skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stephenson's Alternative Universes – For Better Science
The definition of "proxy war" is "a war instigated by a major power which does not itself become involved".

Regardless of the scale or nature of the aid, since Russia is directly involved, the Ukraine war can only be a "proxy war" if you believe it was instigated by the EU/NATO/the US, which is essentially assuming the Russian talking point that it was somehow forced to invade Ukraine because it felt threatened.

I disagree with that position and if you do to please do not describe it as a "proxy war" even if you think that other countries providing a limited amount of aid rather than getting actively involved will cause the war to be prolonged.
If I say the sky is falling, the burden of proof is surely on me to provide evidence. I don't have time or the energy to make counter-claims to flat-earthers with no evidence. This is why we say the burden of proof is on those making extraordinary claims.

I'm happy to debate with those who provide sufficient evidence but it's not fair to expect I put effort into rebuttals of claims of "nonsense" with no evidence.
> I thought housing in the EU has been a challenge for generations with home ownership a difficult to impossible goal for most people, with this being the case across the region.

Who told you that? I mean, it’s certainly the case in some places (particularly in large affluent cities), but, much like in the US, it’s variable. If you take EU countries and the US and rank by home ownership percentage, the US is on the low end (even Ireland, with its long-running nationwide housing crisis, beats the US here). Notably _Germany_ is much lower (65% of US homes are owner occupied, 50% of German homes), but Germany’s an outlier in Europe on this; to a large extent it’s driven by below-cost social housing.
Grass fed, usually grain finished.

> A vegan diet is absolutely going to be the better choice on every reasonable metric for the vast majority of people and life situations (aka Inuits don't count).

Is that true of a vegan diet high in fake meat? Highly wasteful because it extracts and uses a small amount from the input material and often the waste is old as animal feed. On top of that extra transport and energy inputs required, etc.

ON the other hand cattle can be part of a natural carbon sink environment. In Scotland (and other places) they are releasing cattle into the wild as part of rewilding!
There are probably as many people that recognize the sarcasm as those that honestly think so.
names are sound and smoke...

ever wondered from which country the words Häagen Dazs stem? They are fictional words from the US ice cream founders to make them look Scandinavian.
I can imagine it. You're skipping over the actually hard part, which is the question of where the current AI paradigm will top out. Don't pretend this is not an open question.
I would not be surprised if the files were not stored in a particularly secure manner. The publisher probably never anticipated PII being in the PDFs for print. They probably have an indefinite data retention period.
I would guess that imports are a small proportion of all animal feed in the UK. UK cattle are grassfed, albeit usually grain finished. ALso the breakdown does not say feed for what animals rather than where from: as the UK is right next to net exporters I imagine most of it comes from neighbours rather than half the planet away.
This feels like using the internet in 1996 or the iPhone in 2010. Not quite there yet, but you can clearly see that this is going to be massive within a few years.
This is a great use case for von Neumann self-replicating machines. Little self-replicating space robots that fashion aerodynamic payloads and fire them to a small receiving site on the Earth. Just remember to include a stop signal, lest they consume in an unstoppable, exponential way.
hello, creator here, just seeing this thread now.

and yes, to be honest i agree with everything you're saying here. it's needed attention for a good while, i've just been busy with getting the app finished & trying to avoid the distraction pit of "fixing up my blog"
It funny that those people claiming to be disenfranchised have no problem with leaders who won't give them any rights at all.
I moved away from Vercel earlier last week for them not having exactly this (and I got scared after reading the “serverless horror stories”). I just host some static websites (nothing fancy) and Cloudflare Pages seems to work just fine for my use-case. If they introduced this a week earlier I may have stayed, though.
i think the question of the meaning of life is maybe better answered by looking outward and get inspiration from other sources. look at the various religions and philosophies to find something that resonates. some people spend decades on this journey, so i don't think there is a quick answer, and not finding anything doesn't mean there is anything wrong with you.

i found meaning in the idea that the purpose of the existence of humanity itself is to carry forward an ever advancing civilization.

that means that we work together to make life better for everyone. this can mean raising children, but it also has room for many other activities and contributions that don't involve having children of your own.

having found a satisfactory answer, i don't think about meaning, but i focus on my role in the world to fulfill that purpose, while dealing with my own needs and shortcomings.
That's one conservative software selection; almost the entire article could have been written in 2000. Configuring cdparanoia brings back memories!
The New York Times Is Trying to Kill Your Favorite Wordle Clone
If you haven’t felt that way you probably never let yourself experience deep passion for your work. To each his own, but I find that it requires passion to do remarkable things. There is no shame in punching the clock for your 401k.
At least on XFCE with X11, this behavior is configurable, you can enable it or disable it, as you wish.
"I'm sorry, Poszlem, I'm afraid I can't do that."
I've heard that a smile can have a significant impact on both the person smiling and those who witness it.
Signal is built around metadata minimisation. Messages contain the absolute bare minimum information to get delivered. Because there is only one server everyone is connected to, there is almost no routing metadata attached to the encrypted binary blob. You get a key and ciphertext and that's about it. Not even Signal knows the sender metadata that's part of the message, by encrypting it. Basically all Signal knows about you is your phone number, IP address, and the last time you checked the server. It also doesn't store messages for longer than it absolutely needs to (which leads to the desktop client needing to connect to your phone or vice versa for multi device chats).

