skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the Danish public sector we provide services based on need assessments of citizens. Then we subsequently pay the bills for those services. Which amounts to thousands of small invoices having to be paid by a municipality each month. An example of this could be payments for a dentist visit, transportation and similar. Most of these are relatively small in size, and we've long since automated the payments of anything below a certain amount through automation. Systems which are faster and less error prone as far as putting valid data everywhere goes. They are more prone to decision making errors, however, and while fraud isn't an issue, sometimes citizens have invoices approved that they aren't entitled to. Since it's less costly to just roll with those mistakes than to try and fix them, it's an accepted loss.

The systems are hugely successful and popular, and this naturally leads to a massive interest in LLM's as the next step. They are incredibly tools, but they are based on probability and while they're lucky enough to be useful for almost everything. Decision making probably shouldn't be one of them. Similarly ML is incredibly helpful in things like cancer detection , but we've already had issues where they got things wrong and because MBA's don't really know how they work, they were used as a replacement instead of an enhancement for the human factor. I'm fairly certain we're going to use LLM's for a lot of things where we shouldn't, and probably never should. I'm not sure we can avoid it, but I wouldn't personally trust them to do any sort of function which will have a big influence on peoples lives. I use both Co-pilot and OpenAI's tools extensively, but I can still prompt them with the same thing and get extremely different quality outputs, and while this will improve, and while it's very to get an output that's actually useful, it's still a major issue that might never get solved well enough for what we're going to ask of the models way before they are ready.

I hope we're going to be clever enough to only use them as enhancement tools in the vital public sector, but I'm sure we're going to use them in areas like education. Which is going to be interesting... We already see this with new software developers in my area of the world, where they build things with the use of LLM's, things that work, but aren't build "right" and will eventually cause issues. For the most part this doesn't matter, but you really don't want the person designing your medical software to use a LLM.
These were in a variety of facility types and there wasn't any real pattern for me.
What “problems in society” lead to this?

Humans are infinitely adaptable and we live on a hedonic treadmill. Regardless of material and/or social circumstances, there’s gonna be a subset of people who will continue to find existence a terrifying suffering, and will seek escape, including drugs.

No society in history has fixed the first problem. But we can keep negative externalities minimal by outlawing public use of drugs.
>The idea that "I'm not getting everything I want right now means that government is irreparably broken," is ridiculous on its face.

It's weird that you would put those words in my mouth when the actual reason for the dysfunction

>That those folks represent less than half of the electorate

is readily apparent to you.

The point is that Congress is terminally dysfunctional. Avoiding shutdowns and passing grift doesn't change that. I don't want to hear all the reasons why things can't be done (perhaps the most unhelpful thing to do). I just want them done. And I have every right to be pissed abot the state of things until that happens.
Who can keep up with that? OpenBSD is a placid pond by comparison.
Make it a glitter bomb.
Startup idea: AI-generated video to accommpany podcast audio
The NYT article below highlights that podcasters are shifting to add video to what has typically been an audio-only format. BUT, video is costly, difficult, time-consuming, etc. HOWEVER, AI-generated video, based upon style prompts and the audio content, could be very effective, inexpensive, and lucrative. I'm working on something else, but maybe this idea will fit someone here. My fee: one medium cup of coffee if revenues exceed $20 million :). Good luck! https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/26/arts/podcasts-video-youtube-audio.html
All Y-Companies in one Google Sheets spreadsheet
I got hit by this fact hard on the first (and only) device I upgraded, a Surface Pro 6. Second(s) lag on just opening the Start menu with nothing else running, long delays when loading the file Explorer, I suffered through it for a bit just assuming it was "warming up" with post upgrade operations.

After suffering through it long enough, I downgraded it back to 10 with a fresh install and it felt like a different device.

I feel a little bad for Microsoft. They clearly believe they have to find new things to add to their OS for the sake of adding things and justifying the upgrade. And this is likely just from teams that want to show impact (i.e. keep their jobs).

Win 10, for all it's faults, has served me well. I'd be happy to continue using it for a long time. But that doesn't make the stock price go up.
In terms of optionality they’re pretty similar.

