skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I feel that even after 10 years I will barely reach conversational fluency in Japanese

Interesting. I feel exact opposite with Mandarin. My progress learning Japanese was incredibly fast, I could speak decently in 6 months and read after 1 year. But I always lose motivation learning Mandarin because it's so hard. Maybe it's because my mother tongue is closely aligned with Japanese in pronounciation and grammar such as conjugation.
Basically any normal job. There are tiers within those normal jobs but assuming some base level of competence, it's mostly not the delta between Taylor Swift and someone playing for tips at the local bar on weekends or doing Tik-Tok.
We've had several close calls in the last ~80 years. I have no idea what the actual probabilities of inciting WWII and causing a nuclear winter were in the Korean war, Cuban Missile Crisis, Able Archer exercise, and various computer errors and false alarms that occurred, but if you're rolling the dice on existing every 10 years, the chances of taking over the galaxy in a million years are remote.
TorBox adds Usenet, and Debrid on top of Torrents
Show HN: Visualising Geopolitical/Environmental Risks to UK Companies
Question 1:
There are really surprisingly few "standard libraries" or tools for this kind of thing. You would think we'd have a CA editor capable of doing object-based editing by this time -- like, copy in a complete device made out of reflectors and converters, each of which is made out of still lifes and oscillators, each of which is made out of cells, and you could do "group" and "ungroup" operations and snap to the right locations to fit the circuits together correctly.

But at the moment, pretty much all we have is tools to copy and paste rectangular sections of patterns at the cell level -- plus we've got good scripting tools (in Golly) that can be used to string together whatever pieces we might want, but it's up to individual pattern-builders to write those scripts for each specific purpose.

So our "library" is pretty much just the LifeWiki and a few other pattern repositories, and we borrow liberally from existing large constructions -- but when we're building something new, we usually just build flat bitmaps, not anything with built-in annotations or metadata.

Question 2:
The thing that's been the most interesting to me in the last decade or so is the increase in collaboration. Projects used to be done by just one person more often than not -- but now a very large fraction of the biggest discoveries are completed via a large group effort over the course of a few weeks or month. One big recent example has been the RCT fixed-cost universal glider synthesis project, which needed contributions from quite a few people to solve all of the tricky little sub-problems:

https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Reverse_caber-tosser
And all the oil spills and methane gas leaks.
I'm looking at the Best Buy page for the printer, and I can see where it would be confusing.

> Choose Brother Genuine TN830 Standard or TN830XL High Yield replacement cartridges. And with Refresh EZ Print Subscription Service, you’ll never worry about running out of toner again and you’ll enjoy savings up to 50%. (3) Get started today with a Free Trial. (4)

> (4) Requires enrollment in a monthly billed Brother Refresh EZ Print Subscription service plan based on monthly printed page allotments. Unused pages roll over, limitations apply. Additional page set charges and taxes apply during trial.

It's just saying that the free trial of their subscription requires enrolling in the subscription. The subscription isn't required to use the printer.
For anyone curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Communication_Port

I'm not sure I'd consider 15 minutes train to central Warsaw "in the middle of absolute nowhere".
Power in numbers etc. If enough people quit google then it would make a difference.
I do believe the elderly gentleman was speaking in jest, from painful experience.
You can very simply do this with javascript.

Browser developers are now reaching for straws to remain employable.

That said the biggest tasks remains:

- Go back to HTTP/1.1 with "One time password" auth.: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289

- Simplify the browser so that it can be compiled in less than many hours on the latest CPU.

- Completely remove the tie-ins to any commercial/governmental entities.

Basically go back to Netscape with some improvements to javascript performance and hardware accelerated rendering of HTML.

