skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The part where the investors invest this much money without going through the technical detail of the product always confuses me. How can yo spend that much money responsibly without having enough expertise onboard to evaluate the technical feasibility. Maybe I am just too naive.
The protest was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace... are you suggesting they're an anti-semitic group?
You are really reaching. I wasn't expecting a MKBHD review of the Humane Pin just yet, but it showed up in my feed. I saw the title, and I knew exactly what he was reviewing without watching it (I watched anyway and found the content to be in line with the title 100%). On a side note: I knew these things (Humane Pin, Rabbit R1, etc.) were going to be borderline useless, but definitely redundant as mobile phones will very soon make them obsolete.
I think about the famous Steve Jobs quote in regards to modern software a lot:

“The only problem with [modern software developers" is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste.”

Most developers working today haven't regularly used software that doesn't suck so they're not personally offended by unusable designs or 500ms of latency when typing.
Show HN: AI3D Camera Obscura – VisionDevCamp Best in Show App
Sure, some people simply like not having them, and that demographic seems to be growing, as people start to get out of the social pressure of having kids (as was common in the past and still is in many areas of the world, where women are expected to pump out babies, and men are expected to help them do so) and think critically about what they want from their finite life. Many still want kids, yes, but many also don't want to spend 18+ years raising them.
For a minute there I thought you described us (HN readership).
Ah, I see that it is time to raise my objection again.

As I wrote before [0], I think that what Aaronson's calls "the theory" is a somewhat bastardized version of quantum mechanics that might suffice for quantum computing but, in my opinion, not for physics.

I discussed the difference here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38255476

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39627618
I think the issue is just bad direction on that video. They released this "video handbook" a couple weeks ago that's much more human.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyPxwp3SxdU

If there's anything about their work atmosphere I've gleamed from seeing employees talk about the company over the past few months it's quite the opposite of a cold, brutalist tech company. It's cult-like if anything. They've been acting way too impressed by their own product, and now that it's out and reviews have panned it, they tweet about how we all need to be more "optimistic about the future" and similar handwaving. It takes real faith-like buy-in to be shipping something like this and not feel totally embarrassed.
Tegmark’s institution is the Future of Life Institute, this is the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute.

Tegmark’s institute is well-funded, apparently largely due to a big crypto donation from Vitalik Buterin. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/25/a-665m-crypto-war-c...
Hmm, so each of Apple's apps has a limit? So far it seemed like the limit is shared to keep a lot of storage available (for the future?)
Awesome paper! Might be my cue to delve into the world of cost estimates. My naive brain thinks, how can it be so hard :-)
> Who the hell needs to pay anyone to shill butter?

Any company that makes butter as good as the below [1], and has an idea that some people haven’t heard of it.

It’s silly expensive. It’s so great.

https://www.lewisroadcreamery.com/collections/grass-fed-butt...
This makes no sense unless you're unaware of tools like Prettier and eslint which are the seatbelt in your analogy (we don't need analogies, please).

These tools have changed the argument into one over aesthetics which is why opponents have had to grasp for increasingly hypothetical scenarios where the sky falls because the code doesn't use semicolons. Even in the github thread, it starts off concern-trolling over hypothetical day 1 beginners copy-pasting code into Notepad.

That github thread was back in 2012 btw (12 years ago) which was the year of the final throes of the semicolon debate. None of the chicken littling came true. People still upset about semicolons are like that Japanese soldier still hiding in the Philippines in the 1970s thinking WW2 is raging, except they refuse to admit it's just a style preference.
> Rent-seeking is profiting from position without adding value.

No, that's “economic rent”, of which monopoly rent is an extensively-studied subtype. (Monopoly is position.)

Rent-seeking is pursuing economic, including monopoly, rents.
"Oxford" did not choose the name
I'd categorize myself as a "Barry" - which he seems to define in part II of this blog post as someone who is willing to take great personal and career risks to rock the boat, and will even risk getting fired to get their job done - it has usually cost me a lot in whatever organization I end up in. I think these people eventually become skilled pragmatists when burnt out, but I'm not sure he has any insight in these posts about how people become a "Maria."

IMO it's when Barry's finally realize that working their ass off and taking risk for the betterment of a company or leadership team that will not hesitate to take advantage of a Barry and/or ruthlessly cut him down when convenient. I guess by author's definition if a Barry became a Maria, he was never a Barry to begin with, but I do think this happens a lot. I see it in my own career path, with myself and some of my peers.
Biscoff, I hope? Love those.
> I have no idea why the hell people are being so hard on you.

I think it's this and the gatekeeping in general.

> Store bought blueberries are garbage.

They're obviously not garbage and some people don't have access to fresh Blueberries.
There's a war story on this too!

https://www.stimmel-law.com/en/articles/story-10-buying-peac...
"Just Google it" - really? I have no doubt MISTRA exists, but demonstrating specifically where and how a study proves your point is something else entirely.

