skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree although I've always interpreted it as a combination of difficulty explaining complex architecture, and also not really understanding why things work the way they do. A lot of modern AI sits in this kind of quasi-empirical realm just above (in an emergent properties sense) analytic math and statistics, and it seems like there's not a very good integrative account or understanding of what's going on, or a way of deriving what direction to go in. So you end up with poor explanations in part because the authors of the structures themselves don't quite understand why things are working as they are.
It sounds like they were using the Excel spreadsheet for a WBS or scheduling application. There are a million and one COTS products for that. They probably used Excel because whoever did the initial task didn't know, or didn't have the time to learn about, tools like MS Project or whatever else that could have helped them, or only knew of larger scheduling tools that require a sys admin to set up and run.

The reasons Excel gets used for anything:

1. It's present.

2. It's "free". (Corporate already paid for it.)

3. It's easy at the current scale of the problem

4. It doesn't require servers to use.

5. Someone else created it 20 years ago and no one pushed to use a real DB or specialized COTS product because that takes more effort.

6. It's actually an appropriate tool for the job (very common, but not the #1 reason it's used).
Well the more likely reason for that is that the exploit doesn't work if you have the LANG env var set. The US is the primary place where it wouldn't be set and hence where the malware would be active.
It's a lot better than the alternatives. Particularly the misused Shannon entropy.

The top rated answer for "how do i measure Shannon entropy" on stack overflow for example has an accepted answer of "count the probabilities of all 8bit sequences and then multiply the log of those probabilities together as per the equation". Which is a problematic answer. A file of all 8bit characters in sequence repeated many times over won't have any entropy but will have high entropy by this particular arbitrary measure. The problem with Shannon Entropy is that you have no way to define the optimal symbol lengths and frequencies for any given file.

Kolmogorov Complexity on the other hand at least gives some way for us to get a rough estimate. It's just as incalculable as Shannon entropy but at least by essentially explicitly stating "compress it using the best tool you have at hand and see how small it gets and also include the size of the compression program in the calculation to prevent cheating by using a dictionary" you can get some rough estimate.

Basically Kolmogorov Complexity is the best tool we have. It's not perfect because just like Shannon Entropy it's incalculable in reality but unlike Shannon Entropy we do have a good way to measure if one tool of calculating Kolmogorov Complexity is better than another tool. That measure is simply "does it compress better?".

It's literally the best way to measure randomness of an arbitrary file. Any other way is pretty game-able. If someone uses Shannon entropy to measure randomness just look at the alphabet they use for that measurement and repeat that alphabet sequentially over and over again and you'll have a high shannon entropy for a clearly non-random file. Likewise other measurements might be game-able with large dictionaries to lookup. Kolmogorov complexity includes the entire program so that game doesn't work here.
I believe that is just to disable the inclusion of the payload, the given env variable will disable the payload when it is live.
12 hours ago[0] (42 points, 11 comments)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39876131
"Loser, loner, McDonald's--worker".

Fast food work has long been denigrated as a low-pay dirty job predominantly staffed by teenagers and under-skilled under-privileged workers who lack better job opportunities.

In the California zeitgeist this makes pro-fast food worker action politically irresistible. This is actually a compromise agreement reached after an earlier bill[0] was passed and fast food franchisees threatened to run a ballot proposition to get it repealed.

Basically, politics is how we determine who gets what part of the pie. Fast food workers are sympathetic and politically powerful right now. They simply have more political power than other minimum wage workers and they are now cashing in on that political power.

[0]: https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB257/id/2605912
Well they gave the equations so follow closely where the token representations end up and how they're acted upon.
> This is also happens to be easy way to buy votes

People's brains have become so poisoned about institutions that government actually helping people seems suspicious instead of its purpose.
hmm, usually that's a feature of the crypto space...
Shouldn't whatever is depending on xz supporting landlock be verifying that it's the case through blackbox tests or something? Otherwise a check like this even without the bug could end up disabling landlock if e.g. the compiler environment was such that a given header wasn't available...
> however with software nobody dies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
I still use netbsd as my main desktop, since more than 15 years and counting.

