skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The root problem is not that I'm receiving spam emails, but that people are sending them.

Symantec etc. have no business interest in getting people to stop sending spam emails. In the case of the pharma/counterfeit emails that were so common 10-15 years ago the fix was quite simple, but didn't come from the anti-spam industry - it required finding an aggrieved party (brand owners) with enough clout in the financial world.

As you point out, fighting spam is an asymmetric game of whack-a-mole, where spammers can easily adapt to countermeasures. Forcing spammers to get a new merchant bank to handle their credit card transactions flips the asymmetry and makes them do all the work; as a result you no longer see spam advertising viagra.

Getting rid of ransomware would be quite easy, in theory, if you could tank the value of bitcoin, since few ransomware gangs are able to collect ransom the traditional way in bags of cash. And a large fraction of other phishing attacks could be prevented by putting stricter controls on gift cards.
I also wonder if having a hallucination-free LLM is even required for it to be useful. Humans can and will hallucinate (by this I mean make false statements in full confidence, not drugs or mental states) and they’re entrusted with all sorts of responsibilities. Humans are also susceptible to illusions and misdirection just like LLMs.
So in all likelihood there is simply some state of ‘good enough’ that is satisfactory for most tasks. Perusing the elimination of hallucinations to the nth degree may be a fools errand.
I'm disappointed nobody pointed out the dinosaurs thing.
That's fair, I think the style is too dry sometimes but now that I've used Emacs for some time (3 years?) I just look into the pkg docs when I need something, which is rare.
That wouldn't work so well as a cost savings measure. You end up with the shrubs and trees growing out into places they shouldn't and then have to be trimmed and cut back, which costs money.
One could use the dialog command, for which there is a "dialog" python module to show a list of progress bars.

https://pythondialog.sourceforge.io/images/screenshots/mixed...
Throwback that gives some indication of how both well and at the same time questionably it worked a mere 6 months in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764

Though I think now there's a bit too much reddit and stackexchange and wikipedia stuff in the default filter.
Ah ok - I got lost in the indents of the thread while on mobile.
you haven't. Bluesky decentralisation is fake. A PDS is a reasonable Ubuntu box, but even this post admits that a relay is a huge expensive central point of control.

What's the Bluesky plan for spam? Block it at the relay, maybe.

The DID server is the other central point of control.

But sure, go wild with PDSes.
Yes, and I was adding context.

Policy positions get all kinds of promoters for all kinds of different reasons. A position can and should be rejected purely on the basis that the 'wrong' kinds of people support it. It can be considered again when the right kinds of people start supporting it. This is how you don't put total rank assholes in power, and also how enormous assholes game the system to get in power.

If you own a bar and a group of neo-Nazis come in, you have to throw them out. If you don't throw them out, then they will turn your normal bar into a neo-Nazi hangout. Neutrality isn't an option when violence is a possible result.
Floppy Disk Imaging
I'm not going to fault you for using boring tools to build a typical semi-interactive CRUD website, and I agree that a lot of people make SPAs that could have been multi page apps and provided the same or better user experience while being easier to develop.

That being said, having done all the job queues, API integrations and so forth you mention countless times, and having done graphics, AI/ML and symbolic stuff like compiler development, I can say confidently that at their best CRUD apps are still comparatively boring to write. I personally think it's a mistake to latch on and get religious with a stack that's going to leave you stranded on the isle of boring code.
This is what I would do. And every process has at least some state output always (so there are no blank lines).
Should I Clean my Solar Panels?

"While dust and dirt settling on your panels is unavoidable, thankfully, so is rain. Even just a mild and short rain shower will do a sufficient job of cleaning the grime off your panels and will have them performing at their full potential with no effort or money spent.

This is backed by a University of San Diego study where researchers looked at how much energy production was lost due to dust and grime each month during the summer drought. They found that in nearly every situation, hiring a professional to clean your panels is not worth the cost."

https://www.paradisesolarenergy.com/blog/do-solar-panels-nee...
Maybe it requires understanding, maybe there are other ways to get to 'I don't know'. There was a paper posted on HN a few weeks ago that tested LLMs on medical exams, and one interesting thing that they found was that on questions where the LLM was wrong (confidently, as usual), the answer was highly volatile with respect to some prompt or temperature or other parameters. So this might show a way for getting to 'I don't know' by just comparing the answers over a few slightly fuzzied prompt variations, and just ask it to create an 'I don't know' answer (maybe with a summary of the various responses) if they differ too much. This is more of a crutch, I'll admit, arguably the LLM (or neither of the experts, or however you set it up concretely) hasn't learnt to say 'I don't know', but it might be a good enough solution in practice. And maybe you can then use that setup to generate training examples to teach 'I don't know' to an actual model (so basically fine-tuning a model to learn its own knowledge boundary).
Kagi limits the results to sites without ads or affiliate links. Copying that would work against their core values.

