skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It boils down to the fact that iPhone is a pervasive computing device and similar to a "public good" should be regulated tightly.

Extremely authoritarian / communist take.

A $1000 luxury phone is not a "public good" just because many have FOMO and feel like they need one. There are many cheap alternative Androids that are just as good with virtually identical features. Nor is it a device that is absolutely necessary to function in society, like say other real public goods like running water or electricity.
Fairly routine tech jobs. In a prior long-term job I got up to about 4 weeks of vacation after a time and did some month-long vacations, especially Nepal treks. I was pretty careful to preserve time off for single vacations for the most part and had flexibility to take a few hours here and there without tapping into my pool.

I'm pretty close to that currently--although it's combined sick/personal/vacation. I've done a number of 3-week workcations in my current role and also had a few weeks of vacation banked from a prior paid time off scheme. I've long had a pretty generous amount of vacation time and I've always leveraged work travel (which I used to do a lot of) for sightseeing and related activities.
Then you would fly via SEA?
Site won't load, but I assume this was just a subsonic flight, gear down, etc? A major technical milestone for sure, but I think the real trick with their proposal is the economic viability of such a plane.
I think your use of the word "memory" here is imprecise.

For example, I can ask ChatGPT "Give me a 200 word summary of George Orwell's book Animal Farm". It gives me a pretty cogent description of the novel.

That knowledge of Animal Farm is somewhere, not in the context. If we don't call that memory, I'm not sure what to call it. Why should I think of this as different than my own memories of the book?
North America is done going through most of its winter phase
Yeah, any airline could set something like this up. Cathay has always had pretty primo service though.
Chain of thought in itself is pretty simple. We had logical provers in the 50s. The difficulty imo is how "thought" is modeled.

Pure logic is too rigorous, and pure statistics is too inconsistent.
Super interesting! How does the data get fetched? Not all of these services have APIs to get this data. Does Gandalf just scrape this data?
Magic and Medicinal: On the Pharmacological Potential of Mushrooms
oh! that's amazing!

I don't know much about steam engines, but more today, Thank you.
I got the same email but ignored it as I'm not using my Google Developer account for ages.
I bet you 1 chocolate covered cricket that you won't eat a mealworm.

True. Some fish and crabs are also poisonous unless you know how to eat them. (I've been told some parts of the puff fish and blue crabs are poisonous)

I ate a worm from a Monte Alban mezcal bottle last week.
Thanks for your reply. I'll spend some more time reading it in detail at a later point.

To clarify one thing: I haven't even read Dawkins' books.

My stance on "proof of god's existance" arguments stems from, among others, a very goos philosophy PhD which I had the fortune to have as a high school teacher for a while (until he quit and went back to scholarship).

His favorite subjects were Thomas von Aquin and Immanuel Kant, both believers in Christian theological "proofs" of various kinds.

I couldn't think of a less flamboyant word than "debunked". To put in other words: all of the proofs of god's existance that I have seeen have turned out to be logical fallacies.

My best friend, who was strongly catholic most of his life, but went on to study phiolosphy, I think concluded the same.

That doesn't mean he's lost his faith completely though. AFAIK he doesn't like to call himself a Catholic anymore though.

Which brings me to another issue, if not the main one, with these proofs:

which god's existance do they aim to prove? Belief in most religions seems mutually exclusive (in a single mind, and without redefining and muddying historical terms), as much as we'd like otherwise.

"Proving" something like "there is an entity or cause of effect that is more powerful than any entities or causes of effect that we know" is not a proof of the existance of any particular human-defined "God".
Yes:

> XB-1 met all of its test objectives, including safely and successfully achieving an altitude of 7,120 feet and speeds up to 238 knots (273 mph)
Oh boy, this gives me a chance to talk about one of the gems of astronomy software which deserves to be better known: HEALPixel tesselation!

