skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
LOL. I use Emacs for note-taking, spreadsheets, calculations, to-do lists, calendaring, email, static site generation and more. Please show me VS Code extensions that have feature sets comparable to those of Emacs packages like Org, mu4e, calc, etc. Here, I'll save you some time by eliminating a couple options:

- VS Code Org Mode[1] has maybe 2% of the features of Org for Emacs.

- The only VS Code-based mail client I've ever found is VSCode Mail Client[1], which was developed during a single month and then abandoned.

VS Code is clearly for normies who use WYSIWYG word processors, webmail, etc. Suggesting that VS Code has surpassed Emacs for non-coding activities is laughable.

[1] https://github.com/vscode-org-mode/vscode-org-mode

[2] https://github.com/buhe/vscode-mail
Good point. The reason we don't lead with future impact is that we don't know if any of those things will work out. The reason researchers (not us, independent researchers) are looking into these areas is because they believe, and there is some evidence, that the stimulation could have an impact. Where our customers are focused on their problem.

This will become more obvious as we get closer to market and we start more directly targeting specific markets. We are currently building out our separate website which is more targeted at supporting researchers and other collaborations.
According to systems theory (and karl marx?) purpose of the system is what the system does. Here system = person.

And according to those who dont like that theory "The Protestant Ethic" is the reason for "The Spirit of Capitalism" or continuing to work/optimize/explore/exploit way past the point your Needs are meet.
Dumping Parallel NAND with Glasgow
The best way to understand RAG is that it's a prompting hack where you increase the chance that a model will answer a question correctly by pasting a bunch of text that might help into the prompt along with their question.

The art of implementing RAG is deciding what text should be pasted into the prompt in order to get the best possible results.

A popular way to implement RAG is using similarity search via vector search indexes against embeddings (which I explained at length here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Oct/23/embeddings/). The idea is to find the content that is semantically most similar to the user's question (or the likely answer to their question) and include extracts from that in the prompt.

But you don't actually need vector indexes or embeddings at all to implement RAG.

Another approach is to take the user's question, extract some search terms from it (often by asking an LLM to invent some searches relating to the question), run those searches against a regular full-text search engine and then paste results from those searches back into the prompt.

Bing, Perplexity, Google Gemini are all examples of systems that use this trick.
Melancholia. I don't think I've seen a movie that depicts depression and disaster so brutally. It's a film I keep thinking about every now and again.
I found the book even better and started reading more novels from David Mitchell. "Cloud Atlas" is still my favorite of his books. A lot of his essays are available online via The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/davidmitchell
Annihilation
cattackstic!

cattackstrophic!
KDE is still great! I continue to see improvements and KDE6 has some killer features like KDE Connect. (we still don't talk about KDE4 though)
I should point out that this has been posted [1], but not for the past half decade, long enough to need another PSA :)

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fagner.org%2Foptimize...
Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_preemption#
Blade Runner 2049 got me thinking a lot about what “real” or “authentic” mean.
I view it as more moving the problem.

Instead of police kicking down ISP doors they kick down VPN runners doors.

Sorta ambivalent towards them overall. Just don’t have a big use for them
Linux has seccomp and landlock, which are basically harder-to-use versions of pledge/unveil.
>also drives libostree and Nix users mad

no, it really doesn't. (nixos-generators has multiple ready-to-go kexec options, nixos-anywhere is entirely built on the concept, etc, etc. It would be a two-line change to pull in the kexec module into any of my computers configurations [or all of them!], and another single command to kexec reboot into it.)

> How often do you screw up the system so much you have to reformat the disk (without losing data) to fix it?

Have you heard of NixOS? Where this is nigh impossible?

lol
Repainting takes effort too. But it's so vastly less effort than the original. Charging the new customer price to previous owners sucks.
A Large Language Model itself can't perform RAG: a model is a big binary blob of matrices that you run prompts against.

Anything that can do RAG is, by definition, a system that wraps an LLM with additional code that performs the retrieval.

It's the difference between ChatGPT (software that wraps a model and can extra features such as tool usage, Code Interpreter, RAG lookup via Bing etc) and GPT-4 Turbo (a model).
Very glad to see someone also mention Arrival.

I would strong suggest reading the Ted Chiang short story on which it is based: Stories of your Life.

Spoilers ahead:

The movie necessarily makes some changes and adds some action through geopolitics, but at its core it remains the story of a mother that knows that her child will die and her marriage will fall apart; yet she still decides to get married and have a child. It's a story about accepting fate and the ephemerality of life and happiness - and then aliens also happen to be around with a very cool perspective on time to make the whole story work.
NY doesn't sound bad at all, there is roughly 10M people, given random estimate of 2 people per apartment, 89k, would be barely 2%

Edit: plus in NY you have all those HoA payments, so you pay really high price for not renting the place out
Good reminder. Fight Club had the same effect on me but it went through phases as I first watched it in my teens and appreciated it for certain reasons, especially the more anarchist future “back to nature” aspects.