The core assertion that parental involvement doesn't matter much as long as they're not abusive is pretty absurd regardless, but I'll leave the Googling of studies showing why as an exercise for you.
This post is too old to re-up* directly so I spawned a new copy and moved the comments thither: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067070

(That's why the timestamps on the comments are older than the parent submission)

* about re-upping, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
Tossing you in a pond so you'll swim is very different from tossing in a pond so you'll drown for 5 seconds.
> For the Humane’s introduction video, they pinned it on a heavy leather (or leather-like) jacket to give support (what do you do in the summer?).

this is just the usual Silicon Valley bias, with leather jacket weather year round (I'm only half joking)
One of the most common use-cases for a cinema camera is to point it at a beautiful woman... In this regard, "Casablanca" remains unsurpassed.
Nothing directly, in fact I want to like them so much. But I was there since the 90s and the stations just over-played them to the point that I began to dislike them.
How are you using the word hypocrisy here?
Wouldn't that open you up to both similar tax implications AND potential visa issues? You can't enter Canada on as a tourist and then do work.

Obviously the chances of getting caught are extremely slim but the consequences could be significant.
Just wanted to share a glimpse of the future of computing - that incorporates the wonder of exploring new dimensions, on multiple levels...
Extracting valuables from the San José galleon
Stable Diffusion 3 Free Trial
Asymptotic Statistics
https://archive.ph/ULeJe
The tomatoes I grow in my backyard are leagues better than any tomato sold in stores around here. It really does make a difference. No wonder a lot of people are so lukewarm on produce. The stuff people buy in the store is junk!
I wonder how anonymous user sign-in info is persisted on the client. Specifically, I want to know whether re-installing the App will make it forget the previous anonymous sign-in.
why do people not like Max Tegmark? he was kind of a rockstar at NeurIPS
Secret Russian foreign policy document urges action to weaken the U.S.
The founders were really important people in design at Apple. That seems worth the bet.
That's to drive your 17+ year old car into a particular zone, nothing like what was described above.
Some words of wisdom passed on to me from a very knowledgeable person who was in turn given this knowledge when starting their career.

"This organization (group of people) represents a random sample of the population. Traits that occur within individuals in the population will therefore occur within some individuals in this organization (group of people.)"
They have a YouTube channel with some case studies and discussions[1] the channel intro shows high level what the battery chemistry and mechanism is - pumping electrolyte past a membrane and either dissolving or precipitating Zinc + Bromine to charge/discharge. They seem to be making a 10kWh cell which they can stack into a shipping container sized larger cell, and then deploy those to make grid-scale storage, rather than home use. Presumably they have an answer for if all the pumps in all those containers need regular maintenance, but I haven't thought about that until now.

('liquid tracks' should have been 'liquid tanks' in my earlier comment).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@redflow-acceleratingacarbo9077/vide...
> how can I trust that the next jerkoff won't do the same thing

You 100% can trust that they will do the exact same thing, accept that you are always rolling the dice and progress at the irrational whim of some higher power in the organisation.
> It violates core liberal fundamentals. People have the right to be as involved of parents as they see fit, and to raise their children with values of their choosing.

If that's "core liberal fundamentals," then maybe liberalism is, at heart, rotten. Your take on it certainly is. I don't respect a parent's "right" to neglect or mistreat their children. Society collectively is entitled (in fact, obliged) to intervene in harmful family situations.

That's not what liberalism is, though. Who are you citing here? What aspect of liberal philosophy entitles parents to treat children like their property? Parents don't own their children; liberal individualist property rights cannot apply to the treatment of human beings, who have their own rights.

Rather than any sort of liberalism, what you're espousing here is a form of deep pre-liberal conservatism, where children have no rights and are instead property of their patriarch, whose authority is absolute and arbitrary. How can you possibly believe that the government, with its myriad checks and balances, is too susceptible to corruption to intervene in family life, but that parents, whose power over their children should be absolutely unchecked in your view, cannot be corrupt? That they have an inalienable right to withhold education and socialization from their children; that this self-evidently corrupt and selfish desire is beyond reproach?

This is a ridiculous and half-baked ideology.
Drawing Diagrams for TeX with MetaPost
> wisely chooses his employers to not end-up in such environments

This is a pretty common attitude. That is, "I'm able to pick better workplaces than you are".

It implies you have control over the other people that work at the company. And unless you're the CEO, you don't. You cannot with any certainty tell what a work environment is like in the interview stage.

You can job hop a half dozen times until you find a good fit. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. But framing it as: "I pick better work environments than you" is an attitude I'd really like to see disappear. It ignores just how much of a role luck plays.
We really have two sorts of software: the immutable types that developers depend on to behave exactly as they did forty years ago, and then the slop relegated to the general public that seems to need a redesign every 5 years, much like the inside of a grocery store.
The bunnies are kahoots with them too! Eastern cottontails massacred my bushes.
Climate crisis: average world incomes to drop by nearly a fifth by 2050
People aren’t all the same. It’s easy to forget this.

