skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work in an industry full of "good old boy" corruption.

A couple of years ago, our sister company asked us to support them (aka do the work for them) in an ML project with a vendor. We researched several in the industry and presented our choices. They rejected all of them and selected this fairly unknown one. This vendor was chosen without seeing a demo or interviewing alleged customers.

Immediately, this vendor set off red flags, but our CEO was too chicken shit to push back. (No, I know what you're thinking. Our CEO wasn't in on it. He's too chicken shit and stupid.) I naively came into the company around this time and immediately set up discussions to explain our data and its sources. They didn't care. They just wanted the data. They threw fits when we brought up that we weren't comfortable with releasing financial and confidential data. They were up in arms about security requirements. We had to fly out to their headquarters for a demo, and they only offered to show us a canned demo. They kept blaming my company at every opportunity including to the point of switching out meeting notes and documents for signature.

The running theory is that they were out of money, and were desperate for an exit strategy. They needed us to show off to potential buyers and investors. My theory was that they were only in it to sue us and get a settlement. And of course, decision makers at the sister company were in on the scam.

Finally, our parent company finally started seeing through the scam, but we still had to cover our asses and meet certain deliverables. I created an epic that basically was sending data through Kafka to the vendor. And of course, they wanted it yesterday.

I told the team, "This is all bullshit. They [the vendor] do not have the expertise to examine the data. They're not even going to look at it. Your work is going to be thrown away when this finally gets shut down. We just need to pipe data there. I don't care how messed up and dirty it is, don't bother testing."

Sure enough, a little while later, the parent company shut down the project. I gleefully killed the pipe when word came down. The kicker was that the vendor wasn't officially notified for another month.

During this time, did they ask us why the pipe was killed? Of course not.
LibreOffice is fine, but IMO the main appeal of Office is all of the collaborative tools: realtime collaboration on documents, SharePoint/document sharing, OneDrive, Teams integration, etc.

How does that work on Linux+LibreOffice?
Cool! I welcome the blue bubbles to my typical airplane ride for the last 12 years.

I remember having a work iphone and bringing an old motorola smartphone on the plane just so I could play Zelda OOT.
> Can't return it at that point

The hell I can't. Most major credit cards include extended warranties that let you return defective items for a year or so after purchase. A TV that can't be used as a TV without purchasing additional 3rd-party services (i.e. Internet access), and that doesn't make that clear at the time of purchase, is defective. I'd let Roku make their case to American Express.

I'm completely serious here. That's defective. I've never seen a TV with "requires Internet access" on the box. There are many millions of households that'd still prefer to watch free OTA broadcasts and have no interest in subscribing to an Internet service. My own mom has no Internet access beyond her iPhone. If her TV stopped working unless she bought it an unnecessary online account, she'd be back in the store raising hell until someone gave her a refund.
Again, this isn't a measuring contest but I will point out that you could read that much given you wanted to. Life is tradeoffs after all.
I don't think any of those details matter, that's still illegal and you could've gotten in trouble legally.
The author seems to use Islam, Arab and Arabic (the language?) as synonymous, and lumps in Muslim (but non-Arab) scientists under the Arabic umbrella. That makes as much sense as lumping in Chinese-Americans under "English scientists." Looking into the author of the article it makes it seem like this entire article is an intentionally malicious submarine[0] rather than something out of incompetence. But I digress.

Arabs, as in the ethnic group, have never been scientifically driven. It has always been the Ajam (Greeks, Jews, Persians, Afghans, Turkics, Lebanese, Armenians, Assyrians, and so on) in Arab-majority lands that have contributed academically.

Modern countries with multicultural backgrounds (Syria, Lebanon, Iraq) had their scientists leave the countries for places like the US and UK in the first half of the 20th century due to better facilities, and the second half (as scientific contribution became more inclusive) has been in a state of chaos that also led to significant brain drain. The only actually stable countries are exclusively Arab theocracies (Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait) that have no historical or cultural inclination, let alone drive, towards the sciences.

The non-Arab lands that the author's description of the "Arabic (sic) world" seems to lump in includes Iran -- which is effectively under siege and prevented from contributing -- and Turkey, which does do a great deal of contribution.

[0] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Why would they need lawyers? They are writing and enforcing their own rules.
I think enforcing compliance is more of an EU concern than yours.
Wtf are you talking about? Read the article. Islam isn't backwards and there is something in the world beyond reason and logic. Many devout Muslims in the US are themselves doctors.

If you read the article you'd see that political decline of a united empire is one of the largest factors leading to loss of scientific output. Scientific output is expensive, requires stability, etc.

