skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.

They're not mutually-exclusive sets. In professional schools (law, medicine, perhaps others), some of the best-regarded instructors are successful practitioners who teach on the side.
and also do you feel the ai hype is real?
This analysis is numerology.
In part I left because I love it*, and wish it well, but being an enabler does neither your life nor the addict's life any good. Some men, you just can't reach. If you open the fridge, and find the milk is bad, you don't just put it back in the fridge, you throw it out.

* it has wonderful ideals; have you heard the verses to "This Land" that they don't teach in school?

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRnHx3yVuf4
Borland C++, Microsoft C/C++, and GCC (DJGPP[1]) could all target 32-bit extended DOS, but Watcom was the first[2] to bundle a royalty-free DOS extender[3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39038095

[2] https://www.os2museum.com/wp/watcom-win386/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_extender
> extract anything meaningful from that comic

Speaking only for myself, the only thing I usually am interested in "extracting" from comics, is humor.

If it is not funny to you, then that makes me sad, but I think a number of other folks seemed to find some utility in it.
we were working on a ton of stuff (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338) - pretty sure the munich team will need to pick up most or all of it.
That's a very optimistic outlook after it was revealed what preparations had been taken to deal with a global pandemic, a risk scenario that at least every country had a playbook for.

I just think it is not possible to meaningfully prepare for a once-in-a-century event. You simply cannot sustain significant budgets for such scenarios.
mihai is an ml engineer who works at google.
We already have chips that we're not really able to reproduce, like some of the custom chips and ULA (Uncommitted Logic Array) in older micro computers. The fabs and technology is abandoned, and while we might be able to recreate it the results might not be completely identical chips.
> It would obviously be possible, since we have CPUs now but once lived in caves.

That's a big assumption. The modern world was built in easily accessible fossil fuels. We've used basically all of the easily accessible oil and a lot of the easily accessible coal.

Without an easily accessible surplus it's hard to go from agriculture to modern society.
Ah but unlike the crazy USA, Germany has a legal maximum of 48 hours per week.
I like TurboTax. It just works, year after year. The fee is worth the peace of mind that I wouldn’t have by letting a government program lose my submission accidentally.
> I feel like I'm only scratching the surface on what's possible with them.

I started down a Qt/QML desktop frontend path that led into wondering how much of it I could do with just a SVG imagemap-style setup.

Getting Jupyter up and running with a connection to data and SVG tools was an illuminating experience.
Not a CPU, but we made a complete and working SAW filter at university. We did everything from design to coating the wafers, lithography to ultimately bonding, housing and testing. I still have the thing somewhere.

Of course we depended on some machines, raw materials and especially a mono crystalline silicon wafer.

I think it is notable, that we did not really depend on an existing computer. Of course a SAW filter is simple, but the 6502 was still made with a similar technique. So if the material science is up to par again a microprocessor is a smaller step than one might think.
I have a laptop and desire to deep dive into astronomy and astrophysics
Where do I start?
"Eerily similar" only in that I, like most other people, do not have to worry about being arrested, yes.
You are scraping radio signals and selling it. It’s an exact parallel and if you fail to see this it is indeed hilarious.
It's not the same. Now a lot of raw materials are hard to reach and deep down in the ground, since the we took all the easy stuff already.
Equivalent code in Python:

from typing import NewType
I feel that it practically doesn't matter where you go for CS undergrad, especially if you're choosing between two schools that are commonly known to be great. CS undergrad, apart from a few courses at the tail end of your degree, is mostly cookie-cutter, you're not gonna be learning anything different if you go to a different school, and chances are you'll mostly be doing self-study anyway.

I would personally choose Penn in your position because my guess is that more non-CS people have heard of it and know it's a top school, and like it or not that kind of name recognition does help you out in various things.
There are plenty of CPUs to mine - not all are recycled. Why produce them at all?
The post could have been made clearer. And also I’m surprised but they are good at scale.
I like how I can use my Emacs-learned keybindings to navigate native text fields in the OS (e.g., CAPS(ctrl) + a, or + e, to get to line beginning and end; also +h instead of 'delete', keeping my fingers on the home row).
It's hard to imagine how it could improve my life. I'm a senior SWE at a FANG, what would get better for me?
> You can't hide dead people easily.

Yes you can. You can change their cause of death. Covid proved, this can be very easily achieved. Hundreds of thousands of people with wrong and misleading cause of death.

When the doctor is intimidated because he will be fired or he will be beat up by thugs then you put in the cause of death anything you like. A doctor can be intimidated by FDA thugs who revoke licenses, or beat up street thugs with the same effect.

I know personally one doctor who does autopsies. Autopsies are far from rigorous.