“Getting food delivered” isn’t a right or basic necessity. It’s just an expensive convenience.
Has some analysis in it too:

- The percentage of fin tech companies peaked in 2022 at 23% and is now back to 8%

- The government category has the most exits vs failures. Boring is good?

- The most common domain prefix is get* - the most common postfix is *health. And yes you can buy gethealth.com for the low price of $635,910 today
Even if the generated text contains reasoning, could the LLM understand and apply it?
That's too simplistic. The interesting part is this imho:

> DoorDash chose not to reduce the psychological impact of added fees for customers, as they typically do — instead they announced those fees through ads and in-app pop-ups

> In fact, DoorDash on average takes almost half of total fees
on each order. In other words: worker pay is only about half of the total fees DoorDash collects from customers and restaurants.

> The average order in the sample totaled $59.08 before taxes and tip, with an advertised food
subtotal of $44.68. Of that total payment:

● $37.98 went to the restaurant after they paid restaurant fees to DoorDash for the order

● $14.40 was charged in customer fees paid to DoorDash

● $6.70 was charged in restaurant fees paid to DoorDash

Of that total of $21.10 charged in restaurant and customer fees:

● $11.07 was paid to the worker
What I don't get is the attitude of:

Gambling is terrible look at the harm it does it should be banned.

Alcohol is terrible look at the harm it does it should be banned.

Hard drugs - it's their choice leave the users alone, actually open up a place so they can take drugs.
Reminded me of the line from Errand of Mercy, "You will find there are many rules and regulations. They will be posted. Violation of the smallest of them will be punished by death."
That doesn't seem to be universally true, and there were much louder, more extreme voices who meant it very literally.

"Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police"

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
>No one “depends” on IP addresses. Wikipedia could very easily (and likely does) use browser fingerprints

One of the tools Wikipedia gives admins to protect pages from vandalism/abuse is ip address blocks and not browser fingerprints:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blocking_IP_addresse...

>IPs havent been a viable way to ban or identify people since the early 00’s.

You are factually wrong. Copyright holders have successfully won lawsuits as recently as 2023[1] by starting the process via subpoena of ip addresses from ISPs. The steps are:

1) obtain the ip addresses of anonymous users torrenting your intellectual property. (Because the studios monitor torrent trackers for ip addresses.)

2) Connect a real name to that ip address by having a court subpoena the ISP to reveal the owner of the ip address. If the ISP subscriber on the account is not the actual infringer, ask the owner of the account (via a court deposition) to further identify the actual user (e.g. a spouse, a roommate, etc)

3) get a financial settlement or judgement against that person

That type of identity unmasking doesn't happen with CG-NAT or other shared NAT scenarios like libraries/airports because the torrent trackers logs only have granularity of ip addresses which is useless when a thousand people share it.

[1] April 2023 defendent loses $27016.25 in lawsuit via ip address unmasking: https://casetext.com/case/strike-3-holdings-llc-v-john-doe-s...
Driving a car doesn’t make you an irrational car driving addict who can’t function without driving and will do basically anything to drive more because not driving hurts so bad and driving feels so good.
Why Antarctic wildlife is being 'sunburnt'
Philosopher Nick Bostrom's predictions on life in an AI utopia
This post is by Joanna Rutkowska of the Qubes project (a VM based isolation system) and doesn't contain any comments in favour of Wayland. In fact I think Qubes still uses X11.

Are there any writeups that make a case for how Wayland could be used to implement robust GUI isolation?
no, not obvious.

yes, the market for sex work is primarily men. of them, the vast majority are interested in heterosexual pairings from women providers.

can you finish articulating why women would be losing from cheap sex work? which women, the sex workers? a different group? what are each group losing specifically?

have you talked to any sex workers? many of them say they've gained something and I'm waiting to compare that with what you are trying to articulate
Sounds like you had control of your data.
Don't go outside barefoot?
> Doesn't reinforced concrete have a lot of longevity problems?

Mostly near sources of (salt) water: put a roof on a house, and make sure you have slopes away from the structure, and it's not a large problem.

