skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not so much anymore...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

What's 2023's word of the year? Enshittification...
You're responding to said grump ;)

Andres is one of the most prolific PostgreSQL committers and his depth of understanding of systems performance is second to none. I wouldn't have guessed he would one day save the world with it, but there you go.
I heard about this a few years ago. The trial participants were informed, consented, and paid. If you consent to a root cert being installed and analytics being proxied, well, that's that.
It baffles me how such an important package that so many Linux servers use every day is unmaintained by the original author due to insufficient funds. Something gotta change in OSS. I think one solution could be in licenses that force companies/business of certain sizes to pay maintenance fees. One idea from the top of my head.
Documentation as code: Principles, workflow, and challenges
I never had a duvet until the late 70's. I had heard that Swedes slept under duvets, but we had to settle for blankets and sheets. I ws envious! Well, we did have what we called "eiderdowns", which were like duvet inners, but lined in a heavy satin. But they were used as throws for extreme weather; you still slept between sheets and blankets.

I think my parents' generation viewed duvets as unacceptably decadent, and thought all children should learn to fold hospital corners[0] to build character.

[0] https://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Hospital-Corner
Are you stating this because you are a weather researcher or because you think that?

Because we do have weather balloons and weather satellites and weather stations in variant heights and situations.
Isn't this known since 2018?

https://mashable.com/article/facebook-used-onavo-vpn-data-to...
Perhaps I'm naive, bit I would think it's easier for China to compromise chinese companies.
https://www.pixelmator.com/photomator
I think its more of an tooling issue. If your editor / diff viewer cant differentiate between different whitespaces get a better one. Also if you want to ensure some function isnt in local scope etc just test it.
How read-intensive is the kernel's use of RCU? (2022)
> That was actually one of the precipitating causes for the coup

Are you suggesting that the CIA was worried about democracy in Iran so they ousted him to give the absolute power to the king?
What do you mean? You dont sign anything?
Bug? #952 shows matching colour but scores only 94%.

Android Chrome.
I have launched a waitlist.
What do you think about this SaaS?
Just joining in on the canon that this is incredibly fun, much more than I would've anticipated
Wait, what? We don't have middle names, we have "nombres compuestos". Sometimes you may drop part of the name, sometimes not, but you will never see a form with a field for the middle name like you see in English speaking countries.
>There's a natural belief that unless someone is egregiously out of line, all discussion around a project from users is allowed, even encouraged.

I mean sure, but how do you intend to stop people? You can't stop them from setting up a forum somewhere.

This is why github discussions is useful though. A feature request in a ticket is something that needs to be handled. A feature request in a discussion is just some users talking about stuff they think would be cool.
I sometimes play this with people at work. Point at something in the office and guess the RGB.
Malware in open-source web extensions (2021)
If you open the "problems" menu in the bottom bar (a tab on the same menu as the terminal), you should see all the error for your whole project.
Honestly the only VPN I'd rank above ssh in terms of internet-worthiness is WireGuard.
That's probably a pretty massive download for most people, but I guess well worth it.
Wiretapping: Joffe v. Google, Inc. (2013) [pdf]
Yes, this exists. There's more than one company you can choose. It's not 'forced' but strongly recommended. Also, my love for hacking started with getting around it...
Tetrageddon
Ask HN: How bad is the xz hack?
I've been avidly reading all I can about it. I understand how it came about, and my sympathy is firmly with the maintainer. I know research is on going as I type this, but is anyone with the expertise I don't have able to explain in simple terms how bad it is, or could have been?
In Slang, are “x y” with different number of spaces in the middle different identifiers or different spellings of the same identifier? SQL standard says different identifiers

> eg Python could do something similar, because they don't have any existing syntax where you just put two identifiers next to each other with only a space in between

The interaction with keywords would cause some issues. For example, right now, “if” is not a valid identifier (keyword), but “if_” and “_if” are. However, with this proposal “x y” could be a valid identifier, but “x if” would introduce ambiguity

> But C could not, because variable declaration is just two identifiers, one for the type and one for the variable name, next to each other with a space in between

This is one aspect of C syntax I have never liked. I always wish it had been Pascal-style `x:int;` instead of `int x;`
Definitely. And write things !
I think the linux kernel developement is quite open. But Linus is famous for telling people directly in not so nice words, that they are not helping.

I don't think insults are the solution, but giving a clear no, is a skill many people struggle with. And if some cannot cope with that, blocking individuals also works.
To any doubters it's now common for vehicles to be outfitted with a range of sensors including cameras and GPS. Read the fine print on when said data is beamed back to the mothership and make your own decision.
How does HN handle its Eternal September so well? Discussion quality is still great and dang does a great job and introducing newcomers to the HN rules & culture.
Good for you. Now think about other people who are not like you.