And it totally makes sense to be wary! That will help you pick a better place next time.

Although, to be fair, the average place probably closer to what you describe, meaning there is a limited supply of high quality places at the top end of the distribution.
Pretty easy actually.

All video is streamed in blocks currently (HLS streaming mostly). So if they really want they would inject adds inside those blocks and the player won't be able to distinguish between ads blocks and video blocks.
They can stop sending you blocks if you didn't get all the "ad blocks" beforehand for the duration of the ad.
Even if your player "knows" because of a "Sponsor Block" database the interval it needs to skip, by not giving you the blocks beforehand you'd need to wait.

They can also give the stream only to DRM compliant players.

We may end up with some shadow YT libraries with ripped videos. Some distributed crypto hosting platform where the more you seed/rip, the more tokens you get for watching or something like that.
Even if they understand that, MBA executives will be judged by profit targets hit __this year__, not when the crows come to roost 3 years from now.
It was never the weight of them that bothered me it was the uneven distribution of the weight. 40kg isn't much until it's all shifted to one side (the front) of a cumbersome object.
CUDA was always harder to program - even if you could get better perf

It took a long time to find something that really took advantage of it, but we did eventually. CUDA enabled deep learning which enabled LLMs . That's history.

What surprised me about the statement was that it implied that the model of python driving optimized GPU kernels was broader than deep learning.

That was the original vision of CUDA - most of the computational work being done by massively parallel cores
I'll have to see if I can find it at a store. I'm always down to improve my butter experience. I will say that I was very let down by Kerrygold. It's noticeably better if you are having just plain buttered toast, but otherwise I can't taste any difference between it and the normal butter one sees at the store.
> Many universities have tremendous endowments and should be in a position to offer financing to their students.

This is exactly why every time my university comes calling for donations, I decline. Sorry, but I'm not making a donation that you'll use to rebuild a stadium when you're setting your students up to graduate with six-figure debt. Figure your priorities out, whether you want to educate students or play tone-deaf real estate developer.
Sounds like an Atlanta-based flight crew. Weaponized niceness.
Oh, you mean this gate key?
ExpatYC sounds like an interesting group
Related. Others?

The international fight over a 300-year-old treasure-laden Spanish galleon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31895748 - June 2022 (51 comments)
This is definitely a shill comment from Big Black Currant.
How is that any different than deity of religion will save humanity as any more/less believable?
Slam system for sensing and localization of biped climbing robots
Presentation of FHI:

- Founded in 2005 by Prof Nick Bostrom as a multidisciplinary research group at Oxford to study big-picture questions for human civilization

- Aimed to shield researchers from ordinary academic pressures and foster creativity and intellectual progress

History:

Early days (2005-2010):

- Initial funding from James Martin and the Oxford Martin School

- Focus on human enhancement ethics, global catastrophic and existential risks, methodology for thinking about uncertain futures

- Hosted influential conferences and workshops that helped build academic communities around key research areas

Maturation (2010-2020):

- Artificial intelligence, especially AI safety and governance, became a major focus

- Expanded into other areas like biosafety, priorities research, population ethics

- Received major grants allowing expansion of research

- Increasing policy impact and advising governments

Final Years (2020-2024):

- Continued work through the COVID-19 pandemic after moving to a new building

- Some new research directions like digital minds and grand futures

- But also increasing bureaucratic obstacles from the Philosophy Faculty

- FHI was closed down in April 2024 when the University declined to renew staff contracts

Research Topics and Findings:

- Existential risk - pioneered the study of risks that threaten humanity's long-term potential

- Biological risk - modeled risks from emerging biotechnologies and pandemics

- Macrostrategy - studying how long-term outcomes for humanity connect to present-day actions

- Longtermism - the idea that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority

- Grand futures - exploring the limits of what spacefaring civilizations could accomplish

- SETI/Fermi paradox - dissolving the paradox; grabby aliens hypothesis

- Effective altruism - identifying the highest-impact ways to improve the world

- Technology:
- AI safety, alignment and governance
- Whole brain emulation
- Digital minds and AI consciousness
- Human enhancement ethics

- Epistemology and rationality - anthropic reasoning, information hazards, moral uncertainty

- Ethics - challenges in infinite ethics, Parliamentary model for normative uncertainty

Concepts originated at FHI that are now influential:
existential risk, astronomical waste, information hazards, differential technological development, crucial considerations, exploratory engineering, whole brain emulation

Learnings and Advice:

