skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This requires constant upkeep. The goal is to structure it so the local community is incentivized to invest that upkeep, but it's not just gonna happen all by itself. The goal is indeed a self-sustaining ecosystem, but one with human participation. If you want more detail, a good keyword is "Farmed Managed Natural Regeneration"

That keyword also makes it pretty clear it's more than a shovel and some seeds :)

And, fwiw, your request made me look at the thegreatgreenwall.org, and... good god. It is one of the lowest-information sites I've seen in a while. You could spend hours on there and learn nothing. https://thegreatgreenwall.org/science-and-the-ggw is as far as I can tell the only concrete part of this piece.

A much better starting point if you care about a bit more than feel-good vibing is https://www.unccd.int/our-work/ggwi

And that site makes it again abundantly clear that this is a very large scale project. The difference from the Qattara Sea project is that it actually managed to gin up multinational corporation, and that it takes a long term lens (as opposed to "IDK, let's flood this, rest's gonna work out" of the various seaflooding projects). And, most importantly, because it integrates the local communities in the project.

The last part matters because any such project is far from "fire and forget", and you need a strong local stake in any such project for it to succeed.
Well, our brains are closer to spiking neural networks than 'regular' neural networks. And they work pretty well. For the most part.

I feel like SNNs are like Brazil - they are the future, and shall remain so. I think more basic research is needed for them to mature. AFAIK the current SOTA is to train them with 'surrogate gradients', which shoe-horn them into the current NN training paradigm, and that sort of discards some of their worth. Have biologically-inspired learning rules, like STDP, _really_ been exhausted?
What is getting flagged here?

Every news organization in the world is reporting the same story.

Something very strange about the HN choice of what to flag.

.
> Use SQLite for everything, or Postgres if you outgrow it.

Or both! I've followed ElectricSQL for a while and it's pretty awesome to see how they've approached it. Rest APIs replaced with client side SQLlite which syncs to server side postgres over a CRDT layer that you don't actually have to touch/know anything about. And they just rebuilt postgres on pure WASM (https://github.com/electric-sql/pglite).

It's just cool to think that maybe you don't have to do design all of these intricate REST apis and just call SQL.
Found the Shai-Hulud.
> That from a "tiktok is bad for you" perspective. From a security and economic perspective there's a big difference between the company behind it being Meta or bytedance.

No, not really, they have proven time and again that they can't be trusted. Maybe its time to instead of protecting US company's data collection, we instead just limit data collection...
Remove (or open) black-box algorithmic recommendation engines and it's much less of an issue. The main problem with TikTok, from my perspective, is that they can tweak a few parameters and do something like intentionally sway public opinion or attempt to radicalize a subset of people.

This is a similar issue with domestic social media (Instagram knowingly harming teenage girls' mental health, YouTube recommending radicalism, Facebook facilitating Rohingya genocide and failing to act despite reports, etc)

Our government has completely failed us when it comes to evaluating these issues. It's impossible to expect the average not-so-savvy person to do it for themselves or their children.

Platforms of a certain size should absolutely be scrutinized because they are so broad reaching that they can alter the fabric of society (unknowingly, or more troubling, knowingly and without oversight).

It's a little incredible to me, that even within the tech industry, we think so highly of ourselves that most people still willingly subject themselves to these unknowns for hours every day.
Which countries have laws that require their citizens to "support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts"?
It sounds like the Mongolian hosts showed remarkable courtesy by accommodating their guests' odd preferences during the visit.
Does Pathway's ability to use multithreading improve the processing when you deal with multiple kafka topics?
It is designed by researchers who have been studying this for a while. At least for the near term the upkeep is worth it because people who previously no had prospects can now grow enough food to live on. You have to keep it up, but keeping it up means you can eat so the constant upkeep shouldn't be a problem so long as you are healthy. (culture or something is needed to deal with those who because of age or injury are not able to keep it up)