I was able to read it, but only with difficulty. The background animations are super distracting and siphon off mental effort required to ignore them and focus on the text. Many people can do this relatively effortlessly, but for people who can't, the website is far less accessible than it could be.
Everything I read says 2023 was a record year for EV sales in the UK. What is your source for “dropped a fair bit”?

> New BEV sales (by registrations) increased by 17.7% in 2023, compared with the previous year.

https://www.webuyanycar.com/about-us/press-centre/ev-statist....

And this year:

> New AutoMotive says that 18% of all new cars sold in February were electric, according to analysis of separate data from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA).

> It suggests that more than 14,000 electric vehicles (EVs) were purchased in the UK in the second month of 2024. Year-on-year EV sales grew by 28% in February.

https://www.fleetnews.co.uk/news/one-in-six-new-cars-pure-el...
Technically it is, but the ux is very different :)
By that logic the Toyotas and Volkswagens sold in the US are American cars. Or the iPhone is a Chinese phone. While the place of manufacturing is interesting, it's not what people usually mean when they talk about the author's origin.
Why would you write such commit messages instead of describing what changed and, if needed, why?

I find it quite rude to change a codebase and not leave an explanation in the version control metadata. Over the lifetime of the application that's the source of truth. You can type in whatever in Jira or Trello, what's in version control will be built and shipped anyway, and they're unreliable. Sooner or later someone will think it's a good idea to 'clean up' and delete stuff, or someone decides to migrate to another project management supplier and issue-tags in commit messages become dead links.
Tangentially related, but I've had a case where GCC 9.4.0 shipped a broken arm_acle.h header [https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=100985] - code which includes the header would always fail to compile.

Since users could be trying to compile it on GCC 9.4.0, and as the functionality dependent on the header isn't critical to the application, if the build detects the header is broken, it just disables the functionality and emits a warning.

Back to xz: If security isn't your top priority, it seems reasonable to just ignore the failure of an optional feature and just move along. Of course, in hindsight, it's easy to point fingers, but without that, it doesn't sound completely unreasonable to me.
Glad to help. :-)
There are likely few doubters, for many it's the comment focus on China when US and EU car makers are just as far down the same pathway.
We do pretty well with a free-tier Slack instance. They only keep a rolling 10k messages or so, but this seems to be enough for more than 100 friends and colleagues to keep comm lines open.

LinkedIn could be a model for making vouch-networks as we fight the evil bots(or more accurately the evildoers who abuse neutral bots)
But it is read-only?

I was trying to change a single file in squashfs container recently and could not find a way to do that.
Nitpicking: in the "learn to play" tutorial, in the step to add an e in _nough and _ex versus four, the blue tiles are disconected that is an invalid position. Perhaps you can add a tile somewhere in the middle to conect them.
National Security Letters.
Yeah, but the extension is already offering that with more convenience. What I’m looking for is a better solution, as described in my post.
It's not even that. The things don't understand what they're drawing. Ask for a handshake and you get a mutant sausage orgy.
That shortcut is permanently burned into my muscle memory. I still instinctively hit Cmd + Y in Preview.app when meaning to crop.
Not quite, but the liners are some 20 years. Changed and washed twice a year in 90 degrees and still fresh.
Save for the buttons that fell victim to our stone mangle, the covers of the same age are as new as well. That said, none of them are ikea, it’s sort of work place injury from the hotel business to use high quality linen.
No, they're cheap Chinese honeycomb paper and low density particle board.
There also is rigerous downvoting and flagging of anything not fitting the general standard.
If someone consents to your clear request to read their data in the plain, then it's not evil. Still not my cup of tea, but if you clearly explain and obtain consent, it's shady but fine.
94% means you need only one slide up or down, so 6 posibilities. If you move one and it doesn't solve, you can't move another without getting the first to the old position.
Very interesting, thank you for this detailed answer !
No compromise is necessary when you have access under law.
aha they totally are, that's more than a nitpick! Will fix, thanks for pointing that out.
I've been getting most of my work from Upwork in the period since generative AI started to take off. I can clarify something about the number of ML jobs. 90% of my clients are convinced or nearly convinced that they cannot fulfill their chat agent requirements without fine-tuning a new LLM.

I do have at least one job in my profile that involved fine tuning. That may explain why some of the clients hired me. But one thing to note is that I do not claim to be a machine learning engineer because I'm not. I say I'm a software engineer with a recent focus on generative AI.

0% of the clients actually need to fine-tune an LLM in order to fulfill their requirements. What they need is any LLM close to the state of the art, temperature 0, and a good system prompt. Maybe some function/tool calling and RAG.

