skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> many old people who have given their professional lives to this project.

Most ordinary people have given their professional lives to things as ordinary as advertising. If only our lives could have such purpose.
Its not hyperbole, you're just using misguided rhetoric of the prosecution. Weev has escaped to Ukraine in any case, those same bumbling idiots making your argument had their conviction dropped on appeal.
The problem with words is that their encoding density is much lower, so it requires more space to store. Suppose you create an alphabet A that consists of the N most common English words. Then, what might be Q characters in base 58 would instead require Q*ln(58)/ln(N)*((avg word length in A)+1)-1 characters. For N=1000 and assuming that the average word length is 5, this gives a factor of ~3.5x increase in storage space required (e.g. a 20 character base-58 ID would map to a ~70 character string of words).
Foolish of me to think "HTML-first" meant it wouldn't require nodejs/npm and that dependency hell.
Also, the author conflates fiction with non-fiction. No kidding, if you include science books , guides, how-to books, etc. most books do not sell many copies, but they are not expected or intended to. It's not like the market for calculus books is that big. Fiction books by major publishing houses for a general audience still sell a lot.
Blast from the past, but might be useful. Sun tentatively made a computer that ran from cdrom, as TAILS does. The OS was immutable. You could store files on external media. Presumably, have those backed up in time-machine fashion, so as the be able to recover lost files, rather than a snapshot backup.

What a struggle computers are. I am old as dirt but supposedly on top of things. Apple Mail.app forgot my sender address and kept asking me for a "hide my email" From: address. Being a propeller-head, I found it and fixed it. What a fright it must be when things go bonkers and you have no clue.

I don't recall where user settings go on a cdrom OS. Perhaps on a separate home partition or overlay on removable RW storage.

Can't speak for phones.
I wish my parents had access to this when they chose to call me Iain Dooley.

The world has almost unanimously decided my name is now Lain.
Okay.

To deconstruct your argument a bit, as I understand it to be this:

"This car costs a lot of money and has been delayed several times, thus during that time a 'professional' car making company would have found, and fixed, the accelerator pedal defect."

If that accurately reflects your claim, then would that be true of any car company that allowed a manufacturing or design defect to "escape" in one of their very expensive cars? Because this has happened to many (most?) of them[1].

To me, that either puts Tesla in very good company or says the entire auto industry is shite.

If you read through the linked article (it isn't that long) you may notice that a lot of the defects that resulted in recalls seem "obvious" or things that QA would catch. That is the "x-ray vision of hindsight" as my grandfather used to call it, which is that once you can see something it seems really easy to see.

Building a car from the frame up is a very complex engineering task, and there thousands and thousands of hours invested in catching things before the product is sold, but the reality is that it is really really difficult to catch a problem you don't know about before it leaves the factory. In the software world we used to have these really long customer test cycles called "alpha" and then "beta" for we got to "release candidate", the whole point of that was to put customer hours on the very complex software to help identify the problems we couldn't see as developers. That process sort of went away when it became possible to instantly download a new copy of the program, so you could send it to everyone and fix bugs that would propagate through online updates. Games loved it, you'd get a 650MB CD that you'd put into your computer to install and it would start by downloading an entirely re-written game because so much had changed between the making of the CD and the actual product. Before this you had to send new release media tapes or a CD, and the customer would uninstall and reinstall the software. It was painful.

You can't do that with hard goods of course, you can just drive into the dealership every week and swap out your current Cybertruck for the model currently coming off the assembly line. So defects like this are rather inevitable.

In my opinion, that defects both exist and make it into the field isn't "unprofessional". And when I wrote the first comment I didn't realize they had sold less than 4000 cars, so clearly they were paying some attention and they seem to have done the right thing by recalling them. To me, and this is just my take on things of course, that feels more professional than unprofessional.

[1] https://www.lambocars.com/known-supercar-recalls-in-automoti...
There are gems coming out today that will be considered great works by our descendants.