Usually people care about a person while he is still alive, as soon as his soul flies away to some remote heaven no one cares. Especially when that person is drinking for decades, usually everyone knows what the cause was, his family, his friends, it is not rocket science.

I didn't read the citations, it is many hours of study, but if any of the above is in question, i can give pretty lengthy citations about Covid and cause of death. A lot of research is pretty widely known.
As long as it takes ASML to ship the lithography machines to the US or Germany?
They'll send you a letter with the wrong value and the value they think is correct. And if you agree, you usually don't have to take any action (beyond maybe paying more).
An Inky 7.3 inch, pimoroni sells them. Pretty good, but the colors are cleary muted and it aggressively dithers (only 7 different ink colors in pixel)

I made an overly greasy movie to impress hiring managers on linkedin, should actually do a writeup and make some photos of the thing in its proper wooden frame...

https://files.rombouts.email/photoframe.mov

Also I run a fine tuned stable diffusion nowadays through Replicate ai, it now creates scenes starring my kids' pluche toys. Live view of the latest generation at the index page...

https://files.rombouts.email
The general relativity theory was not about gaps or corner cases of special relativity. It was about extending the theory outside its domain of applicability.

The theory of special relativity showed how to transform the physical quantities between inertial reference systems, i.e. systems where Newton's law of inertia is true. The relative velocity between the origins of such systems must be constant and there must be no relative rotational movement between them.

The theory of special relativity was not applicable to non-inertial reference systems, like one that has an accelerated motion relative to an inertial system.

Einstein's quest has been to find the transformation relations for this more general case. Together with the theory of the stimulated emission of radiation (1917), this has been the most original part of Einstein's work, because the previous transformations of the special relativity had been discovered before Einstein, he had just given a new explanation for them.

The only intuition related to general relativity was the guiding principle that whatever transformations will be found they must lead to indistinguishable local behavior of the forces of gravity vs. the forces of inertia.
> No more nats

Hehehe... writing this from behind NPTv6 (a form of a prefix-to-prefix NAT). I have to use it because this is currently the only working method for a fail-over configuration with two ISPs.
It’s interesting how in a system where one team writes all the code, nuking your clients from orbit when they look at you funny can improve iteration speed.

It’s funny to wake up and read this after falling asleep reading about algebraic effects.

If you squint the right way, this is a kernel that lets a server perform an effect that the client cannot handle.

I feel like this would make code reuse and composition much harder, but provides a much simpler execution model. Definitely the right trade off in a static embedded system. You can always just vendor and modify a task if you need to reuse it.
A related question is if we'd ever be able to reuse existing software.
They could. They just want you to confess the things that are harder for them to track. So they pretend they know more than they do.
We also dug out millions of tons of useful materials out of ground, purified them and concentrated them in cities and along roads etc. We cleared forests on most of continents to let people do farming there.

In Eastern Europe at least the biggest limit on farming and state-building in early middle ages was clearing the forest for farming. It was the biggest energy expanditure for people there, and it took hundreds of years to get to a state in which most of the land is available for agriculture. If the apocalypse was quickly over - we'd get to continue from that point without spending all that energy again. If it takes 50 years or more - most of Europe would be one huge forest again.

Depending on the kind of apocalypse all you'd need to do might just be to scavange for usable solar panels/wind turbines/car batteries and starting agriculture in the places that are still available.

Or you'd need to start from scratch, but then we're talking centuries.
Well, they can; that's the service the article is discussing?
I’ve heard this means: teams get several months to work on just security. A lot of the work is cleaning up internal tools, secrets in deployment pipelines, that kind of work.
Does it properly uninstall nowadays? As in you can move between versions by removing a newer version and installing a old version?
„The bound paper volumes, each running 700 pages, represented a fraction of the 7,473 total volumes necessary to render the encyclopedia's extant text on that date.“

So, there are some missing volumes. And they don't print the pictures.
The first amplifying vacuum tube was patented in 1908 and you could produce a crude computer from that, even if terribly inefficient.

I imagine civilisation would wind back to around the 18th century, because we would understand things like fertilizers, calculus and how to make steel, but could not immediately use that knowledge to produce steam trains, bicycles or saxophones.

So, assuming an accelerated pace of development thanks to some of this knowledge surviving I'd say 50 years give or take.
AFAIK composition, in the traditional sense, means that you put your objects/concepts together from different smaller objects or concepts. Composition would be to have a struct Car that uses another struct called Engine to handle its driving needs. A car “has a” engine. A trait that implements the “this thing has an engine” behavior isn’t composition, it’s actually much closer to [multiple] inheritance (a car “is a” motorized vehicle).
If I say, “Hey, please don’t text me anymore. I’m going to block this number,” and you respond by buying 500 phones in five cities and text me nonstop, is that ethical?
I really hope this does not affect the Free File Fillable Forms.

