include rape.

There's stretching an analogy, and there's comparing junk mail to rape. This is a first for me.
" These lecture notes, at least several of them, made their first appearance on the web in 2006."

Looks like it's a broad and deep foundational course. I'd imagine really appreciating this theory priming, and then taking on more domain-specific courses.

Nice to have all of these materials available!
It's not a "Malay accent" but a simple "written as heard".
And it was based or at least inspired on the previous XForms[1] toolkit – the one with way too many bevel shapes for buttons etc., not the XML thing. Probably at least partially done because XForms wasn't open source, and to provide a more "modern" C++ API.

Meanwhile, XForms has been open-sourced, but FLTK being in a different language and having evolved a bit since its creation didn't suffer from the problems Lesstif had and is standing on its own rather well. And despite being C++, it pops up rather often when you're looking for GUIs with decent language bindings (e.g. for Lua or Rust). Probably because it's less a moving target than Qt or, heck, Gtk.

1: http://xforms-toolkit.org
What’s hard to understand exactly? I’ve pulled a brief summary from both links here to make sure it’s clearer.

> Research is ongoing to understand the mechanisms of PFAS toxicity. The epidemiological evidence suggests associations between increases in exposure to (specific) PFAS and certain health effects

* Heart

Increases in cholesterol levels (PFOA, PFOS, PFNA, PFDA)

* Vaccine

Lower antibody response to some vaccines (PFOA, PFOS, PFHxS, PFDA)

* Liver

Changes in liver enzymes (PFOA, PFOS, PFHxS)

* Pregnancy complications

Pregnancy-induced hypertension and preeclampsia (PFOA, PFOS)

* Infant birth weights

Small decreases in birth weight (PFOA, PFOS)

* Cancer

Kidney and testicular cancer (PFOA)

And

An estimated 200 million U.S. residents receive PFAS-contaminated drinking water, and state-level testing indicates widespread contamination of environmental media, (13) yet tremendous data gaps exist related to PFAS contamination and human exposure. (2,14) The only federal drinking water testing initiative with PFAS data to date, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule 3 (UCMR3), focused on large drinking water systems, had high reporting thresholds (10–90 ng/L), and excluded private wells. (15) The EPA has developed nonbinding Health Advisory Levels (HALs) for four PFAS, including updated HALs for PFOA and PFOS at “near zero” levels, (16) but no federal limits on PFAS in public drinking water currently exist. (2)

That set of known harmful effects + 2/3 of the population having the stuff in their drinking water… ain’t great.
To be fair to the regulators, they have been busy lately:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/...

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/12/...

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...
I am building the perplexity for workspaces. It became #1 AI product on PH
As a PM, I've always found it hard to keep reading documentation and messages to understand the information I can access. I recently started learning how to code and was inspired by perplexity. So i built an similar to it that generates direct responses to all my queries using the workspace information (jira tickets, slack messages, etc)
I mean, even if you are not aware of that and you start wondering what MDN is an acronym for, that’s the obvious result to arrive at?
this is hilarious, I cracked up at the loud part. Talented singer for sure with amplification down to boot!
Last year I had a "oh, shit, I'm old" moment when I was talking with a 20-something year old who didn't know what a dial tone was. She never used a landline phone.
Yeah, I got yelled at once by JP passport control for coming back after a visa run, mainly because on the entry card I put a residential address (short term stay place) and that I was staying another 90 days.

The three main things JP passport control are looking for are asylum seekers, people over and people that are illegally working under the table and not paying into the Japanese tax/retirement system.
To be fair, if you're young enough, nothing is familiar anymore, because that's no longer a goal for UIs.
>I've been seeing this sentiment since 2001 at least. No one ever follows through; if they did we would have seen this already in the desktop stats.

There has been an inflection point crossed lately, because of Proton and the Steam Deck. Linux is at 1.95% market share on Steam today. A year ago it was 1.3%.
> All my appliances are mid-century or older. Parts are simple and easily fabricated if necessary. Having a restored 85-year-old refrigerator (compressor and refrigerant still original) in active use, it's amazing how efficient it actually is.

I don't think the word efficient means what you think it means.

Have you ever measured their power consumption?
This is different. If you ever worked with models as a photographer, you'd have noticed that many models that look great in "2D camera projection" look weirdly distorted in the real life. VR basically showcases this weirdness and what tended to be attractive in 2D is suddenly repulsive in 3D.
I think it's the same reason I guess why people mourn e.g. BeOS.