Long live NetBSD.

My system uptime is counted in years.
The situation in china has a difference between the situations you find in the west (like canada/australia).

The local gov't in china does not have any NIMBY's at all (they have no rights like that in china), so the local gov't allows developments as long as somebody is willing to pay the price of the land. After all, this is how the local gov't gets their funding.

The central gov't decided to pop the bubble early (before it became the Japan level of bubble back in the late 90's early 2000's). It's hurting of course, but probably a right sort of hurt as it's really investors that lose out (and china actually, imho, doesn't want an investor class being large and demanding more rights as they become richer and richer).

In the west, such a bubble is difficult to form if NIMBY's stop high density development.
"Muzak is music which has nothing wrong with it. But because it has nothing wrong with it, it also has nothing right with it. And that is what makes muzak so horrifying."

No, I don't remember where that's from. But it seems to fit.

Also, TIL that's actually a proper name rather than only a generic term.
(That maps shows that film location and many others, almost all right off Highway 101:

E.T. (1982), Outbreak (1995), The Tree of Life (2011), The Majestic (2001), After Earth (2013), the canoe chase scene from Last of The Mohicans (1936)...
Reading this felt like a huge waste of my time.

TFA picks out 4-5 realistically unavoidable features of AI training - like that a certain quality threshold value was chosen arbitrarily, or that there's more training data for English than for other languages - and then they hand-wavingly suggest that each feature could have huge implications about.. something. And then they move on to the next topic, without making any argument why the thing they just discussed is important, or what implications it might actually have.
On December 30, 2008, the Case–Shiller home price index reported the largest price drop in its history.
That doesn't apply to any other types of workers?
AKA the Nirvana Fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

If it's not perfect in every way, it's bad.
Who is Matt Lakeman? Why should I care about his analysis/opinions on El Salvador?
> Wouldn’t having such an API be of assistance?

It's probably going to come down to:

1. How accurate is it?

and:

2: Are the people using it for things that it suits, vs things that it doesn't?

For example, if it turns out to be decently accurate at predicting weather (say) "3 days from now" while being seriously wrong at timescales of 6 months, then only using for weather forecasts for the next few days seems good.

But some people tend to believe anything an "AI" computer says regardless, so we'd need to make sure those kinds of people aren't getting it adopted where its harmful.
What do you mean unless? If no amount of money can produce something then you cannot select a buyer based on price. You have not found an exception. You're parroting the rule.
Bitcoin is and will always be real currency as long as enough people believe it is valuable (i.e. can be used to transfer value), regardless of how much it upsets hn user la64710.

Bitcoin is here to stay.
good point; i don't want to be sensational, so i updated the headline
So everyone else here brings up great points, but something else to consider is that the barriers to market entry are, to some extent, created by the OEMs themselves, by dominating the ISO and AS9100 committees and TWGs/TSGs[1]. This means a couple things.

First, Boeing never needs to take an external audit - they wrote the thing - but their suppliers need to cross every T and dot every I or else they owe Boeing money. In the worst case, a supplier can end up handing over product and STILL owing money. But Boeing - and especially BCA - they have never, and will never, undergo an actual AS9100 audit.

Second, since the standards are existing Boeing process, that represents a pretty much undefined cost for any market entrant. And that cost can be cranked arbitrarily if/when Boeing feels threatened, by amending the specs themselves - as they tried to do to SpaceX in 2010. That's probably a story for later, but it's pretty disgusting, although not as disgusting as what happened to the C-Series. OK, none of those are as disgusting as a million other things, but you get the point.

[1] And, to some extent, the FAA itself, but that's a whole other subject.
Kip Thorne was also in charge of the science of Interstellar (2014 movie).

He even wrote a book called The Science of Interstellar.

