skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many, many Starlink terminals and service subscriptions used in war zones by members of the UA army are donated and/or fully or partially paid for by private people - ukrainians and many more nationalities (including UAE). I personally helped stuff a van full of Starlink terminals and drones and my friend drove it to the UA border (though this was a much larger group effort than just us - especially the finance and sourcing).

The UA army command is doing everything it can, but it's not unlimited and everywhere. The war effort relies on help of private individuals and groups a lot. Many soldiers are using equipment sourced entirely from private sources - all they got officially was a uniform and gun. All the drone videos you see on the internet - these are almost 100% bought privately.
I'm familiar with the doll research, the children were asked which doll was prettier and chose the white doll.

That's not the same as preferring the white doll.
Unless there's official documentation that this is officially supported, hacks like these can stop working at any moment. For an unimportant machine, sure, use whatever third-party tool to bypass the installer you want. For a production machine, I don't think that's wise.
Ah... Interesting theory.

But if this actor bloke can tank car sales in the whole UK, with just an article in some newspaper...shouldn't News Corp be fawning over and toadying up to him? After all, he might write another article, telling all their advertisers to take their marketing budgets elsewhere.
Blindsight hit all the right hard sci-fi notes for me. I've yet to find something that scratches that same itch.
Great article. One note: it’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art, not Modern Art (you’re thinking of MoMA).
Does this change anything? It is the warming that is harmful, not the cause of it.
AirBnB comes to mind. https://airbnb.io
It's questionable how much the Tonga eruption which sent an 'Unprecedented Amount of Water Into Stratosphere' has had on the climate. Some temporary warming was certainly predicted and this would be global.
At the core, it's all military technology. Canned food was invented for Napoleon's Grand Armee.
Then there's the famous list of joke languages which includes C-, named after the grade its creator got in his compilers class. :-)
The biggest problem for UAF is the pause in flow of ammo and weapon systems from US.
I can see a lot of potential for sabotaging the russian forces there
Nitpick: it’s not “Sudo for Linux”, it’s just “sudo” and runs on a wide variety of operating systems aside from Linux. It actually predates Linux by around a decade.
It just seems like there are probably enough of us who do thrive in the early-stage startup atmosphere that someone could make good money targeting that niche with advice. We're different enough to be a subculture, but we're still working within a lot of the constraints of systems that weren't actually designed for people like us.

For example, I've searched for but never been able to find actual advice about how to think about private company stock options. Everybody ends up writing them off with a, "Well, there's a decent chance they won't be worth anything, so just ignore them and try to operate within the world we do understand." Nobody quantifies the risk. Nobody talks about how to hedge against it prudently. Nobody talks about what to do when the piddly little number of shares the company tossed you as a customer support agent are suddenly worth half a million dollars and are a life-changing amount of money, never mind what to do if you had a real stake. Nobody talks about how to evaluate which early companies do have a strong shot at "making it" and which ones are doomed.

It's not impossible to think these things through and evaluate them. It's just hard, and not mainstream. For those of us for whom "instability" is a feature, not a bug, advice from someone who gets that and thinks it through would be infinitely more valuable than advice from the hordes who tell us we should just try to be different.
Or roam the hallway, do nothing but bitch and all.

If I'm terminated I'm not gonna care about wrapping things up, I'm out of there.
Because NATO did not expand. Countries decided to join NATO. You may think this is the same with other words, but it isn't.

In the first version there's only two actors in the world, who can make decisions: Russia and NATO (or rather USA, for they argue NATO is basically the USA with another name). In the second version countries are free to decide who they associate with. There wasn't some empty space that NATO moved into. The countries who were there said "hey, NATO. Russia has been attacking and oppressing us for a long time and we fear they will do it again. We'd like to join."