But then as I grew older and read the book and gained more life experience in general, I appreciated it differently, the deeper meaning, anti-satire, realness and broader narrative as I then started to understand it, seeing things about society through the lens of the characters and with an understanding of why we have order and laws and a system. I thought I was maturing or being some higher intellectual.

But then as I got even older and gained even more wisdom and experience, I realized the teenager appreciated aspects were really the true and tangible message, and it was because of the truth that was revealed. I came full circle and realized the returning to nature was the real answer all along, and appreciated the anarchy again and even more fully but now for an entirely different reason.

Oh and READ THE BOOK! It is the only time in my life where I was not disappointed after reading the book that I had watched a movie before reading the book actually, just try hard not to catch any spoilers on differences between the book and the movie!
Just tried it on a complex marketing page and it did a great job. Congrats!

I'm curious, if you care to share, what kind of load this places on your host? Is this something that you can keep going for free or will it eventually become non-cost efficient to keep running?
This project never made any sense to me. I could never make the numbers work out.
With Biden at least, he's held pretty firm to not raise taxes on the middle or upper-middle class. So like $364k married filing jointly even (my bracket).

If I ever do make enough to get hit with a Biden platform tax hike..I think I'm doing pretty okay :)
Think in object orientation: Put related nouns and verbs together: it is much easier to organize your thoughts using constructors and methods. However do not use virtual methods unless you really must, and if you do, make the class a well-defined explicit interface having only abstract methods. That said, avoid using implementation inheritance: overriding one defined method for another.

Get rid of pointers: When passing objects by reference, using references instead of pointers, especially reference to const, makes code much easier to read. When combined with vector instead of raw arrays, most uses of raw pointers go away.

Do not implement your own fancy data structures: instead use the Standard Template Library. I use STL map, set, and vector all of the time and they remove the need for most other data-structures. Also, when you can, use iterators to traverse these containers, rather than the visitor pattern. Using iterators keeps the control flow of the client contiguous, so it is much more flexible than visitors.
Visualization of hyperloop between Florida and Hong Kong, and some of the hollow earth visuals, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39722705. Rest of the movie was less memorable :) The storyline of Apple TV's Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is more engaging. A few good visuals as well, but it doesn't have a movie budget. Moonfall has a good interior visualization of "hollow moon" spaceship at the end, but is otherwise forgettable. Mind-bending images of fictional "under space" and "inner space", respectively.
Watching BBC Iplayer via VPN is hard, mainly because it’s in the interest of the BBC to avoid eating the cost of serving the world for free. And VPN traffic is easy to spot, if you’re looking for it. I’m assuming the BBC invests a lot of resources to fence of non paying foreign viewers.

But this is a BBC specific problem, most of the other European geofencing is quite weak and getting access to most other public broadcasters works just fine with a proper VPN.
The company is a chess related company that sends instructors to school for afterschool events, so he would be teaching kids, instructing other instructors, helping run events (chess camps, tournaments, etc.), and giving private lessons.
"Mental illness" alone is not a defense. The defense is insanity, which term in law means that your mental condition was such that you had no way of knowing what you did was wrong. If you're schizophrenic, say, and you kill someone, but you are compos mentis enough to understand that you killed a person and that is wrong, you don't get to plead insanity. If, on the other hand, you were under the delusion that you were killing an alien or a demon or something, then a plea of insanity might work.

I know that this is Hackernews, and the perspective that there's no such thing as responsibility for our actions, because we are all products of our biology and environment; and hence no such thing as evil, is popular here. But whether and how mental illness absolves, or does not absolve, you from criminal culpability is a fairly rigorous area of law.
On the flip side C projects often end up with things like linked lists and pointers to [it depends] because that lack of abstraction, while obvious, encourages the programmer to take shortcuts (otherwise no time for actual logic)
User experience and observing how they interact with the end product of software development is the true version of walking the aisles. What to find improvements, just be the person that trains and teaches the administrator, the general user, the maintainers, and the installers.