HEALPixels stand for 'Hierarchical Equal-Area Iso-latitudinal Pixels'. It is a scheme that was developed to analyze signals that cover the entire sky, but with variable density.

Like HTM or Hilbert curves, this can be used to organize spatial data.

The tesselation looks kind of funny but has many good features - it doesn't have discontinuities at poles, and is always equal area. And with the "nested" healpixel formulation, pixels are identified by integers. Pixel IDs are hierarchical based on leading bits - so, for example, pixel 106 (=0110 1010) contains pixel 1709 (=0110 1010 1101). This lets you do some marvelous optimizations in queries if you structure your data appropriately. Nearest neighbor searches can be extremely quick if things are HEALPix-indexed - and so can radius searches, and arbitrary polygon searches.

HEALPixels are used today for more than just their original intent. LSST will use them for storing all-sky data and point source catalogs, for example.

More here:

- Original NASA/JPL site: https://healpix.jpl.nasa.gov/

- Popular Python implementation: https://healpy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

- Good PDF primer: https://healpix.jpl.nasa.gov/pdf/intro.pdf

And an experimental database being built on healpix for extremely large data volumes (certainly many TB, maybe single-digit PB): https://github.com/astronomy-commons/hipscat
Show HN: I built games and courses to learn Triads on the Guitar Fretboard
Hey all
I’ve been working on fretboard learning app (www.fretboardfly.com) for the past year. Posted a couple fretboard games on here last year asking for feedback and got a great response. Yesterday I released a ton of new games and courses spanning Triads, Scales, Chords and Arpeggios and would love to have you guys try it out and give feedback. I’ve removed all login/signup requirements for a bit so its easy to try out and everything is free to try without signing up
Cheers
Copenhagen is as good if not better than both, at least accounting for the population being double that of Zurich.

Metro and commuter trains run all day and all night (the trains also go to Malmø in Sweden).

Long distance trains go all the way across Denmark and as far as Gothenburg in Sweden, although there are very few been midnight at 4am.
The time processing the longer prompt isn't being spent churning (i.e. "thinking") on the problem at hand, it's spend calculating attention matrices between all the tokens. The time spent on this is a function of the number of flops you have available.

So no, if you just fill up your context window to garbage, the LLM will not perform better at your task/question.
Which, funnily enough, is expanded on in no less than three[1][2][3] dedicated websites that are essentially called "Casino-Without-Swedish-License" in various ways, and are also linked as sponsors on the bulma.io website.

[1] - casinoutansvensklicens dot co

[2] - utansvensklicens dot casino

[3] - casino-utan-svensk-licens dot com
Got it, makes sense.

It still seems quite distinct as users aren't forced to have an iPhone, there are widely used alternatives, but folks were forced to have a PC if they wanted a computer for most tasks and situations back in the 90s.
Turns out that the striatum has two areas that are over-connected to it. One deals with immediate external information, and the other, the default mode network, is in operation when no other interesting stimulus is available--daydreaming? Why do they procrastinate? Both of those areas are overconnected compared to the future weighing area in the prefrontal cortex. Simple as.
They are all the same, the government just doesn't like competition
Should have thought about it in advance?

Something similar happened to me with cofounderslab.com. I paid some $60 for full membership, asked a question and got banned. Threatened lawsuit if they don't refund me and they did. Still can go fuck themselves, didn't visited their pathetic site ever since (many years ago).
Haha February was an absolute blur, many sleepless nights :). Great to hear that the idea is shared, hope we can deliver a big part of your vision -- would love to chat through any thoughts or feedback you have!
His point is that we talk of existing, as existing in this universe. But God is outside of it.

An analogy is: it would be wrong to say Tolkien exists in the Lord of the Rings universe, even though he made it, and so in a sense is a precondition for any of the characters in the lore existing.

This is actually not unusual but is the standard theological view
RedditDB
I don't think that's quite an equivalent loss of "faith".