I do not want to be forced to mail in paper forms just so I can do my taxes for real.
I have worked on a team which trains foundation models
Crazy how little effort people are willing to put in to maintain a healthy ecosystem on their property. The landscaper at the last apartment I rented literally tore out a perfectly healthy basil plant and sprayed herbicide everywhere.
A friend and I spent a month or so building an iOS app we were hoping to release and monetize, but we're also entirely unable to get a developer account created. Corporate entity, DUNS number, American, extremely boring people, and just a generic "Error creating developer account" on the signup form. Apple's support was hopeless in helping.

We gave up and re-built it as a web app. The thing that convinced me was the realization: When was the last time you installed/used a non-game App on the app store that, by your assessment, has less than 1 million users? I looked down my list of installed apps and realized that indie apps are kinda dead anyway. And our web app has been pretty successful.
I love this question. A similar question is, assume all knowing oracle, so no research required just execution. How long until we build the CPU?

There's a long and deep infrastructure dependency that needs to exist that would take a long time for all-knowing hunter gatherers to get in place.
Claude AI – Name and Shame
> I guess it was originally done this way because in the past people actually had some semblance of privacy and the government didn't actually know a great deal about people's income.

You still had to file taxes, though, so they would know about your income, if only a year behind. I read somewhere that tax withholding only started during WWII (and it was supposed to be temporary). It's really the withholding that would give the IRS the information needed to file your taxes in advance, so it's only a fairly recent possibility.
Highly recommend a payroll service for this, like Poppins. It costs like $50/mo for a single employee, which is rounding error on nanny wages, and they do all the withholding and state tax filing for you. Then give you instructions on how to fill out federal tax Schedule H on your personal taxes (1040).

I did it manually the first time around and it was a pain in the ass.
Don’t think about it as mentoring, just chat and compare notes about your work. You’ll help each other out.
Union's power is in the enforcement of employers to accept collective bargaining (that's why the misnamed US "right to work" laws are so effective at disenfranchising workers). AUW, as it currently organized, lacks that power, so yes, all that remains is bitching.

Which is why memegen exists: it is a way to disarm Google's employees. Had they didn't had memegen to post on, the higher probability more would tunnel their disappointments into organizing.

Those disappointments were created by Google: they (used to) market themselves as a benevolent employer. People get on board, and realize that the truth is far from that. Of course, they wouldn't be able to hire some people they wanted to if they had told them the truth. Should those employees know better? Maybe. But any relationship, including labor, is built on trust.
Out of curiosity, what made it difficult?

Not knowing what was required for sure? Figuring out how to fill out the 1099-MISC? Knowing how to file it with the IRS/state?

I remember it being a bit tricky at first but once I knew the right form it only took a few minutes. The hard part for me is keeping track of rule changes.

Payroll service works though =)
It's clear that what's missing is flexibility and agency. For anything that can be put into text or a short conversation, and I'd have to chose between access to ChatGPT or a random human, I know what I'd chose.
We can't. All of the Earth's cheap energy has already been extracted. None of the remaining energy stores can be extracted without modern technology because it would take far more energy to extract than it produces.

If we lose our ability to produce these extraction and refinement tools (or energy becomes too expensive to extract before we have sufficient alternatives), we'll be locked into a subsistence based existence for hundreds of millions of years until the world reserves of coal and oil are slowly replenished.

No energy = no post-industrial goods (and mass starvation due to lack of fertilizer), and definitely no CPUs.
There's a lot of moderately powerful embedded Linux systems out there that either don't have an MMU equivalent or have one that the vendor BSP doesn't use by default. Too give one example, Xilinx doesn't set up the SMMU for AXI DMA devices on Zynq by default, iirc.
Let's see how that turns out for them this time. This was last year but buy now is probably 5 in 5...:

"1 in 5 VMware customers plan to jump off its stack next year" - https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/08/vmware_customer_forre...
I'm curious on how easy would be to with solar with the knowledge we have now in material science
This is a reasonable point of view I guess. But there's not really a reliable way for the consumer to get the real probability. If it happened to me, it's likely enough to consider. Maybe there's a hidden variable about my usage pattern that makes it more likely. Since it's totally opaque, there's no way to know.
A Surprising Shadow Was Created by the Total Solar Eclipse
Indeed, LLMs have that distintive and slightly revolting quality of friendly, helpful and inoffensive tone that reminds me of American customer service ideals. Also the user's profile is equally toeing this line of uncanny valley.

I guess the only way to identify ourselves as human is to adopt a measure of rudeness, some grammatical mistakes and snark that those stupid AIs still try to avoid at all costs.
Yep, there's a thriving industry around nanny payroll services, if you don't want to become an accountant. Wish the common use-cases were streamlined for DIYers.