By avoiding current authors or media you miss out on the cultural story and critique/commentary that influences all our media. Sure, the last 5000 years are interesting, but isn't right now pretty amazing too? You might accidently read the best book ever written but you won't know until history plays out. But I think it's important to see how recent history has shaped the narrative of the worlds authors in today's world.

Weve lived through a lot of major events. Everyone does. But these are our events.
The Seattle Public Library is reducing maximum digital holds
> nobody donates physical books anymore

It's partially number one but definitely this for me, insofar as thrift stores go. The two thrift stores around me that take books are Goodwill and the Salvation Army and I won't donate anything to them any more.

My book donations go to the neighborhood independent bookstore for them to price and resell and keep their employees paid.

The large chain bookstore near me still has several shelves of science fiction, new release and perennial favorites, so I think at least some are still being made and sold. Hopefully you can find what you seek.
Yep. Memory fences are a sniper rifle, EIEIO+ is a shotgun, and side channel attacks are a knife fight.
Sounds good to me. We've been trying democracy for a while and I'd like to try something else.
How come neither v nor u are in the final set?

They’re not even mentioned and don’t look like a thing else, except maybe each other in some typefaces.
As a Quest user: mostly younger devs. I see 18-22yo developers who do not care about the history of Meta making very impressive games that attract large amounts of their peers, adding micro-transactions along the way to fund their development, and it works, they make a large amount of money and have very active communities on Discord.
It only reduces the ambiguity if everyone does the same and everyone knows that you've done it.
We used to joke that our messiest roommate in college (surprisingly, not me! at least, not during the telling of this story) used to spend a lot of his time playing a game where you're a robot, cleaning up a house.
It's pretty good inside Visual Studio Code as well. Sometimes the autofill does the wrong thing, which is annoying, but not often enough for me to turn it off. The live chat feature is also pretty useful.

ChatGPT-4, by comparison, seems to have gotten noticeably worse at writing code since it was first released. I have no hard data to show that, but I have a very strong feeling that it has.

Now, they're both supposedly based on the same OpenAI stuff, but I think Microsoft must be adding some "secret sauce" to Copilot. Different training data? Different system prompt?
Are you a reader of virtually fun?

That's exactly the kind of topics they explore.
Is the thinking that the person who pirated it was never going to buy it anyways?
This is exciting because:

- "Parameter Efficient" finetuning methods let you customize LLMs without having to train all the parameters

- But LoRA (the most popular method) didn't match full finetuning performance on some tasks

- DoRA closed the gap while still being very efficient

- Quantization (representing the original weights with fewer bits per parameter) makes things even more memory-efficient

- FSDP lets you spread the work over multiple GPUs, using less memory on each one.

The upshot is that where you previously needed, say, 8 fancy Nvidia A100s to fine-tune an LLM you can now do so on a few 3090s, and while it might take a little longer you're at least getting something almost as good as (or in some cases possible better than) the full finetuning equivalent.
terminal wants me to FIND THE FIRST CODE IN THE SYLLABUS. where?!?!
> US schools mainline special needs children in regular schools because it leads to better educational outcomes and societal integration in the long run, whereas Japan usually separates most of these children into separate schools

If it delivers much worse results at much higher costs for everyone else, that seems like a terrible trade off.
I think you're kidding, because this reasoning means (a) assuming a priori that blacks will do noticeably worse and (b) deliberately choosing worse applications, both of which are crazy. At least, it's the kind of convoluted joke I'd enjoy making to certain friends who know my real thoughts on the matter.

But I can't really tell.
Depends a bit on how certain you are on your preferred answer to the question: is the brain analog or digital? If you think it is predominantly digital, quite a lot of the details of the biochemical mechanisms don't matter. If you think it is predominantly analog, they matter hugely.
Hold on, is that the robot that did surgery on a grape?
An L3 hit only takes ~15 ns so that means another 15-20 ns is spent traversing the fabric and memory controller. I'm not sure what all is involved there but for Intel it has to go around the ring and for AMD it has to cross chiplets.
> Qualcomm don't make a higher end VR chipset

I don't think that's a given long term. Even already the chip in the Quest 3 is rated at the same GPU grunt as an nVidia 1060, the minimum supported chipset originally for PCVR. The next gen is already announced and is significantly more powerful again, able to power 4k displays. I would project in 3 years from now we have something that can actually be considered at least moderately high end in stand alone form factor from Qualcomm.
I'm still kinda pissed about that, personally.

