skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my lifetime I've easily bought 100x more books used than new, which (from their perspective) is economically indistinguishable from piracy. Any of those "lost sales" estimates strike me as entirely bogus.
I think the sad and exhausting truth is that phase 1 trials aren't designed to facilitate patient choice, engagement, and agency. The drug isn't commercially available, and the trials are not a public service.
Big tobacco, big food, and big oil. I guess credibility is for sale at LSU. But does it come with a ride around the Leisure River initialism pool?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879177/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1124865/

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-04-03/climate-cha...
The https://apod.nasa.gov/htmltest/gifcity/e.2mil URL still works, and now I'm really curious about why there are 2 million digits of e on APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day)
Carrier, inventor of the air conditioner, is moving on to the home heat pump
Even just "autism makes MY travel a challenge" would be better than the current emphatic generalisation.
Let’s see how I go. There are quite a few out there - formio and formily came closest. I would probably have chosen formily, but the main docs were all in Chinese and I couldn’t get it to work.

I also looked at vueforms and surveyjs, the builders are not free though.
I think there's a core of a good esolang idea here for sure.

I struggled with the difficulty of getting any program to work, due to the multiple layers (note names to key names), inability to inspect the interpreter state, lack of a reset besides reloading the page. I don't know if these difficulties are part of the design (for instance, needing to actively play it like a piano), or merely of the implementation.
It is how everything in the digital age works - artificial scarcity. It does seem silly, although I also struggle to think how else we can make the whole thing work.
I think at least half of the top level comments didn't read the article, and mistook it for an article about reading habits. It's actually about the number of books that sell well, not the number of readers.
Johnnybgoode: Assistant for users of the Johnny Decimal file organization system
Out of curiosity, anyone knows why would this post be removed from the front page?

I was excited see that the post is getting engagement. I saw it in 3 position. Then checked an hour later and it is nowhere to be seen.

I am assuming this is some sort of opportunistic algorithm at play that gives a chance to a post, but removes it if it is not performing, but curious if anyone has more details.
Affirmative.

https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/15r15e2/the_absolut...
We will add about 3.5b people in the next 26 years and then it will level off
I'm somewhat curious how this compares energy-wise to other carbon capture technologies. When the byproduct is food, you could justify using it for that purpose even if quite inefficient, as you can save the energy that would otherwise be used to produce that food.
Definitely not. These timeout creating e-waste and are borderline useless.
Regardless of the validity of the "user manual" metaphor, it's a pretty thin manual. At the phase 1 trial, you basically have some data from cell lines, mice and other small mammals, and maybe a few early humans. You can't infer much of anything from that.

To a first approximation, about half of drug candidates fail in each phase of development (i.e. 50% drop off in every phase, from 1 to 3). Naïvely, then, about 80% of compounds tested in phase 1 will fail to become drugs.
I can still listen to music and videos, with sound, while the ringer side button is set to off.
Thank you! that detail helps a lot. I wish these companies were better at giving off a professional vibe when they make genuinely good products
I'm a machinist who got a CS degree in large part because I am also passionate about manufacturing in the US. Perhaps we should chat. I think my email address is in my profile here.
Well they put a golden record on voyager (https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/) with a lot of our info. so I think they were betting on friendly aliens, if any.
I can see this easily incentivising only a small subset currently popular books, rather than a wide spectrum. I think the regulators have not yet caught on, regarding the effect the publishers greed will be having in this area.
s/AI/technology/

It's not a paper, it's introducing multiple papers.

While it does not mention "capitalism", it mentions "the power, wealth, and ideology of a small cohort of industrialists".