The real question is if in 50 years - as the current people use the fact that they have food and some extra invest in education for their kids, and so the kids move away to better city jobs. Those that remain likely love agriculture, but will be looking for ways use tractors to do the hard jobs. This doesn't seem to scale to large tractor operations. Those researchers thus need to look ahead to what follows this in 50 years.
How often do you feel motivated to tackle tasks and challenges taken on by others, like embracing new technologies or contributing to important projects? Dive into the newest edition of Implementing where I delve into the benefits of engaging in personal projects. Share your thoughts!
Keep in mind that winter in the most-populated areas of Scandinavia and surrounding regions can be quite mild compared to cities in North America that are much farther south.

Consider the climates of cities like Ottawa and Montreal in Canada, or Minneapolis in the US, for example. They're at roughly the same latitude as Venice, Italy, yet get rather harsh winters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa#Climate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal#Climate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis#Climate

Compare their climates to those of Helsinki, Oslo, Stockholm, and Saint Petersburg:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki#Climate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo#Climate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm#Climate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg#Climate

Ottawa, Montreal, and Minneapolis can experience noticeably lower temperatures, more snowfall, and so on.
"That business isn’t going to go away."

No doubt you're correct but users who've control of AI at their viewing end will for the first time be able to control whether they watch ads or not.
Is this grass roots support or an astroturfing campaign?

I find it difficult to believe that your average "addicted to social media" user cares enough to contact congress about it.

I'd be surprised if anyone stood up in favor of Facebook, Insta-whatever, etc.
This is missing the core of the bill. The bill isn't a ban of TikTok, the bill is a cease and desist of sending user data to China. It gives ByteDance the option to do so, but since that would defeat their entire purpose for existing they see it as a "total ban" on TikTok and that's what they're telling their addicted teenage audience.
Impending, for values of impending that started out "in the 2080s...", and went to "no, wait, in the 2060s ...", to "no, wait, in the 2040s ...".
> almost all open source LLM distribution is piracy and almost all API based LLMs, including ChatGPT, are also piracy and copyright laundering

That's an amplification of copyright, original expression is protected, but not the ideas themselves, those are free. And don't forget when we actually get to use these models we feed them questions, data, we give corrections - so they are not simply replicating the training set, they learn and do new things with new inputs.

In fact if you think deeply about it, it is silly to accuse AI of copyright violation. Copying the actual book or article is much much faster and cheaper, and exact. Why would I pay a LLM provider to generate it for me from the title and starting phrase? If I already have part of the article, do I still need to generate it with AI? it's silly. LLM regurgitation are basically attacks with special key, entrapments. They don't happen in normal use.
You can't ask a politician to think without offering him money. /s
>Prove it.

Proofs are good evidence that pure functions are easier to reason about. Many proof assistants (Coq, Lean, F*) use the Calculus of Inductive Constructions, a language that only has pure, total functions, as their theoretical foundation. The fact that state of the art tools to reason about programs use pure functions is a a pretty good hint that pure functions are a good tool to reason about behavior. At least, they're the best way we have so far.

This is because of referential transparency. If I see `f n` in a language with pure functions, I can simply lookup the definition of `f` and copy/paste it in the call site with all occurrences of `f`'s parameter replaced with `n`. I can simplify the function as far as possible. Not so in an imperative language. There could be global variables whose state matters. There could be aliasing that changes the behavior of `f`. To actually understand what the imperative version of `f` does, I have to trace the execution of `f`. In the worst case, __every time__ I use `f` I must repeat this work.
Hopefully this really means 'deploy a mobile pier'. The starvation is rather too urgent to wait for a building project.
Do you expect any of those to be in mass production six years from now?
The link is 404.
Link doesn't appear to be valid, but aren't these usually precalculated and stored in a lookup table?
I'm a big fan of Fern's SDKs (disclaimer, I became an investor in their company, but after I used their product)
Garden – The Design System by Zendesk
You are being downvoted but I share the same sentiment. America just does not want to share a slice of the private user data profit pie.