I wouldn't object to it doing fuzzy "Google Knows Best" searches for normies, but I really wish verbatim was still an option.

On the other hand, I rarely use Google these days anyway.
I'd really like a set of elements like this that is truly HTML + CSS. Vanilla. Layer on some _optional_ JS for some enhancements.

But this franken <form> element requires JavaScript to even render. Same for the tooltip, leader, cover, totop, ++ components; all of which can be done with HTML and CSS.

Fine, write your HTML is JS, but that isn't "HTML first".

edit: I stand corrected. the form will render without JS. The tab element in the docs wrapping the form doesn't render.
I'm not knowledgeable to speak to that, but just to clarify—the low-hanging fruit in libpng I mentioned is in simple, vectorizable loops—conversions between pixel formats in buffers. Not in its compression algorithm (which isn't part of libpng—it calls out to zlib for that).
Presumably the interests of an AGI could be designed into it. It could be made to have programming be the center of its existence.

Even if it couldn't be designed in, then if we accept your analogy with people, we could simply generate AGIs until we found one that was interested in programming, then clone as many copies of it as we needed.
Spurious Correlations: correlation is not causation
Are you describing Europe? Our taxes definitely feel like they are going to the "regime", making politicians and the wealthy richer, not the everyday worker.
I guess everyone remembers those strange Tom & Jerry episodes that felt like watching Twilight Zone. They were made in Czechoslovakia.

https://www.awn.com/animationworld/tom-jerry-produced-prague
but then you've shut down account creation for 24 hours.

But so what? The impact of that would be negligible, almost certainly less than that of having site performance go through the floor/become temporarily unreadable. It's not like a B2C product launch, and the target audience of HN is more or less optimally positioned to understand why one might deliberately interrupt service.
No, endianness is not a feature of UTF-8 encoding. There isn't a UTF-8LE and a UTF-8BE. That's because the codeunit is bytes.

Forget "decoding", you have to parse JSON. But you don't have to figure out how it's encoded first. Because it's a byte format. You already know.
I appreciate your feedback, especially knowing your background in video game design.

The hook of my article was inspired by personal experiences, but the themes of overcoming past traumas and building self-worth are also relevant to a wider audience in my opinion. It’s true that those with experiences of emotional neglect or trauma might relate more closely.
Pianofuck
See also Douglas Crockford's Base 32: https://www.crockford.com/base32.html

This takes the approach of allowing ambiguous characters by decoding them to the same value, and also considers the problem of accidental obscenities.
Why not include '1', but make it so '|Il1' all map to the same internal value? That way you have no ambiguity while minimizing alphabet reduction.
Developing nutrient-rich fertilizer from toxic ammonia
Yea, FLOPS and RAM aren’t that problematic it’s really insane memory bandwidth or really novel hardware that’s at issue.

That or some novel AI architecture. I doubt we need to actually emulate a brain to reach near parity with human cognition.
Flightless birds don't live in suburban and urban environments. There are predators there and they're all locally extinct.
The 'pivot to software' is more like a pivot back to software because Meta already disbanded a previous OS team at Reality Labs and indeed platform software was exactly what motivated the thinking behind buying Oculus as expressed in Zucks internal deal memo on the subject [1] where he ranks Apps and Platform OS (eg Android/PlayStore) both above hardware. They also recently passed on an offer from Google who are working on a new XR android build. 6DOF 3D is a unique surface area and so far all we have seen are OS ports from 2D pancake land so these efforts can't come soon enough.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33538742
Is big bang theory really "tech humor?"

I haven't watched much because the laugh track and general cheesiness turned me off.. but I thought it was just jokes about him being a "nerd" in the ways mainstream people think of nerds..
I think Galactus is Marvel IP, so I don't think they can do that one.
Just bring a book.
You then have to currate a list of words which also don't have similar sounds, are comprised of subwords, aren't offensive, or other gotchas.