> This introductory essay for the special issue of First Monday, “Ideologies of AI and the consolidation of power,” considers how power operates in AI and machine learning research and publication. Drawing on themes from the seven contributions to this special issue, we argue that what can and cannot be said inside of mainstream computer science publications appears to be constrained by the power, wealth, and ideology of a small cohort of industrialists. The result is that shaping discourse about the AI industry is itself a form of power that cannot be named inside of computer science. We argue that naming and grappling with this power, and the troubled history of core commitments behind the pursuit of general artificial intelligence, is necessary for the integrity of the field and the well-being of the people whose lives are impacted by AI.
I do not think that is true. Many nations have birthrates under the magical 2.1 required for population maintenance. I have not seen stats that say we are something like 2.6->2.5.

US is ~1.8

Korea is 0.78
iPad and iPhone. Much less to maintain than an Android phone and a desktop PC. Ask me how I know. ;@)
If your wife is in the Apple world this MacWorld article gives a good overview of the options.

https://www.macworld.com/article/672451/how-to-share-screens...
> Of course, if they are already used to some other system, like Windows, changing is probably more trouble than it’s worth.

I thought that, too, but I installed Xubuntu on my parents PC, told them it works like Windows (like double click desktop icons to open programs, the X button in the corner closes them), showed them how to check email, watch Youtube, play solitaire, and shut down. I expected them to say "put it back like what it was", but after about 10 years, it never happened. I eventually showed them how to keep it up to date, but no big security issues ever happened like on Windows.
> The Meta Quest app can connect to a headset and show what the player is seeing, both video and audio. Been watching my kid play various games for years.

You don’t have your kid on a child account, you have your kid using an adult account. Child accounts can’t screen share —- it’s acknowledged in the Quest FAQ - https://www.meta.com/help/quest/articles/in-vr-experiences/o... “only the primary account can cast”

> Not sure what state reset you’re talking about.

Setup a child account. Let your kid login. Have the kid take the headset off. Congrats, everything just got killed, and it’s now PIN-locked to the adult account. When the adult types in a PIN, it trashes the child’s session, and starts an Adult session.

(We work around this by gently holding the face sensor with a finger while moving the headset around between people, to trick the headset into thinking it’s still being worn -— but this is ridiculously broken, no one should have to do that just to get it to work)
Awful lot of people on "Hacker" News incredibly worried about the livelihoods of people who look pretty and dance for 15 seconds for a living.

Any time one hears someone mention the phrase "content creator", one should, by default, execute s/content creator/manipulative parasite/ in their mind. The entire business is social engineering of our brains, en masse, and you should care as much of the livelihoods of these people as you would about an Enron executive, or Madoff or SBF associate.

That said, it doesn't matter who controls the platform. If it gets banned or purchased, the show still goes on, and the world is still worse off for it.
> The housing situation in Canada (not just Toronto and Vancouver) is on a scale unlike any other developed country.

Australia?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-67723760

Maybe it's a thing with British colonies...
My assumption was always that they went into the design of it assuming they would use the chips for more games. Then either the game didn't sell well or the SNES was at the end of its life or something happened to prevent them from using it again.
Looking at the best-selling Amazon-published titles leaves the impression that this is the case.
That's not true for the world population yet, though!
Incredible, rivals Llama 3 8B with 3.8B parameters after less than a week of release.

And on LMSYS English, Llama 3 8B is on par with GPT-4 (not GPT-4-Turbo), as well as Mistral-Large.

Source: https://chat.lmsys.org/?leaderboard (select English in the dropdown)

So we now have an open-source LLM approximately equivalent in quality to GPT-4 that can run on phones? Kinda? Wild.

(I'm sure there's a lot of nuance to it, for one these benchmarks are not so hard to game, we'll see how the dust settles, but still...)

Phi-3-mini 3.8b: 71.2

Phi-3-small 7b: 74.9

Phi-3-medium 14b: 78.2

Phi-2 2.7b: 58.8

Mistral 7b: 61.0

Gemma 7b: 62.0

Llama-3-In 8b: 68.0

Mixtral 8x7b: 69.9

GPT-3.5 1106: 75.3

(these are averages across all tasks for each model, but looking at individual scores shows a similar picture)
Memory Safe XZ Utils [video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5K9HBiJpuk
Eh, there's nothing magical about parental preferences. A loving parent would not want their child to live with a name that they didn't like.