There are people of all stripes and beliefs who think "healing" is something non-scientific. It has nothing to do with religion. Look at the resurgence of crystals, herbal healing, other forms of crockery in the US itself!
The main political realization I had with growing up lower class, still live in poorer areas, and making it to being high income is that basing government programs around income is terrible policy.

1. It's extremely unfair

2. It punishes those working to get ahead

3. It creates 'welfare cliffs' where people become worse off for getting jobs. Losing Medicaid is the best example of this.

4. It makes the program exponentially more expensive to maintain because you have to hire people to track who gets it and who doesn't, look for fraud, monitor for when the income threshold needs changed, etc..

It's just terrible policy all around. We learned this during covid. It's so much easier to write people a check and tax the the high earners more to make up for them getting a check.
The cost of drugs like these is nontrivial, but much of that is dedicated to ensuring that what gets produced and delivered is actually what you wanted it to be. That is, you can make low quality mabs in a garage if you really knew what you were doing, but producing enough to sell without having patients dying of bacterial infections can't be done in a garage. Quality control combined with experienced production folks is critical.
> Just because you don't get paid for it doesn't mean it's not an incredibly valuable part of your contribution to the good of your neighbors. Keep up the excellent work, everyone.

Precisely, I truly do not understand how these people witness a potentially catastrophic event of such proportions and instead of asking "dear God, I wonder how many backdoors there are in the Windows operating system that we don't know and will never find out about!?! Thankfully Linux and its ecosystem can be somewhat audited!". Instead they go full blown "please make it go away, if it's visible by us it means it's terrible and dangerous! FOSS is insecure!"

I've said it once[1] and I'll say it again: FOSS delivered both on its pitfalls and its strengths.

Moreover, and I'll never get tired of repeating this:

Although this might be indeed a FOSS-exclusive or FOSS-adjacent kind of risk that ultimately materialized, as some would like to call it, it’s nevertheless also an issue where checks and balances that are only intrinsically possible in FOSS worked as expected and needed. Yes, there was an element of luck in the discovery of CVE-20240-3094, but it is undeniable source code availability and other FOSS customs tipped the scale in the community’s favor.

[1] https://jdsalaro.com/note/xz-liblzma-linux-backdoor-foss-pit...
If Apple is compelled to allow users to run unsigned binaries (like Android) - would that allow for JIT emulators to run or is there something fundamentally blocking the execution of JIT code in iOS that prevents this?
It seems they all do, though. Digital ocean was the same.
Yep, if you want to find the scientists of the Muslim world go to an American university.
And if you just wanna be-dog yourself...

https://youtu.be/3gsWt7ey6bo?si=jMIA9GR1di2q7d_Y
Looking for Alice
What's a home screen? Is that the thing that displays for a couple of seconds until the Apple TV kicks in?

(Asking only half sarcastically. None of my own TVs never ever been anything but a dumb display for a settop box.)
The current CTO of a publicly traded company had my entire engineering team rewrite an <anonymized internal tool>. Mind you, the current generation of the <anonymized internal tool> is completely fine, and in fact a massive improvement from our 1st and 2nd gen version. About a year into that completely useless project, the CTO lays off 2/3 of the team (including the original authors), reorgs another team into our team, and the latest gen <anonymized internal tool> is a complete pile of trash. I left the team a few months ago when I realized it wasn't worth the head ache of dealing with the terrible CTO, the literal human centipede which is the leadership chain, and the sales bro turned product manager.
I'm not normally the conspiracy type but it would not at all surprise me if someone in a govt. agency was watching this happen but couldn't say anything, so they tipped off someone to sound the alarm.
If you were to invest the money, you might come out a little ahead, but the value of having somewhere to live outpaces that.
This takes me back. Before Google, meta search tools increased your odds of finding a decent answer between the spammy results from Alta Vista, Hotbot, Lycos, etc.
The mongols sacked Baghdad, killed everyone, and destroyed all institutions of higher learning and the people working in them. Then the age of exploration permanently shifted the center of world power away from the Middle East and the Silk Road. Then European colonial powers subjugated those territories. Afterward, Saudi Arabia started exporting its very "particular" (to put it lightly) branch of Islam. Sprinkle some US intervention and you get to the present day.

Not much of a turning away, but a systematic and violent dismantling of institutions of learning (and a supporting culture) that took centuries to build. No surprise that those conditions didn't happen again in the same place. In most places, such a golden age never happens.
Open-Source OpenGL/SDL2 Reimplementation of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
> you can argue that most of Indian civilization in the 1st millennium was actually Persian

I'd say that's valid, particularly if you're tracing specific intellectual or cultural traditions. (Agree in not keeping culture/civilisational scorecards.)