The Atari was a nice system, but it wasn't ground-breaking. The Amiga was decades ahead of it's time and could have been so much more if Commodore had any business-savvy. It's hard to overstate the impact of seeing an Amiga A500 in full flight, coming from the previous generation of 8-bit machines. It felt like it was straight from the future (and still does in many ways).

It also straddled the line perfectly of being ridiculously powerful for the era yet simple enough and approachable for a kid/teenager with dedication to understand it on a level that simply isn't possible these days. To quote myself from an article I wrote on the floppy disk[1]:

"I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it is exactly about the Amiga that captures me in a way that no other computer ever did. Part of it is I think because the Amiga was the last system that was simple enough that one person could reasonably hold the entire machine in their head.

It was complex, true, but with enough studying and time you could know pretty much everything about every single bit of the Amiga’s memory space, workbench, the custom chips and so on. That’s what makes it so special and endearing.

That simply doesn’t exist on other platforms. I mean modern systems are amazing - and I’ve worked on some serious big-iron hardware in my time - but you could spend an entire lifetime now simply becoming an expert in one tiny piece of the whole system. Modern computers just don’t have the accessibility that the Amiga had, and it straddled the divide perfectly between being simple enough to know it and love it, yet powerful enough to do things you’d never dreamed possible."

[1]=https://www.markround.com/blog/2019/12/30/back-to-the-floppy...
After reading all these, I've landed at the following conclusion:

Regardless of its architecture there is only a finite amount of information the language model can work with at any given time. It depends on the task at hand which way of "forgetting" causes the least problems.

For coding and math a perfect context with a well defined maximum length of 16k..256k tokens paired with high quality ICL would work better than automated "random" forgetting. However, it requires a good strategy to present only the information relevant for the task to fit into the maximum context length.

For free-form literature and other non-technical stuff automated forgetting is likely beneficial, because you don't need to come up with a strategy to choose what's important to keep in-context. What you get is automated gradual forgetting and "mixing up" past memories, just like in humans.

Since I'm a software developer geek I strongly prefer the first one, but as you can see, it depends on the task at hand.
Hahaha o yea forgot :-) I mean a Steve Jobs yell, not sure that a Ballmer yell would’ve worked equally well on the product people.
> there is rarely a "No, go away", but only "No, but annoy me again in the future"

Same with those damn YouTube shorts. They even have a dedicated button in the toolbar that cannot be hidden, on the mobile app.
You understand the intenet isn't made up of US states, right?
As a user, this annoys me too because it's so intrusive and obnoxious. I don't care about the privacy angle, but their AI isn't as good as Copilot and is much worse than ChatGpt. Tried it for a day or two and then wanted to turn it off since it wasn't very good, but you can't. And it keeps bugging me on every update.

This is the sort of thing that makes me reconsider using Jetbrains at all, even though I prefer it to VScode. Enshittification rarely reverses once it starts...
Exactly, you need to have Internet service, and the phone is an add-on to that. What you won't get is a standalone emulation of Alexander Graham Bell's Plain Old Telephone Service without also having to pay for the broadband.
Basically the ability to perform a task on the first try, without any feedback. E.g. a robot that is trained to pick up blocks being told to shoot a basketball though a hoop, and making a reasonable attempt at doing so on the first try (doesn't have to be successful, but has to in some way resemble throwing a ball through a hoop rather than picking up blocks).

I can see how the machine learning definition is similar, but the whole idea of retraining and fine-tuning is foreign to a lot of subfields in GOFAI.
Which of these are OS?
This film gets bashed often but I remember seeing it in the cinema when it was released and I absolutely adored it, and still do. I’ve ’inflicted’ it on several friends and acquaintances — and keep in mind I’m no M. Night Shyamalan fan having never seen Unbrekable and having walked out of the cinema midway through The Last Airbender that I hold to be one of the worst films ever. Anyway back to The Village: its scenery and ambiance were absolutely perfect. The twist was pure genius.
Wait, what? There's OpenSearch and web extensions which let you add more search engines (removing builtin ones is harder though).
I don't know, Windows 11 came with many things I've wanted for years:

- notepad with tabs

- shell UI with tabs, VT-100 support and ability to replace the shell

- Paint.net with AI

- even Windbg has massively improved
Japanese also developed a Chu Nom type system (manyogana) to represent Japanese sounds using Chinese characters, and it was almost as complex, requiring a good understanding of Chinese as a foundation. But manyogana was simplified into the two syllabaries used today, hiragana and katakana.
The reliability of fridges was "Buy it for $300, plug it in, it works continuously for 10 years with no servicing" so the reliability really had nowhere to go but down.