Everything else invented in the last 20 years is meaningless. This is valid in most domains: Raspberry Pi is the only real exception.
Also checkout Frappe Books from the team behind ERPNext for desktop accounting: https://github.com/frappe/books
Point 6.4 discusses the justification in Norway, although their annual turnover data is blacked out. It looks like the authorities actually take this into account
and try to make the fine really hurt.

https://www.datatilsynet.no/contentassets/8ad827efefcb489ab1...
At time of writing, this is downvoted. I virtually never comment on voting/flagging, but this is maybe the most disappointing downvoting I've seen. The parent made a simple logical assertion based obviously on knowledge that was omitted, and was asked the obvious question of "why?". It doesn't get much more innocent than that. I can't know why it was downvoted, but I can't help think it had to do with the tendency to over-interpret tone/implication on controversial topics.
Read Oz Katerji (for one) for some depth on the regional standing Hezbollah has. Most notably, Hezbollah dragged Lebanon into direct and painful involvement with the Syrian civil war, at enormous cost, at the behest of Iran. I don't think you'll find many serious analysts suggesting that the IRGC has helped Lebanon.

Stuff like "your reading comprehension is special" doesn't belong on HN.
Technology is evil and evil kills everyone OMG cut to credits of B-movie sci-fi flick.

No. That's trite and silly. There's a much, much more likely answer to the Fermi Paradox -- so likely it's obvious. So obvious it's boring. So boring that everyone ignores it. I don't understand why. It's so blaringly obvious that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is:

Intelligent life is unbelievably, inconceivably, staggeringly unlikely. Quadrillions of universes lived and died without any life emerging -- at least any that could create a civilization. It has literally never, ever happened before, because the odds of it happening are one in 10^billions. It's nearly completely impossible. Which is why uncountable eternities with uncountable cycles of uncountable universes have passed with no life ever emerging ... except, except just this once.

Just this once, it happened. And what are the odds that, given life occurred on one planet, that it would be on that planet that its lifeforms looked around and asked "what are the odds of life? Shouldn't life be everywhere? It's everywhere on this planet!" What are the odds that it would be us lifeforms that life happened to? Well, 100%. So it looks easy. But it's not.

See? Boring. Life is staggeringly close to impossible. It will take another 10^10000000 universes being born and dying before it ever happens again. There is absolutely nowhere else in our entire universe, as big as it is, where intelligent life happened.

But you'll continue to ignore that answer, because deep scary biblical lessons about how the AI plague is consuming the universe and the Mass Effect reapers are going to come one day because we're making noise in the Dark Forest ... well, those just make better Sci-Fi books.

And yet if you shuffle a deck of cards, that particular order of cards will never again be seen in the universe, or hundreds of other universes full of card-shufflers. It is staggeringly close to impossible that you could have possibly gotten that order of cards. Are you really so sure that life didn't require more particulars to be exactly right than one specific order of a 52-card deck? It's so blindingly obvious that everyone just refuses to see it.
it appears to be loading an augmented reality library from here: https://brojka.8thwall.app/retrobit-ar4/
>And while the PR impact of this hasn’t been negligible, it’s also been light. Outside HN it hasn’t really registered.

I divested all my GOOG stock when the Gemini debacle happened. I figured they were too entrenched in political ideology to compete with AI and would just slowly decay. For me, this is a positive PR impact as it shows GOOG is getting back to competing instead of collecting rents on technology they created decades ago.
Both, many new writers are publishing shorts, and if popular, then turned into paid content by kickstarter type funding. Many new writers have popped in the last 10 years due to the internet.

Almost like podcasting, Podcasts are free, but then paid content can come out of it. Short stories to books, cartoons to comics, etc.
new code or maintaining legacy code?
I’m using ChatGPT as a personalized book recommendation tool. After each book I re-open the thread and explain what I liked and didn’t like and then ask for some more book suggestions and short explanations why. It’s working well enough, and I’m on my 5th book so far with this method.
Upgraded the plugin today. Using the new chat sidepanel just work forever without any results when trying the "explain" and "generate test" commands.
The technique to use is to give the model an “out” for the missing/negative case.