To answer your second question: Exactly what Russias neighbors feared is the reason. Russia is unhappy they couldn't oppress their neighbors anymore since 1990 and they want to do it again. They cannot really do it to the countries that already joined NATO, so they did it to the country that was late to the party.
Russia could economically collapse as well though it’s true that they have a longer runway. But as far as corruption goes I think Russia is far more corrupt than Ukraine, US or China. Russia is literally a mob state in its current form.
Cosmic Aerospace
Beyond the unnecessary spending right now (since our car is basically new), the charging infrastructure is our biggest worry. Even when places supposedly have charging spots, I keep hearing about how many are broken and how few are actually working. I don't want to sit still for even 1-2 hours, and I certainly don't want to sit and wait for one of the few working spots and then sit there charging, too.

I suspect some of that is overblown, but I'm not about to find out with a $50k investment.
The spoofing could be local to exactly the device you want to spoof. Just put a very weak sender on top of the antenna.

Agree about the other stuff though, and the points made in other comments that Starlink is sort of a GPS itself.
1) why is that quite clear?

2) so?
Not answering also lets them know the number is valid, unless they receive some sort of error after dialing.
> Postgres also allows a client to, midway through a query, request that the query reverse direction and re-return previous results in reverse order.

What is that useful for?
Perhaps you could expand beyond that flippant snark and help people understand what they're missing? Otherwise, your comment doesn't really contribute much beyond making you feel better than others.
The ones paid for by US DoD contract?
Seeking Datasets for Evaluating File Chunking Strategies for RAG/LLM
Hi everyone,

I’m delvingg into optimizing RAG for ingest pipelines involving textual documents such as PDFs, Office documents (Word, PowerPoint, etc.), HTML files, emails, and plain text. My aim is to benchmark file chunking strategies acros these formats to evaluate the impact on the accuracy of the RAG process itself. For this, I need a dataset that includes:

- Textual Documents: A diverse set of PDFs, Office files, HTML documents, emails, and plain texts to test chunking strategies.

- Associated Questions: A set of questions or queries tailored to the content of these documents, to assess how well the RAG process retrieves and generates accurate information based on the chunks.

- Evaluation Metrics or Ground Truth: Ideally, the dataset would come with a benchmark or ground truth for the answers to these questions, allowing for a clear assessment of the RAG's accuracy and performance.

If anyone has come across datasets fitting this description or has experience creating or using similar datasets for RAG accuracy evaluation, I’d greatly appreciate your insights. Additionally, recommendations for tools, frameworks, or methodologies for conducting these evaluations would be incredibly valuable.

Thanks in advance for any help or direction you can provide!
Can You Help Me Stop Mindlessly Scrolling on My Phone?
This (developers having significant time to work on hobby/side projects) seems to be pretty common among experiences I read about online (i.e. Hacker News, blogs) but basically unheard of among people I work with/talk to IRL. I'm very curious how people manage to carve out this time? Personally I find it very difficult. It was virtually impossible when I had a full time job - I guess that's what full time means. But now I work freelance, and while I'm able to spend some of my "work" time doing things I want to do vs need to do, I still have a lot of actual work to do and thus find it very hard to do anything meaningful with my "extra" time.
> For example, before AC, electrification required 1000x more wire than it does now. Streets were covered in poles and electrical wire.

What do you mean "before AC"? AC was invented more than 100 years ago.

The wires are still there. The power companies just tend to bury them underground nowadays. Out of sight, out of mind.

In any case, what does this have to do with global warming?

> Cars produced far more and worse pollution.

The change is due to government regulation of emissions. Good luck getting the auto manufacturers to give a crap on their own.

Even EVs are heavily subsidized by government funds.

Besides, the primary cause of global warming is manufacturing, not auto emissions, which is why global warming hasn't stopped despite an improved emissions situation. And it's also why accelerationism is not a solution.
Shallow is still a depth.
i don't think that calling the police in the middle of a war is very consequential
A password manager LastPass calls "fraudulent" booted from App Store
Draining dozens of millions of dollars may have even worse effect on Firefox.
Yeah, I like Hono, but it was surprising to see a react alternative from them. I am not sure why they are trying to compete with preact/atomico.
Is there a way to login to a website for the website scraper?
Latency and bandwidth are not completely unrelated.