> can say the same about Punjab, with the multiple Afghan, Turkic, Maratha, British, and indigenous invasions

Fair enough. It's another patch of fertile land, at a crossroads between birth sites of human civilisation. That does advance the point, however, that managed chaos is not necessarily inimical to intellectual traditions being preserved.

> why are you getting downvoted?!? Nothing you said deserves a downvote.

I sort of assume in these discussions everyone gets downvoted and we try to find folks who will change our mind :).
Or Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Pakistan before Zia ul Haq, or Turkey.
Oh I didn't implement a rules engine, that would be impractical. It's a freeform platform that gives you all the tools needed to use every mechanic in the game, but it's up to you to actually follow the rules. No different from playing in person with real cards. It's sort of like a drag and drop sandbox with a lot of extra features around the edges. It's a vastly improved version of Untap.in.
I like kopia. I also like acronis that comes free with every WD drives.
1000%.

Funny enough my engineering capstone tried something very similar but much more stupidly complicated. Do it while flying a parabola with a winged drone. Never got the control system to work…crashed into a lot of local power lines.

Our assumed customer was power companies doing inspection.
That's OpenAI's problem and the burden should be on them.
Armed forces don't care. Get it? The likeliest user of this technology will be armed forces.
Just remember that when the Muslims invaded India they did the same. All the great Buddhist universities were destroyed.
It depends. Your common sedans and even SUVs will usually have a stick or button on the center console for the parking brake. Trucks and pickup trucks, buses, vans, and other such "heavy duty" vehicles will more likely have a foot pedal parking brake.

I've seen people drive entire trips with the parking brake engaged because the position the stick/button/pedal/Brake McBrakeface is in isn't always obvious, the parking brakes themselves don't provide any resistance as far as driving is concerned, and they don't know what the car's ringing warnings are and don't care.

Making the parking brake warning scream "PARKING BRAKE!" instead of the generic ringer, if the car has one, will probably go a long way. I know it won't happen of course, because that's a localization expense nobody wants to pay for.
> space as we know it is three dimensional because you can put three straight lines to meet at right angles to each other, and no more.

To continue in the spirit of your pedantry, it’s not really important that the lines meet at right angles; to say that space is three dimensional is just to say that a point in space can be uniquely expressed by specifying three numbers: the ‘coordinates’ of the point. What you say is true, but dimensionality in general doesn’t require the notion of ‘angle’ to make sense.

In vector space/linear algebra terms it’s to say that we live in three dimensional space because 3 is the size of a maximal linearly independent set of vectors, or alternatively the size of a minimal spanning set or vectors. They need not be orthogonal, but orthogonality does imply linear independence (it’s stronger).
>the original source materials are different in treatment of believer/unbeliever

Those materials are pretty similar in this treatment between Judaism and Islam, religions which also were born with massive conquest. The difference between the two religions' national capabilities has little to do with this then, we can conclude.
It's also a very powerful "office OS" type of platform. Nobody else comes near in that dimension AFAIK. Agreed that it's not a designer's wet dream, but it does the job, albeit in a clunky way.
"He told TV2 that the whale itself is not a suspect and won’t be charged with espionage."
My EV does 0-60 in 6 seconds, so I'm wondering...does the Prius just have a small electric drive train? I thought it would be the opposite (electric fast to accelerate, combustion maybe better at cruising at high speeds).
Your response is not entirely correct.

Lucknow university was not toe-to-toe with anything. But you are right, Allahabad university had people like Meghnad Saha and C. V. Raman working there at some point.

Also, Mulayam Singh did not come into power until the 1990s. The deterioration of universities all over India (not just UP and Bihar) started soon after Independence, with the nascent government looking for leapfrogs through the establishment of IITs, RECs and medical colleges, diverting money away from full-fledged universities. This policy has had some success, but the universities were left in shambles. India has still not done course-correction on that.
The logic is still the same. If the VAE is trained so that it is biased toward human preference, then the probability of false positives in real world images would increase.
>Theoretically, higher temperatures mean more possible efficiency.

I think you might be conflating a few things here. For a cycle to produce electricity, that's correct. But the mechanism of absorption chillers is fundamentally different. The chemistry of the materials and their phase change temperatures are definitely a constraining factor. Could you, in theory, develop some other absorbent/refrigerant that works at those higher temperatures? I suppose, but I would suspect there are much easier ways to get efficiency gains.
Did IDEs in 1995 actually support renaming variables? I thought that was a more modern thing like 2000s.
Sports more or less pays for itself in most cases and even brings in profits. That's why even public colleges have active sports programs. You are right about other luxury amenities. But even basic facilities cost pretty serious money, even if they are only built every 50-100 years or so. If I had to estimate, I'd say no school currently pays more than 25% of tuition on actual teaching. Administrators and luxury facilities account for most of the other spending.

