skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a resident of a nearby state whose real estate market keeps rising because of the steady flow of people forced to leave California because they can't afford it, my favorite of the dumb propositions that is destroying California is Prop 103. Among other complicated things it specifically enumerates what tools homeowner (and auto) insurance companies can use to set rates (global climate catastrophe models? Not a thing when they voted in 1988, so now they can never be used). It also created the Consumer Intervenor process so it takes about two years for a rate hike to be approved, and companies have to prove that they are only using the approved methods and nothing else. This is the reason the California homeowner's insurance market is in grave danger: the company runs the "real" model which tells how much they will pay out in damages over the course the rate period, then they have to figure out a way to justify it to the (as a result of the prop, now elected) California Insurance Commissioner in the face of the Consumer Intervenors (who get their costs, expenses, and attorney fees covered out of the company pocket if they win and the rates aren't approved). If the company doesn't think the lines cross, then they don't offer insurance and start to withdraw from the market. This is why California's homeowners insurance market is so dysfunctional, because of a proposition that passed 35 years ago with 51% of the ballot but now effectively cannot be changed or amended.
Hey, thanks for the comment in the other thread, it's blocked so I can't reply there.

You're right about getting in touch with dang and I've done this before. This time I thought I'd try to get the community to react. Dang is one guy, there are things we should be able to deal with on our own, like adults, right? I figured if it gets so bad that he or someone else notices then OK.

As it happened, I saw the original thread get unflagged two or three times and then re-flagged. It's now flagged again. I think it was users who vouched for it, then it was dogpiled on again. I am unsure if this means the consensus is that that kind of discussion should stay flagged, or it was just a reaction to the subject. There were a couple of inflammatory comments in there and obviously there's people on HN chomping at the bit to fight the good old internet wars all over again.

Still no clear way to have a civilised discussion around this kind of subject I guess.
Mandatory XKCD reference.[1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/1235/
The (most?) popular SQLite driver for Go often gets PRs to update the SQLite C amalgamation, which the owner politely declines (and I appreciate him for that stance, and for taking on the maintenance burden it brings).

e.g., https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3/pull/1042#issuecomment-1...
Magnetic avalanche triggered by quantum effects: Barkhausen noise 1st detection
Here's a reality you aren't addressing: people don't really want to eat insects. Here's another: about 2 years ago a president was elected in my country partly by promising that the poor would get to eat meat regularly once again.

Make people miserable at your own peril. The simple fact is nobody really wants to be reduced to eating worms and bugs. No one really gives a shit about how "scalable" it is either. Whoever finds a way to provide what people want will have enormous power.

> If people find an alternative that looks, tastes, and acts like meat

Pretty big if you got there. The "alternatives" so far don't really fulfill any of those criteria. They also have the added bonus of offending a person's basic dignity with the knowledge that they're eating insects. There are literal animals out there who receive better treatment.
xz is just a horribly designed format, and always has been. If you use it, please switch to Lzip. Same compression level, but designed by someone competent.

https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/

https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html
Cash. Netflix lets you basically turn a dial on the ratio of cash to stock, but it starts with a single cash number.
We got hit by [0] and so had to pin to an older version (we didn't raise the issue).

Also, just look at the amount of open bugs and their age [1]

They also recommend using swap for some reason, however if your memory usage reaches the point where swap is being used the performance is so bad that the machine may as well be dead.

It's been nothing but trouble, which is a shame because the changes they've done to redis have crossed my mind too.
We'll probably move to Scylla.

[0] https://github.com/Snapchat/KeyDB/issues/465

[1] https://github.com/Snapchat/KeyDB/issues
Bottle is soooo underrated.
If you're willing to attract new hires with more pay, your competitors are willing too.
It’s not obvious to narcissists or little feudal lords, though I may be repeating myself.

Give a man a little power…
Is this similar to binary search or could it be a binary search where you're just excluding all possibilities that you know can't be the probable result that you're looking for?
It would have predictible structure. There would be groupwise, regular sparsity. You could exploit these patterns to infer properties like, "there is no connection from this vertex to this entire span of verticies".

Just think about representing a compressed version of a matrix. You want to have a short encoding for matrices are ones that are more ordered in some real, exploitable way. With some determnistic computation of the compressed representation, you could produce the full adjacency matrix.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=secondcoming#3986566...
http://underhanded-c.org if people want examples of what could (and probably, somewhere, IS) being done.
Now, years laterand knowing much more than I did then I suspect the file might have been in the gigabytes and was causing overflow issues. Because it was crashing, not slowing down
Even though 1/3 of the Baby Boomer generation are already dead, they are still a larger percentage of the population than Generation X. Generation X also has a smaller share of population than the Millenial Generation and Generation Z.