Fortunately with names, there are no returns, but exchanges are accepted (with a low restocking fee) in perpetuity.
Thanks for that. Good to know I wasn't the only one...
That's right. It all depends on what you're doing with the input string after the match. The point is to be aware of the nuance and to communicate that clearly in the code in cases where it matters.
> Also, 400 W of electricity is generally cheaper than 20 W of calories

Are you serious? I don't think you have to be an expert to see that the average human can perform more work per energy intake than the average GPU.

> The problem isn't the manufacturing process, but rather the architecture.

It's very much a problem, good luck trying to even emulate the 3D neural structure of the brain with lithography. And there are few other processes that can create structures at the required scale, with the required precision.
I bet never. Brains are not computers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39751509

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9885558

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21253267
reddit is full of hivemind alarmist positions like this that is impossible to change anyone's mind on.

- qtips will rupture your ear drum and there is never adequate justification for using them inside the ear

- flushable wipes can never be flushable and will always damage your pipes/sewer

- cpvc water pipes will destroy your entire house in your sleep unless you rip it all out immediately

etc...
While the change makes sense, I can't help but feel that the system can be managed more intelligently. For example, if I have 15 books "on hold" on Libby, there's no reason for the library to treat the #15 book with the same priority as #1 and spend more money to buy additional licenses for it.
How about some color? Or in other words, how much longer until the Vercel-inspired brutalism fad wears off?
I'm getting a bit skeptical of MMLU at this point. As far as I can tell it's a set of multiple choice questions that hasn't been updated since 2020. We have to trust the model providers not to deliberately or accidentally train on it for those scores to be useful.
Yeah that's what I was thinking: 2 birds with one stone. However much CO2 removal is taking place, it's gotta be better than not having it taking place. My question would be: if we were to produce enough of this stuff to replace, say, Soy protein then would we need additionl CCS or CDR?
Can’t wait to see some Phi-3 fine tunes! Will be testing this out locally, such a small model that I can run it without quantization.

Feels incredible to be living in a time with such neck breaking innovations. What are chances we’ll have a <100B parameter GPT4/Claude Opus model in the next 5 years?
Solein Green
Well, I don't think so. We, humans, are growing pretty fast - https://www.worldometers.info
What an absolute bloody rort by the publishers, reducing their production/transport/storage costs while jacking up the prices for the libraries and turning them into subscribers. Despicable.
Charging Customers Is Hard
I love the idea of owning books you can’t find anywhere else. One of the main reasons I don’t bother going to bookstores is because I know everything there is just gonna be on Amazon anyway, and with reviews.

But the idea of coming across a strange book few people have read, and finding unconventional wisdom and writing inside that no publisher would ever put out, sounds exciting!

I think more people should write books and publish them in small quantities and just give them away for others to discover some day. Let the books circulate through the world, growing old and more mysterious with time. It’d be better than keeping some static blog site that will disappear after a decade.
What did you yourself mak You're a whole studio it looks like!
Do any serious theories on the brain being predominantly digital hold any water with neuroscientists? I feel like it's fairly well accepted that the brain isn't digital even just with what we do understand about neurons?
Heh. Silly American thoughts.

This site[0] says Global birthrate is around 17.3. However, it has been dropping ~1% a year. It was 19.3 in 2014 and today it is 17.3. So indeed growing more slowly, but a strong trendline downwards.

Table copied and limited to the decades:

Year Birth Rate Growth Rate
2024 17.299 -0.940%
2020 18.077 -1.120%
2010 19.991 -0.870%
2000 21.733 -1.090%
1990 26.094 -2.400%
1980 28.192 -0.530%
1970 32.995 -1.520%
1960 35.346 -0.110%
1950 37.844 0.000%

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/WLD/wor...
What about "Meta Horizon SDK for Android SDK for Linux?"
According to some models... Why do you state predictions as though they are fact?
I tried this but couldn't get the completions to load. I think it's a really good idea though (much faster than zsh script completions), so hopefully soon I can retry the install and either get it working or open an issue.