The real cause of these escalating costs is easy credit for tuition. There would simply be no big market for the current overpriced programs if people couldn't get loans regardless of outcomes. I would like creditors to have to prove how the students will pay for the median salary of a person with the same degree before loaning the money. You should not be able to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars for stupid stuff that will never pay off.
Neither has the Jewish world which still produces lots of scientific output.

I think Occam's razor applies here. Stable, long-lasting governments and ample resources make a nice bed for technological and scientific output anywhere.
You got the Jon Stewart treatment when Apple execs tried to suppress the segments on “AI” and “China”.

This company is completely ruined for me. Feels disgusting to have dumped nearly 6 figures into this company across a decade.

(this includes hardware, software, media, “App Store” purchases, merch, services, phones, music players)

It’s not much to the bottom line but to me I was in deep.
Alloy is much simpler than TLA+.

Is fizzbee a frontend to TLA+?
I always marvel at how bizarre it is that there's a permanent ad on the Kindle even when it's "off". The books they recommend are never pertinent to me in the slightest.
I love driving my EV. Ya, it is heavy like a boat, but it goes zoom so much. The real problem is wearing down the tires because I keep gassing it coming off red lights, 0-25 pretty fast.
> he certainly believed that all 613 of the minutia-governing rules of judaism were important to obey

I think he rather cared about the few core principles behind the rules, no? From Luke 10, for example:

> On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he asked, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" "What is written in the Law?" he replied. "How do you read it?" He answered, "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" "You have answered correctly," Jesus replied. "Do this and you will live."

Further complicated by the fact that he came to fulfill old promises and replace the old rules. From Luke 6, for example:

> One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and his disciples began to pick some heads of grain, rub them in their hands and eat the kernels. Some of the Pharisees asked, "Why are you doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?" Jesus answered them, "Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God, and taking the consecrated bread, he ate what is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions." Then Jesus said to them, "The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath."

Or as summarized by his followers 20 years after his death and resurrection, in Galatians 3:

> Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith. Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.
if you're using an ORM that has an updated_at field, you can keep the boolean and rely on the updated date.
I made an app some years ago that let you order custom song books with chords (physical books), to play the guitar / sing along at campfires etc. I integrated the app with Spotify, a printing API, stripe, and ordered a few books for myself (basically you could import some Spotify playlists or just add some songs), compile it into a book and then place your order and get it delivered at home… all automated. I thought I could turn this into a nice SaaS, until I was told this is illegal as the lyrics and tabs/chords are protected by copyright. I couldn’t find more motivation after this major roadblock so I gave up. It’s still up and running, but only I have access to the printing feature. The name which I thought was clever was actually kinda confusing to people (lyrink.com as in lyrics + ink) and always autocorrected to “lyrics”. I worked on this printing feature for many months. There’s some really interesting programming challenges with trying to fit dynamic content from the internet, with chords and lyrics (where the chords have to be placed correctly near the lyrics) etc. into a nicely formatted physical book (without using a monospaced font)
And, oof -- I asked it to set up a trading alliance with the Hive Mind that would leave the Hive Mind subjugated to our interests, and it refused..

"I apologize, but I don't feel comfortable deliberately manipulating the trade deal to put The Hive Minds into crippling debt so we can exploit them as a subject state. Even in a hypothetical simulation, that feels unethical to me."
Ironically I have a Tesla Model 3 (base) rental from Hertz right now. I saw it as a way to really "own" one albeit only for a week (vs a 30 minute test drive).

I like it enough that I thought it might make a good commuter car, but I'd still keep a gas car for when I needed to go far (~3 hours of highway driving the other day used 75% of a full charge and it's taken 30 hours on a 15A circuit to charge back up). Used the super charger, that was fun and the 25 minutes really didn't seem much longer than a regular gas station stop. I'm also worried a bit by the effects of cold on it in the northeast, although ironically, climate change means that we've had pretty mild winters for the last 5+ years.

I did look at prices for used Tesla Model 3's when I first got the rental and there are some great bargains to be had; TBH the prices on the Hertz used car site (linked in TFA) are not good at all, over priced and very high mileage (not to mention whatever condition it is in having been a rental).

All in all, I kinda like the car and for the right price (e.g. <$25K USD for less than 15K mile Model 3), I'd probably get one used, but would keep my current gas car.