skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> No one's trying to eliminate anyone

Probably not any consolation to the Neanderthal or any other animal species that is out-competed in nature. Doesn’t have to be malevolent or intentional for a more capable species to render others extinct. (Indeed that would seem to be the base case, historically speaking.) of course, symbiosis is possible; we could be puppies to the AI. Many people find disempowerment to be almost as bad a prospect as extinction though.

> The issue is whether or not we can build a machine capable of even understanding the directive.

Asimov’s laws are an ok starting point for a moral code, but nobody has the slightest idea how to implement them. The issue is not “understanding” them, it is baking them into the fabric of a mind so deeply that they cannot be broken. This requires mind engineering, a deep understanding of mind-space, and we are far closer to stumbling into AGI through brute force scaling (as nature did) than to understanding mind-engineering deeply enough to embed “laws”.

> it's not clear why an artificial mind would pursue this as a goal

There are a couple stock answers here. At the highest level though, why not? Humans have pursued goals of global domination, eradication, genocide. If only one in a billion minds has a defect (or is prompt-hijacked) to start power-seeking, it could still be bad; AI is not bound by human limitation to inhabit one body and can in principle expand to occupy all the compute it can secure.

Or if you prefer, why would a more intelligent entity agree to be commanded by a less intelligent one? The base case seem to me that ASI will not remain under our control, unless we very carefully sculpt its mind to align with our interests.

Another simple argument is: because someone will build or prompt-hijack such a mind. People have already created “take over the world” agents with GPT-3, as a joke (I assume). There are enough people willing to take such an action that we’ll need defenses in place.

I think it’s true that the more ASI entities in existence, the less likely one is to fully take over. However there are esoteric decision theory reasons to believe that digital minds might be able to bargain/negotiate more effectively than biological minds (source code / mind state transparency etc) and so you might expect the ASIs to eventually collaborate to take control.

Personally I don’t think that full-extinction is the most likely outcome, just that it’s completely plausible if we get unlucky and it’s very hard to prove safety in advance. And there are plenty of disempowering outcomes that seem quite bad too vs. the counterfactual.
I think this is what a lot of people don't get about taking funding from a VC:

> The grand but improbable plan called for shifting its entire platform onto a blockchain called Celo, another a16z portfolio company

(emphasis added)

I was at an advertising startup which got a massive investment from SoftBank. One of the people involved in signing the deal told me that the main benefit wasn't the $$$; it was that the other companies which were funded by SoftBank would be encouraged to use our services. And, of course, we in return would use our stablemates' services where we could.

Yes, money is nice. But becoming part of a mutually-reinforcing collective is the real prize.

In this case, it was obviously an attempt to stimulate a market into existence. We should all be grateful it failed!
Lunar reconnaissance drone for exploration and high-resolution mapping
Not sure I understand the advantage over ASCII Separated Values (ASV) which use ASCII control characters 0x1E and 0x1F
Severn Bore: What is it and why does it happen?
Reporting on progress up to level 1 is a waste of everyone's time. It's either done or it's not. It ships when it ships. If the team has committed to delivering by a date then just let them get on with doing that. Blockers and setbacks should be actively communicated up the stack if they will affect the deliverable, but otherwise it should be assumed things are on track.

Management are always salivating for details, but we know what always happens: we drop a technical term one time and management goes around repeating that like they know what they're talking about. They use these like weapons to keep other people off their back: basically say something that nobody understands and they'll leave you to it. Some managers will push for more fodder, but it's not your job to provide this. It's your job to deliver.
Agreed. Json seems to be designed with machine interpretation as first concern. Having to wrap object keys into quotes eases parsing I guess, but for humans it is a nuisance.
> What is p(much better) vs p(much worse)?

there are many more ways to be dead than being alive, yet here we are.

Optimism > pessimism.
> If you normalize your vectors, cosine similarity is the same as Euclidean distance.

If you normalize your vectors, cosine similarity is the same as dot product. Euclidean distance is still different.
Sure. Here:
https://medium.com/p/5e397cb12e63#04a5
> I think you do not really know what you are talking about here.

Yeah, maybe.

The reference says

> The behavior is undefined if the calls to functions in this library introduce a file system race, that is, when multiple threads, processes, or computers interleave access and modification to the same object in a file system.

My understanding of the vulnerability happens because a different process interleaves access to the same object in the file system between the time of check (TOC) and time of use (TOU) leading to the TOCTOU bug. And this isn't a vulnerability in C++ because it's considered UB by the spec.

I'd be really interested in hearing you explain why this section of the spec isn't relevant to the TOCTOU bug. I'd learn something new if that's the case.

I know you're frustrated by the discussion of CVEs but please understand that the entire article and this thread is based on understanding C and C++'s security record based on CVEs. Herb Sutter compared C++ with Rust, pointing out 61 CVEs in C++ and 6 in Rust. Therefore it's really relevant to compare the attitudes of both communities about filing those CVEs. The fact that the exact same vulnerability warranted a Rust CVE but not a C++ CVE is quite telling.