For example, I documented how to load an OS image for assembly. Watched them use the guide and saw they flipped through the document. Afterwards, I inserted an extra page of what shows up in the text stream and said, "sit and wait for ...." at that point they started flipping around.
District 9

How would we treat aliens if they arrived?
> Many, many people simply aren’t able to do that. You can’t manage complex organizations that include people without that ability

Never thought about it that way, but I think you're correct. The number of adults who cannot hold their cool in the face of a perceived slight or setback is shocking.
not sure why you are getting downvoted, this is exactly my experience as well. In 5 years working on my own gig, I have developed more skills not only in sales, marketing and engineering than 12 years as a pure software engineer in the industry
Yes, that was the context: a Redis alternative to support the same operations but be what Redis isn’t.
The thing I never hear mentioned is when your home ISP (or say your favorite cafe's) is known to use your traffic data for marketing purposes or sell it outright. I trust Mullvad farther than I trust my ISP. I could switch ISPs, but my only option is Comcast and they're even sleazier.
"Come and see" and "20 Days in Mariupol". Both are about wars and both affect you the way nothing else does.

The last one is a documentary about the war in Ukraine. The actual raw uninterpreted reality of things that we read about in history books or in the news changes your perspective on many things, from politics to simple things in life that we often take for granted.

News stories force an agenda on you. History books may give you some knowledge about the reality we live in today. THIS lets you live through the traumatic experience of the history books and news story events.
How familiar are you with factor analysis? I worry that because the best mathematical minds are often not attracted to psychology as a field, that psychologists as a group are somewhat blind to implications of statistical choices and assumptions that they inherit or make.
Graveyard of the Fireflies (1988)

Warning: not a good times film.

But it is beautiful in profound and sad ways. It deepened my appreciation for the good circumstances I have been fortunate to enjoy in my life.
Indeed, and I don't think the film painted government in a bad light necessarily.

When I said government, I should have more accurately said politics. Or even humanity. It is depressing to me that we can get ourselves into a situation where using a weapon of that magnitude can be the reasonable course of action.
I don't know, but if it was possible surely it would already have happened with the legumes?
Because I've hosted websites where blocking datacentre IPs has caused a massive reduction in spam and malicious activity - and tried to use Google search with Mullvad dialled only to be greeted by a CAPTCHA every other search.
The only problem I have with Kate these days is... its icon. It's been there for years now, and yet my mind still just stops for a noticeable bunch of milliseconds whenever it has to recognize it. For some reason it looks like it represents some brand's useless mobile app rather than a proper utility and my mind somehow refuses to associate it with Kate.
You are bringing up a valid problem, but I think this needs to be fixed at UI level.

There are GUIs getting developed for e.g. NixOS that lower the barrier to use the OS pretty dramatically.

I agree things need to be simpler, but it would be nice to keep the capability to generate a bill of materials for each package.

IMHO, Flatpak is a regression in some of these aspects.
As someone who operated a high fraud target during the pandemic, I am comfortable asserting that while not all commercial VPN traffic is fraudulent or malicious, most fraudulent or malicious traffic is over VPN.
That's not an good tactic for a number of reasons.

The attack involved a lot of drones. Hundreds. Dealing with hundreds of drones with manned fighter aircraft is dubious and possibly a terrible mistake: committing and exposing high value assets for what is, militarily, scutwork.

Fighters don't carry enough gun ammo for the purpose, because ammo is heavy and the guns fire it very rapidly: typically there is only a few seconds of gun ammo capacity in a fighter. Air to air missiles are too precious to use on these targets: they're needed to defend against high value threats and can't be wasted on these crummy, militarized model aircraft from Iran. Also, these drones fly at relatively low altitude, so defending fighters must operate at low altitude and low speed over foreign territory, which is problematic for many reasons. Finally, the drones aren't easy to find because they aren't great radar targets, being small, low altitude, and mostly made of lightweight composites: it is unlikely they can all be detected and engaged quickly enough.

For all of these reasons and others, manned aircraft are poor counter for this sort of attack. Despite this fighter aircraft were used. It was reported that the US, the RAF and the IAF all used manned aircraft to bring down some of these drones. But as you know, many still reached Israel. There, cost effective ground defense did most of the work.
Everything from Jodorowsky is great. Especially this one particular movie, which is probably the most famous one that was never made.
‘This is not right! You’ve removed all of this stuff! If the negative is scratched, then we should see that scratch.’ People were really hard-core about it.”

Dat me! But I shoot and process film on a home made camera, sometimes intentionally degrading the film, or processing without times, or mountain dew instead of water.
With this technology, faster chips will solve it _for an application-specific definition of "solved."_

The models aren't actually capable of taking into account everything in their context window with industrial yields.

These are stochastic processes, not in the "stochastic parrot" sense, but in the sense of "you are manufacturing emissions and have some measurable rate of success." Like a condom factory.

When you reduce the amount of information you inject, you both decrease cost and improve yield.