-- https://www.statista.com/statistics/296974/us-population-sha...
testdata should not be on the same machine as the build is done. testdata (and tests generally) aren't as well audited, and therefore shouldn't be allowed to leak into the finished product.

Sure - you want to test stuff, but that can be done with a special "test build" in it's own VM.
Post communism
They rely on the incomes of family members, savings, or governmental transfer payments (social security, welfare, disability, etc).

Not sure the percentages of each, but those categories probably about cover it.
Why? It's easy to do it as a varied cost.
Like most platforms, it's valuable IFF a lot of people build on it. But the fact that I can make an on-topic, constructive and informative comment about it and still get downvoted tells you everything you need to know about how likely that is.
Somehow I don't think he was referring to corporate chatbots.
Every time you enumerate another method for making a functional search engine right now, you also posit a way for it to be circumvented in an hour or two.

"Oh, it's easy! Just bring PageRank back, and flag sites that create content too fast!"

Later that afternoon: sites multiply, and individually generate content slowly
One interesting thing about muon accelerators is that they could produce enough neutrinos to be dangerous:

https://accelconf.web.cern.ch/p99/PAPERS/WEBR6.PDF

which might be a good thing in that the neutrino mass is a "missing part of the standard model" as opposed to "possible physics beyond the standard model". The neutrino mass term could explain dark matter, dark energy and the matter-antimatter asymmetry

https://arxiv.org/abs/1303.6912

whereas a Higgs Factory or top factory seems likely to be a big disappointment because all the evidence we have is that the Higgs field is as simple as it could possibly be and a top factory might end up just verifying that complex calculations people did 40 years ago (by the time the machine comes up) were right.

Muon colliders are a possible path to a Higgs factory or top factory but the path to a muon accelerator that can revolutionize precise neutrino physics is much shorter and I think more rewarding.

Notably neutrino physics is win-win. Either the right-handed neutrino exists as a heavy particle and is very likely to be the darkon or the neutrino is a Majorana fermion (is its own antiparticle) which is certainly a weird and interesting result. Contrast that to all the other poorly motivated darkon candidates such as sparticles, axions, etc.

I remember reading a lot of papers about muon accelerators about 20 years ago, they have been a big research topic in the US and Japan because we didn't have CERN.
The Japanese has the same problem. It’s sounds like someone who is fluent, but maintained a beginner level accent, with a slight tinge of robot.
You seem to have your objectives (and non-objectives) clearly stated, which gives Plume a fair fighting chance :)

Good luck with your project!
I think you can stop your sentence after the third word. (source: am Romanian)
do people in tech just straight up ignore the fact that they're all using the same names? is it ignorance? hubris? indifference? why would you ever use the name gemini not that google has co-opted it?
One of those "you need to know someone at Google to fix this" kind of problem
Man, that thread feels prophetic. Since 2017 whenever this comment was written:

> 100% of my friends who have used Mongo/similar NoSQL have given up and had a nasty rewrite back to pgSQL...

I've led three migrations at different companies from Mongo to Postgres, spending months of my life and millions of dollars.

There really should be a sociology study of why so many people/companies used Mongo even well after the downsides were clear.
Astronomers Catch a Supernova Explode Almost in Realtime
> Pensions in Romania are a joke, ask your relatives that recently retired.

Both my parents have decent pensions. It's directly proportional to your contributions. Small lifetime contributions, small pension. Nowadays, a part of those contribution also gets invested, and my current net worth would actually allow me to retire right now.

> Bribery isn’t less common, it’s just becoming increasingly inaccessible to common folk.

Bribery being less accessible literally means that it's less common, but maybe we aren't speaking the same language. Local police is more corruptible, but try bribing DIICOT, see how well that works out. Also, in general, there have been many cases in which people got caught taking bribes, so, depending on who you try bribing, you can be kicked out of the room, or contacted by authorities.

Colective was a tragedy. But it was also a hyped news story by all tabloids. My son suffered from Lylle's syndrome when he was 1-year-old, also treated at one of the hospitals where they treat burned victims. He was also born premature at 30 weeks with 1.2 Kg. My mother was operated for acute pancreatitis, which at that time had a 70% death rate. I have an aunt that's a cancer survivor. Both me and my father had several surgeries in our public hospitals. And I don't practice bribery. Take from this what you will.

> "Our malls are full but industry is dead. We’re a consumer economy"

Yet we are producing and exporting more than ever, with the GDP going through the roof, adjusted for inflation. What in the world is a "consumer economy" anyway?

I hear these same words from my father, a common myth, but he has the excuse that he was a communist party member. What's yours?

> "I also find it funny that you say we “avoided communists” and “home ownership is high” in the same breath. I wonder why home ownership is that high, and what policy lead to that."

