skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is not democracy (everyone getting an equal vote) but representative democracy (everyone getting a vote on a person once every N years who then gets the power to do what they want which they hopefully did not lie about in order to get those votes).

Delegation (everyone getting an equal vote on all issues but being able to designate someone else to vote on their behalf on any given issue without forfeiting the right to vote directly on other issues) does not suffer this problem and is arguably more democratic.

Additionally certain forms of representative democracy make this problem worse like first-past-the-post voting resulting in strategic voting, i.e. voting not for the person you think best represents your interests but most likely to win while still representing some of your interests, encouraging politicians to do the bare minimum and avoid taking strong stances on divisive issues to remain "electable".

The problem is that representative democracy centralizes power in a ruling class (sometimes literally, due to nepotism and dynastic reputations) whereas delegation maintains decentralized power while allowing for that power to be temporarily centralized (e.g. many people delegating to the same individual) but always with the understanding that everyone is free to reclaim their power by withdrawing it from their delegate on a case by case basis. In Germany a variant of this was promoted by the Pirate Party under the label "liquid democracy" - although they of course heavily focused on a possible technological implementation of it rather than promoting the idea itself first.
Completely understandable and yet another example that practicality beats purity.
Awesome. From the perspective of tech recruiter for startups, I can say that Hiring Managers just love this stuff. It really sets you apart!
One thing that makes me kind of happy - I am no longer scared of "AI singularity". Looking at the bullshit LLMs generate, I don't think they will take over world and start to upload our minds to torture chambers or whatever.
This post never actually delivers on its claims. What about CAP or FLP does this resolve in a new way?

The author, additionally, seems to not be well-versed in the existing distributed database literature.

Essentially they have added a queue in-front of all database operations. That queue is totally ordered, so you can't have consistent issues. That queue apparently does all operations via a two-phase commit (without calling it that and being unclear on semantics, so I am not 100% sure).

Ok. So you've moved the question of availability and consistency to your queue. Is that a single queue? If so, then it's a liability. Why not just use a single database at that point. Is it multiple queues? Then you still have a consensus problem to solve. Are you using two-phase commit? Well, now your availability is seriously impacted.

There is nothing there.

It's a shame because there are models that are much more interesting that provide a useful mental model for this. PACELC is my favorite. The essence is that when everything is going fine, your decision is around latency and consistency. When there is a partition, your question is between availability and consistency.
> If going to Mars is worth doing, it's worth doing at scale

I don't think this is true.

If the main value is getting credit for putting the first human there, and doing a few experiments on soil samples or somesuch, then it definitely wouldn't be worth scaling things up, the same way its not worth doing missions to the deep sea, Antarctica or the Moon at scale...
Show HN: Cahier – A knowledge base with native support for research
I'm happy to be on Hacker News to present my most recent project. Cahier is a personal knowledge management system created to support out of the box the research workflow. It allows you to both store and consume study documents (PDFs, web pages, etc.), manage the annotations from those documents, and produce written content based on them.

It goes further than existing reference managers because we chose to make the annotation management a part of the application, so you can organize and centralize highlights in notes and special document elements.

It's a local-first, native application for Windows and macOS, created to be a research companion for serious readers.

Here's a more detailed method that uses the app: https://felipefarinon.com/articles/a-method-for-doing-resear...
At least for me, the article keeps going offline intermittently. Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240308111845/https://protesila...
With or without OS/2, it would be really interesting to see how everything turned out. Windows had such a profound impact on both business and personal computing that we might've been in a completely different place!
Thank you. I am unable to find a therapist, and I was unable to manage with antidepressants. My mechanism right now is "see if you still feel this way a week from now" which - so far - helps. It isn't so much that I changed my mind, but more that I understand that there are people that depend on me being around.

Job is indeed a major factor. I don't currently work in a great place - it is generally a rather toxic place - and age-discrimination is, like most of the industry, rife. Pushing 54 it is hard to find a new gig, especially in this market, which doesn't help at all. After 30 years working at the forefront of this industry solving some of the hardest problems around, my skills, experience, and insights are just no longer required.

Life circumstances have left me without any kind of options for retirement, early or otherwise, so this is me for the rest of my life; I'm likely to die behind my keyboard. I'd rather go out on my own terms, watching the sun set behind the sea.
could be he had information that would be devastating to some specific higher-up individual
Is that the point here?

I think the key point about using someone else's framework is that it's someone else's framework, not that it's someone else's framework.
My understanding is that AGI has no formal definition as it means different things to different people.

