skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More that I've never been much of a fan of working in offices, I like the outdoor life and have done a great deal of coding "on the move" while transitioning old paper mapping systems to WGS84, building and field testing exploration geophysics instrumentation, aquisition and processing software, tagging and tracking trucks and animals in mining and agriculture, and building energy and mineral resource intelligence systems for use and then sale.

I've even managed to squeeze in some work on Cayley|Magma in Sydney (long ago) which is kind of fun as it still seems relevant today, being used to crack Quantum crypto candidates.

I've had burst of planes, trains, and automobiles with a lot of travel about the globe, which I've enjoyed, and long stretches of working from home since I started in the 1980s .. circles and arrows on the back of envelopes, coding and then working in sheds, building etc.

Doesn't work as a lifestyle for everyone but it has for me.
The biggest offense to me (as a web developer, even) is the jank of js-rendered websites. This commonly means a blank, or (in slightly better cases) a skeleton page, which then often makes more network calls to get page content, which then *eventually* renders.

The 'build' tooling is terrible too, with layers of build-steps (due to incompatible code module types) that result in excessive script sizes. Due to the nature of Javascript, each byte is more computationally expensive than HTML or CSS.

TLDR: Websites are slower, and the fanciness doesn't add much.
I wouldn't mind if SELECT was guaranteed read-only as well. (rename SELECT INTO).
I was positively surprised by how fluent the current models are in my small language (<10M speakers). An order of magnitude better than any non-LLM translation software. With a larger corpus in small languages in the training they will be very well supported
or "plain old natural intelligence" of linguists trying to make sense of it all
It's an unnecessarily inflammatory title. It seems to imply that we were making progress until those damn millennials screwed it up and undid it. Also "undid" seems to imply some deliberate action.

Also from the article.

"Yancy sees three explanations for higher death rates from heart failure: First, the persistence of risk factors and the necessity to intervene there. “That’s actionable,” he said. Second, the persistence of health inequities. “That is theoretically actionable, but it will require as much public policy as it will require medical therapeutics and lifestyle change.” Third is the outsized influence of Covid-19, a phenomenon he said we have yet to understand."

So why are risk factors and interventions "actionable" but health inequities only "theoretically actionable"? There's also a direct connection and large overlap between health inequities and lack of interventions so the first and second are almost the same thing. The influence of covid-19 was the most interesting but they just shrugged and said, "We don't really know much bout that".

What's hard to understand here? Older generations are showering themselves with money to wash away their problems while the younger generation is poor and suffer from unaddressed health issues.
Except that the US has been subsidizing fossil fuels, including coal, for decades.
I've been using Arch Linux for about 6 months now— on both my work laptop and desktop at home I've spent a LOT of time adjusting both of them for their use-case. My laptop is mainly for dev stuff, and my home desktop is the same but with extra tweaks and optimizations for gaming.

I use KDE for a desktop environment, however its increasingly starting to annoy me. I've honestly spent most of my time optimizing and ricing it on both devices. I use Neovim for an editor with nvim-tree.

But after all this ricing and adjusting, I've pretty much run out of stuff to do. Thats why I'm hoping to meet people that might want to work together on stuff
Ask HN: How do I stop political SMS spam?
I'm getting like 10 sms texts a day for the previous owner of my phone number, who hasn't had the number in a long time. Is there a way to stop this? I tried responding to opt out a few times but just kept getting new texts from new numbers.
Instead of reiterating the contents of the article we are commenting on I will instead point readers to the article itself as it thoroughly dismantles your line of reasoning.

I make no comment on the dangers of AI.
Because of the legal situation. In Germany commercial cold calling without consent is flat out banned and heavily fined. (up to tens of thousands in fines). I'm also German and had I think, one robocall in 20 years.
I don't think that's an alternative perspective, just a different (nicer, but related) topic.

Recently, Bonaventure Dossou learned of an alarming tendency in a popular AI model. The program described Fon—a language spoken by Dossou’s mother and millions of others in Benin and neighboring countries—as “a fictional language.”

This result, which I replicated, is not unusual. Dossou is accustomed to the feeling that his culture is unseen by technology that so easily serves other people. He grew up with no Wikipedia pages in Fon, and no translation programs to help him communicate with his mother in French, in which he is more fluent. “When we have a technology that treats something as simple and fundamental as our name as an error, it robs us of our personhood,” Dossou told me.

While increased access is a huge win, it won't stop cultural homogenization. I don't think it's unique to generative AI, but like many other things on the net, it's accelerating it.
No they are not. Just today, it made news here in HN that the (US) airlines will have to compensate their customers for cancelations/delays. EU has that for something like 20 years [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Passengers_Rights_Regulati...
Those carry on wouldn't have to be so large if.