I'm not happy with the CVE system, no one is. You're not either. All I'm saying is, comparisons of CVEs across languages, like Sutter has done, aren't helpful or useful. He claims that C++ will be equally safe as Rust if CVEs were reduced by 90%. But as long as the C++ community doesn't file CVEs when Rust does, that's not correct. And it's likely to be more incorrect if the community follows through with Herb's suggestion to take control of the CVE filing mechanism.
Ok, cool, now uncripple midjourney and we'll have something.

One cannot currently describe a characters feet, because that means you're probably a pervy foot fetishist, along with who knows how many other banned prompts.

It's impossible to use freely as a creative tool. The Bic company's pencils never had these issues, one could draw anything they could mentally visualize, even naked ladies. Pencil and paper is still a more useful creative tool than midjourney.
"egregious" was a strong word, apologies. Still the silence is deafening here.
A: Yes, provide mentoring and use whatever fits your needs.

If you funnel potential contributors straight into mentoring, the popularity of the tools is not an issue.

For visibility, there are many possibilities, such as volunteer platforms.
This discussion comparison goes a lot indepth than any other such treatment. It makes sense to limit the comparison set to small number of popular js frameworks.

I think author should have considered Solidjs as well for completeness
I feel like most people would rather just scrap it if they can afford to. Even if someone else were willing to pay a large sum of money for the car, I'd be too weirded out to go sell it.
Yup, this is the choice: Either a walled garden run by Apple that has a price premium. Or a discounted device by Android that allows Google to snoop on all your data if you want to use a single one of their services (App Store, Gmail, Google Maps) - and correct me if I'm wrong but without play services enabled an Android is not really usable. I rather pay the premium.
His prediction is in response to a question asking if Linux is "following in the tradition" of Unix, and immediately after, the conversation turns towards a discussion of his (at the time ongoing) work on Plan 9. "Changed his mind" seems like a kind of weird phrasing to me because Linux being more successful than Plan 9 in 2023 isn't a matter of opinion, it's a recognition of reality.
Oh, thank you very much indeed! :-)
In the general population, there would be a very satisfying schadenfreude in watching the techies make themselves unemployed by their own hubris. I think that's part of the desire for the story to be true.

The other part is that those selling AI want to believe it is as big as the introduction of the internet, and not just another hype train like blockchain.
Any evidence that makes the current hotness seem like a tectonic shift is attractive to those types.
^ How to spot a sucker
Does Bebop support use as a file format by dumping directly to disk, as some serialization libraries do? Or perhaps a better way to phrase it, since ultimately you can send whatever you want to a binary file, is it intended to be used in such a way?
Description of USV: https://github.com/sixarm/usv
The answer to that is there: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n40...

It is mainly wording around specifying that the result of a concurrent access can not be guaranteed. Which here Rust is no different, it just does not have a specification for his stdlib (yet)
Which image of Earth are we not used to seeing?
Embedding size and maximum context length are not related. The maximum context length of gpt-3.5-turbo is known though: 2^14
I left githup due to how Microsoft enabled 2FA, now back to anon ftp via gemini.

I would like to find something like github and was thinking about sourcehut. But now I may think of looking elsewhere. But to be honest, anon ftp is good enough for me since my things are about as far from earth shattering as something can get :)
I always wonder why we don't use this.
This is where your weekly status becomes a gold mine for your defense labor lawyers.
If you're serious about proving an AI correlation, you have to do better than two data points over one year. The leading hypothesis is that low interest rates led to overhiring in tech, so now that interest rates are up companies are cutting excess jobs.

To rule that out and give credence to an AI hypothesis, you need to go back several years to before the peak in the tech growth rate. We need a series of trend lines, not just a comparison of one year to another.

Also, your selection of job titles is pretty small and doesn't account for other possible changes. The most obvious one: where are the full stack web engineers? From the data in TFA it's impossible to tell if companies aren't just consolidating their specialized frontend/backend roles into generalist roles.
Jockstraps were invented in Boston 150 years ago
> there is not a single thing that’s unique to humans.

It doesn't bother me. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
EVs Can't Fix a Global Epidemic of 'Car Harm,' Study Finds
Thanks Drew et al for Sourcehut, Hare Lang, principles, and more!
ASCII has a field delimiter character. The fact that we chose comma and tabs because a field delimiter character is hard to type or see is one of those things that saddens me in computing.

Imagine the amount of pain that could have been spared if we had done it right from the start some 50 years ago.
In this case, the argument is indeed self evidently right. Trying to equate the two things after being able to observe both in the real world is like seriously claiming that a stove fire and a nuclear blast are pretty much the same thing because they both produce light and heat. Why would anyone bother convincing anyone out of such an obviously absurd claim in a practical context?
Because we have to justify the existence of all of those over paid product managers.