More equivalent would be where you see enough evidence of faked/false papers being published that you start believing that most papers are faked/false. More equivalent would be you concluding that (e.g) the FDA does not possess either the authority or expertise (or both) to ever correctly make any judgements about the safety of food or drugs. More equivalent would be your deciding that CDC doesn't actually understand how disease spreads and thus should be ignored.

(I'm aware that the latter two examples here sound suspiciously related to specific recent events/trends in the USA, but that's accidental and not intentional on my part)
Great company building actual difficult technologies.

What engine are they using this time in their supersonic aircrafts? Last time I checked, Rolls-Royce abandoned Boom as their engine supplier.

[0] https://simpleflying.com/rolls-royce-quits-boom-supersonic-e...
Nova explosion will be visible to naked eye in rare stargazing event
Transitioning from Heroku PostgreSQL to AWS EC2: Step-by-Step Guide
Aren't the movement of the earth and sun so predictable that we could have simulated this outcome to a similar degree of accuracy?
Dimspire – Dimspirations for Daily Life
Thanks for the useful report! Fixes are in the pipeline and should land in the next version
I felt it was a good dive into "good" programs at a bit of higher level, rather than "here's how to do X". Quite a bit applies to Windows software and other software that never touches Unix as well.

Some bits are better than others, some bits haven't aged too well in the last 20 years, and it's a shame esr has since turned crazy. But I still feel the book holds up reasonably well.

"Bait and switch" certainly seems too strong of an accusation, especially for a book that's available for free.

I do agree that even pre-crazy esr was never on the level of Kernighan in any way.
The Elements of Differentiable Programming
I noticed that bit in the video -- gear down -- why is that? Just to avoid one possible point of failure, the gear failing to deploy properly for landing?
You're just repeating the previous explanation with different words, so that's not really satisfactory. A mechanistic demonstration of how step by step reasoning tends to constrain the space of solutions to ones that are more likely to be correct would be an actual explanation, until then this is a just-so story.
With all due respect, the difference in looks between the Surfaces and your laptop is justification enough.

I mean this sincerely. People are willing to pay for good design.
This is absolutely how it should work. Negative externalities should be paid for by the source of them. It can be difficult of course to find where that price lies, but this is what all those lawsuits were about. It’s a shame they didn’t just bake that cost in from the beginning, instead of failing to take responsibility and then having to be forced to do so.
I recognise the huge amounts of effort involved in this and I applaud the moderators for keeping HN an interesting place to be.

That said, I think it's reasonable for us to have visibility on their manual interventions, and this could be easily surfaced via the Hacker News API (https://github.com/HackerNews/API), if the Story JSON included the values of "contro," "bury," and "gag" fields, which are currently opaque to users of the API

See https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-hacker-news-ranking... for more discussion on terminology

One other positive thing to mention about HN: the cost of running HN is non-zero, yet it remains ad-free. I'm grateful for this. So many websites have become unusable due to monetisation dark patterns.
Link Checker for Microsoft Word – Find suspicious and broken hyperlinks
They won't ever have a monopoly on a browser engine though, or messaging app.

Their monopolistic practices are, arguably, preventing other monopolies. If Safari disappeared 97% of mobile browsers would be Chrome (or use the Chrome engine):

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/world...
Maybe we should teach Prolog/CLP and PDDL to LLMs. Unfortunately the training set would be too small.

It would be cool to have logic based modeling jobs, even if the goal is just to feed the LLMs.
Ah yes, global ocean temperatures are famously tied to winter on a single continent.
A physicist view on gRPC – Simulating the Sun-Earth-Moon three-body system
It's always surprising when people don't see that the government, which can take your money and throw you in jail if you don't let them, or send you to war, is entirely blameless in any alleged bribing.
Hmmm.
Augmented reality display, Carbon fiber frame, supersonic intakes...

And 3 J85-15 jet engines designed in the 1950s (?)