Most people don't want a more limited set of results. Most google users want more results not less.
Only a windows issue
Yes, this is a good sign, but it’s just the first of many hurdles you need to pass in order to get to the finish line.

This Monday meeting may be the go/no-go gate for the next phase, where they decide whether to invest more time to investigate your business. They will evaluate in each stage, every time deciding whether to invest further effort.

If this is your first such encounter, and it sounds like it is, my suggestion would be to approach it with a primary objective to learn about how this whole process works.

Often founders approach these situations like it’s a one-way thing (VC must decide they “like” the startup), but in reality, it should be a two-way process: the founders should also evaluate the VCs.

I would ask the VCs about their portfolio companies, and some of their success stories. Ask them if they could introduce you to some of the founders they backed. Reach out to some of the others yourself. If everything works out, you’ll end up married to these guys, and you want to know who are you getting in bed with.

In the extreme, these guys may be running one of those predatory schemes where you basically get sold some bullshit accelerator program and they screw you for equity.

A good rule of thumb is: the moment they ask you to pay anything - GTFO.

And here I mean literally ANYTHING: you should not be expected to pay a single cent for anything relating to their process; it’s their business to do that and bear the costs. And this also extends to the cost of due diligence (if and when it comes to that): the VC should bear all the costs no matter how it ends, whether they invest or they bail.

Extension of this rule: the moment they offer anything except cash for equity - GTFO.

Good luck!
When you look at the predictions from 1900, 1920 and 1960 (the ones I saw), they were unanimously optimistic: no wars, cancer cured, flying cars (or similar stuff at the beginning of the XX century). They indeed failed, but either because they did not predict great things such as the Internet, or because they were overly optimistic.
The JSON spec [1] explicitly forbids multiline strings. (Granted JSONL is already outside the spec, but the idea there being each single line contains valid JSON, encountering a multiline string in JSONL would if anything violate more expectations.)

[1] https://ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-404_2...
Ian Cutress Interviews Pat Gelsinger
Neither inflation nor demurrage can stop people from saving. They can simply exchange their constantly shrinking money to some good of lasting value. If the problem is lack of liquidity, helicopter money will do, everything else is a needless complication.
I bet that, basically, an LLM is just a part of a future AI. The same way that a distributor is part of an internal combustion engine. Or the way Minsk’s described The Society of Mind. Eager to see if an LLM can be bolted on to some new kind of giant model that does something like mitigate the LLMs weaknesses. Maybe it’ll be a collection of radically different models working together in 20 years, and not just a single model. Like, uh, our own brains. It reminds me of how lex and yacc are super important as grammar and tokenizer, but are only just the front end to much larger projects.
My solution is to pick the file names in such a way that `include *.ledger` imports them in the right order (you need the latest version of ledger for that to work, in older versions the order was indeterminate)
Detection of a new state in the protein folding process
Don't have kids. Wasn't able to.

But I went to subsidized Catholic schools through junior high. Then a public high school. Then a "state" university -- where we had "in-state" tuition that was reasonable.

My dad was an auto worker. My mom was a nurse that ended up with a career in administration as I got older. (He was also an alcoholic and may parents divorced -- but that's a longer story.)

We were fine. I did just fine.
Is the 100-year old TB vaccine a new weapon against Alzheimer's?
This is an interesting text to spark discussion as it appears it gives more information about what can be done by individuals and local communities.

Even the negative comments here are interesting!

I wish there were more articles about the warming in smaller cities and what can be done, to spark discussion and put more heads thinking about this.
This is a solid advice.
Totally agree, and that's where I landed when I started doing stuff to my computers that violated the 'magic abstractions' of ubuntu et. al.
I’ve got this bookmarked and use it to find hyper niche materials on numerical modelling. The stuff it finds on solvers, mesh generation, and optimization methods is so much better than anything I could ever find on Google. Stuff from the 80s and 90s. I’ve found sites written by professionals that I would never find on Google. As someone that doesn’t just take the commercial package of the shelf getting to that knowledge maybe finding Fortran code examples is extremely valuable.
There are good reasons to give Go good will:

Simplicity:
Editor, GitHub, golang download. I have a working dev env for a LOT of use cases. Sudo apt install vim git wget tar. wget golang, untar, set env var. I have a script to do it for me on Debian boxes. Python, ruby, php are pretty close. IM guessing C# is a bit more complicated but not by much.

Dependency and library management. GO wins vs python(venvs), ruby, node, php... go mod and how it deals with pinning, pulling from GitHub. Again I dont know what C# has here but go feels both magical, and easy to understand on this front.

go build / go run. The fact that is this easy and fast to get to a running binary is impressive. I had a badly behaving container the other day and the residents of it were not giving back helpful errors. One go program (sub 100 lines) later I was getting usable error messages and quickly worked through the network issues. There are plenty of go apps that work like this! Mediamtx is great (RPI cam server) just grab the binary blob and go... The same thing in python is gonna be a lot more complicated.