The poster here created his own definition, but what is wrong with that? He set a very specific bar to achieve, something that most "high-level" thinkers in the space have not really done. Isn't the point of discourse to bring your ideas to the table?
I just felt that the article does not meet my expectation of an HN entry. No hard feelings. Try again soon OP.
I’ve wondered if the institutional buy up of BTC via ETFs and corporate and governmental balance sheets has adequately considered this risk. Could a bad actor steal BTC by cracking sha256 keys on a quantum computer? There could be a catch-22 - doing so would zero the value of btc, so if they didn’t immediately transfer to a quantum resistant asset, their heist would be worthless. Still, they could profit by shorting or it could be on agenda of other assets to just zero btc.
Prot's thoughts echo some of the fears I had during the "slow leap" of 2018. I never made the jump to sourcehut, but I did leap to Gitlab, and have a general feeling that whatever small following I was building got snapped in half and never recovered.

I just suddenly stopped engaging with the users in my projects. Also a good thing in some cases, but it made my work take on a new private and hidden aspect, which is the opposite of what I wanted (open collab, easy dialogue, connecting with like-minded peers).

Gitlab just doesn't have the audience that Github does, and so my new strategy since a few months has been to develop on Gitlab, but to clone everything onto Github, just to get some audience.
This is just more malicious compliance by Apple. Indie developers are completely locked out of web distribution, and it applies only to developers who are already paying the Apple tax.

> To be eligible for Web Distribution, you must:

> Be a member of good standing in the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more, and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.

> Developers will pay a CTF of €0.50 for each first annual install over one million in the past 12 months.

https://developer.apple.com/support/web-distribution-eu/
Using Microsoft Azure Bastion Tunnels with Ansible
Concept functionality for managing Ansible connections through Microsoft Azure Bastion tunnels.
I’m no rocket scientist, but I feel that statement holds true for bullets too
Apple will allow users to download apps directly from a developer's website
I'll take it slow today
Related:

Attractor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor

Strange Attractor:

https://www.google.com/search?q=strange+attractor&tbm=isch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor#Strange_attractor

Nonlinear Dynamics: Introduction to Nonlinear Dynamics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MizhVorgywY

Nonlinear Dynamics: Delay Coordinate Embedding:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJB0kxpR4Rk

Takens's Theorem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takens%27s_theorem
Apple will allow distribution of iOS apps via the web in the EU
Somehow, most people fail to see the obvious: The ongoing FAA audits at both, Spirit Aerospace and Boeing (so far it looks horrible based on initial reporting) will identify each and every single verifiable whistleblower claim anyways.

So no, despite the general retaliation against whistleblowers out of princial (for the record, that alone is illegal and should be punished a lot harder and more often), Boeing as a company or individual employees have nothing to gain here.

Funny how a place full of rather smart, educated and curious people like HN collectively fail to see that one, very simple, fact.
I hope you are not part of the founding team but if you are, you truly are doing your startup a disservice. Sharing your startup/ideas is great but doing it in the form of an advertisement "underlying approach introduced in Reexpress as among the more significant results of the first quarter of the 21st century" is just weird.
Mathematics of Machine Learning
Two big changes here. One is allowing third-party app stores to exclusively offer their own apps (I guess removing the requirement that they accept other apps). And the second is allowing apps that meet certain requirements to be installed directly from the publisher’s website:

> Apple's specific criteria, such as being a member of the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more and having an app with more than one million first installs on iOS in the EU in the prior year, and commit to ongoing requirements, such as publishing transparent data collection policies

But as you can see you won’t be seeing indie apps distributed in this way. Though, to be fair, for most indies the App Store with the old rules is probably the best deal available to them.
> he is an affiliate marketer for an overpriced product

Didn't he recently announce that he now even has equity in AG1? So, it even goes beyond "affiliate".

That said, if you listen to the actual wordings of the claims he makes about AG1, he very clearly makes it a subjective statement, as in, he himself is taking it, because it sounds to him like a good idea (and walks through his thinking).

He very clearly distinguishes the modality around that from the modality around the science he reviews and that sort of thing. At least, to a trained ear, the distinction comes across very clearly.
Because, as unlikely as it is, if we're discussing risk scenarios for AI getting out of hand. Well then a monolithic superintelligence is just one of the possibilities. What about a swarm of dumb AIs that are nonetheless capable of reasoning and decision making and they become a threat?