XMPP needs to have a username and server name at the very least. This is because it needs to work in a federated context, and it doesn't use things like DHTs to decentralise messages in a way that allows hiding the routing data. The message body is encrypted, of course, and headers can be minimised, but there will always be unencrypted metadata. To quote the spec:

> The OMEMO protocol does not protect against attackers who rely on metadata and traffic analysis.

As for Matrix: the message body is usually mostly encrypted, but it's leaking a lot of metadata. Message IDs sometimes fine themselves outside of the encrypted envelope as well as timestamps and other information I don't think should need to be outside the encrypted envelope.

Neither XMPP nor Matrix were designed with encryption as a first priority and that led to protocol design choices regarding metadata that cannot be altered without breaking most clients. They also tend to store messages grouped by chat group/conversation, though multi device support is technically optional for XMPP. From a server dump of either XMPP or Matrix, someone can deduce what users are chatting to what users when. In Matrix, you could deduce what messages are responses, updates, or deletions of what other messages, as well as reactions. For Signal, you'd need wiretaps on both sides to deduce that level of information.

A protocol like Signal would be near impossible to federate. That said, if federation is your goal, MIMI+MLS seems to be the future. Matrix is moving towards MLS, Google's RCS encryption already uses MLS, and MIMI and MLS are often tied together in spec definitions. I believe the XMPP people are also working on (have finished work on?) embedding MLS in XMPP as an alternative to existing encryption methods.
> if you have long running sessions and do several upgrades, are you running N versions of the code & eating up RAM because the old sessions aren’t complete?

I believe Erlang supports two versions running along each other. They capped it at two because back when this was developed there wasn't enough RAM. Joe Armstrong gave at least one talk where he says if he'd have liked to support arbitrary number of versions and garbage collect them as old sessions complete.

> Thus I stand by that there’s no “generic” solution you can bolt onto an arbitrary language.

The main point of the post is centered around Barbara Liskov saying "maybe we need languages that are a little bit more complete now". I'm not interested in the limitations of current languages, I'm interested in the future possibilities.
What software subscription are you asking about?
Does it (or will it, ie. is it planned) support delayed execution? eg. I have a task that I want to run at a certain time in the future?
Fair, I post it as a starting point to establish ones own interpretation of self-awareness, so as not to wade into the philosophical rabbit hole of bringing my own definition.

The reason I think it can be useful as that, is because I see competency and comprehension as requiring 2 very different levels of "self".
What kind of comparison is that? The tool is literally called "TimeLapze".
I don't underestimate the power of emotion in argument, I despise the power of emotion in argument. Well, OK, I use rhetoric myself, it's no use communicating in a robotic monotone, but generally speaking emotive argument is an anti-rational trick to ram home a point of view while evading criticism.
> There is no reason to believe that human intelligence is a stochastic parrot. We have a large body of research to indicate emotion and thought are interdependent [1]. Cognition is not a simple, discrete quantity.

And? My thoughts can create a mood, my mood can influence my thoughts. Do you seriously believe that this isn't a trivially easy thing to get even just a LLM to do by itself with the right system prompt, let alone more complex models? Sure, my guess is that it would probably just be role-playing rather than having qualia, but so what?

> The Chinese room argument is arguing intentionality

I agree with IshKebab about the Chinese room. Just because Searle was trying to argue that because the human within the room doesn't know Chinese therefore the system as a whole doesn't, doesn't mean his argument works. I'd say it doesn't prove anything either way, because the human in that room serves the same role as a homunculus in a human brain, leading to an infinite regression problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument
Before the attack on Ukraine people said the same about Russia attacking Ukraine. There is no reason why Russia would do that, and look where we are now.

As the farmer said, "I'm not greedy, all I want is the land next to mine.
> TERM is already used for determining color support.

It's one of many ways to determine colour support. And arguably the worst of all of the ways too.

- $TERM

This isn't intended to contain colour information, yet that's how it's often abused. Meaning a lot of applications are broken in non-xterm terminals if they happen to use the $TERM variable correctly

- ANSI code: CSI 22 c (Send Device Attributes, ANSI color)

This is the correct way to check for a device capability. But it requires more effort and knowledge of terminals than your average developer has. So is rarely supported by console applications.