Testing: A friend of mine and I recently started a project together and his commentary after coming from working on large ruby and node projects is "how is this testing this fast". GO is eating its own dogfood here with its concurrency model. IM guessing that, C# can run the same way.

Golangs good will isnt because it is the best at something. If were comparing features go is gonna come in 2nd or 3rd or 4th every time. Thats the thing, go is consistently very good at feature "X". It's not the best but it remains in the top 5. Speed, concurrency, compile time, ease of setup, ease of deployment, portability, scaling...

Golang is the Toyota of programing languages. Lovable in its reliability.
A lot of people these days want to flip through YouTube or listen to podcasts rather than reading even though the latter is often more efficient. So now you're asking someone to create additional content that won't make them any money (assuming they care).

People still create content for free--and it's obviously hard to monetize content generally--but, as apparently in your case, it's possible and if that were my goal I'd probably optimize for that.
Let’s say you could magically reduce the population of humans on earth by 90%, at a moment’s notice.

Two questions:

1. Is climate change averted, and a non-issue? Or has it just been pushed back for a little while?

2. What does life on earth look like, when 90% of the people you know and depend on today are just gone?
I highly doubt that this is a good thing to do.

Forgetting things seems to be a protective mechanism, otherwise, life becomes too stressful. Humans and other animals focus on negative things and if you do not forget them, your stress level will skyrocket.

Recorded cases of people who can't forget and experiments with rats shows us these phenomena.
You can imagine human behavior is like a stochastic parrot (the name of your argument,) but that’s, again, a gross oversimplification of the human experience.

I don’t really feel like having the stochastic parrot debate again, but look it up.

We’re more than parrots.
> The wiki page leaves out the source of the the 'point-free' nomenclature

The wiki page explains it in the very first sentence: “… in which function definitions do not identify the arguments (or "points") on which they operate”.
What are you picturing climate change looks like in +50 years when you say your kids/grandkids will have horrific lives because of it? Are they wandering a dystopian hellscape in search of water?
Pursuing things that can't scale
Every year I write a similar threaded cli monitor .. Now maybe rich can solve this for all, but i'm surprised it took so long to emerge.
The Shirky principle is: "institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution".

I see no evidence that UNRWA is the one trying to maintain the status quo.

Rather, other parties are trying to maintain the status quo, and UNRWA is providing humanitarian aid until things change, to alleviate misery.

I think it's quite obvious that if a peaceful solution were found in Israel and Palestine, the UNRWA would very quickly wind down its operations. With a lot of its staff possibly being hired by the local government.

The full situation over there is extremely, astonishingly complex. But the "Shirky principle" tries to posit some kind of simplistic answer. And it's just wrong.
Thomas J. Watson, the father of IBM
They cannot say "I dont know" because they dont actually know anything. The answers are not comming from a thinking mind but a complex pattern-fitting supercomputer hovering over a massive table of precomputed patterns. It computes your input then looks to those patterns and spits out the best match. There is no thinking brain with a conceptual understanding of its own limitations. Getting an "i dont know" from current AI is like asking navigation software how far it is to the Simpsons house in Springfield: the machine spits out answers but cannot fathom the cultural reference that makes the answer impossible. Instead, it finds someone named simpson in the nearest realworld Springfield.
Rich countries have sub-replacement rates of fertility already.

All we have to do is embrace it.
There's similar incentives in some parts of medicine in the West. Some physicians get into academic medicine not because they want to be researchers, but because they like teaching residents and/or the high complexity that academic medical centers attract. The result usually isn't fraud, but fluff papers that don't meaningfully contribute to the field.
Random micro-smiles throughout the day seems doable. Thank-you.
Java virtual threads hit with pinning issue
Engineers Are Not a Commodity – Stay SaaSy
It's always been odd to me that "Jason" and "JSON" didn't end up homophonous. But as an A-A-Ron, if anyone named Jason ever quotes the Key & Peele sketch at me, I'll no longer need to think about how to retort!
This is a cool series of posts, thanks for writing it!

We've released a bit about how the AWS Lambda scheduler works (a distributed, but stateful, sticky load balancer). There are a couple of reasons why Lambda doesn't use this broadcast approach to solve a similar problem to the one these posts are solving.

One is that this 'broadcast' approach introduces a tricky tradeoff decision about how long to wait for somebody to take the work before you create more capacity for that resource. The longer you wait, the higher your latency variance is. The shorter you wait, the more likely you are to 'strand' good capacity that just hasn't had a chance to respond yet. That's a tunable tradeoff, but the truly tough problem is that it creates a kind of metastable behavior under load: excess load delays responses, which makes 'stranding' more frequent, which reduces resource usage efficiency, which makes load problems worse. Again, that's a solvable problem, but solving it adds significant complexity to what was a rather simple protocol.