I don't think words work well for codes that aren't meant to memorized. They make it harder to currate a unambiguous list since that list needs to be several orders of magnitude larger and the ambiguity can accent dependent. Of course, if memorization may be needed, then that is effort may be worthwhile.

Error detection with codes isn't hard, that's why checksums exist.
I think that Iain is the Scottish version of Ian? Is it unacceptable to choose the alternate spelling, Ian?
I believe an implementation is here:

https://godocs.io/encoding/base32
One Artist's Portrayal of Late-Stage Capitalism
$ php -v
PHP 8.2.7 (cli) (built: Jun 9 2023 19:37:27) (NTS)
$ php -r 'var_dump(preg_match("/^[a-z0-9 ]+\$/", "hello world"));'
int(1)
$ php -r 'var_dump(preg_match("/^[a-z0-9 ]+\$/", "hello\nworld"));'
int(0)
$ php -r 'var_dump("hello\nworld");'
string(11) "hello
world"
...
$ php -v
PHP 7.2.26-1+0~20191218.33+debian8~1.gbpb5a34b (cli) (built: Dec 18 2019 16:09:52) ( NTS )
$ php -r 'var_dump(preg_match("/^[a-z0-9 ]+\$/", "hello world"));'
int(1)
$ php -r 'var_dump(preg_match("/^[a-z0-9 ]+\$/", "hello\nworld"));'
int(0)
$ php -r 'var_dump("hello\nworld");'
string(11) "hello
world"

I'm not sure which version of PHP had the behavior you describe, or whether it misbehaves under more specific conditions, but preg_match() is one of the more commonly-used regex functions, all of which share the same engine. The behavior here seems to be "correct" for at least the last 5 years, for varying interpretations of "correct".

edit: https://3v4l.org/N4o8D suggests that the behavior here is identical for all versions of PHP from 4.3 to 8.3.6.
I feel like the Seattle Public Library part of the original title (The Seattle Public Library Is Reducing Our Maximum Digital Holds. Here’s Why.) is relevant. Could drop "public", "our", and "Here's why" if it's a length issue.
Lacks ferries and availability of e-bikes. Google maps has both.
Meta isn't even trying to get anything on Vision OS at all, I'm sure they have no interest or care about that until and unless it becomes a mass market product.

They don't want to be locked out of freedom to do what they want, and that's a primary motivation here it's true. But the obsessive focus on ad revenue that people assume they have is pretty far from their thoughts in the VR/AR space at this point. They have complete faith that being the dominant owner of the dominant platform that they think the future of computing will revolve around (I'm not arguing this, but I'm satisfied it's what Zuckerberg believes) will yield sufficient value to be worthwhile and they aren't worried about how it happens at this point.
I appreciate the feedback. It's always interesting to see how perspectives on a theme can change over time.
It’s not like people are regularly entering as anything other than defectors and the one guys wife said she was tricked into going there and held against her will.
> Instead of magic, just say "consciousness", and let's identify it as things like: The aroma of coffee, the taste of chocolate, the sound of a drop of water, the feeling of warmth on your arm... those sensations are not nerve cells

Of course not. Your voice is not vocal cords, but it is produced by them. Similarly, consciousness is not nerve cells, but it is produced by them. At least, that's what a physicalist like Dennett or myself says. Either you agree with that or you're not a physicalist. I don't really care at this point which it is, but I'm curious why you haven't said which.

> "it's a biological phenomenon"

Which is just a cop-out. It's the same as saying it's magic. Sure, it's a true statement in the sense that conscious beings, or at least all the ones we currently know about, are biological beings. But it tells us nothing at all useful about how consciousness works or how biological beings can have it.

> I move my arm and the damn thing goes up

Ok, but how does this happen? That's the important question. Dennett spent his career working on it. Searle, as far as I can see, has spent zero time working on it.

As far as the bare statement itself, Dennett has never denied it, and it's perfectly consistent with physicalism and with everything Dennett says about consciousness. So I have no idea why Searle thinks it's some sort of knock-down refutation of anything.
It makes me happy that it sits right above the Meta OS post (at this writing).
Also avoid lowercase rn which can be mistaken for m.