The reliability of cars, on the other hand, used to be pretty awful. Lots of maintenance, regularly needing repair work done - not to mention regular servicing, oil changes and tyre changes. And people replacing their 5-year-old cars because 'old cars just aren't reliable'. So there was a lot of scope for improvement.
Well, of course we use Pocket if the native browser bookmarking function doesn't save the full text of the page for search. Why can't we have the tiniest improvement for bookmarking in browsers in 25 years? It's like they took an oath to never improve it.
>if they did we would have seen this already in the desktop stats

Well you can see it. Linux is used by 4.25% of all English speaking Steam users. And its trending upward.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
Platforms Killed Pitchfork
To be fair, they do seem to immediately want to reverse it?

Not that I really disagree with the premise though. IntelliJ has not gotten any better with every update for a few years, but it does get slower and slower.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. It's the truth. Back in the 90s many of us invested hundreds of hours mastering Perl and post 2008 ended up using Python/Ruby/etc more frequently for various reasons and now speaking for myself I can barely decipher a line of Perl. It's syntax is extremely hard to maintain in memory when you stop using it.
I suppose with up to eight eyes, you can get a lot reading done.
txtai: An embeddings database for semantic search, graph networks and RAG
There's some nice stuff in the new features and everybody has their favourites. Some like the subroutine signatures, but I'm a big fan of the hash slices and postfix dereferencing in v5.20.

https://www.effectiveperlprogramming.com/category/perl/new-f...
Just for the record, you can absolutely change the default search engine in Safari and Firefox. I use kagi in both, so bangs are supported everywhere.
Deep tech investing, reframing the narrative, retrofuturism
I think it is obvious that you cannot say what counts as manslaughter if you don't in fact know what counts as manslaughter. "Something I read about in an article, where people died and it seemed very wrong" is not the definition, and shouldn't be, for obvious reasons.
We do not require to have experience with all tech listed, but the more of it one is familiar with, the faster onboarding will be.

For example, our last hire knew Haskell/Python/TS/React well, and got into C++ in our project.

And of course the list helps people decide if they would enjoy working with our stack.
If you need to give out a number that you'll never pick up, why not just use any random non-working number?
> Our economies, political systems and culture are all built on the concept of infinite growth

Not really, everything could work exactly the same as now even when growth stops. The current system did bet on growth continuing for 40 more years, but there is no infinite there, other than those bets failing there is nothing in current society that demands infinite growth.
> That stove top broke after a couple months, but luckily we're in Denmark where the warranty is a year

You may or may not be a fan of the Euro, but EU law is two year warranty for consumers.
The most annoying attempt to foist Edge as a browser is the (new?) setting of a separate default browser for opening links in Outlook 365. Took me 10 minutes to understand why Edge opens. WTF.
It's fair enough I shouldn't have posted it.
Also a big difference between applications so anomaly detection has a wider set of working solutions than prediction if such a thing is even possible
The film didn't work for me, because I didn't realise the "twist" was supposed to be a twist. I had assumed it from the start and was expecting the reverse to be the twist.
A book about this topic which I enjoyed is "Learning Linux Binary Analysis" by Ryan O'neil.
Exploring Felix Klein's contested modernism
Same here! For those not similarly blessed, the Internet archive has a copy.

https://archive.org/details/CompleteSpectrumROMDisassemblyTh...

Of particular note, the use of a stack based VM for floating point.
If you are curious about how small a ELF binary file can be, you might like the following amusing article: https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.ht...
Then stop buying games that are not?
Same. I absolutely loved how the reveal retroactively revised the whole story.
Ofsted inspectors 'make up evidence' about a school's performance when IT fails
It's not the same situation as back then.
1. They don't have the same browser market share at all.
2. They don't have the same operating system market share they used to either (specifically, they lost the mobile space - which is how majority of people in the world access the internet).
3. It's easier to use another browser now on Windows then back when it was at its worst in 00s (where IE was more or less part of explorer.exe / core of Windows).

Above can make a huge difference legally. Specifically your reference to the previous court case, which was built on point 1-2 above. Key word here being monopoly and how it's defined.

Apple lived (until a few weeks ago, still do outside EU) in a world where it's OK to have it basically impossible to install another (real) browser on it's biggest OS, or install any app of your choosing without their blessing (and a 10-30% cut on revenue!) for that matter.