Also he won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Very smart man!
Desertification is not carbon neutral, though. You have to have the forest regrow to do that. It might be radiation budget negative though, because forests have pretty low albedo, and deserts reflect a lot more light.
the extra dot is easily hand waved away as a mistake. a non breaking space looks intentional.
Excellent comment.

It's worth noting, in addition to looking down upon MapReduce, Stonebraker and the academic crowd were equally unimpressed by other commodity hardware scale-out practices of the time – including the practical-minded RDBMS sharding and caching strategies used by all the booming massive-scale startups.

In 2011, in an interview with GigaOm, Stonebraker famously called Facebook's use of sharded MySQL and Memcached "a fate worse than death" [1]. He also claimed the company should redesign their entire infrastructure, seemingly without clarifying what specific problem he thought needed to be solved.

The reader comments on that post are also quite interesting in tone.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110710005619/http://gigaom.com...

Edit to add a disclosure: I joined Facebook's MySQL team a couple years after this, and quite enjoyed their database architecture, which certainly colors my opinion of this topic.
I aspire to build software so despised as Excel. You either EOL a hero, or you sell upgrades enough to see yourself become the villain.
I get inside the duvet cover. Pretend I’m a ghost. And have my wife hand me the comforter from the bottom. Bit of a workout. Works great.
Too good and relevant not to share here: https://qntm.org/responsibility
> It might just be that the people using them don't value writing that much.

That's the trouble with genAI; their purveyors probably have lower standards than the artists they used to deal with, and we're stuck with the results.
True. It's easy enough to be distracted by the confusing message that TVs and Movies provide us about what women want in a man - the thing to remember is that most of these is targeted at fantasies of teens and young adults whose ideas on relationships are often immature. Date a mature adult woman, and you'll find that they mostly evaluate you for a serious, long-term relationship based on your health (physical and psychological), earnings and social status as @boppo1 points out.
Maybe the LLM prevented an intervention where you were asked why the thing you were working on was taking days, surfacing the need for a better approach.
Yes. Lots of pool allocators as well. :-)

The principle application is making changes to Audio plugin chains without stopping the real-time audio thread. The new chain has to be pre-allocated, and the old chain has to be sent off-thread to get deallocated on a deferred basis. You can't pool-allocate a VST or an LV2 audio plugin.

Data subscriptions (Audio VU data and control port values) also use a similar deferred deallocation scheme. Doing so allows use of mutexes and shared ptrs in dependent non-realtime data structures.
> qualified DevOps engineer

Which is not something that one professional needs to be in order to have to perform some duties that fall within the role of DevOps.

I am, first and foremost, an application developer using Python and JavaScript. But I also have extensive experience:

- setting up Docker Swarm clusters

- managing cloud infrastructure with Terraform

- configuring deployments with Ansible

- setting up observability on Prometheus/Loki/Grafana stack

- putting up together CI servers for my team

- setting up backup/restore infrastructure.

- deploying and managing internal OSS tools for a dev/data team: Gitea, Taiga, Redash, Apache Airflow, Baserow...

These are all tasks that could be part of a "DevOps Engineer" job description, but if you tell me that "to work with a primarily Golang dev team you need to pick up Golang", I'd be assuming that you are not looking primarily for a DevOps Engineer, but a Go Developer who can do DevOps. And because I am not a Go Developer, you'd be putting my whole application on the bottom of the Stack.
Wittmann's Tiger Rampage – Villers-Bocage, June 1944 [video]
We have just gone back to landlord welfare with tax durable mortgages possible. We are also circling in on having the country borrowing money to pay for such policies, while also trying to squeeze in tax cuts.

The attitude to housing here is just gross.

No major party is interested in changing it. I find it very hard to imagine this government (or any other in living memory) letting the housing market drop significantly.
There are enough people who are talented and pretty, no need to compromise.
Panera would not have qualified for this exception, since their restaurants are not bakeries.