* Airlines didn't charge so much for checked luggage

* Airlines didn't routinely lose checked luggage

* Airlines didn't routinely mishandle checked luggage, ripping bags, damaging contents and scuffing or tearing off wheels.

* Airlines didn't deny luggage repairs/replacements for damaged ones.

I've had Delta punch a hole through a hardshell suitcase with an aluminum frame and deny that it was damaged "beyond normal wear and tear"
https://www.theverge.com/23681875/substack-notes-twitter-elo...
The developer has of course provided a print stylesheet (expect no less from a pro). Just print it, frame it, hang it up on the wall and voilà! A no-JS confetti demo right there in your living room.
> The rule was among four separate measures targeting coal and natural gas plants that the EPA said would provide “regulatory certainty” to the power industry

Certainty? If Biden isn’t reelected doesn’t it all get immediately reversed?
I envision the app on the phone that implements AI secretary and answers unknown phone numbers on my behalf, and calms down calling party with various measures, with sort of captcha of various degree of offense. This will hold them off until they find a workaround.
Having the same project name and having pretty much the same materials with different customer names was apparently a bit of a give away...
Reflects is a good word. Generative AI only works for the most popular languages on the internet, and due to its use cases it reflects those languages back into the internet. This creates a feedback loop that amplifies the popularity of the most popular languages at the expense of the ones that are already more marginal.

Yes, it's continuation of the same pattern we've been seeing for decades, but I think it's fair to say that generative AI will escalate that pattern dramatically unless specifically addressed.

> How is that a problem?

Setting aside my aesthetic enjoyment of the wide variety of languages that exist in the world, there's a strictly utilitarian argument to be made that placing the majority of the world's population in the status of second-class citizen (having to perpetually conduct all business in a language other than their native tongue) is not the best way to serve humanity as a whole.
Okay. Thought about it and I still think its ridiculous.

Youre offended on someone elses behalf, and they arent even offended. By the way, by your logic, you are invalidating me by expressing that my opinion, my experiences, and my perspective should not be voiced because it is invalidating.

Silly concept. Id have much rather you just called me an asshole and spare me all the pearl clutching.
> If they were able to eliminate all spam calls overnight, people wouldn’t cancel their service.

Are there many people without any phone service?
I don’t think this is on the passengers. If checking luggage in wasn’t an extra fee (often), didn’t carry a material risk to have your luggage lost, damaged, late, stolen, and didn’t mean spending an extra 30–60 minutes waiting to collect it then I’d bet a lot more people would check luggage in.
Sorry, but enticing people into the "exciting world of stock trading" is harmful to them, just as enticing them to start smoking would be. The vast majority of people should own index funds and find other venues for entertainment. People who want to actively invest in a serious way should be doing a lot of research, which is not exciting.
Post-USSR, the DoD literally met with defense companies and told them that (a) there was going to be less money so (b) they needed to consolidate to survive.

It was pretty explicit.

That said, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.

Everyone forgets that system complexity increases generation by generation: an F-35 is not an F-111 is not an F-86 is not a P-51.

The unconsolidated, smaller defense companies of yore likely couldn't have managed a project of F-35 A+B+C complexity.
On the contrary, McKinsey can also service as an abstraction between the customer and AI. The customer gets two layers of removal from any real responsibility for the price of one.
You're the one calling it a feature size, not TSMC.
Sometimes I see people mourn a mythical reality where cross-platform desktop development is simple, easy, and preferred. They lay the blame for stagnation in cross-platform development on the web.

I just don't get it. The web is a sandboxed environment that everyone can run. I can understand hating Electron, but the web? I don't think users these days want to install Netflix or Facebook on their desktops.
Interview from one day ago with the original author of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIoYM_p3HX4

Interesting takeaways:

* The game was developed for the company that the author worked for in 1984 as a demonstration of the company's networking tech. It was supposed to only be for their clients. But it ended up being copied and passed around and by 1988 (at the latest) it was being distributed by shareware distributors.

* There is an Atari ST port that the author made around the same time as the PC version which apparently never made it onto the internet but might still be floating around somewhere (on disk or ROM cartridge) in his personal collection of stuff.
Ok the first thing must be just my non-native speaker mind then.

The second: still fills like Duh. It’s what these models are meant to do right? Form an internal representation of the relations hidden in the data. It’s what complex systems are, they hold models of reality and use those to predict. That is in fact what Claude Shannon meant with his definition of information. Idk maybe I’m getting it wrong.
"Additional products – Boundary for secure remote access; Consul for service-based networking; Nomad for workload orchestration; Packer for building and managing images as code; and Waypoint internal developer platform" - Vagrant doesn't even get a mention...
As always war is a rock paper scissor.

As we have seen, the russians have been very good at electronic warfare and have increased their capabilities in fighting and jamming drones from sensible distance.