It's complex for sure.

It's unfortunate imo that Mozilla/FF got squashed by Chrome, and also made some questionable strategic decisions in the last 10-15 years. Performance, simplicity, stability and keeping up with me web tech being key USPs of Chrome, compared to competition. Note that absent from that list is monopolistic abuse (even though Google has it's fair share of that as well). In other words, you don't win the browser war by simply using monopolistic abuse as a strategy, you need to primarily win on value to your end users. That's at least how it's been in the past.
No. The technology is different this time. I argue software is a form of literacy, and literacy demands openness.

My great hope is the VW emissions scandal where the CTO of the company had to commit lines of code that said “do billion dollar crime”.

In a git repo.

We can see your crimes now.

Wikipedia is this in microcosm - we can see the edits, we can use software to watch for us, everything is in the open and the feudalism and rent seeking exist best in the hidden darkness

What we do with that is up to us.
Put the offset at the end! Famously, the table of contents of a .zip file are the end rather than the beginning, which has many useful properties (such as being able to patch the contents by only appending to an existing file). And you can concatenate an executable and a .zip and get a file which is both.
I got an eye opener when a fridge with a 10yr parts warranty came with a $2100 labor bill to actually install the broken condensor. I'm not sure why the condensor would be built in such a way that swapping one out can cost $2100...but it was cheaper to purchase another fridge, this time with a top of the line parts and labor warranty

This infuriated me greatly because of the waste, not one of money, but for the environment. I considered paying the $2100 just to avoid the environmental waste, but realized this would probably be only one in a line of upcoming repairs.
European fridges also have a freezer, while remaining single door. Top half fridge, bottom half freezer.
https://pubs.acs.org/cms/10.1021/acs.estlett.2c00502/asset/i...

This isn’t compelling? These aren’t population centers they are known PFAS contamination sites — not following population. They are airports (PFAS in firefighter foam was a massive source of contamination), industrial sites, military sites and wastewater treatment plants. Only one of those are inherently associated to population centers.

What kind of map would be more compelling? Maybe a more interactive one?

https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/

The usgs has different data and visualizations:

https://www.usgs.gov/tools/pfas-us-tapwater-interactive-dash...

I also know there is a map for Europe:

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/02/23/f...

The study I linked to suggests that the methodology used to collect the information is flawed (the EPA didn’t even test private wells of any kind for example) and suggested that this is only perhaps 1/3 of the actual contamination.

What’s important to understand is that many groundwater systems complex and quite a few are connected so when you add chemicals that don’t break down to them you can make changes that aren’t potentially even fixable. And we are talking about the vast majority of usable water on earth being contaminated.

> When many people think of a water source, they think of lakes, rivers and streams; in other words, surface water. However, of all of the usable freshwater in the world, approximately 97 percent of it is groundwater. According to the United Nations, 10 million cubic kilometres of water are stored underground. The United States Geological Survey states that there is about 4.2 million cubic kilometres of water within 0.8 kilometre of the earth’s surface. Environment Canada cites a study that estimates that all of the groundwater in the world would cover the surface of the earth to a depth of 120 metres, while all of the surface freshwater would only cover the earth to a depth of 0.25 metre! While groundwater estimates can vary, scientists agree that there is a lot of water under the earth’s surface!

Source: https://www.safewater.org/fact-sheets-1/2017/1/23/groundwate...
> Some articles require pretty strict criteria to edit

500 edits and a 30-day history are not "pretty strict" - it's the minimum evidence that you have a basic knowledge of the rules. Protected articles are articles that tend to attract wingnuts and agenda-pushers.

I keep on coming across editors with a history of (say) 50 minor edits, 100% of which have been quickly reverted for being nonsense or worse. It's a blessing that such editors can't alter high-profile sesitive articles.
If an AI model can tell if an image is faked, it can tell another AI model that an image is faked. False detections are inevitable and as the line gets blurrier as models learn to do their jobs better, false detections will become more frequent. There really isn't any outcome where it's plausible that they will become less frequent.

So that isn't going to be an arms race, it's going to be a massacre.

The cryptography stuff also has the potential to end badly, you can end-to-end cryptographically sign all you want but inputs are still analog, humans have been faking things "in-camera" for a long time and there's nothing stopping anyone from reading ChatGPT from their phone and typing it into Word on their laptop. So sure you have the verification that something wasn't altered digitally, but now you have to ask yourself whether you trust that every photon that hit the photosensor is authentic, that every sentence typed by a human was conceptualized by one.