When you saturate the available bandwidth you simply cannot send more packets through the same channel so the only option is to queue (or drop and resend later), which means the packet will be delivered later.

You seem to be describing a severe congestion at the ISP side due to your ISP not having enough bandwidth to handle their peak load. Surely, they could work smarter and selectively shape the traffic so that they drop the traffic you think is less important than yours but a) they may have crappy traffic shaping infrastructure b) they may not agree with your characterization of traffic priorities and they will rather not throttle video streaming or whatnot.

EDIT: my point is that it's very hard to actually know what's the cause for the high latency unless you actually work for the ISP. Several causes can have the same observables
I love Ted Chiang, and enjoyed Exhalation, but personally I would recommend Stories of Your Life and Others as the first book of short stories. I found it had a higher percentage of home runs.
> would be nice to explore the topic more than “Musk is bad”

Isaacson’s Starlink claims are muddied.

But Musk has tweeted Kremlin propaganda points, e.g. on its proximate nuclear red lines (which, for the record, we’ve since passed). I blame David Sacks for giving him bad advice. But whatever the reason, it’s fair to question whether this was intentional at some level.
This reads like a commercial.
I do vaguely remember the Virtual dom was being advertised as faster. E.g. minimizing of updates by evaluating the dom-tree and e.g. moving entire branches. I dont think it was devs misreading intent here, maybe just in hindsight that dom-manipulation wasnt all that important of a bottleneck
Interesting, this is the organization I was referring to: https://wrightfoundation.org/

But I wonder if the two are related?

https://wrightgrad.edu/
Tucker did an excellent job with this one. I'm glad he asked about Evan Gershkovich. Putin didn't reveal anything new though
Here's two posts I wrote on how I do email tokens and async workers:

• https://taylor.town/pg-email-token

• https://taylor.town/pg-task

Here's a condensed version of how I do login/signup:

app.post("/signup", async c => {
const body = await c.req.parseBody();
const usr = {
email: body.email.toString(),
password: sql`crypt(${body.password.toString()}, gen_salt('bf', 8))`,
} as Record<string, unknown>;
const [{ usr_id, email, token }] = await sql`
with usr_ as (insert into usr ${sql(usr)} returning *)
select usr_id, email, email_token(now(), email) as token from usr_
`;
await sendVerificationEmail(email, token);
await setSignedCookie(c, "usr_id", usr_id, cookieSecret);
return c.redirect("/u");
});

app.post("/login", async c => {
const { email, password } = await c.req.parseBody();
const [usr] = await sql`
select *, password = crypt(${password.toString()}, password) AS is_password_correct
from usr where email = ${email.toString()}
`;
if (!usr || !usr.is_password_correct) return c.html(<p>Your password was incorrect.</p>);
if (!usr.email_verified_at) await sendVerificationEmail(usr.email, usr.token);
await setSignedCookie(c, "usr_id", usr.usr_id, cookieSecret);
return c.redirect("/u");
});
Indonesia's election is next week and they also impose 3 day "quiet day" where no political campaign may occur. I don't know if we'll have internet shutdown though.
Although both sides know the others locations pretty well anyway from drones and informants. And presumably the communications are encrypted.
If predictions of 8 to 10 degrees Celsius warming by the end of the century are true, then humanity is absolutely doomed.
So the answer to this question: "Do you believe that wealth is an innate right no matter the societal cost -- that people should be able to own such things or amounts of things that it is to the detriment of those around them?"

Is 'no'? Couldn't you have just answered with that?
I believe that AGI is capable of all of this. Eventually. If it doesn't kill us at that point. If we don't get enslaved by the corporations who control AGI first.