Another issue is dealing with failures of capacity (say a few racks lose power). The central system doesn't know what resources it lost (because that knowledge is only distributed in the workers), and so needs to discover that information from the flow of user requests. That can be OK, but again means modal latency behavior in the face of failures.

Third, the broadcast behavior requires O(N^2) messages for N requests processed (on the assumption that the fleet size is O(N) too). This truly isn't a big deal at smaller scales (packets are cheap) but can become expensive at larger scales (N^2 gets steep). The related problem is that the protocol also introduces another round-trip for discovery, increasing latency. That could be as low as a few hundred microseconds, but it's not nothing (and, again, the need to optimize for happy-case latency against bad-case efficiency makes tuning awkward).

Fourth, the dynamic behavior under load is tricky to reason about because of the race between "I can do this" and getting the work. You can be optimistic (not reserving capacity), at the cost of having to re-run the protocol (potentially an unbounded number of times!) if you lose the race to another source of work. Or, you can be pessimistic (reserving capacity and explicitly releasing what you don't need), at the cost of making the failure cases tricky (see the classic problem with 2PC coordinator failure), and reducing efficiency for popular resources (in proportion to the latency and popularity of the resource you're looking for). Slow coordinators can also cause significant resource wastage, so you're back to tuning timeouts and inventing heuristics. It's a game you can win, but a tough one.

This needle-in-a-haystack placement problem really is an interesting one, and it's super cool to see people writing about it and approaching the trade-offs in designs in a different way.
Do you have an example of a niche expert page you found useful, which is easier to find on Marginalia than Google?
70 coins removed from stomach of zoo alligator during routine exam
I'm okay with that flavor of "good ads".

I'm fine with a machine taking my observable physical characteristics and using that to select ads for me. I'm also fine with ads that are not so much targeted as self-selected.

It's the use of non-observable, non-public info to build and reference an advertising profile where I start to object. It's creepy, and the ads are somehow less relevant.
I’m a tall man with assets.

My friend, it is just the opposite.

I’ve had a date end because a woman had a hard requirement to be dommed. No thanks.

I had a woman hint at making a pass at me this New Years. I tried to deflect. She still followed up: “maybe you don’t need chemistry if there’s power”. Made my stomach churn and my jaw drop.

I’m a big guy and porn has taught women to want things from men who look like me, which I have no interest in.
ledger has a few powerful features that hledger lacks, for example in ledger you can create an "assert" statement that checks all your journal entries fall in the correct time period (easy to mess up if you copy/paste journal entries). But it's pretty easy to move between the two.
I feel the same way about information provided by LLMs as with lots of pre-LLM articles and overall YouTube 'information' videos.

Sources matter. You're either rehashing information from a collection of sources or you have your own data to prove your statements.
Did you try telling it that being lazy is futile in the manner I described? That is a major improvement over just telling it to return complete code. I've gotten chatgpt to spit out >1k lines of complete code with that, using just "return complete code" will cause it to try and find ways to answer a subset of the question "completely" to appease its alignment.
I've got a stack of browser windows on the left side of the screen, and stacks of emacs windows in the middle and right sides. 4 / 3 / 5 for just everyday "keep stuff open" notes and current browsing / status monitoring stuff. Terminals tend to peek out of the bottoms and corners of those stacks as needed.

Focused tasks go on other workspaces but with the same kind of stacking. The browser windows usually multiply onto the 2nd screen off tot he left for those, with documentation and references.

I used to use "focus follows mouse" but ive lost some dexterity over the past couple years and slowing down with "click to focus" has helped cope with that.
>Again, where do you think these reforms come from, exactly?

From the federal government. That's the whole point.

>they could've easily formed internal agreements to simply not lower their own standards

No.These policies were literally designed to make it illegal.

>Again and again, companies exert enormous effort to create and find loopholes and weaknesses in law, abandoning all ethics in the process and causing massive problems for society. And somehow this is blamed on government?

Yes.

>Sometimes an explanation aimed at children is the right explanation

But this is not the case
Oh whoops. Anyway point made I think
I call it "railway oriented programming", after the presentation by Scott Wlaschin.

https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/rop/
Interesting comments, mostly from people who have been around the block a few times. Personally I'm young and I just picked up Emacs a few years ago. I'm still unashamedly in the evangelical phase, wanting to share it with everyone I meet. It's literally a gift from all the good deities combined. But I can see why it's not more popular. You need to be a programmer to make it even halfway usable. That's its power and its curse.

Personally I think GNU Emacs is a dead end. If Emacs is to live on it needs to be rewritten from the ground up in Common Lisp, it needs to be multithreaded, and it needs to have default keybinds that target the average computer user; us wizards can change them with ease. I think Lem looks quite promising.