Boudin is the only restaurant that would have qualified for the exception. Their owner is not a donor to Newsom.
I think you're probably missing a lot context about the situation. Here's some useful links https://x0f.org/@FreePietje/112187047353892463 also https://gynvael.coldwind.pl/?lang=en&id=782
> The problem with xz wasn't a small community; it was no community. A single malicious actor got control of the project, and there was little oversight from anyone else.

So because of this a lot of other highly used software was importing and depending on unreviewed code. It's scary to think how common this is. The attack surface seems unmanageable. There need to be tighter policies around what dependencies are included, ensuring that they meet some kind of standard.
I know the headline is about neuralink, but I personally thought the most exciting thing in this YouTube video was the Dyson robot vacuum cleaner. I want one.
Does sshd normally run with any LANG env set when it’s run as a daemon?
Not using windows much anymore, but great to hear about O&O and ExplorerPatcher. I notice you don't list an ssh client. I still install cygwin for that. Anything new besides putty?
yeah. Hip hop / pop or whatver the nomenclature is, is way more compoex now. Why? because the real artist is no longer the rebellious young girl or the face tattooed young boy, but the geeky/middle aged music producer behind the scene. Making even the lamest mumblings enjoyable. The singer is just the brand. The face.
A Family Tree: Hippolyte Hodeau's Trench Art (Ca. 1917)
"It is used by a fairly large number of other programs, one of which is OpenSSH. "

Not exactly. OpenSSH does not use xz. From the original report:

"openssh does not directly use liblzma. However debian and several other
distributions patch openssh to support systemd notification, and libsystemd
does depend on lzma."
I’m not sure it was. Hiroshima and Nagasaki (but especially Hiroshima) had outsized effects because of how Japanese cities were built of readily flammable materials at the time; incendiary bombing of Japanese cities was also far more effective than that of German cities. (Which is saying something because the German cities were very effectively bombed!)

There’s disagreement over exactly how bad a major nuclear conflict would be, but everyone agrees that it would be significantly worse with an exchange of 500 kt thermonuclear warheads than with an exchange of 21 kt fission warheads. And the point of deterrence is to make that potential exchange as bad as possible.
I'm pretty certain the comment isn't accurate, and is just more subterfuge.
Spraypaint on the fixed-position camera lenses
The note seems oddly reductionist or strawman-indulging. Nothing about MR says you can't use indices. In a sense, MR is really about sharding!

It would be interesting to know how often MR (and its line) has been used on datasets, and execution hardware, which didn't suit standard SQL approaches. But it's also fundamentally different targets (again, both data and hardware). You probably shouldn't be doing MR-like approaches on less than dozens of (commodity, local-disk) nodes, and I think that's a pretty extreme tail for standard monolithic SQL...
There is a large area on the border between Myanmar and India. It is neglected, and the locals need the incentive to do something. I stumbled on it via a friend of a friend and a chance upon a teacher there who turned out to be a school friend from the 90s.

About two years ago, I invested some money to map the area, satellite images, drone and on-ground footage (videos, photos), etc. Greenhouse with lots of tree sapling and convinced a local relative to give me a large area of farmland for me to experiment. I was building a project to attract investment and make it an investible asset, and I can monitor that region.

This will help plant a lot of varieties of trees, employ the locals, and hopefully earn money. Unfortunately, communal un-rest broke out last year (2023) and was shelved. This year, I'm trying to start slowly, again.

In my last calculations, there is a potential of over ~128,000 Carbon Credits that can be generated at its final avatar. Anyone interested to see if you want to work with me, feel free to connect. I'm hoping I can do something interesting and useful with the idea.
The reason L2s can scale that high is every machine doesn't have to process every transaction.

Each L2 is its own chain that uses its own sequencer/s. The blocks from this chain are then compressed into a single blob of data with a ZK proof that the transactions are valid. The validators on L1 only need to verify that ZK proof matches the hash of the submitted data, which can be done in a few ms even if the L2 did 1M+ transactions.
> The reason Rust has both Arc and Rc types for reference counting is precisely because most of the time when you need reference counting, you do not need thread safety.