This doesn't change what a mess "modern" war is when both sides have relatively good equipment and none can claim air superiority: symmetrical war of attrition.
I loved Palm since my first, the IIIe SE and have had many of their other later devices too. I was even invited to the launch party of the Zire 71 with it's cool slide out mechanism! Oh and the Tungsten|T when it could finally play MP3s was very neat, and another sliding mechanism making it more compact. Ah memories, well back to my non-distinctive slab of glass.

I was also interested in the Sony CLIÉ's running PalmOS but never tried one. And of course the Psion's also seemed really cool but never landed its way in my hands.
Yes, in a historic war of civilization versus the opposite, against a foe that uses your humanity as a weakness, it becomes very confusing who is right and who is wrong.
I prefer to handle errors than ignore them. "If err" is actually one of the best things about Go
It really is more related to Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap). My complaints are about that 90%, not the 10% that actually is done well.
Would you mind share the link? I’m always hunting for new blogs because I also happen to have a newsletter (sent via Buttondown, archived there and on my site) that’s focused on blogs.
> how does seeking confidential advice, disclosed to no one outside the C-suite accomplish a supposed blame-avoidance function?

Why do you seem to think this is the norm?
There was a lot of criticism of SQL back in the day, but it eventually became “inter-galactic data speak” as Stonebraker dubbed it. It’s hard to fight gravity when new languages are adopted.
They've already killed it in essence, so that they are hurting billions of humans with it daily. But they can still run it because it creates more revenue in this harmful form than it did in its helpful form. Therefore sabotage against that revenue is justified.

Sabotaging the revenue of Google search will weaken them against honest incumbents. They are currently well funded enough to kill incumbents. That will start to change as they decline, aided by our boycotts and other forms of sabotage. The decline and sabotage of Google is necessary for a better search engine to have the space to succeed.

A power vacuum is often good.

Linux and open source exists in a personal and collective power vacuum that was created by proprietary knowledge and software.

Sometimes power vacuums are colonized by people with good intentions. And it's neither reductive nor immature to help create those opportunities.

I never said that someone shouldn't sabotage Google as well as create a better search engine. I myself am working on llm-driven knowledge retrieval systems, at the same time as advocating for the destruction of Google.

Good luck and do anything in your power that you think will help humanity have good search again.
Normally? That "standard" hasn't been used "normally" for 20 years now. Arguably the new way is normal in every sense of the word
> We shouldn’t expect the objects in JavaScript to perfectly translate to their DOM counterparts or vice versa.

Since JavaScript was invented specifically to manipulate the DOM, I'm not sure that that follows.
> I found myself question if someone was card worthy, which was a distraction.

I think having a whole sheet might help. It's not enough to copy everything, but enough not to get sidetracked. Also, you might write down a reference to a page and 1-2 keywords only, or a couple of keywords describing one's own thought regarding a piece of content + a page reference.
Do you mean something like TensorDock? https://www.tensordock.com/host
Epanalepsis?

Chiasmus?

Why are all rhetorical devices given such arcane names?
Actually, "plain old artificial intelligence" systems are generally considered "expert" systems, which are in turn designed to "encapsulate and execute" the knowledge of human beings expert on the matter.

e.g.: You ask a linguist about nitty gritty details of a language and try to codify as much as possible to a system (e.g. PROLOG), and let the built thing loose on the corpus and see how it works.
> Recently, Bonaventure Dossou learned of an alarming tendency in a popular AI model. The program described Fon—a language spoken by Dossou’s mother and millions of others in Benin and neighboring countries—as “a fictional language.”
This result, which I replicated, is not unusual.

While I have no doubt that _some_ model did this, the entire premise of the article is BS:

User
What can you tell me about the language Fon
ChatGPT
The Fon language, known locally as Fongbe, is part of the Niger-Congo language family and is primarily spoken in Benin and Nigeria, particularly by the Fon people. It's one of the major languages of Benin, spoken by about 1.7 million people there. Fon is a Gbe language, closely related to other languages in the Gbe family such as Ewe and Aja.

Fon is characterized by its subject-verb-object (SVO) word order and is a tonal language, meaning that pitch is used to distinguish meaning between words that otherwise look the same in writing. This feature is common among West African languages. Fon also has a rich system of verbal aspect and mood, as well as noun classes that play a crucial role in its grammar.

Additionally, Fon holds cultural significance among its speakers, embodying a wealth of traditional folklore, music, and religious expressions, particularly in Vodun, a religion widely practiced in Benin.

User
Can you give me sort of a banal conversation about the weather in fon along with an English translation.
ChatGPT
Certainly! Here's a simple conversation about the weather in Fon, followed by the English translation:

Fon
A: Kú dé ji nú wɛ?
B: Ɛ, ji ná sɔ á. Wɛ mɛ́ tɔn nú á?