Expecting it to happen just in time to save us from ourselves? That sounds more like religious belief to me. We're burning down the garden in the hope we will find a yellow brick road under the ashes.
I remember when Firefox did themselves a bud light when they ousted Eich. People hold grudges.
These are conversations just like talking about code editors and so on. No one is right or wrong. But if I had to choose - micro services hard harder to control and secure. And vi? not for me ;)
> unlike other countries

Unlike many other countries. I live in Europe and certainly don’t need provide an ID without a cause or even carry one with myself
don;t they also use android phones? or iphones
The Rowan Atkinson article in question and some discussion here at the time 8 months ago:

I love electric vehicles – and was early adopter. But increasingly I feel duped

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36180186

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36174660

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36193984
Fine-grained reactive, i.e. solid. Svelte works for that too.
> It seems safe to say we are now locked in to a path that will break the Paris Agreement

I've been of the opinion that this was obvious from the day the Paris agreement was signed, and should be absolutely no surprise to anyone.

Not saying we shouldn't try, more energy makes for more extreme weather which is not great.
Not sure what's a scam about Mozilla's VPN offering? AFAIK it's powered by Mullvad, one of the VPN providers with the best reputation when it comes to privacy.
The world isn't just a collection of independent climates.

Surviving in one of today's extreme climates doesn't necessarily provide proof of surviving when the previous extreme is now the mildest climate.

Even if the human body can take the heat, it still needs to be fed and watered. Those systems currently aren't in your climate, in many cases.
Well .. which one is better for your chances to get more money in the performance review?
Original source; https://www.semafor.com/article/02/08/2024/tucker-carlson-ed...
Yeah, listening in wouldn't work because you can always stack more encryption on top of the one the carrier might listen in to. But Starlink can't operate without exact knowledge of antenna locations for aiming the phased arrays (some sibling said that it can operate without GPS, but I read that as it's able to locate the antenna on its own after a crude signal handshake is done).

But in a world where Musk/Starlink/someone inside Starlink/someone with sufficient leverage over Starlink was trying to hinder the Russian invasion, they would allow Starlink terminals to be sourced through plausibly shady channels and then operate in Russian hands for quite a while, before striking locations and only then shutting down.

Or even go all Ultra on them and start an elaborate programme to create alternative explamations for the data use.

One reason I don't consider this likely: imagine how hard Musk would enjoy going through his very own version of the Cryptinomicon Ultra plot line. The idea that he might be able to keep that a secret just doesn't fit in my skull.
A Kafkaesque digital relationship with ourselves
I do so love my dead animals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
The hardest part for me to accept is that there are so many people who just don't care. Not about the disasters, the climate refugees, the death toll, the extinction of thousands of species, respiratory diseases, etc.

How can people just accept all that as a fact of life when it's all man-made horrors?
There you go - 100% right you are.
Second this recommendation. Blindsight hits much harder and faster than Egan - and in my opinion the writing is much tighter. Similar focus on science-based idea exploration, particularly in regards to theories of consciousness, brain structure, probability, and vampires. If you like Egan I'd be shocked if you didn't like watts. He is one of the hidden gems of science fiction and an absolute gift to humanity.
I doubt any major tech company is going to take that risk. Even if legally binding, the PR nightmare would hardly be worth the minimal reward.
Brand Fatigue (2011)
For reference: all that CO2 is equal to about 0.04% of human atmosphere. Of which 3% is from human activity.

So 0.0012% of CO2 in atmosphere caused by humans. Nature is responsible for the remaining 0.0388% in atmosphere.
>Spiral diopter: freeform lenses with enhanced multifocal behavior [full article/no paywall]

https://opg.optica.org/optica/fulltext.cfm?uri=optica-11-2-2...

Abstract

Lens design is of paramount importance in the evolving world of technology, where compactness and high optical performance are a necessity, ranging from smartphones and wearable devices to vehicles and virtual reality. Freeform design techniques allow us to transcend traditional limitations, but creating new optics remains a substantial challenge unless we consider unconventional physical phenomena. Here, we introduce a lens type based on freeform design, employing spiralization of one of its diopters that results in optical vortices. This enables multifocality, primarily serving needs in ophthalmology; however, its potential applications could broadly impact many other domains. In particular, this lens design could be crucial in miniaturizing emerging technologies while retaining their optical quality.
It's pretty cheap to call musk a pro russian.