"{text}\n\n###\n\nPlease summarize the text above. The text is a video transcript. It may not have the names of the speakers in it. If you need to refer to an unnamed speaker, call them Speaker_1, Speaker_2 and so on."
I share all of the concerns with rampant capitalism that many do, but I actually don't think capitalism is the root cause here.

I think the fundamental cause is societal complexity and the principle-agent problem. One of the most amazing things about the modern world is how we are effectively able to combine the efforts of millions of people across the world to solve problems and build large things. Even something as simple as a banana split is a marvel, with bananas from South America, milk from English cows turned into ice cream in Europe, flavored with vanilla from Madascar, drizzled with chocolate from Africa.

That action at a distance is why our quality is life is orders of magnitude better than humans had a few generations ago.

But as in software, the cost of abstraction and information hiding is that sometimes information that is important gets obscured. In software, this can mean that an abstraction gets in the way of optimizing for performance metrics you may care about.

In society, the abstraction can mean there are externalities to your choices that you are unaware of and wouldn't deliberately opt in to otherwise. But the trade-off, knowing every single externality of every single product you directly or indirectly use, simply doesn't scale.

Capitalism exacerbates this because it's a really good mechanism for building complex social interaction structures and automatically routing away from "inefficient" solutions (i.e. ones that do present the consumer with the externalities). But I don't think it's fundamental to capitalism. If we had some other post-capitalistic way to organize human effort at scale, I suspect it will still be susceptible to these problems.

What we probably need most is systems intertwined with capitalism that provide the transparency and regulation needed to avoid negative externalities.
Elon vs Bezos race is the real reason for this right?
The difference is that in lean you only need to trust the kernel. The rest is constructed on top. If the kernel is sound everything else is as well. This is in stark contrast with a standard programming language. Where at any time a bug can be introduced. It's also in stark contrast with math where any lemma may contain an error.
No, many independent sources.
Ask HN: Startup I work at is failing -precedent for VC backed hostile takeovers?
I work at a startup where I am also a minority investor, but it is currently failing. The CEO's attitude is alienating both employees and customers. There are unpaid bills, broken promises, and potential fraud. Our financial runway is nearly depleted.

However, a key customer and several employees have expressed their confidence in me personally.

Given the company’s valuable technology and talented staff, I am exploring ways to save it. Since there seems to be confidence in my leadership, I am thinking of securing venture capital to fund a hostile takeover. Are there precedents for similar hostile takeover attempts? Am I risking an Anthony Levandowski-like situation?"
As an outside observer, I just hear a lot of hyperbolic reasoning like:

"Tech workers are demanding that they have right to know how their labour is going to be used. With little clarity about the project, they fear the technology might be used for harm."

Is there actual specifics about Project Nimbus that "are helping it commit atrocities in Palestine", or is it just that Google is selling general cloud computing to Israel as a customer?
"I am not opposed to libraries or free tool rental — I am opposed to paying for them with our public tax money. If people want those things, then band together and spend your own money doing it. Ironically enough, I’d even donate to such a cause. "

Alright so NOT public funds, but everyone that wants to take part or that is tacitly endorsing it.. and you would even give happily?

What's the difference with taxes?

I sure wonder how much is spent on public librairies vs the tax cuts companies like Apple get. But surely, we all benefit from multinationals getting tax cuts, aren't we? Much more than from our neighbors having access to books and tools right?
Are the ad firms who buy this data immune to prosecution? Is legal to buy or own data if it's illegal to sell?
I'd hope that it's equally dangerous for both the buyers and sellers of this kind of data.
Who is downvoting this? It's factual.

Look up housing prices in places in San Francisco or SV. Tear downs sell for more!
Couldn't they simply incorporate?, in the municipal sense.