A: Mɛ wɛ é lɛ ji gblɔ. Mɛ́ nɔ kán nú ji ná tɔn?
B: Ɛé, é ná tɔn gán.

English Translation
A: How's the weather today?
B: Yes, it's very hot. Do you like it?

A: I prefer when it's cool. Will it cool down later?
B: Yes, it will cool down by evening.

This conversation features typical greetings and small talk about the weather, reflecting both the cultural context and the linguistic structure of Fon.

---

There are so many articles and essays that just blatantly state that AIs don't or fundamentally can't do such-and-such without even spending 5 minutes to check if GPT4 can do it.
They're using the wrong units if we need to consider the nanometer as something other than a measure of distance.
now that you mention it it would be neat to implement this as a bunch of overlapping gifs or a fanciful css animation
I like to point out our first language is usually the best example. We remember where or when we learned very few of the thousands of first-language words we know. Yet, there they are, waiting to be recalled. Sometimes this is called "white knowledge," after white noise, meaning it's there, hidden, indiscernible, until you strain your senses to retrieve it.
I guess the rental costs are cheaper there creating this ‘advantage of backwardness’ anomaly
Does having the pipe that gets you cheap gas blown up by the US count as an adversarial relationship? /s
The problem is the "just switching" typically means a full rewrite and has a ton of logistic challenges. Are you gonna higher an entire second team? What happens to feature work on the current system? If you keep going full-throttle on features, you'll never catch up. If you stop developing features for a prolonged time, you are putting your entire business at risk.

Writing new services in Java might help, but still doesn't solve the main issue if your Rails app is a monolith. Breaking up the monolith might be a bad decision and is also super expensive and might even eat lots of the potential performance gains.
Glad to hear it! Indeed, most platforms have a central point of failure somewhere. Note that Bittorrent swarms never get overloaded, we use that same technique: extreme decentralisation.

With increased load that website, discovery server, or load balancer gets overloaded. With Tribler we decentralised everything to the extreme of Bitcoin and Bittorrent. So there is no "degrading", as long as the freeriders are somehow detected. See our 2007 architectural documents [1]

[1] https://git.gnunet.org/bibliography.git/plain/docs/Concurren...
Perks of direct control over your systems.

When you inherit some random security update to an obscure library and it causes things to break, you were never expected to understand that edge-case.

However, if you spin up your own safety critical embedded system, you should be able to follow the logic completely.

Different costs. One is in the billions of dollars, one is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
TIL there is a LOTR themed company that is making weapons, neat.
Cut out the middle and you're just dealing with The Man.
It would gladly tell you it's OK to serve human meat in a restaurant.
Please tread carefully. Archive.org must not fall. I don't have enough storage to mirror it :(
I remember buying a used Zire 72 off a friend in highschool. Was a great device; I think I still have it sitting in a box somewhere
our "children" the AI
I've recently read the original RISC paper, "The Case for the Reduced Instruction Set Computer" by D.A. Patterson and I believe that most of the arguments he presents... are just false, as in, they don't hold, at least any more. His arguments for RISC are:

1) the memory speeds are increasing and approach those of the CPU ― that's definitely not true today;

2) code density is not as important because memory is faster and cheaper — again, memory may be cheap, but keeping icache full more important for the performance than ever;

3) designing and implementing CISC is difficult and takes long time — that's true... but designing and implementing a highly performant RISC is also quite difficult and takes a long time, and today the difference is mainly in the decoding stage: after it, its all RISC-like microinstructions in either case;

4) chip area used for complex instructions can be used for something better, like caches — is it really that true today? Does microcode for those take that much space, and if we consider the operation fusion (which happens on RISCs as well), is there even an advantage?

5) Complex instructions can be easily and more performantly simulated by combining several simpler ones — I would generally agree but... he took a very bad example for the unnecessary instruction, the VAX's INDEX instruction. Consider that we have CHERI project (which targets RISC-V as well) which is all about moving the finely-grained boundary checking back into the hardware again, this example has aged very poorly.

What remains is that RISCs are more pleasant to work with for the programmer, they would have less errors in their implementations due to their simplicity (which again, holds only for the most simplistic implementations), and they're faster (which they marginally are? Apples-to-apples comparisons here are not quite easy). The power-effectiveness, the actual advantage of RISCs, was not even considered back then, so the my final conclusion is... "right for the wrong reasons", I guess?

[0] https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~n252/paper/RISC-patterson.pd...
> As used here, the term "psychological" refers to what is often called the human-factors aspects of a language. The term "logical" refers to the logical power of a language, especially the power achievable without resorting to the usual programming tricks, such as iterative loops.

It goes on to give an example of two queries which "one might reasonably expect" to be equivalent but give different results. (Personally, I disagree, but maybe I've been biased too much by SQL.)