I remember reading about these J85 engines in an issue of Popular Mechanics roughly 20 years ago. This engine was designed to be cheap and small enough to fit in a carry-on suitcase circa 1955. They are best known for powering the F5 "low-budget fighter" from 1959.

Crazy that a new aircraft is launching with such new tech, but still rocking engines that were fundamentally designed around 10 years after the dawn of jet aircraft.
What are your concerns with LGPL?
This sounds great, but breaks pytest on the projects I've tried it on - both Django projects, both in different ways. I'm interested enough that I'll be keeping an eye on progress though!
> Extremely authoritarian / communist take.

that's how you know he's right
Who's "requiring" anything? Android is there if you want open smart phone computing. iOS is there if you don't. And at a near 50/50 split, that means both are about as close to continuously feature parity as you could hope for. Listening to all arguments over why iOS should open itself up when Android is right there for anyone that wants that sort of freedom feels like listening to a bunch of C programmers bitch about Rust's borrow checker or Java's Garbage Collector. Your "software freedom" goal is already here in the world's most popular smart phone OS and supported on more devices from more vendors than even the most "open" iOS version will ever be. But not everyone wants or needs to write code in C and not everyone wants or needs the sort of "software freedom" that Android is giving.
I think it could also have a connection with symbolic AI: The discrete tokens could be the symbols that many believe is useful or necessary for reasoning.
It is also useful for compression, reducing memory requirements by the quantization and small integer representations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-symbolic_AI
Was gravity an idea not worth shit before we developed ways to empirically test it out?
> To achieve this, we first instrument the test using sys.settrace (or, on versions of python >3.12, the far better sys.monitoring!) to keep a history of all the functions that were called, along with the calling line numbers. We then re-run the test and use AST parsing to find all the variable assignments and keep track of those changes over time. We also use AST parsing to obtain the source code for these functions.

I don't want to be negative on someone's Show HN post, but it seems like getting all of this and showing it to the user would be way more helpful than showing it to the LLM?

My standard sometimes when I'm thinking about this kind of stuff is "would I want this if the LLM was swapped out for an actual human?" So would I want a service that gets all this useful information, then hands it off to a Python coder (even a very good Python coder) with no other real context about the overall project, and then I had to ask them why my test broke instead of being able to look at the info myself? I don't think I'd want that. I've worked with co-workers who I really respect; I still don't want to do remote debugging with them over Slack, I want to be able to see the data myself.

Going through a middleperson to find out which code paths my code has hit will nearly always be slower than just showing me the full list of every code path my code just hit. Of course I want filtering and search and all of that, but I want those as ways of filtering the data, not ways of controlling access to the data.

It feels like you've made something really useful -- an omniscient debugger that tracks state changes over time -- and then you've hooked it up to something that would make it considerably less useful. I've done debugging with state libraries like Redux where I can track changes to data over time, it makes debugging way easier. It's great, it changes my relationship to how I think about code. So it's genuinely super cool to be able to use something like that in other situations. But at no point have I ever thought while using a state tracking tool, "I wish I had to have a conversation with this thing in order to get access to the timeline."

Again, I don't want to be too negative. AI is all the hotness so I guess if you can pump all of that data into an LLM there's no reason not to since it'll generate more attention for the project. But it might not be a bad idea to also allow straight querying of the data passed to the LLM and data export that could be used to build more visual, user-controlled tools.

Just opinion me, feel free to disregard.
In an urban environment you can build UP. Airports avoid structure over 40 or 50ft to avoid interfering with the controllers visibility.

Instead of having one giant check in hall you could have one floor per airline, for instance.
Yes. The bet is still that the airlines can find viable routes to fly with a vehicle that creates sonic booms.
This setting at Earthquakes USGS also shows the quake group being discussed.

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=31.27319...

Major collection from central Alaska near Denali National Park down the peninsula and fairly large group heading up California.
Comparing and contrasting 9 different free/open software licenses
Hidden Door: If you can imagine it, you can play it
>I always think of neutrophils as being like bombs full of bleach roaming around looking to destroy things.