Maybe Congress can work on this next.
Hitch hikers guide to the galaxy helped me learn 67 with 42, the answer to life the universe and everything.

And my dad had me trained to reply 49 when asked "what's 77?" early, to pull off as a party trick. Though I couldn't answer and followup questions hahah.

That helped.
> not worth the effort

That's your decision to make and I have no reason to quarrel.
They're probably right about that?
Sure "they" do.
> less than two hours

> hassle-free taxes

That's still a crazy demand on the time of someone paying for everything. My bank, my employer and my brokerage all report on me, the IRS should be able to just mail a check or a bill most of the time.
Everyone seems to be an expert on what to do in this situation. I would argue that it's not as trivial as it seems. Yes the waymo cars seems to be on the wrong side of the road for far too long but when surrounded with erratic uniwheeler, stopping is not necessarly the right thing to do either. As a human driver, i got into some strange situation where I had to play damage control because of an early bad decision. In a big city, not crossing the double yellow line mean you will probably end up stuck every block. I personally see this as a good example to learn from but not necessarly a reason to stop testing. I would also restrain from making any decision before seeing the actual data from the car cameras/lidar/radar system.
It has been the same here in the UK for longer. I haven't paid for an SMS for over 20 years.
One hurdle is that the easy to mine materials have already been mined. We have been using progressively more sophisticated methods of ore finding, mining and purification.

Doing that the second time around would be harder. Though we can probably recover good quality materials from scraps.
… read the article

> Crews reshaped the landscape, spreading fine sand across large stretches of rich topsoil, Duttlinger said. When Reuters visited his farm last year and this spring, much of the land beneath the panels was covered in yellow-brown sand, where no plants grew. "I'll never be able to grow anything on that field again," the farmer said.
Jesus, I can't believe I'm saying this in 2024 but just use a php script and an sqlite file.
I think LLMs can do a lot more than people assume, but they need to be given the proper frameworks.

When was the last time a researcher, economist, etc. was given 10,000 papers and simply told "do some original work"? That's not how it works. Daniel (the author) provides some good examples where _streamlined_ work can happen, but again, this is pretty basic stuff.

To push this further, though, imagine LLMs that fill in frameworks... A few steps here: (1) do a lit review, (2) fill in the framework, (3) discuss what might be missing, and maybe even try and fill in the missing information.

I'm doing something like this with politics and economics (see: https://emergingtrajectories.com/) and it works generally well. I think with a ton more engineering, curating of knowledge bases, etc., one can get these LLMs to actually find some new "nuggets" of information.

Admittedly, it's very hard, but I think there's something there.
EyeEm will license users' photos to train AI if they don't delete them
I don't think EITC is hidden? It's just a subsidy for families.
It’s not that you have to be professional to understand, it’s that professionals reliably do. The vast majority of Americans can’t even name what the Bill of Rights does, or what the enumerated powers of Congress are, for example. It’s not that these are inaccessible pieces of knowledge, but people aren’t aware of them.

With a basic grounding in civics and after brushing up on the laws in question, I think most people could follow along.
Sure we would fall behind in some stuff, especially AI, but does it really matter if suddenly all we have is 2-5 year old CPU technology? Mostly everything should work as good as it does today. We will just need a bit more power.
My grandma has an android phone and I'm fine with her having a phone that could permit her to sideload an app. Having a phone number at all is a far more serious threat, and I presume you are fine with your grandmother having one even though a scammer could talk her into giving up her bank details or buying dozens of gift cards and reading out the codes.

The solution to the grandmother scenarios is to have a trusted relative that works closely with them, who they trust to copilot or handle completely all business dealings. If that's not possible, then they're at risk whether they have an iphone or android.
To put things bluntly, literally every classmate in law school using an Apple laptop had to get their laptop replace at least once due to the failure of the device caused by normal usage. My understanding from younger relatives is the same.

That HP hybrid? That was my laptop in law school. It still works, and it's great for drawing (though not as good as my Surface).

Their CPU fans fall apart. They tend to overheat. The hinge breaks- plastic. The display and audio quality is worse.

Apple laptops circa that era were notorious for heat issues, weak plastic, and poor displays. Their sound quality wasn't much better than a cheap PC laptop, unless you shelled out for a top-of-the line MBP..and of course a $2500+ laptop is going to be better than a $500 laptop.

Software support also sucks. At some point newer versions of Windows just don't have good support, the webcam from example doesn't work in modern Windows.

This is objectively false. I can still run software, and use hardware, from the 80s on my Windows 11 desktop. You can't even run 5-year old software on an Apple because Apple broke compatibility.

while the Mac kept going and running most new software.

This is objectively false. Older Macs can't runner new Apple OS software.