The one guy that I did fine-tuning for, he kept telling me to feed small documents into qLoRA without generating a dataset, just the raw document. I did it over and over and kept showing him it didn't work. But it did sort of pick up patterns (not useful knowledge) from larger documents, so he kept telling me to try it with the smaller documents.

Eventually, I showed him how perfectly RAG worked for his larger documents like a manual. But he still kept telling me to run the small documents through. It was ridiculous.

I also ended up creating a tool to generate QA pairs from raw documents to create a real dataset. Did not get to fully test that because he wasn't interested.

Anyway, the SOTA LLMs are general purpose. Fine-tuning an LLM would be like phase 3 of a project that is designed to make it faster or cheaper or work 10% better. It is actually hard to make that effort pay off because LLM pricing can be very competitive.

Machine learning knowledge is not required for fine-tuning LLMs anyway. You need to understand what format the dataset goes in. And that is very similar to prompt engineering which is also just a few straightforward concepts that in no way require any degree to understand. Just decent writing skills really.
I'm assuming nation states and similar actors monitor mailing lists for phrases like "I'm feeling burnt out" or "not enough bandwidth, can you open a PR?"

According to the timeline here, trust was established in "only" a few years. https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdo...

So I imagine major actors already have other assets in at-risk open source projects, either for the source code or distro patch/packaging level. Is that too tinfoil hat? I only know enough about secops to be dangerous to myself and everyone around me.
That sounds very interesting.

While avoiding monoculture, it might help incentivize locals if you integrate (if not focus on) trees with economic value that should grow well in that region, like the rubber tree hevea brasiliensis, the quinine-producing cinchona, and garcinia species like garcinia kola and garcinia mangostana. If there's a certain density of such trees per acre, the locals can surely earn some extra money by harvesting them from time to time, in a substantially non-destructive way.
Cognition Labs Seeks $2B Valuation
When I had Windows on my work computer, FastStone Image Viewer was great for browsing photos/images.
I don’t understand this view of “If I give someone unsolicited money, they will do what I want”.
Windows 98 did have an image viewer but it was an optional component. It was called Imaging for Windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaging_for_Windows

There was also a Microsoft Photo Editor that was bundled with Office 97:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Photo_Editor
But, I don't want "origin X", I want "peer-to-peer". I don't want some server somewhere providing the authorization to enter the network by gating the CA: I want a mutually interoperating set of web applications written by different developers all able to run code (maybe in a library) that bootstrap themselves into a permissionless peer-to-peer network. As for your concern about having to deal with a ton of incoming connections, such is the life of a supernode: if you aren't up for that, don't sign up to be a supernode. But like, without this, why do we care about "supernodes" anyway? If you have some centralized server you have to talk to to get certificates, just have it do signaling as well! :(
The macro defined in build_to_host.m4 is probably called on the tests subdirectory, so it gets these files as a parameter.

EDIT: It is called here and will do the extraction of the backdoor when run in the 'tests' subdirectory:

https://salsa.debian.org/debian/xz-utils/-/blob/debian/unsta...

EDIT2: So it will get the directory as a parameter, the actual file is encoded indirectly here:

https://salsa.debian.org/debian/xz-utils/-/blob/debian/unsta...

This grep will only match bad-3-corrupt_lzma2.xz
The term "third world" did originally mean "third party" nations, as in nations not aligned with the West or the communist/socialist block, but over time it somehow became associated only with impoverished nations which were also the third party nations during the cold war.
Related question: Is there any way to view HEIC files on Windows without installing the extensions from the Microsoft Store, or dodgy proprietary software? Even Irfanview requires the former.
Can someone please share the actual work for which he was awarded, I couldn't find.
I may be dating myself here but I seem to recall Intel offering a hobbled 486 processor in which the math processor was disconnected for no other reason than marketing. Regarding the Gate array Technology it seems we've come full circle with the new risk V processors being offered up at incredibly cheap prices.
I think to ensure readability it caps the colour at the lower end, so #950, #951, #952 all show up the same.

That's my best guess.

EDIT: But from reading the code there seems to be no such logic. Strange, because I observed the same thing, in Firefox on Android.
Despite the 2021 date this is similar, from my understanding, to the xz issue.
> The GPL is good for forcing people who make changes to the source to contribute back. [...] The GPL is upstream-centric, the MIT license is downstream-centric.

An interesting take. It doesn't match my understanding of the GPL though. AIUI, the GPL does not require that you send your changes "back"/"upstream". However, it does require that you make the source code to your changes available downstream, to the people you distribute the code to.

Conversely, MIT does not require that you make your changes open and available to downstream users.

> Open source should be open, for everyone.

...for everyone, except for users of modified versions of the project, apparently?