He is the one private person that helped ukraines war effort the most by providing them starlink in the first place.

Is it so hard to understand that there are reasons for him to not allow the usage for deep strikes, besides him beeing on putins payroll?
It's the second time in my life that I encounter the word "doolally", and I love it.
Joke identification confirmed. Proceed with subroutine "LAUGH".
Because Putin's statements are not mere random utterances of 'fun facts'. How many times has Putin said 'Garry Kasparov is a smart guy'? (Kasparov is a former world chess champion, Russian Presidential Candidate, and now works on Renew Democracy Initiative, a pro-democracy NGO, which opposes spread of autocracy). Or, for that matter, the same abt Navalny or any of his other opponents ?

Reductionist thinking is convenient, but far too often misleading.
Does that mean the user's code is compiled in the browser? Is the compliation a feature of Cheerpj?
Lots will be paid for by the DoD, for the others: ask the AFU - the users could supply their account details up through the chain of command (or directly via GIS Arta).

Actually, I'd hope this is already happening regularly anyway so they can cut off any terminals captured by the enemy
Trustworthy Satellite Earth Observations for Science and Society
Connect() – why are you so slow?
>(numbers invented)

all numbers are invented ;)
I think hunter-gatherers in Antarctica might be fine eventually.
Yeah, you would have to either 1) move those pieces away temporarily or 2) make the squares larger (or pieces narrower).
Humans live anywhere in the world with a average temperature range from -20 to 30 degrees. This is a range of 50 degrees. 10 degrees increase wont kill us.
Pregnancy doesn't just happen. Cases of rape excepted, the child in the mother's womb came to be in that womb, and to depend on the mother for survival, due to actions taken by the mother. Therefore, the mother is responsible for the well-being of her child.
At this point the biggest risk for shareholders is that a company CEO cannot answer an AI strategy question in an earnings call.

That’s why.
perhaps `admininator`
If you build a global thing like this it’s gonna be damn hard to keep anyone anywhere from using it unless you hard geofence.
> Egan’s prose, characterisation and plotting are often weak, but almost every page has a new creative concept.

I agree with all of that. I was thinking recently about how Egan compares to Neal Stephenson after some discussion of his (NS) fiction here a few days ago [1]. They both (imo) are weak at characterisation etc. - but to me Egan's work is among some of the best sf I've ever read [1], wheras I find reading Stephenson an ordeal. I think that's down to the depth of the ideas that Egan explores, but I'd be interested in what others think of how he compares to other authors.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39287616

[2] Permutation City. Diaspora, short works in collections like Luninous, etc.
I used to work in the space, so probably a mix of

- Academic books (generally HUP, OUP, UCUP though the occasion PUP is alright)

- White Papers from top tier think tanks (use the UPenn Rankings [0])

- Axios and Politico - their target readership is aimed directly at those working on the Hill or Hill adjacent

Just sticking with these 3 types of resources should be enough.

Also, IGNORE anything on Twitter, Reddit, or HN. The lesswrong/r\credibledefense types are all idiots ime. Using an "objective" tone doesn't make rubbish "objective"

[0] - https://www.bruegel.org/sites/default/files/wp-content/uploa...
Some US localities allow something similar, and the “school district” may be larger than some countries.

Others are so small and rural that there is only one option, period.
Can they do the same in New York and Chicago when they're done? The cities are drowning, crime is a nightmare and every new policy seems to make daily life worse. These folks who call themselves 'against the carceral system ' have somehow gotten themselves elected in roles intended to fight crime and not defend it (like Bragg and the illustrious Boudin alluded to here).
Full disclosure, I have a Tesla and I love it. I have access to superchargers and home charging, and it has not really increased my utility bill. We should all want emissions free driving, I don’t think that is the issue, but to get there the quality of the vehicle, charging networks, and driving behavior will have to change. I am ok with having both ICE and EVs, let people choose, but I also believe in the long run emissions free will win out. Today it’s EVs but who knows where we might go.