"RAG" is application specific methods of estimating which information to admit to the context window. In other words, we use domain knowledge and labor to reduce computational load.

When to do that is a matter of economy.

The economics of RAG in 2024 differ from 2022, and will differ in 2026.

So the question that matters is, "given my timeframe, and current pricing, do I need RAG to deliver my application?"

The second question is, "what's an acceptable yield, and how do I measure it?"

You can't answer that for 2026, because, frankly, you don't even know what you'll be working on.
Kollabe introduces async Planning Poker, enabling Agile teams to collaborate on task estimation without the need for synchronous meetings. This article explores how async Planning Poker can streamline the estimation process and improve remote collaboration.
Why is Arnold's head slightly larger in the AI version of the first screenshot? The ears do not align.

Whatever the case, my wife and I went to see The Lost Boys the other day and it was grainy and blurry compared to the super-sharp previews and I just wouldn't have it any other way.

Restoration is one thing. "Improving" it by smearing statistical filter juice over it is quite another.
To me, the issue is that you can’t divide days and years evenly in the way that one would want to with metric time, so you haven’t achieved true metric time. You’ve just achieved even 1,000 even units within a single day, so it’s not worth the inconvenience.
So many... here are a few

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Sophies Choice

English Patient

Master and Commander
If you have access to any language models, I encourage you to ask this question:

> What is the significance of the word "source" in the expression "source code"?

I landed on this question by first asking it about "open source" rather than "source code", but the answers referred to "source code", which is a bit circular for this conversation. I'll share a truncated version of how Mistral Large replied:

> It is called the "source" because it is the origin or the primary input from which the executable form of the program is derived.

The primary input from which a language model is derived is the training data. That is the source. If the training data for a model is not open, then the model is not open source, because the source of the model is not open.
The problem with paying extortion or ransoms is that you incentivize the attacker to come back and do it again. It may have been $5k to pay off one attacker and more than that to build the defense, but now you have defenses and are less likely to suffer attackers in the future. And as you say, not paying money to criminals is inherently worthwhile.
Voter coalitions are just parties in their earliest proto-stage. Coalition politics necessarily requires some amount of tit-for-tat and trust building, which forms long-term connections, which lead to organizations like parties over the long term. You can't ignore human mass psychology here; working together towards a common goal is not something that can just be completely disregarded in the next electoral cycle.

There's no way for policy on one issue to represent a plurality of distinct individuals, but most issues are broadly orthogonal and not particularly strongly related in and of themselves. Any single candidate, however, is effectively a packaged bundle of policies on all those orthogonal issues. That bundling is the problem.

I think that any claim that representative democracy somehow does not also lead to "unchecked populism" has been disproven by experience of the past century or so. All this stuff about how it lets you have wise, even-handed leaders that "temper the mob sentiment" was ultimately just wishful thinking - it turns out that those kinds of leaders generally tend to lose elections to populists. If you're really lucky, you get someone who runs on a populist platform and then turns around and does the whole sage king thing.

We're in enough trouble as it is because we shoved most politics up to national level. On that level, any way to enact extensive policies will be problematic simply because broad consensus doesn't scale well to that level. I agree that the solution to that is indeed "laboratories of democracy" where highly localized decisions can be made tailored to the local wants and needs, and where people can easily vote their feet - somewhere around the municipal level is probably fine-grained enough for that, I think, although large metropolitan areas would need further breakdown (which is not a problem with multi-level federalism). But when you get to that level of decentralization, direct democracy works pretty well beyond just serving as a check on representative bodies, and can itself be made more deliberative with fewer people involved.

I also agree that it's generally too easy to pass "will somebody please do something?!" type legislation, but that is true in either representative or direct democracy, and so there need to be checks on that either way. Supermajority requirements & automatic sunsetting can help a lot there, especially if the sunsetting term is proportional to the amount of votes the law gets - so e.g. if it can barely pass, then it needs to be re-enacted every year, while something that has near unanimous support is kept around for decades.
Or 15 years ago when I made photographs using no camera and just objects, light, photo paper, dodge, burn, dodge, burn.
Predestination

How do I describe this without giving it away?
> Rights are a social construct.

I strongly doubt this. You might make a case that our conception of them is tied to our biology and evolution, but that also means these ideas and concepts have obviously existed well outside and over society for much of history.

> It's fair to describe their delineation as creation.

I strictly disagree. What gets created is a collective enforcement mechanism. The right, recognized or not, exists separately from this.

> Natural rights don't really work without a deity bestowing and defending them

Your reference, in the very first paragraph, contradicts you with `all people have inherent rights, conferred not by act of legislation but by "God, nature, or reason.'