Or, instead of metal/steal rebar, you can use composite rebar:

* https://www.jlconline.com/how-to/foundations/composite-vs-st...

There's also fiber-reinforced concrete (which may not always be a replacement for rebar):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-reinforced_concrete
What's your point? Because _my_ point is that if you think about Walmart and however bad you know (or heard) that it is, Amazon is worse than that.
I've always seen it as two different solutions depending on timing. Collective action, from governments usually, is most effective when we already broke something. Individuals are much better at avoiding problems before they occur, usually dependent on people being informed enough to know what they opting into.

I do wish more consumers would be hesitant to buy new products when they know little about how they're made or how they work. Ironically the more government we throw at preventing problems the more likely consumers are to skip past being skeptical and blindly trust that the big, regulated company must be doing what's best for us.
If I tell GPT-4 to print something, it understands it needs to check if my printer is turned on first and turn it on if it's not, so, yes?

Also, if the generated text contains reasoning, what's your definition of "understanding"? Is it "must be made of the same stuff brains are"?
If you are in public you have no right to privacy, especially if you break laws and misbehave. This has been exhaustively debated, The Verge should know better.
It is probably true for game engine dev, but not generally true for game dev, which is a vast field and not as computationally demanding as many imagine. I believe Go's unwillingness to be less strict about some (non-type) semantics would be a bigger problem for game devs than GC.
Adderall?

I'm only half-joking :)
This is not a matter of tools though, did you read the article? The main pain point is that Rust semantically makes fast iteration impossible
I was (and, am) a huge fan of EXAPunks, the limitation being my own problem solving skills.

Do you think TIS-100 is better or worse? It's a strange omission from your list.

Is it that you never played it, or do you think TIS-100 is superior (asking because I haven't tried TIS-100)
Well, I don't think I'd be good in charge. Obviously you are being sarcastic, though. But if I were in charge, I would ban all AI development. (Assuming anyone can be in charge at all. No one really is...)
My company uses GrubHub. We get a fixed allocation each day to order lunch.

I pay for the grubhub+ and I often order from places close by that I can walk to and pickup. This saves on the extra tip for delivery and it also gives me some exercise.

But what I have noticed is that the prices are $3-$4 more per item on the grubhub menu for a restaurant than the prices shown on the menu at the restaurant.

It seems like restaurants are jacking up prices to pass on the grubhub fees to the customer.
The old 8bit micros from the c64 era had plenty of documentation. Those computers even shipped the schematics of their hardware, let alone a manual for BASIC.

I literally learned to program by reading those manuals
Yes, only the missing file data needs to be sent. Working out what's missing is the problem, since protocols that aren't aware of git's structure (blobs, trees, commits, etc.) cannot exploit that knowledge to e.g. walk up from each ref and stop when we hit existing ancestors. Instead, they're stuck comparing the file contents of two entire copies of a repo (via their Merkle trees). That's probably not a big deal for smaller projects (e.g. I've played with hosting my own git projects on IPFS), but it's a lot of overhead for projects like the Linux kernel with massive histories, lots of refs, many developers frequently pushing and pulling many changes, etc.
By using other, more secure interfaces like uinput, or libei[1] whose access you can allow it deny separately from the Wayland socket itself.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libei
Process raw materials in Africa, urges top environmentalist
I write PHP forms for fun but there's a very valid point the default of this is extremely manual for every form you want to build. I really like the idea of at minimum using a database that creates tables and columns as needed for a form sent at it.

At the office we have less proficient users who want to make web forms, but self-hosting the data is important to us.
Show HN: Videogigagan Content Aggregation Site
VideoGigaGAN is a cutting-edge generative model designed to enhance video super-resolution. It builds on the foundations of the GigaGAN image upsampler by integrating temporal modules, significantly improving the detail and temporal consistency of upscaled videos. This technology specifically addresses challenges like temporal flickering, offering solutions that refine the quality and stability of the output video. VideoGigaGAN is ideal for applications requiring high-quality video restoration and enhancement, such as film production and media processing.
> If the text that the text-generating tool generates contains reasoning, then the text generation tool can be said to be reasoning, can't it.