BuT tHe DaTa SaYs We NeEd a Ux ChAnGe
I don't think it's a joke; at https://github.com/sixarm/usv they discuss how they're working on IANA standardization.
Dark Patterns are now illegal in India
An overdue status update on Darklang
We've just shared an overdue update on our journey. This past year, we've been reimagining Darklang, focusing on a new CLI runtime and embracing AI.
That the other teams were better funded and yet failed, says to me the Wright Brothers were better informed.

That society didn't know this at the time is indeed relevant to AI development, and the analogy would be that the next big thing might come out of some minor research team that most people dismiss instead of the biggest and most well known groups… a bit like how Google's LaMDA was making headlines before ChatGPT surprised everyone.

It's certainly still possible today that some random individual has a crucial insight that gives them an edge over the big names, yet even those big names know far more than me.

Which is rather annoying, because I'd be interested in taking the opportunity of having been laid off to switch from iOS to AI. (If anyone reading this is hiring people in Berlin, contact details on my website. Plus side of hiring me: I'm relatively cheap in that field, and enthusiastic about the possibilities).
Is there a framework, philosophy, or "manner of thinking" that would always result in disparate minds behaving consistently?

Engineering, quantitative science, and religion have infighting, and maybe fundamentally we do not yet have a model that requires conscious loss in order for the thought system to prevail.

The extreme would be the end of contracts. Pragmatically, somehow we need both a way to accomplish our goals while also understanding another mind. Having methods of conflict resolution are then unavoidable.
If you bought the winning lottery ticket, you’d be a lottery winner.
Princess of Wales Edited Photos
Apparently it is not. They have submitted it to the ietf. I will have to watch closely to see if librecalc/excel and languages/libraries adopt support. Seems like it does solve some common problems with CSV.

https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-unicode-separated-valu...

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-unicode-separated-val...
Lot of mailing lists offer the option to download mbox with old messages. So you can just download those for months/years when you were not subscribed.
I love Emacs and have used it since the start of my programming career. It is so powerful and I consider it more like a portable programming environment than a text editor. But I find it's performance frustratingly slow. I accept that it will never be as fast as Vim, but when it takes as long or longer to boot up as a regular IDE it makes me question why I'm not using that. Plus there are large json files I can open up no problem in NeoVim that Emacs chokes on.

With that being said, there is no program that has come along that is a sufficient modern replacement for Emacs like Neovim is for Vim. Unless you've used Emacs heavily then it's just hard to understand. And it's not just being able to use a terminal or write some markdown/org notes in it.

It's built in support for IRC. Reading email. Emacs Speaks Statistics. It's being able to make functions and bind just about anything to a set of key chords. It's using things like restclient to send rest requests, and many other awesome things. Using Emacs kind of feels like programming in Smalltalk in a way.
> The blockchain plan seemed impossible—and that would soon prove to be the case.

As is tradition.

(Did any company _ever_ launch anything borderline successful with The Almighty Blockchain(TM) that wasn't just some sort of token?)
Absolutely, and an excellent idea it is, too.

Whereas I have worked for 2 of the largest 3 Linux vendors, and at both of them, the facilities and site-management people all run Windows. The excuse is "oh but we need to for the interoperability with our suppliers!" Note, this includes server side stuff and groupware. Meanwhile, the marketing and management people all use MacBooks.

It's no wonder their desktop OSes are so poor. Only the techies use their own products, and the management don't listen to the geeks.
Right, how dare he, complaining about a paid service.
Almost like they own shares in Google and Microsoft.
You don't need "support" for scrolling. It is supported by the browser, out of the box. The website hijacks scrolling with JS by introducing "smooth" scroll, which is a big no from the UX perspective.
> Conscience is fundamentally a trait that requires some kind of physical personhood - an actual self-identity with empathy attached to it. Corporations, being pure legal fiction, have neither.

And, for the same reason, they have no capacity for autonomous thought and action. Corporations are just organizational models for coordinating human activity, but all of the agency still originates with individuals, because there's nothing else that it could originate with.

All malicious acts you are attributing to corporations actually originate from the malicious intent of individuals who are merely using the corporation as an organizational model.

> This is why it is imperative to keep them as small and toothless as we possibly can as a society, even beyond issues with monopolies.

Keeping organized forms of social coordination "small and toothless" is inherently antagonistic to the concept of society itself -- the proper solution is to constrain malicious behavior without interfering with non-malicious behavior, regardless of how that behavior is coordinated or formalized.

There's also a paradox here, in that I have not seen any mechanism proposed for combating the implicit sociopath of one kind of organization that doesn't rely on creating even greater concentrations of monopoly power in the hands of an essentially equivalent form of organization.
> Were we less human when we couldnt yet replace defective organs?