I don't trust Meta either.
Thank you very much for informing me of this.

It's also excellently curated. The transcripts are a plus that is often missing and the cross-linkage between transcript and audio is a wonderful gift to the listener.
If the US could just stop swinging wildly between two parties who hate each other being in control every couple of years, that might get done.

These sorts of big complex trade agreements take _ages_ to negotiate and require a certain degree of stability; given the US's current hyper-partisanship it's probably not happening any time soon. Realistically TTIP was dead the day Trump was elected.
I've seen the third order Taylor series used, but with the coefficients calculated at various offsets for a quarter wave. So you lookuo where you are in the quarter wave, then look up the 3 or 4 cofficients. This keeps the error somewhat bounded as the size of X is a small so the series does not diverge too much.
> you'll need evidence more than the statement "(many) politicians still care about these things."

I can personally attest to language that made it into bills at the state and federal level on the back of a call with an overworked staffer. I have also watched bills die because nobody bothered calling in support, but a few did in opposition.

You’re right that the process of getting a bill initiated is frought. But the country’s needs are diverse, and in most electeds’ backyards a given issue isn’t a battleground. So they’ll swing whichever way is convenient and move on.

Where this doesn’t work is for big-ticket issues; you aren’t going to flip your elected’s position on abortion with a call. Your study uses survey data from 1981 to 2002; the fact that an issue is being broadly surveyed biases the result. (We have no survey on this bill as yet.)
Not this again. Eventually someone will be proven right. Eventually. In other news, the sky is falling.
> You’re going to see ads whether you like it or not.

No, I'm not going to actually.[1]

When I occasionally have to surf the web via another computer, I'm amazed at what the web looks like for "normies" in 2024. I would never use the www if I had to look at all of that dancing baloney bullshit. The fact that anyone would, really is strong evidence of the cognitive collapse caused by modern internet access.[2]

[1] I really dislike when writers use these constructs of "we" and "you". I'm always reminded of Lenny Bruce's bit including "What do you mean 'we' kemosabe". The writer has no knowledge of who is reading, and shouldn't include them in some group that the writer is imagining. It's generally a propaganda play.

[2] Reference links:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6502424/
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2105061118
https://news.happyneuronpro.com/the-online-brain-how-the-int...
For their purposes, yes. The EU has more population, and the US has more military, but those things don't matter between them.

Is a marriage unequal because the male could beat the female at any time because he's stronger?
And arcsin?
What sorts of "healthy laws" would you suggest the government pass to curb TikTok specifically?
If you have a solution that doesn't take away rights from large portions of the population whose only "crime"[0] is they hold opinions you don't agree with then I'm all ears.

The person I saw the other day with a "Fuck Biden" sticker on their jacked-up pickup truck has exactly the same right to express their opinion as someone who thinks them driving around in a gas-guzzling monstrosity is a crime against humanity. Now, if either one of them tried to impose their will on the other by, say, destroying the truck or, umm, attempting to sodomize the president then the government has the right/obligation to intervene but before then they should be absolutely powerless.

[0] obviously not talking about things like CSAM which is an actual crime
No other US ally has as much sway in US politics as Israel, not Canada, not the UK, not Japan.
Look for Billion Dollar Mistakes
Oh they're still obsessed about metaverses in which they own everything, but are afraid to say the word now.
True, but any US ban will have effects beyond just the US. It's also important to remind folks that what TikTok is doing is no different than what Meta (et.al.) is doing.
That's right. People forget that iOS 16 beta (or maybe 15) introduced an orange dot to signify if any app was copying data from the clipboard. TikTok lit up like a lighthouse, performing a copy every 3 seconds.
Yes we did, but there’s a difference between delegating a task (asking a computer to do it) and executing the task (running the calculation). Otherwise you might as well say humans can run 40mph because we can ride horses.