And avoiding vowels can help avoid offensive words within a generated code:

FUKFUK9 - https://www.replacements.com/china-fukagawa-fuk9/c/27446

KUNT1 - https://id.made-in-china.com/co_gzberlin/product_Power-Steer...

base32 removes the I,O,U but other words with A,E need to be avoided too - no vowels helps avoid words in English.
> I’ve tried multiple times to get into SBCL, but every time I run into the problem that I have to learn Emacs first.

I have the same problem with Hylang.
The first time I heard about the railway was a couple months ago from a RealLifeLore YT video. It goes into a lot more detail and is worth adding to your watch queue if you're into the engineering of global trade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glR7lvtrGRI
Hold up on that second one
Is hantavirus a possibility?
You're way overdramatizing this. Tiktok has already been banned in several countries (like India) for similar reasons and without any of the catastrophe you're suggesting.

People can and will switch platforms, it's not that big of a deal...
This isn't the first spam/DDOS attack on HN, although it's one of the more severe. This is basic stuff for any kind of user-driven forum, going back to the BBS days. You are going to have periodic problems with trolls and spammers so you need to have some sort of mitigation process in place. That doesn't need to be some sort of top-heavy new technology, it can be as simple as the ability to add a few new scripting rules or wildcard matches on a few minutes notice, or hit the pause button on new account creation.
i just love the details on this one. thanks for sharing!
I wasn't, but I am now. Thanks for the tip!
Or maybe we are friends/allies and not adversaries? You're over complicating it by ignoring the glaring differences in relations with Europe vs China.
And what are you going to do with that supposed "authenticity" you demand? Or does imagination not play a role in your porn consumption?

The majority of porn may involve real people, but most of it is hardly what I would call "authentic".

"Oh no, I'm stuck in the oven! Help me, stepbrother!" C'mon. ;D
Thanks for the video. I’ll definitely try it out. In my original post, I should’ve emphasized that I’ve also been focusing on strengthening/mobilizing my wrists. It’s only been a month or two of concentrated effort, but I think they’re improving a bit.
> Very likely the mainstream philosophical meaning of phenomenal

Again, if you had read Dennett's work in detail, you would know that in this particular area of philosophy, "phenomenal qualities" has a particular meaning, and it's not just "conscious experience"--it's a particular assertion about how conscious experience works. And one that cognitive science has shown to be false.

> > phenomenal doesn't mean conscious

You're not quoting anything I actually said in my post, so I have no idea what you think you're responding to here.
Anecdotally, I call bullshit. I cleaned my ears for decades with q-tips and never had an issue. Then I stopped due to the advice that they’re harmful and my ears began clogging up with earwax to the point that I stopped hearing. This happened so often that I required frequent trips to the doctor to unclog the ear canal. I eventually decided to say “screw it” and resumed using q-tips. Haven’t had an issue since. It frankly baffles me to see stories of people rupturing their ears drums with them. Maybe don’t shove them in your ear like you’re a knight driving a lance through a dragon’s heart? Be reasonably careful and listen your body and cotton swabs can be a useful tool.
Article title (h1 only): What is it made of?
Thank you for reminding
My own personal anecdata on this comes from being able to find a passage I read in a 500-page book in 1992 for a class I was taking in 1998. I could probably even find that same passage now if I were to walk across the room to the bookcase where I have that book.

Although on the other hand, I was also able to turn up an article I’d read online a couple years later when it was relevant to a friend’s relationship with her newly out trans kid, but it was definitely a different sort of recall and lookup happening in the latter case.
One of the most brilliant things ever to be born from the internet uterus. I show this every time our PM asks "why".
> the cameras were turned off to save power and memory

Since it’s powered by an RTG, how does the power get “used up”? I assume that this refers to the available power budget at a given moment versus some sort of expendable power reserve.
Ugh, the camera tumors are getting ever more bulky and protruding. Can we have a decent phone with a flat back again for those of us who don't use their phone as a camera?