- $COLORTERM

This is the modern day equivalent to the device capability API. But also isn't used often

- $COLORFGBG

This was the original env var intended to be used like $COLORTERM, but fell out of favour because, well, nobody bothered to read any docs.

- $FORCE_COLOR

This is an often used standard. Christ only knows why this one exists when we already have 3 other env vars being used this way. Another example of nobody bothering to read any docs

- $NO_COLOR

This is intended to do the opposite of the others and tell applications not to use colour. However even this is often ignored.

----

That's 6 different ways to check whether to colour output or not. Only one actual standard method and everything is only partially supported (if at all) in applications. Hence why applications then need a `--color` flag, which even that differs in support and syntax across different command line tools. And the "default" method you described, $TERM, actually breaks applications on alternative terminal emulators and hardware terminals -- that is unless they decide to announce themselves as `xterm` and in that case that environmental variable becomes entirely pointless because it has naff all to do with terminal listening.

----

> Not sure what terminals do without color support with color escape codes.

They ignore them.

ANSI escape codes are a pain in the arse to parse but there is at least a documented standard way to parse them. Anything that is a CSI (Control Sequence Introducer) sequence, and that includes SGR (Select Graphic Rendition) parameters like colour codes, start with `{ESC}[` and terminate with a character in the range of 0x40 to 0x7E. It's actually a little more complicated than that[1] but that's the gist of it.

So you know what to print and what to ignore.

There are other escape sequences too, the other big one being OSC (Operating System Command) and they're terminated `{ESC}\`, which is usually referred to as ST (String Terminator). That is unless you're xterm, and then you terminate OSC sequences with either ST or BELL (char 0x07).

A lot of this makes more sense if you look at code rather than documentation. So I've made an effort to ensure my own terminal emulator's source code is as self-documenting as possible, eg[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#CSI_(Control_...

[2] https://github.com/lmorg/mxtty/blob/main/virtualterm/ansi_c1...
Writing code without bugs is indeed a hard problem. Not only for upgrade paths.

Sometimes the tradeoffs of the application make it worth to spend QA resources to validate a staggered upgrade path.
HN for all things LLMs:

is the news about OpenAI?

YES => be emphatically amazed, say it's extraordinary and changing the face of the earth (especially if Sam Altman is involved)
NO => be extremely skeptical, blasé and demanding
I would get a MacBook. Perhaps a Razer Blade if gaming is more important than anything else.
One thing to bear in mind; if you’re a tourist in a place, you tend to be exposed to the touristy stuff. Italy actually is an example where getting good non-Italian food may be difficult even in many large cities (this broadly makes sense; it has the oldest population in Europe and one of the lowest immigration rates), but it’s a bit of an outlier there; most large European cities will do better.
What are the YC hacker led consultancies, who's disrupting Accenture?
Digital consultancies, such as Accenture, EPAM, and ThoughtWorks, dominate the tech sector with substantial billion-dollar revenues. Despite the established players, there is a growing interest in disruptive models within this space. While Y Combinator (YC) recently invested in NUMI, a design subscription business changing design services, it remains intriguing who is pioneering innovative consultancy models to challenge the traditional incumbents. The emergence of startups focused on reshaping and displacing the existing consultancy landscape is a dynamic area worth exploring within the startup ecosystem. Anybody working on such? or know of interesting approaches in this area?
I thought Russia was a multi-national state, not a nation state.
The only message that this position would send is that wars of conquest are acceptable and the EU will sit idly by while war rages around them.

You’re basically describing the start of WWII.
> I’ve seen people regularly struggle to write code that accepts all back compat state + handles it correctly.

From the post:

> In a world where software systems are expected to evolve over time, wouldn’t it be neat if programming languages provided some notion of upgrade and could typecheck our code across versions, as opposed to merely typechecking a version of the code in isolation from the next?
It's an experience, some things give more issues, but other things are better and other just different. Documentation consistency, source code availability in the base install (recompile/optimize the OS gentoo style with a few commands), packet filter, following the whole FAQ, discovering the community blogs and IRC channels, etc

Many years ago, on my own house, I started as:

ISP modem -> all things in one VLAN (1 switch segment)

Then I added:

ISP modem -> Linux router -> Separated VLANs (home servers, LAN, WiFi, TV, games, etc)

Finally I did:

ISP modem -> OpenBSD -> Linux firewall -> Home VLANs (LAN, WiFi, TV, games, etc)
-> Home servers

One more hop, but I did think "If someone wants to enter from the outside, will need to exploit 3 layers of TCP/kernel implementations, and switching VLANs, instead of one layer".