Over time, humans have demonstrated a vastly more impactful ability to manipulate our environment and ourselves than any other living organism we have encountered.
No-one doubts if you put a message queue in front of your database, you can do what these videos show. The doubt is if this says anything interesting about distributed systems. At least these videos don't demonstrate that.
Which post?
> Funny how a place full of rather smart, educated and curious people like HN collectively fail to see that one, very simple, fact.

You could have just made your point; you didn't have to end it with "everyone is dumb except me"
Growing up my trash was picked up by a human and the truck crew had two or three people on it jogging house to house to pick up trash as the driver slow rolled through the neighborhood.

Now my trash is serviced by one person who mostly never leaves the cab and who would be better described as a skilled machine operator than as a menial labor role. The work isn't completely automated but technology has reduced the job market for trash truck crews by two-thirds. I'm guessing the barrier is higher now too, requiring training and certifications to run the robotics on the truck instead of physical fitness being the primary prior qualification.
No, HN has worked this way since long before dang was running it; I believe pg implemented the feature. It's a good feature, in that it tends to bury threads that bring much more heat than light.
Th DMA was written explicitly to target a small group of mostly American tech companies, while excluding others like Nintendo.

Traditionally, console manufacturers have lost money on hardware, and made it up in license fees for software and accessories. It is a bit more complicated in reality, and I think that situation should change, but the DMA as currently written won't have any impact on it.
Surprisingly, they actually did write a FAQ entry on it (I'm honestly surprised):

https://github.com/SixArm/usv/tree/main/doc/comparisons#asci...
Translation of what you wrote: "I don't like what you wrote but I can't see how to refute it either."
Vehicle Cloning – Another Reason Not to Use Automated License Plate Readers
Sincerely Thank you, and I will through my Protonmail address.
Probably. My background is a PhD in the physical sciences + high performance computing, where I’ve pivoted to applying those techniques to machine learning. Depending on the current tech hype cycle, this background matches various job titles: data scientist, applied scientist, research scientist, quantitative engineer, machine learning engineer, research software engineer, scientific software engineer, etc.

I typically go with whichever likely matches the most LinkedIn search filters of the day. Unfortunately, I can’t bring myself to put “AI” in my job title (despite the potential career benefits) because it just feels kind of icky. Maybe for a role that performs fundamental AGI research, but that’s about it.
Why not? Android has nearly twice as much marketshare as Apple in Europe.
Addressed in the FAQ: https://github.com/SixArm/usv/tree/main/doc/faq#why-choose-u...

Main point: ”USV provides typically-visible letter-width characters (such as Unicode 241F), whereas ASV provides typically-invisible zero-width characters (such as ASCII 31).”
did you add it?
Have you tried disabling transfer lock before editing the glue records? On Hover this is necessary for either changing nameservers or glue records (otherwise it fails with a weird error). Although I'm not sure if it is a registrar mechanic or just a Tucows/OpenSRS thing.
> > - most powerful propaganda machine (international and domestic)

> This is clearly false given the previous presidency.

That doesn't follow. Just because another country has a propaganda machine that was, when fully engaged and focused on a a singular goal, able to achieve that goal in our country, doesn't mean that our propaganda machine isn't more powerful. It could just mean that ours was blindsided by this particular effort of theirs, or any of various other scenarios.

Note that I'm not saying our propaganda machine is stronger—just that this particular argument is not remotely conclusive.
> Are you aware

Few sentences that start with this clause are emitted in good faith, and yours is certainly not one of them.
Inside the industry too - the CEO of Nvidia just said that young people will not need to learn how to code!
no mac support :-(
But in order to qualify for distributing via your own website, you need to have had a million installs in the prior year. So everyone who could potentially use that distribution method will by definition be subject to the CTF. It seems like an indie dev's only non-Apple option that can avoid the CTF is to distribute through a third-party app marketplace and hope to stay under a million installs.
I don't think that comparing one year against one other can possibly show the title to be true or false.

A couple of weeks ago there were some articles here on statistical process control. The same lessons about meaningful data sampling apply.
One wants to have perspectives of change even in sacrifice. Cant imagine actual change with any given party or political conestellation atm
Clonezilla is great. It's got one job and it usually succeeds the first time. My only complaint is the initial learning curve requires tinkering. It's still not at the trust level of fire and forget. Experimenting is recommended as backup is never the same thing as a backup and restore and even Clonezilla will have issues recreating partitions on disks that are very different from their source.
Last.fm: "Techcrunch are full of shit" (2009)
No, I just meant save every exercise as a file, like chpt1ex1.js, chpt1ex2.js, &c. A lot of consecutive exercises are just variations on the previous exercise, helping you build your knowledge, but that makes it tempting to overwrite the previous exercise or never save the file. Then you don't have anything to review with after working hard on the book.