That's pretty much what we did. There's no super intelligent monkey in charge. As much as some have tried to pretend, material or otherwise. There's just billions of average intelligence monkeys and we overran all Earth's ecosystems in a matter of centuries. Which is neither trivial nor fully explained yet.
My understanding was that Word2Vec[1] was trained on Wikipedia and other such texts, not artificially constructed things like the triplets you suggest. There's an inherent structure present in human languages that enable the "magic" of embeddings to work, as far as I can tell.

[1] https://code.google.com/archive/p/word2vec/
Wow. If this is how you write in your non-native language, you must be a virtuoso is your own!

What's your native language?
If only Zed got more traction & in-turn extensions, that's more performance than what most need
Securing DRAM Against Evolving Rowhammer Threats
This is the calculus for every crime, and yet somehow crimes happen.
The benchmarks are in the repo + provided as screenshots in the README, but to clarify this is speaking to performance improvements relative to v2 of Bebop.
A non-linear advance probably wouldn't involve Shor's algorithm. As what happened with AI algorithms. What we call post quantum cryptography is really post Shor's cryptography.
What about the things normal people want to build: strength or strength-endurance or endurance? How is that affected by carb/fat/protein ratio?
no, as in the Kellogg School of Management
Check when Morris worm came out.

And by the way,

"A consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to--they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980 language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."

-- C.A.R Hoare's "The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture"
Aldrin cycler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_cycler
Feel you so hard. Sucks to be a Zoomer now, trying to do Boomer things.
I sheepishly collect analytics, and sourcehut provides similar relative traffic to my website as github does (I host more projects on github). Unfortunately nothing is immensely popular so I cannot say with certainty this will hold true, but I've observed high engagement with popular sourcehut projects.
"middle of formal deposition for his civil retaliation case"
> Democracy tries to select for people doing the right thing

If this was true, wouldn't democracy improve standard school curriculum so the general public at least has a chance at being able to choose quality leadership, see through the incessant lying/untruthfulness and misinformation of politicians and the media/journalists, have the ability to at least sometimes think of things from an absolute (what is maybe possible, were we to try) rather than relative perspective, etc, instead of being led around by their noses like oblivious if perhaps well meaning schoolchildren by these people?
Ask HN: Recommendations of blood test providers for the UK?
To do a check up of everything or at least most of the most general/useful markers
Wait and see for what exactly?
> But as soon as you have a boss and the boss asks "how long? who does what? where do we start?" - you have to have some framework.

Why?

Does it work? Is it productive? Is it better than not doing that?
That recent push by Roku for accepting updated EULA around arbitration makes quite a lot more sense
IMO we underestimate the psychological implications of wealth in modern society.

I suspect even if a power ball lottery winner takes a philosophical position it would be taken far more seriously than if they had never won the lottery.

At some point you start to believe your own bullshit when all of society signals are telling you what a genius you are.
I have gotten jaded about ESR, but this post was spot on and had an awkward but effective mix of respect, flattery, warning/rebuke, care.

Linus's subsequent wildly successful development of git makes them both look shrewd.
This is my issue with the term processed foods. If a food is processed because it has artificial sweeteners and food coloring, it's different then food containing high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated fats (which is what the study looked at).

If you are going to condemn processed foods, show me that it's worse to eat Quest Bars than fruit and nuts with honey.

I hold the problem is sugars (and alcohol).
The parallel concern - we saw how too open communities just don't work in modern world. Way too many sides have their own 'pitch', be it marketing, politics, propaganda, always to manipulate opinions via emotions to steered goal which is never actual simple truth. Truth doesn't need much marketing among reasonable people.

This is how flat earthers, climate change deniers, blind supporters of putin's war on ukraine etc spawn out of blue and suddenly it feels like half of the world got mentally disabled. Well, they didn't. There was either once a nice community say about patriotism for XYZ, which was gradually subverted into whatever fringe stupid position they hold now, via various negative emotions us-vs-them of participants. Or such a community was already created with such purpose.

Good old Prigozhin's and GRU troll farms well running full steam for past 2 decade, always subverting western countries, especially those former communist ones. All it takes is 1 skilled manipulator, all 3-letter agencies everywhere have whole departments for doing exactly this (and counter-attack it too, but that's far less effective).

With realistic videos, russians can pop out any video of zelensky or biden being a pedophile, and those photos of putin riding a bear will look 100% perfect which is enough for most older russian population.