Really it was more an excuse to do things and learn... anyone can be attacked if targeted, even with 10 firewalls in front. Just by clicking a link, rendering a font, a PDF, etc... Nowadays I've moved to much, living rented and I only have a personal laptop (and one for job when provided).
I just tested Claude and it failed my alignment test to the point it would violate international conventions on genocide before it would help a conservative.
Thank you! I didn't know this meaning of the term. I always heard it as being used to describe a male dominated culture.
Duplicates in Excel refer to the occurrence of identical values or entries within a dataset or a specific range of cells. Duplicates can occur in single columns, multiple columns, or across entire rows, depending on the context of the dataset. Excel provides several tools and functions to identify, manage, and remove duplicates efficiently.
I believe the person you're responding to was being sarcastic.
Lol! The one and only ;-)
Unfortunately, there’s always someone who is more than willing to read far too much into a low-level technical decision if it serves to, in their eyes, ‘prove’ their preconceived worldview.

A company as large as Apple making this particular decision in service of a wider vision to “own user devices, is attributing to Apple a degree of organisational and coordination prowess that is well beyond unheard of in any organisation even one tenth of Apple’s size.

But it’s Apple, right!?
If you read the context given in the report, it mentions that this is done to change the plane's ILS rating from Cat-IIIB to Cat-IIIA. While I have absolutely no clue what operational/financial reason there might be to do this, I would guess they want to reenable the servo at some later point.

(The plane might also just not be certified to operate without that servo; as shown by this incident the servo still has some impact even when it's disabled.)
I also prefer working in the office. I am more productive there. There are many distracting factors at home, such as pets, for example
That it is poorly defined is a separate problem.

If my brain were to be uploaded, it would matter very much to me how "self aware" it was in the vague and ill-defined sense that sort of corresponds to words like "consciousness" and "qualia" that we also can't test for yet.

Either such an upload is a fork of my consciousness that I wish to be protected from harm and abuse, or it is an unfeeling book that can be used to solve any problem without having to worry about those issues.
I will say the

jax.lax.max()

call in the example is unintentionally funny to me. Almost felt like I was reading code written by Dr. Seuss.
Perhaps stories are how humans make themselves self aware?
Sounds like ShareX is what you are looking for, it has these exact functions basically.
Although it is Windows only.
https://getsharex.com/
Arm chair guy here, have you thought about designing MEMS-like solenoids directly into a PCB?

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Schematic-Structure-of-t...
Recently, I've been pondering this idea that everything seems to have come to a halt, but perhaps we just don't know much
> Read the comment I wrote initially

This is why I call you conceited – the only reason people can disagree with you is because they are stupid or because they haven't actually read what you said. You seem so confused by the fact that I have read it, and I find it to be unconvincing. You suggest that these switches exist primarily to look pretty, when as I understand it, their main purpose is to communicate that checking them has an immediate effect rather than only after form submission. I don't see them being used like that as much as I just see them jammed in random places, and even when they are I have to wonder if it would make more sense for the UI they are a part of to be made into a form. You dismiss the issue with state identification by saying they could represent "a binary choice between any number of things". The idea that a switch can have more states than just on or off is confusing to me, and that still doesn't help with the issue of determining their state unless you label both sides which is a waste in comparison to the simple checkbox, which draws on the user's existing knowledge from filling in forms on pen-and-paper.

> Copout

I'm sorry that I don't have the opinions you want me to have so that I'm wrong.
> Democracy is a lot more scary than Authoritarism from a military perspective.

Yes. But note that armies are a hierarchy with little flexibility once orders start coming down. When democracies want to achieve outcomes they set up (subordinate) dictatorships. The army does not stop to vote in the middle of a war. Indeed, sticking to the Ukraine example, they suspended elections as I assume is usual in war.

Democracy is a better model of governance because the military can focus on winning wars. In a dictatorship, the military has to focus on keeping the dictator in power - otherwise the dictator will get rolled. Since authoritarianism can only do one thing at once, generally they have a weak military at the expense of stability.
The easiest way to do this is to replicate to a database system that uses prolly trees for its storage, then run your diffs in that other system. I.e. dolt. Currently supports mysql binlog replication, postgres logical replication coming in about a week.
A good read, thank you.

The "Spectral reflectance curves for aluminum (Al), silver (Ag), and gold (Au) metal mirrors" graph is neat - hmmm, silver has a 0% notch at ~320 nm (near UV) ...
> How much open source code and research does the Catholic Church publish?

The Catholic church has not only engaged in centuries of religious scholarship, it has given the knowledge freely to anyone. They even set up buildings where you can go and they will teach you what they have found, most people go on Sunday.

That isn't to mention their patronizing of the arts supported the greatest painters and composers that humanity has ever produced.

Now how many hungry has OpenAI fed?
Yeah... It's like before and after for me
Get a DIN-rail and some mounting brackets
Show HN: I launched a SaaS to explain text from images using AI
It has many more features, check it out on the website!
I hope you will love it...
Also, there's a $1 plan especially if you want to try it out.

And, give me feedback on this if you can!
Now you say it, I see it too.