Pretty true and they're way more complex than that, as you likely know.

They do ingest cells and then kill those ingested cells with bleach (NADPH oxidase > superoxide > hydrogen peroxide > hypochlorous acid). They also release at least 16 different antimicrobial proteins into the surrounding environment. And finally they release eutrophil extracellular traps (NETs), web-like structures of DNA that trap and kill extracellular microbes
Check out https://thenoted.app/

Think of it as obsidian for video note-taking.
LA's graffiti-tagged skyscraper: a work of art and symbol of city's failings
Apple sells several different models of phones which, in fact, are not $1000
On their main page they referencing the following:

XB-1’s carbon composite and titanium fuselage is propelled by three General Electric J85 engines. [1]

[1] https://boomsupersonic.com/xb-1
>every subsidy is a form of price control. Price controls are not just ceilings and floors.

You make many points and I didn't read the whole thread bellow but on this point specifically I think you are wrong especially in the context of GP which was saying that price controls are not effective. What GP means is that actual price controls are not effective. So I don't see how redefining price controls here is meaningful. That is, it would not be fair to say, for example, that since things that are "a form of price control," however we define that, are effective, therefore true price controls are also effective. So I don't see why you are trying to redefine this word here. And it is obvious that GP means price ceilings and floors. And, importantly, that's what people mean by the term. For example that is how Wikipedia defines it.[0] Also importantly, that's what the phrase literally means. If you subsidize something, you did not control the price as someone can still charge more for it after subsidies. They just won't choose to due to market forces. Even then if you only subsidize one company then they will not lower prices assuming that the scale effeciency created by more buyers does not provide more profit than keeping the current price. I suppose you can say that since the market force is so strong that the government giving subsidies amounts to literal price control. But this is obviously a very different meaning, and since it is not the common usage it makes no sense to define it that way in this one comment. Additionally, by that same token we would have to define every market action as a form of price control. So my point here is that nobody defines subsidies as price control and it makes no sense to do so from both a linguistic and economic standpoint.

>Also "subsidies don't work", the subsidy often not a consumer subsidy it's a producer profit subsidy. See EV's which all have subsidies built into their price except the Leaf.

I don't know who you're quoting here or what this paragraph is saying. But I didn't see GP say subsidies don't work. And nobody has said that price controls not working amounts to subsidies not working. Subsidies obviously work and have been shown to work for decades. Not in all cases does it work, but many times it has worked and the outcome is one that would most likely not have occurred in a completely free market. And this shouldn't be surprising as using capital to grow a company is one of the main 'discoveries' of Capitalism along with the division of labor. The only issue is that you lose market signals and you have to increase taxes. Government-free markets and Capitalism are not the same thing. To deny this is to say that the East India Company was not a form of Capitalism as it had government mandated monopolies over several markets.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_controls
While I acknowledge the cool factor, I don't like what Boom is doing. We should be looking at making air travel more efficient, reducing the energy/emissions per passenger-mile flown. We don't need to invent ways to make luxury travel by the rarified few ever more expensive and damaging.
I wonder how many more years until phone/watch/tv releases of microLED. It seems like it's been a perpetual "5 years away" for the last decade or so. And as I am in the market for a TV upgrade, I'm personally leaning towards a LG G4/C4 to last me until microLED displays release.
US experience is different, with big diesels and primarily freight. I'd rate them as similarly annoying to a divided highway, but I suppose it depends on the region and the specifics
Loved the effort and concept that went into designing Logseq.

The reason I don't use it: when creating notes, if one doesn't use hashtags etc. properly (and spell them correctly), one would pretty much never be able to retrieve the snippet.
You should read Never Let Me Go.
Notes on Implementing a Range-Based CPU/GPU Profiler
Sparing the Midnight Oil
Human composting lets you replenish the Earth after death
Heisenberg Compensator