During communism home ownership was nearly zero, as everything was owned by the state. And nowadays Bucharest is in the top cities when it comes to affordable housing when reported to the number of average salaries needed to buy a home. City planning is poor, nearly non-existent in places, but Romania builds plenty of housing, which makes it affordable, with some exceptions.

Do you still live in Romania? And if you do, do you know the country you're living in? :-)
This is why you don't stay at a company for more than X years - IME, it's probably around the 3 year mark? I once received > 2x comp after leaving a company I had been at for 6 years.
That was a review of someone else's work? https://github.com/tukaani-project/xz/pull/86
Well actually :nerd_face: technocracy is a completely different thing (the belief that the educated specialists should rule society)
But, viewed on a small-enough scale, the managers did get their way.

And "small" is usually quite descriptive of managers.
I’m doing a PhD in quantitative field, not stupid by any means. But people doing physics seem out of this world to me. I feel like they’re just orders of magnitude smarter. It’s a shame the field seems a bit stagnant now. I hope they find a way to advance the knowledge without planet-scale accelerators. There should be a feasible and elegant compact solution.
More curious about your story of starting your own company on a near-whim! I've been grinding out trying to do the same over a year or so without any traction at all and I'm finding myself almost back at Square 1 without any more solid ideas.
The Ballard neighborhood of Seattle experienced a lot of business turnover starting about ten years ago because many of those stores don’t own their own buildings, the landlords got dollar signs in their eyes, and a lot of older business owners looked at their books, realized how much extra money they were going to have to make per square foot just to keep the lights on, and opted to “retire” instead of renewing their lease or selling the business.

“I am too old for this shit.” Seems to have been the common refrain.

You can also shrink the employee pool by having more 20-something’s living at home and fewer dual income families.
Things You Should Know About Scipost
I live in the US, have a decent-paying job, but I don't have any kids, and I got a vasectomy so it seems unlikely that I will have any kids. If something happens by accident (e.g. the vas deferens heals), my wife and I would almost certainly keep it and we'd be parents, but I don't think that's terribly likely.

I actually do really like kids, I like my nieces and nephew, but the problem is that the value proposition for having kids is not terribly high. They're expensive, and time consuming, and honestly kind of a liability. It's especially hard for women, because pregnancy takes you out of the workforce for a long time, and women are still (however unfairly) typically the "primary caretaker" for the child. Since your 20's are generally the optimal time to grow your career, it's an extremely high opportunity cost to have a child.

I've never wanted to have my own kids. My wife and I have agreed to take care of our nieces and nephew if something happens to their parents, but I don't think I'd be a terribly good parent, and I would prefer to avoid screwing up another human.
Analogy is to plagiarism. The normal person content industry seems to do an okay job ejecting plagiarists and they should be encouraged to do the same with ai generated sludge.
Not every religion works with the concept of absolute truth and dogma (see Mysticism, Taoism, various pagan ones, ..) and I was speculating above, whether the sun cares about and supports us. That is probably in the theological realm by common understanding. Or maybe more philosophical?

Who knows, probably more philosophical, but I think the lines can get blurry.
Title of the article: Is the Sun Conscious?

In the article: "Therefore anyone who supposes that the sun is conscious is making a childish error, projecting anthropomorphic illusions onto inanimate nature."
Its worth noting that the “working age population” has a starting age but no ending age; once you cross 16, you are in the denominator for the labor force participation rate until you die. 106? Still in the “working age population”.

There's also a “prime age labor force participation rate” which has both a start (25) and end (54) age for the denominator population, and the prime age LFPR has been strong [0] as the full LFPR has dropped [1] because of the Boomer demographic bulge making age-related exits from the labor force.

People who like to sell unemployment as underrated by the official statistic in recent years like to point at the drop in the full LFPR and insinuate its because of prime-age population being pushed out of the labor force, when looking at the prime age LFPR reveals that that is not at all true.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
The problem is - historically it hasn't bitten companies badly enough that they stop doing it.

On aggregate, you can get away with massively underpaying your top talent and overpaying new hires - most of which aren't good and will go to other companies before they're even moderately productive.

I question why they're so obsessed with hiring so many new people to do basically nothing. That's the reason they have to over pay for them: The sheer amount that they're trying to hire.

Perhaps it's inevitable that you have to hire 100 people to find 5 or so people that'll be good and stick around for a while that you can underpay in the future.

I suspect there's got to be a better way.
A backdoored xz could also run payloads hidden inside other xz files, allowing targeted attacks.
Yes, it's usually regenerated already. However even the source is often pretty gnarly.

And in general, the build system of a large project is doing a lot of work and is considered pretty uninteresting and obscure. Random CMake macros or shell scripts would be just as likely to host bad code.