Look, it's their project. If they want to distribute it under MIT, that's their right. I just get a bit frustrated when the rationales for using permissive licenses don't seem to make a whole lot of sense.
Yes, it’s the equivalent to the Nobel in that it’s yearly with a big monetary prize, but the most prestigious award in the field remains the Fields medal, which is only awarded every four years.
Ah, good 'ole trustworthy Swiss companies! Like Crypto AG![1]

Realistically, all VPNs are compromised. But for most people's threat model, that's irrelevant anyways.

Proton for instance revealed the location of a climate activist leading to his arrest[2], with the inspiring message from the CEO that "privacy protections can be suspended", silently on a per-user basis at any time.

Haven't seen anything like that for Mullvad, but it's probably the same. At least the company takes crypto. But these things are always just surface level obscurity at best.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG

[2]: https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/06/protonmail-logged-ip-addre...
When I first joined, pg himself replied directly to me telling me to do better or post less lol
In relative terms (of new cars sold) they're down around 1%. That isn't good when share needs to be increasing.

Policy support for EV adoption has been woefully poor and inconsistent (you could generally say this about most things from the government at the moment...).

It's hard to make investment decisions around EV infrastructure when the government keeps changing their plans every leader.
This person revived an account they haven't touched since 2018 in an attempt to convince ME SPECIFICALLY that there is nothing wrong with the original repo maintainer. They gloss over my arguments, use logical fallacies and are generally antagonistic in a way that is not immediately obvious. You be the judge, dear readers.

At any rate, this person has failed their cause and has actually made me double down on the conspiracy theory :)
I've seen a few MG EVs in the UK; they seem to get pretty decent reviews. Only ~6.5% EV share in 2023 though.

(MG is SAIC Motor, which is Chinese and state-owned)
Heads-up: It's ROYGBIV
Nice one - you reminded me to restart my Thunderbird backup of GMail. I've got it setup to use imap to connect to GMail (a couple of different accounts as it happens) so it's got a copy of all my emails and keeps itself up to date efficiently. As a bonus, it's far more capable at deleting old messages if I need to clear some space to keep under Google's limit.
I get that sometimes, but not all the time.

ChatGPT seems to be able to fix, I'm going to say "about half" of it's own mistakes, but that's my gut feeling and not a detailed analysis even within the domain of questions I've been asking (which itself probably isn't representative).
March 31: World Backup Day
Lessons learned optimizing DynamoDB costs
US has massive tariffs on imported cars outside of nafta countries. The chinese companies are working on getting mexican factories up and running, I assume that we'll see a big influx of cheap chinese EVs soon enough.
Yes, this is anecdotal, but I think there’s a fair share invested into it (from my experience)
Hm, ok I have Arrays of 64 byte atomic Structs defined in C and I want to iterate over them in Java, is that possible with the Memory API?
I still think the EU brands have a chance. The ID2 has lots of potential and the eC3 is a price leader being made in EU. The new scenic and the Renault 5 also seem much more appealing than the BYD cars.
See also:

* https://www.worldbackupday.com/

IIRC, April 1 is World (Test) Restore Day.
Occams razor says that those commentators were not in on it; that pressure is common on all projects, there is no need to think that they were part of an attack.

In fact, Occam’s razor says that the malicious code was injected by a compromised account and not a malicious actor who spent years steadily getting into position to attack?
Raghuram Rajan says India has more pressing needs than chips
I know it's not adding very much to the conversation but I just have to give kudos to the author of this article.
It's always nice to see what the magic smoke inside those chips look like before I let it out!
So great job I look forward to reading more of your articles!
>there's no way it can be done faster and cheaper, as for a new project they spent 2 months just to deiced which version control they should use

That sounds like they have plenty of room to do things more quickly.
> Sega CD

Would have been easier to make it a Turbografx CD game. It's got the 6502-like CPU and the CDROM interface just like they wanted.
I recently wrote a post covering all the ways L2s will intoperate and share liquidity with each other: https://paragraph.xyz/@blueyard/how-ethereum-can-solve-l2-li...
Definitely better than China.
I despise real name policies on social networks, but it's a very different thing to be anonymous while in a position of public trust.
Except many people have a policy of ASCII only in source code and therefore would catch it immediately.
"Malice" is, at present, as much of an anthropomorphisation as calling it "good"; you could ask it to play a malicious role, and it will do so, but it is not so by itself.

The output of AI can often be confusing, yes, and indeed this is part of the issue Yudkowsky has with AI in general: we can't predict it in detail, especially not in domains where it out-performs us (like Chess).

However, this is tangential to any question about "making society worse" — even when it's making society better (because it's more capable than we are at something which we care about), Yudkowsky would caution that this may be a 5D chess move to gain more power.
22) #5A7 (Splendid!)
Took me 42 guesses.