One design aspect I do question is that completions are baked into the library. It'd be neat to have them in SQLite or something that could be updated independently (not sure how feasible that is though. I've never been any good at querying graphs like flag/command completions in SQLite).
doesn't the compiler usually do well enough that you really only need to worry about time critical sections of code? Even then you could go in and look at the assembler and see if it's being inlined, no?
>And on LMSYS English, Llama 3 8B is well above GPT-4

Source?
Y'know, I talk to a lot of unhappy Amazonians as a part of what I do. A sad number of stories I hear rhyme with this one. There's enough smoke there to clearly be a fair bit of fire.
I think the sadder part of this is that this licensing model means that a cartel of publishers will set ebook pricing as high as possible to squeeze every surplus dime out of libraries. High enough to make libraries make extremely difficult budgeting systems but not high enough to strangle their golden geese.

In the past, libraries could buy physical books and that was it. But once, own forever. Maybe they’d need to purchase a lot of copies of popular books or replace damaged and lost items. Otherwise, the rest of the money could go toward local programs that help the community.

Now, publishers will try to essentially extract surplus funds away from the community for extra profit margins that they don’t need to stay in business. In the past, a library that stopped buying books still had books. Now, a library that fails to pay their tithe will become a shell.
Honestly at this point, I feel like the ethical thing to do is "steal" digital and buy/borrow physical, the copyright surrounding digital goods has been so thoroughly gamed in the favor of publishers.
I suspect that most people on hacker news, when they say content creator, that’s a stand in for “customer”. Banning TikTok hurts their customers which in turn hurts them by interrupting their flow of income.
Mine all feel like "we do these not because they're easy, but because we thought they would be easy".

Turning a thousand-page book - PAIP - into a stack of Markdown files in a git repo, readable online. The print book received more editing and revisions than the ebook. I converted an ebook's ... odd formatting ... into Markdown, remade diagrams, generated new ePub and pdf files, and had the spine cut off a print copy to make a fresh scan. Working on that scan, I made Scantailor, an X program, easier to access from a Mac, via Docker. I tried different OCR engines, and pored over the diffs, incorporating dozens (hundreds?) of improvements. I got to find so many differences between Markdown engines. I have ideas on how to make Pandoc links between chapters. There's still a lot to do!

My current WIP: Lars Wirzenius posted about file systems with a billion (empty) files. I started exploring because I was curious, if I was remembering correctly, how well a mostly empty image file would recompress - like, drive_image.gz.gz. Lars offered a Rust program; I was curious about how other methods compared. Like, how about nested shell loops, tar, and touch? And, hey, how well can we archive and compress them? I've gotten to see some issues, bottlenecks, and outright failure modes with SMR hard drives, Samba re: sparse files, and parallel gzip compression. I've accumulated some shell script boilerplate to make it easier to go back and verify my processes, and harder to accidentally wipe out past work if I rerun it.
Ask HN: Are there wrapper/runner programs that encrypt writes and decrypt reads?
Are there any wrapper programs that run a program and make the program transparently encrypt its writes and decrypt its reads?

i.e. with the program launched being oblivious to the fact that the file it is reading from and writing to, is in fact encrypted on disk (on top of a file system, what could be an unencrypted file system)

I'm specifically interested in being able to run a program with a wrapper program, type a password, and only that process that is started being able to read from and write to the file, transparently (I don't want to use file permissions to limit which processes can read from or write to the file)

Oh and by the way, I know disk encryption file systems exist, I use LUKS, not really what I'm asking about.