This is also why I like meson, because it's much more constrained than the others and the build system tends to be more modular and the complex parts split across multiple smaller, mostly independent scripts (written in Python or bash, 20-30 lines max). It's still complex, but I find it easier to organize.
It’s time to do ‘something’

Well, like it says on the top of this web page, the Ontario school board is suing social media giants. You seem passionate about this, as do they, so it sounds like you might be interested to start a conversation with them.
RHEL9 is shipping 5.2.5; RHEL8 is on 5.2.4.
Yep, then we'll ask AGI how to solve our problems, and it will tell us that we're screwed.

That would really be peak humanity.
First version of BNN was submitted to ArXiv a month before XNOR-Net: https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02830
Even image generators are still in that phase where they are excellent at generating faces and dream-like sequences but suck at details.

Pair that with the increasing legal copyright headwinds in terms of sucking in the world's data, and I can see this flatlining.

All that processing power is expensive, and these companies are yet to have a clear path to monetization. Stability AI is already circling the drain.

This has the "let's back the cash truck up to lock in the market share" of the streaming wars vibes, until they realized it's just not sustainable.
Honestly is it company culture, or is it just clueless HR teams who can't hire for shit?

I'm not complaining though, stupid HR and hiring policies are the reason we're consistently getting some really good people from FAANG to join our tiny firm.
FYI, your formatting is broken. Hacker News doesn't support backtick code blocks, you have to indent code.

Anyway, so... the xz project has been compromised for a long time, at least since 5.4.5. I see that this JiaT75 guy has been the primary guy in charge of at least the GitHub releases for years. Should we view all releases after he got involved as probably compromised?
This is one way:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59577162
TFA: The P5 report calls for R&D on a muon collider, stating, “This is our muon shot.”

That just doesn't have the same ring to it as "moon shot". I hope they do not continue using this phrase. It doesn't have the same gravitas nor is it awe inspiring. I highly doubt it help earn funding. In fact, it leaves me with a negative charge.
Are you all extremely underpaid or something? Or how are new grads getting so much in a down market? I'm decently experienced saw lots of relatively low paying jobs in general
Lzip – A Lossless Data Compressor
Basically yes. There's a lot of useless beauracracy at pretty much all companies and the 40 hours took that into account. It seems like with remote work that some folks just started working like 35 hours and focused on the priority items which still got done. The mostly just skipped the useless meetings that were only there for the beauracracy. So the net effect hugely helped the individual, while having minimal impact on actual goals being achieved.

The biggest negative from WFH was it being more challenging to onboard new folks (a legitimate concern). It's less easy for someone new to pop into your cube, ask a question, and then get back to it. Now they have to do it through IM, or schedule a virtual conference. It's not all that much harder...just a bit of additional friction since things are more asynchronous. Maybe the senior engineer you need to talk to is sleeping in late and then working late and you're doing the opposite.

I'll add one additional negative is that WFH may interfere with our natural need to be social. This is extra hard on extroverts, but I think even introverts are impacted. They may be quiet, but I've talked to many that don't miss the disruptions or commute, but do miss just being around other adults to a degree. Some introverts struggle to find social outlets outside of work (especially outside large cities), so they spend a lot of time alone and naturally get lonely and this impacts their mental health. Everyone is different though and none of this is significant enough to force a return to office.
> I wonder why home ownership is that high, and what policy lead to that.

Post-Soviet privatization?

If I had to guess...
Companies doing speech synthesis where one can clone a voice using a small recording should add digital watermarks into audio itself, akin to steganography. Companies that allow speech communication can check for these marks to make sure the voice was not generated. Many problems, including quality drop resistance, but this can be done and be a valid defence a year or maybe a few years. Not sure if carriers or phone manufacturers can check for these marks in default phone calls.
> Buffalo and wisent are both bison.

There are also buffalo that are not bison, like the domestic water buffalo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_buffalo
For what it's worth the author is a PostgreSQL committer, he's not a security researcher but he's a pretty damn good engineer!
My understanding had always been that there were never pencils where a rod of lead was encased in wood.

However, in the Roman times, styluses were used for writing which were just sharpened rods of lead. Right or wrong, I pinned the etymology on that and didn't give it another thought.

How can we be sure that someone's knowledge of those Roman-era instruments didn't influence the etymology of "pencil lead", in spite of the story about the graphite deposit?

There are missing dots in the short explanation. I mean, between the time you discover a graphite deposit (thinking it might be lead) and the time you go to production with graphite pencils, you know very well that you're not dealing with lead. You would only persist with the naming as a deliberate inside joke. If so, who can say that the joke wasn't informed by historic knowledge of lead styluses?