Hmmm, I'm curious about your use cases as this is almost precisely opposite my experience. Normally, I regard Rc as a footgun as I've always found that I'm shortly going to have to change everything to Arc.
Aaah, I can imagine the panic I'd be in.

Yet, such pain is where the innovation comes from :). Wishing you all the best! And plan to try this out once it covers more product categories.
I agree, in the case of "rent is $20,000/month" calling that a "shortage" doesn't say anything. It is no different than a case where "rent is $200/month". There is nothing the reader/listener can learn by adding shortage into the mix in either case.

Pointless, yes, but I'm not sure pedantic is the right term for describing using a word in a way that does not communicate anything. But, to each their own.
Yes, stuff that splits up, shuffles, and combines the result is exactly what I mean. That’s MapReduce. It’s just that e.g. in Dremel/BigQuery the shuffle step happens via a special in-memory distributed system, but the fundamental idea is the same: do what you can on the node, partition/shuffle, reduce on the receiving nodes, sometimes more than once.
How is this different from, say, smartphone components? There are no-name phones. Are they all using Samsung or Apple screens that fell off a truck? I think not.
The most ridiculous make work rule I've ever had was being forced to use objects instead of functions because it was apparently easier to claim oop code as capex than fp code.
> welfare queens

Please define this term for me, thanks
It can be easy to game metrics like this -- trading off p100 for p99.9 or p99. E.g., defer all the expensive work to 1 in every 10,000 operations.
Preaching to the choir, I studied atmospheric science in university, carbon credits for anything outside of geoengineering just seems like greenwashing to me. Cap and more cap seems to be the right approach to me, the "trade" part has never been anything but an excuse to move money around.

I was actually interested in how OP thinks that a carbon credit could be authentic though. Especially one where the landowner is paid for ecosystem services previously provided by nature for free, now being compensated for the land they already want to keep as a forest.
That's not good news though.
Is there a GCC option to error on non-standard English characters?
Since a few weeks I'm (re-)building FreshRemote.Work as some kind of fast + lean "remote job search engine". The goal is to make it as simple as possible while simultaneously give as much info about a job and/or company. All of course without any nonsense, bloat etc.

Some highlights:

- LOTS of remote jobs every day

- all jobs come directly from company ATS (so they're REALLY fresh)

- all jobs have a salary listed (no "guesstimates"!)

- UI is super-simple, fast, informative and works also well on mobile

- comprehensive tagging + search

Note: it's still kind of a prototype but lots of features and improvements are in the making for the upcoming weeks :)

Missing anything? Feedback's welcome!

Cheers
Pat
then the question becomes.... why was the original machine not simply expandable with extra sidecars, why couldn't they upgrade their TI 99 4/a or PC Jr with sidecars so it could do the same as a machine that provided "more out of the box".

is it because CPU freq kept doubling every 18 months or whatever? but i would argue, when that doubling stopped and we reached the 5 ghz limit, we didn't see sidecars make a comeback in computer land.

the closest thing we have is external GPU which is still, after all, cabled, not sidecard.

i am making a hypothesis again that the cost of upgrading a machine with sidecars is always going to be higher than just buying a machine that allows lower cost upgrades via slots or cables.

or in Apple worldview, its better 'overall' from user experience to just buy the nextgen which has very little or no expandability. and just guess what people actually need/want based on careful research and connection with customer base.

now i dont have good data on cost of sidecard vs other interconnects but it seems inherently higher to me. thanks for the response.
China's Volt Typhoon hackers target US infrastructure
As always, there's a relevant XKCD: #2347.[0] It's frightening how much of modern infrastructure depends on vulnerable systems.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/2347/
Delphi kicked ass. Though, looking back, it didn't have hash tables at your fingertips like modern languages. I really can't imagine writing code without hashmaps anymore. Did that ever get added, and in a convenient way that doesn't require declaring a new object each time?
More an implementation detail than a conceptual distinction, though.