Also, no one person invented the calculator. The calculator is the culmination of hundreds or even thousands of years of invention. It’s not like the knowledge or creativity is in each of our brains and we could each build a calculator given the requisite materials. It took thousands of lifetimes of ingenuity. So there’s another answer to your question of things we aren’t efficient at solving: building a calculator.
They're not deciding what software we install, did you read the article? The bill would require ByteDance (TikTok's parent company) to stop sending all this user data to China where it is ultimately used by the CCP. I'd argue that this bill doesn't go far enough, and companies of a certain size should be required to home US citizen data in the US, where it's subject to our laws and regulations.
>You should not let a geopolitical rival unfettered access to your populations data

In America the rights of the people come first, not the desires of the elites trying to lord over them. Americans don't win by letting the American government become more and more like the Chinese government.

This kind of geopolitical posturing is a lose-lose game for citizens of all countries involved, who lose more and more rights in the name of beating The Enemy, and a win-win game for the elites who use The Enemy as an excuse to exert more and more control over the population.
> they'll be encrypted

Since some months (years?) ago, WhatsApp lets you set up your own encryption password for the DB backup. I set one up and used https://github.com/ElDavoo/wa-crypt-tools to get access to the decrypted SQLite and run some analytics over my messages :)
that’s not entirely true. there was no 3rd party software in the first year and people still bought it. On another note they managed to create a luxurious market although the other platform also allows 3rd party apps. What I’m trying to say is, yeah it’s undeniable that 3rd party devs bring something on the table, but so does Apple
The homicide rate in cities needs to be lower than primarily rural or suburban or small city states. This is because cities require citizens to be more trusting of one another due to close proximity. It takes a much lower crime rate to make a city feel unsafe compared to a less populated area.

I don't understand why this concept is still hard to grasp. If you lived in a low trust high crime society would you rather live in a tenement building or have your own acreage and gun?

That being said, yes Nyc is safer than many cities thanks to Giulianis continued policies that make new York city policing closer to a right wing fever dream than many would like to admit.
Street Fighter II Complete Restoration with the 8-Bit Guy [video]
I've been coding with Claude 3 Opus since it first launched this past Monday. From the start I thought it was better than GPT-4, on a surface level it was less 'lazy' with its completions, and as I dived deeper, it was able to produce good code to solve bugs GPT-4 Turbo was not able to do.

IMO Opus is hands down the superior model for coding, the GPT-4 killer if you will. We immediately shipped it to all of our users at https://www.double.bot (coding copilot) and have been hearing similar stories from users all week.
Do we really want to emulated the Chinese state in regards to freedom of speech?
To be honest, in the appropriate context I will contradict myself and say that that you should think of TypeScript as a separate language. There's a lot of dynamic things you can do in JavaScript that will interact poorly with attempts to statically reason about your code with TypeScript; even if it's the approach you'd take in JS, when you add typing you should recalibrate how you approach the problem - that, to me, is an argument for thinking of it as separate language.

...but that's mostly just what I say to JavaScript devs, to be polite - to not tell them that their JavaScript code is bad, too. Code that's difficult to reason about statically is strictly worse, in my opinion, than code that's easier to reason about statically. And in that sense, TypeScript is just guiding you to write better JavaScript, which maybe undercuts its claim to being a language of its own.
The Stanford researchers also found a substantial number of CSAM images in the LAION-5B dataset which were not recognized by PhotoDNA, probably because the images in question were not in wide distribution prior to their inclusion in LAION.

Full paper: https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:kh752sm9123/ml_traini...
Can you explain more? I'm not sure what you're arguing against or foreshadowing
I am definitely not making this claim. I was replying to this:

> People assume there's some level of "intelligence" in them, but they're just extremely advanced "forecasting" tools.