A quick search indicates this is the process in California:

> Today, incorporation means going through a rigorous and complicated process with the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) in the county where the community sits (each census-designated place must be contained within a single county). Before a community can even apply for incorporation, at least 25 percent of registered voters there (a community must have a minimum of 500 registered voters to qualify at all) must sign a petition stating their desire to make their community a city.

https://californialocal.com/localnews/statewide/ca/article/s...
> For example, War and Peace in its original (Russian) language is sprinkled with French words and phrases, all duly translated via footnotes

Amusingly, my English edition kept the French and didn't have footnotes. I read it as a kid and had no hope of understanding the French so I just skipped over it whenever it came up.
Yes, the human effort of checking proofs written in Lean is O(1) as you only need to verify the kernel. The human effort of checking proofs written traditionally is O(N). Of course writing proofs in Lean is much more difficult (for now) and, checking the proof is not the only interesting part. Other mathematicians also want to understand the proof, and this will always be O(n).

Also, while it's true that bugs in mathlib cannot cause lean to accept invalid proofs as long as the kernel is correct, bugs in mathlib can still be annoying (I have only used lean briefly and I got stuck for a long time on a buggy tactic that was silently messing up my proof state).
Stripe CEO says he used to be a 'misanthropic introvert'
Exactly, yeah. What's happening there is awful and very sad, but there's almost nothing I can do about it, whereas our government provides billions in weapons to Israel
Reunification is desired and could happen but unlikely on the basis of a regime change in China. It’s also very difficult because of the strategic position the island has for the US military in the broader US China conflict view. Looking at the map the US is surrounding China from the east like the Nato is surrounding Russia from the west.

As soon as the west is more independent from China again the conflict will enter into the next phase. Any military activity in and around Taiwan will brain drain the country very quickly and most of the talent will go to western companies.

30 years is a hell lot of time these days.
> gain control of their weaponized maple syrup reserves before they even know what’s happening.

Not sure if the BBC is implicit in psyops, but they report the reserves are very low [1]. On the one side, that means the spoils of war are low, on the other side, it means they won't be able to mobilize their unique units.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68657703
It would tell you that the system is inconsistent
EdTech is one the large classes of misspending.
This was a pretty long read and I didn't really get much from it. The format of a million tweets is awful.

tl;dr it patches the executable by having a shim dll that does the patch when it gets loaded. Pretty common in the game modding community. It finds where it needs to patch by scanning for a byte pattern.

What does the actual patch do? No idea, that's what I was waiting for and I never got it. I was expecting a disassembly comparison of the before and after.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
pretty big death note spoiler
It's illegal essentially everywhere in the US to organically grow something low-density into a proper city. The only way a new city is getting built at all is to do it that way from the start.
You don't need a college degree to have an office job.
Yeah the Chinese language simply uses parentheses for that purpose. The convention is that each Chinese character is placed into its own parenthesis unlike a regular parenthetical remark. For example, if the one thing being said is ABCD but the other meaning, most likely an ironic one, is WXYZ, the author simply writes A(W)B(X)C(Y)D(Z). Of course this requires the two to have the same number of characters, which is reasonably easy to do.
Tell HN: iOS 17.4 Breaks Web Inspectors in BrowserStack
We recently had a user report that there is an issue with audio playback after upgrading to iOS 17.4.

Looking to reproduce the issue, I connected to an iPhone 15 running iOS 17.4 running on BrowserStack.

I was able to reproduce the issue but neither the Safari Web Inspector or Chrome Dev Tools are functioning. No log or error messages in the console, no activity in the network tab and only an unrelated stub DOM is loaded.

I tested on a few different websites besides mine and the dev tools were still not functioning.

The iOS 17.4 release seems to have caused breaking changes in BrowserStack. Has anyone else run into Safari bugs related to the iOS 17.4 update?

UPDATE: I have heard back from BrowserStack support and they are aware of the issue.

BrowserStack Support:
I would want to share that we are currently facing an issue with our DevTools feature on iOS 17.4+Safari combination. Our Engineering team is working on fixing this however, we do not have an exact ETA for the resolution.