I've done some searches and I was only able to find FUSE filesystems that can transparently encrypt files on top of a file system, they work by initializing a directory, to store the encrypted files in, and then mounting that directory to a FUSE filesystem mount point, a mount point where any process can access and read or write (if one doesn't leverage file-system permissions, which is not what I'm looking for)

Here's a useful page that talks about and compares these open-source file encryption solutions (gocryptfs, encfs, ecryptfs, cryptomator, securefs, CryFS): https://nuetzlich.net/gocryptfs/comparison/ (https://archive.is/gMwpV)

Inspiration to think of using such a program came from reading about NixGL[1], a program that wraps and runs programs (programs installed with Nix on a distro that is not NixOS), to make OpenGL or Vulkan applications able to run and work on distros that are not NixOS, it works like this:

$ nixGL program
$ nixVulkan program

I imagine this program does some things so the program it wraps/runs correctly loads the right graphics driver libraries, something that's not really analogous to changing the behavior of file-system operations (I think).

What would it take/require to change the behavior of file-system operations/syscalls/APIs in a program (besides recompiling it)? syscalls or APIs like fopen(), write(), fsync(), fflush(), fclose(), FlushFileBuffers() (on Windows).

How can a program accomplish this? by using/doing something like virtualization? emulation? syscall/API translation? e.g. like WINE?

[1] https://github.com/nix-community/nixGL
I read paper books because I can flip back and forth without friction, and I can underline and scribble.

I don't know why eReader interfaces make these two functions -- critical for deep reading -- so difficult.

Kindle is optimized for linear reading only. So beach reading and long romances.

But if you do the kind of reading that Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book" proposes (skimming, inspectional reading, writing notes), you pretty much can't with Kindles.
Response to the question of trains in the United States
it’s because of zoning … kinda. Postwar mentality and a lot of racism made it so that Americans had an ideal of a house with a big green grass lawns with separation between all of the houses. They made zoning laws to prevent density. White Americans, who were the people who actually got housing loans, Were afraid of downtown because they thought they might have to interact with Black people. So basically, a shit ton of laws were made in the United States requiring houses to be single-family and separated. This really sucks for community, hence Houston haha. So the only place where there is high enough population density is the East Coast by New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, … And I guess Boston, but fuck Boston. So we don’t have trains in the United States because everyone has a car because we had zoning laws that made it so that you have to have a car to be able to travel in between your home and a grocery store, school, or job.
And while we are at it, make it so if a work goes out of "print", then the copyright expires.
Right thanks for the reminder, I added it
spent way too long looking for that code in the syllabus
That's not at all standard.

Most books Apple sells come with DRM.

This section of the Apple documentation explains how a publisher can control whether DRM is used for their book:

https://itunespartner.apple.com/books/support/30-manage-book...

All of the major eBook stores sell books with and without DRM (including Amazon Kindle, Rakuten Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play Books).

Whether an individual book includes DRM on all of these stores is down to the publisher, and you won't typically see books from the major publishers offered without DRM.
Probably a physical relay to deal with parasitic power draw
Thanks for the added information.

I'll argue that `Process.exit!` does modify the state of the program in place (which isn't the typical thing one thinks of when thinking of values). Without the bang, it's just a function call that throws an error, which can be caught and handled, so the logical state machine is unchanged. With the bang, it replaces the set of states the current program can be in to a single exit node.
This really is the peak of user interface design. I will never be convinced otherwise.
> My question would be: if we were to produce enough of this stuff to replace, say, Soy protein then would we need additionl CCS or CDR?

The global per capita CO2 production is under 5 tons per year [1] so assuming people ate 5 kg of the stuff a day and it was pure carbon by mass, it'd be a bit more than third of the CO2 emitted.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Not too surprising given how Google has been closing down their Android platform to Meta for a while now
319 comments and I don't see the simple fact that the article title is dead wrong.

We are going through a massive book boom right now: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GLSGuGOWoAArd-K.jpg:large.

Book sales are the highest they've been in 20 years lol. So all the comments mourning books can relax.