I will gladly be part of some more closed community, trust is a very important item and currently we already severely lack it. There are of course numerous issues with such communities, ie including new members and anyway steering away from actual truth, but thats 100% problem now already. But some friction is not a bad thing per se, it works the same way in real life in smaller villages everywhere. Clearly good enough model for past 10k years.
Impressive. How do you know if it's a new vs. reposted job?
Ah, thanks! Would be interesting to see benchmarks against cCap'n Proto
Read it as a resolution.
Opening the website with Firefox 123.0.1 on Windows 10 x64, the webpage slowed my browser to a crawl. After a quick look into it, it seems it didn't play well with the Angular Devtools extension[1]; you might want to look into it.

Interesting tool nonetheless!

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/angular-devtools
That is why computational linguistics prefer the term related over similar here.
Similarity is notoriously hard to define, for starters in terms of grammatical vs semantically similarity.
The font choice is likely your browser's default, as the code doesn't appear to specify one at all. The repo's demo uses a monospace font.
I stopped replying in this thread earlier due to dang’s comment. I am not going to respond fully, as your response is clearly /not/ in good faith.

> If you ban everyone from a country from immigrating (which is exactly what you're proposing for all birthright citizenship countries)

Nowhere do I say anything of the sort. I am pro—immigration generally.

Stop trying to put words in my mouth and then battling the straw man.
Not sure what to say, I always had family to catch me, intentionally or not, when I came even remotely close to what you are going through. All I can think of is this: nothing is worth sacrificing your life for. That, and most likely you are not alone, even if you din't know it. I am no religious person, so no prayers, but I sincerly hope you get through this!
The app still has to be notarized, this seems logical to me, I’d only be worried if they ever allowed unsigned apps to run.

There are plenty of “free Vbucks” and survey sites that show you how to enable sideloading on Android to download said app that is just pure malware.
The scale of word embeddings (eg. Distance from 0) is mainly measuring how common the word is in the training corpus. This is a feature of almost all training objectives since word2vec (though some normalize the vectors).

Uncommon words have more information content than common words. So, common words having larger embedding scale is an issue here.

If you want to measure similarity you need a scale free measure. Cosine similarity (angle distance) does it without normalizing.

If you normalize your vectors, cosine similarity is the same as Euclidean distance. Normalizing your vectors also leads to information destruction, which we'd rather avoid.

There's no real hard theory why the angle between embeddings is meaningful beyond this practical knowledge to my understanding.
If you switch to a Microsoft account instead of a local account before you move your install, you can often recover your license once Windows processes the hardware change (sometimes it takes several attempts over a few reboots, their license server is special), and once that happens, you can go back to a local account, if Microsoft didn't remove that flow.
I just want to be able to install my own apps on my own device without paying $99/year (and with a signature that lasts a reasonable amount of time).

Sadly, this doesn't seem to allow for that.
Spite-Driven Development
My comment was specifically about the use of tens of thousands of copyrighted books which had been pirated and distributed illegally, for which the authors - most of whom receive quite a small amount of money for their work as it is - received nothing and weren’t asked for permission.

There is a very big difference between knowingly downloading and using illegally distributed copyrighted works vs scraping the internet in general.

And if we can’t have copyright any more then we need to work out how to allow authors to make a living, (and musicians, and artists, and indie software developers in fact…)

I agree it’s less clear cut about content that has been willingly posted to the internet but that’s not really what I’m most concerned about.
For any non-trivial editor you will need an object model that abstracts away the low level drawing functions and manages state.

I think fabric.js is worth checking as its source code is well organized and documented. It's not a small project though and the latest version was rewritten in TypeScript: https://github.com/fabricjs/fabric.js/tree/master
Back in the early '00s there was such a device - the Zector ZVG. It was driven via parallel port and used a custom version of MAME.

I'm sure somebody in the VAC scene started work on a replacement after these ended production.

I had an ZVG and it was pretty good. But now I just play my Star Wars cockpit.
> I fear that participating online with other humans will require "proof of self"

I fear something worse: that it WON'T require proof of self, because the LLMs will be able to tell if you're human... and your age, wants, needs, everything else; that's the nightmare scenario for me: LLMs integrating all the little bits and pieces of yourself you shed online, all the information you leak, from the speed your mouse movements to how long you read an article -- and what articles you read -- and the words and style of your comments -- everything building into an accurate and detailed profile of yourself.
And that is why while C++26 is being discussed, C++20 modules are still full of warts, working on Visual C++ (kind of), and not really anywhere else, as ISO C++ has long stop being about standardizing stuff with actual field experience.
> Though, to be fair, for most indies the App Store with the old rules is probably the best deal available to them.

How do you figure? Given the choice, many indie Mac developers continue to distribute their software outside the Mac App Store.