In the meanwhile, we would suggest you to use the Chrome browser with iOS 17.4 devices there the DevTools feature is working as expected.
Arms manufacturers do not actually start wars. While I understand why some people may find that line of work not aligning with your morals, there isn't you can really change within the company
Been using it the same way to pick movies to watch.
We've had electric garbage trucks in Copenhagen since last year. It's a small but nice improvement.

https://group.vattenfall.com/press-and-media/newsroom/2023/s...
Very much. The more things change the more they stay the same.
(2022)

Related: "No one buys books" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40119958

> Sales to libraries, for example, can be a significant portion of a book’s sales.

This is one reason why I was skeptical of some of the stats getting promulgated recently. My local library, not a particularly large library, has many shelves full of "obscure" novels that you and I have probably never heard of. This is repeated in libraries across the country and the world. I like to browse the stacks and select books somewhat randomly, an admittedly hit-or-miss procedure, but I've found some diamonds in the rough.

I suspect that public libraries are not actually "stealing" from retail book sales. For a currently best-selling book, a library may have multiple copies but never enough to satisfy patron demand, and there's typically a long backlog on holds. Whereas for lesser-selling books, the library sales are a bonus and may expose readers to the writer in a way they wouldn't otherwise.
If they actually do build Barcelona-style superblocks full of young families, then tech companies will be chomping at the bit for office space in those same blocks.
Yes, author of the article obviously never tried to learn Sumerian, because the Japanese written system is quite regular and easy to deal with in comparison.
I think we could solve that issue if we put our heads together.

For example We could admit new states as pairs to maintain the balance of power.
LLMs and the Harry Potter problem
I do not imagine LLMs will be of any use here.
One simple solution is just don't open source. A lot of folks forget that many open source licenses were produced to be "business friendly" to encourage participation by the private sector. The private sector, however, has largely done the bare minimum unless profit was involved. Then they'd either co-opt the project or fork it to their own ends in pursuit of profit with minimal returns to the original project WRT their gains.

That's a long way of saying, for what open source is and was, a lot of projects are mislicensed when juxtaposed to their goals and needs. It's okay to sell your software, it's okay to be "source available", it's okay to be entirely proprietary.
California Forever just seems like a bunch of VCs getting tired of watching increasing amounts of money go to vampire NIMBYism and fantasizing about how they could solve the problem.
I'm writing a book on building and launching mobile apps end-to-end ( https://opinionatedlaunch.com ). I'm treating it like building and launching an app (Dogfooding my method! But for book-writing!). It's got a website, a marketing plan, and even an affiliate system.

I took the self-publishing route because the book's target market is niche; there's only one CTO in a company. Someone I know went the publisher route, and I think he's quite successful. I have only sold a dozen so far, but I'm pricing it accordingly.

In summary, I like to think of book authoring as starting a SaaS. Start from your target market, then the book topic, then from there you can tell whether you can cast a wide net, or aim narrowly.
Probably ChargePoint: https://www.edmunds.com/electric-car/articles/largest-ev-cha...
Confronting Dark Patterns in App Reviews
I think it is important! It is an unspeakable unknowable dread hanging over the entire story. Its brought up later in the book and remains a very scary, very foreboding mystery. It implies either an unfathomably powerful and malicious force or an unfathomably powerful and uncaring force, both of which are terrifying.
Iverilog is a Verilog simulator. [1] Yosys [2] can synthesize Verilog to a variety of things, including simplified Verilog, cell netlists for ASICs and FPGAs (requiring further conversion), and also directly to the bytestream, for some Lattice FPGAs. Both are fully open source tools. Not as sophisticated as the commercial tools, and the Verilog dialect that is common between the two, is quite minimal, almost painfully so.

But it works! A couple years ago I tested yosys with some code a little simpler than yours - a Verilog PDP-8 processor. Yosys turned it into a network of about 100 flip-flops and 800 NAND gates that, in principle, could be wired up out of TTL chips or made into an IC.

[1] https://github.com/steveicarus/iverilog

[2] https://github.com/YosysHQ/yosys