- Take the long-term view; build up new fields even if not currently fashionable

- Have a diverse team from many disciplines

- Invest in the right organizational relationships to maintain stability

- As an organization scales, its structure needs to evolve

- The key to replicating FHI is having the right people and intellectual culture focused on the most important questions
Joseph Priestley created revolutionary "maps" of time
or the film 'Parasite' by Korean director Bong Joon-ho (2020 Oscars Best Picture winner)
Little confused as to why it has vite in it‘s name, it seems unrelated to https://vitejs.dev/
Some medicines aren’t available at the pharmacy and the locally produced varieties fill a market gap. Ethical hits for the modern druggie.
Comparing the Popover API and the <dialog> element
Ask HN: How's AI different than the dot-com era?
I am old enough to have lived the dot-com era. In the mid-90's I had a "cushy" job but once I realized that the internet was going to be huge, I quit my job and rode the dot-com wave.

And now here we are with AI.

The way I see it AI is going to be evermore disruptive of old business model than the Internet has been; but contrary to the dot-com era, the barrier to entry is a lot higher. Is it?

Aside from YC's recent batch, where/how does HN see Innovation leveraging AI and where are the opportunities?

I asked ChatGTP and what I got back was average cliche' answers.

Can we have a human-powered large scale brainstorming?

TIA
Yea! I think sometimes you have that one person that tries to make everything about politics, and it really makes team dynamics annoying.

I usually err on the side of caution and push for a "don't ask, don't tell" policy on these kinds of topics, because it takes 1 person to cause unnecessary drama.

I think small team vs big team plays a role as well.
This comment thread is mostly populated by people who are more like Uri Berliner than they are like Katherine Maher, so isn't surprising that they agree with Berliner about the issues he brought up.
It's been a long time dream for me since about 2013 when I started getting deep into Ruby and Rails, to be able to write Ruby code for the frontend instead of JavaScript. I was a lover and adopter of CoffeeScript (which had it's flaws and imperfections), but that mostly got killed by ES6, and in truth ES7 and beyond made javascript a whole lot more tolerable so less need/motivation to use Ruby on frontend.

I wrote some PoCs with Opal[1] that felt pretty good to write, but the overhead was rough (this was many years ago so things might be different now) and I never really felt like I didn't have to know about or care about the underlying javascript. I tend to discard leaky abstractions as I feel they often add more complexity than they were meant to cover in the first place.

Has anybody used this or Opal or anything else? What is the state of "write your frontend in Ruby" nowadays?

[1]: https://github.com/opal/opal
Oh, my country's Constitution has it clearly and uneditable.

It doesn't help when all of the heads of the Judiciary and Executive decide the text means something else.
Looking at hydrogen after considering a CNG car, it has all the problems of CNG, plus it's an even more exotic fuel that reacts with the container and it's an exotic chemistry project to turn the fuel into motive power. Yes, the vehicles exist, but it seems like a big waste of everyone's time and money.

Shared problems:

high pressure vehicle fuel tanks that expire 15-20 years after manufacture and are uneconomical to replace (if parts are even available)

high pressure fuel storage which will require a large energy cost to compress

High pressure on board fuel storage is hard to expand and heavy compared to liquid fuels.

CNG/LNG/Propane powered vehicles can work for high mileage fleets that work locally, they typically put on enough miles that the vehicles would be retired before the tanks expire anyway, and they can put fueling stations in their service and parking depots. And the vehicles tend to be heavy already, so a large metal tank is no big deal.
It's an interesting result, but note that it's inexpensive for drug production, not inexpensive for carbon capture.
Paul Christiano Announced as Head of AI Safety at the U.S. AI Safety Institute
"The only free cheese you'll find is in the mousetrap". Free hosting and streaming is not guaranteed, when the big company pays for the hosting.
Apparently you want to mandate that I live in a society that lets people remain unvaccinated. I don’t want that, but I do want to live in a society that doesn’t mandate sharing the public right of way with cars. It interferes with the “let live” part since I know of millions of fatal car cases.
To be fair, this has been my initial impression with basically all image generation models. The current generation is finally at the point where throwing untuned prompts at untuned models gives good results, but those never match the results of finely tuned (positive and negative) prompts with parameters adjusted from experience; ideally with model fine-tunes added.

If you want the best results there is still skill and work involved. Consequently a showcase by people experienced with the model far surpasses what you get when you shout prompts over the internet for somebody else to try
Sounds like the "you only use 10% of your brain" myth, but actually real this time.
Evaluation of a Constraint Programming Based Tool Designed for Counterpoint [video]
All kinds of pessimism in the comments of course. Obviously they are different processes with different tradeoffs. But there are a growing number of applications where 3D printing is the better choice. But it's interesting that the video didn't even highlight the 6 week tooling lead time or the cost of the tooling! How many more batches or different parts could they have done in that 6 weeks time, or adding more printers with the saved cost? Hardware companies and manufacturers can and will get creative with their mix of production methods and scheduling options available to them.