My question wasn't meant as a quip. Rather it was literal-- how do you know your intelligence capabilities aren't "just extremely advanced forecasting"? We don't know for sure, and the answer is far from obvious. That doesn't mean humans are advanced LLMs-- we feel emotions, for instance. My comment was restricted to intelligence specifically.
You’re misunderstanding the DOS attack I think. This is a DOS on the server itself and can prevent all other clients from connecting or the server from doing any useful work as its time is spent computing keys instead of anything useful. It doesn’t require any MITM proxy to be installed. Basically imagine a client could connect to a random Google server and take it down.
Why should we? Bricks will be built in low-cost countries. Tech and science will come from europe.
FYI
"The head of the Russian General Staff Academy announced the threat of a “large-scale war in Europe”

The state agency RIA Novosti on Thursday reported on an article by Vladimir Zarudnitsky, head of the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. The article was written in the departmental magazine “Military Thought” and was “at the disposal” of the agency.

The possibility of an escalation of the conflict in Ukraine into a large-scale war in Europe cannot be ruled out; the likelihood of Russia being drawn into new military conflicts is increasing, the main idea of the RIA Novosti article is retold.

“The possibility of an escalation of the conflict in Ukraine cannot be ruled out - from the expansion of participants in the ‘proxy forces’ used for military confrontation with Russia to a large-scale war in Europe,” wrote General Zarudnitsky.

“The main source of military threats to our state is the anti-Russian policy of the United States and its allies, waging a new type of hybrid war in order to completely weaken Russia, limit its sovereignty and destroy territorial integrity,” the general was quoted by Reuters, which also noted that a high-ranking A Russian military officer warned of the threat of the conflict in Ukraine escalating into a full-scale war in Europe.

Zarudnitsky's comments come as the West struggles to help Ukraine with more weapons and money after a failed counteroffensive, Reuters noted."
> Think of it more as a measure of outsized impact on the world in a given year.

I was Time's Person of the Year in 2006, all i did was get in arguments with people i didn't even know.
They are well aware of their agency
Same thing as always. Cash grab pols making it rain on their pals.
Exxon Barges in on Hess Deal
http://steve.hollasch.net/cgindex/math/inccos.html is a great technique if you need a fast integer approximation for some some arbitrary sampling interval (i.e. motor control)
That is literally the trillion dollar question.

Will a Japanese or European company overtake ASML [1,2] in making bulk CMOS smaller?

[1] https://www.asml.com/-/media/asml/files/investors/investor-d...

[2] https://www.asml.com/-/media/asml/files/investors/investor-d...
I don't know about that. If you look at the bylines more than half the writers come from anglophone countries, and a lot of the feature articles seem aimed at foreign settlers in Japan. They take breaking news from the Kyodo newswire and mostly do features.

My Japanese isn't good enough to read the news at speed, but I can manage TV news; there's a lot of stories that don't show up in the Japan Times until a week later. They do cover major political, economic, and crime (if it's a murder) news in a timely fashion.
There were actually three distinct invasions - Crimea in early 2014, Donbas in summer/autumn 2014 (after the rebels started losing), and finally 2022.
Better reels than TikTok. We can actually control it.
I’ve been using zsh for a while now and you just blew my mind!
Apple Releases macOS Sonoma 14.4
Just to make things clear. Few people are denying that sexual violence did occur. These were a bunch of men doing a bunch of violence to other people, I would be shocked if none of them did sexual violence.

What people are debunking is the notion that Hamas used sexual violence as a weapon of war. There are no evidence for that (nor for sexual violence at all, it is just that it is very plausible). And the use of such stories in propaganda purposes.

This is in contrast to the Israeli military who has been recorded using sexual violence as a weapon of war against Palestinians on multiple occasion.

What makes this disgusting, is the use of stories of sexual violence to propagandize anti-Palestinian sentiment. Sexual violence is a horrible crime, that is truly horrendous for the victims. The victims of such crimes deserve better than their horrors being used to justify other crimes.