I don't know... you're still describing a talking parrot here, if you'd ask me.
Drugs are bad. For you personally and for society in general.

Period.

Only ignorant or malicious people bring arguments against it.

Yes, this point can itself be taken too far and radicalized. There are no idiot-proof ideas.
Could you elaborate? If my understanding of this is significantly off then I’d appreciate if you could explain.
>If I want to build something akin to Dwarf Fortress (in terms of simulation complexity) as a browser-first experience - what stack should I choose?

I'd suggest Haxe with OpenFL or HaxeFlixel.
I don't have an answer and I agree with you with the latter (so does HIV yucca)
AFAIK tagged-index-handles are typically used for this (where the tag is a generation-counter to detect 'dangling handles'), which more or less side-steps the borrow checker restrictions (e.g. see https://floooh.github.io/2018/06/17/handles-vs-pointers.html).
I think you may be thrown off because the first "as" is meant to be "are".
I contribute to an open source project by doing extensive testing. I've been doing this off and on for more than two decades. I don't fix the bugs I find; the people who do are much better at that than I am. But I like to think I've gotten good at finding bugs, and try to find new ones as soon as possible so they can be fixed before formal releases.
I've finished Exapunks. Should go back and finish TIS-100.

One thing I both love & hate about Zachtronics is the Histogram of Doom that appears at the end of each problem. There's no better feeling than ending up in the top ranks for efficiency or speed. And no worse feeling than refactoring everything and still not budging from the middle of the pack.

Considering you're being ranked against other players, in some ways this makes a Zachtronics game one of the more vicious multiplayer games. I mean, you're never playing against another player directly. But you're always being compared to others and it can be humbling at times.
How would that work for open source? Wouldn't the company just make its own builds?
THIS. Politics,

The big money drowns out even an enormous amount of citizens, hackers or not. 8 container ships cannot be a very massive income for the industries throwing money at politicians and would go a long way. Thorium reactors would create new jobs, deal with the problem om storing radioactive fuel rods for millions of years by making them a commodity for a new industry that makes use of them and reduces the millions of years needed to store those down to thousands of years and when we run out of nuclear waste we can continue fueling them with thorium, which is _everywhere_. The air would get cleaner & ther is money to be made.

You would think not that much political will was needed for small, big impact things like that.

Of course, ther eis always the chance I am insane and will wake up from this nightmare in a haze from forcefully administered anti-psychotics via injection
We really don't need time to tell.

Just making a transformer bigger and bigger, and feeding it more and more data, will not change it from being a language model into something else, anymore than scaling up an expert system such as Cyc will transform it into something other than an expert system. "Scale it up and it'll become sentient" is one of the recurring myths of AI.. a bit odd that people are falling for it again.

As an aside, it seems reasonable to consider an LLM as a type of expert system - one that has a broad area of expertise (like Cyc), including (unlike Cyc) how to infer rules from language and generate language from rules.

If you want to create a brain-like AGI, then you need an entire cognitive architecture, not just one piece of it which is what we have currently with LLMs. Compared to a brain, an LLM is maybe just like the cortex (without all the other brain parts like cerebellum, hippocampus, hypothalamus and interconnectivity such as the cortico-thalamic loop). It's as if we've cut the cortex out of a dead person's brain, put it in a mason jar to keep it alive, and hooked it's inputs and outputs up to a computer. Feed words in, get words out. Cool, but it's not a whole brain, it's a cortex in a mason jar.
Obama get the blame because "the buck stops here," but just try to imagine the huge chain of people that the intelligence had to traverse to get the targets approved, and then someone up the chain had to sell the idea to the president.
I Witnessed the Future of AI, and It's a Broken Toy
What's the difference between a human and a talking parrot that can answer any question you ask it?
I absolutely agree. In fact, I think the problem is that like everything, there is an optimal point for efficiency, and crossing that line by making things "too easy" when it comes to data means too much power for one person to handle ethically. Absolute power may corrupt absolutely, but near absolutely power also corrupts quite nicely, too.

In short, we should have limits to amount of scraping possible, simply because humans can never be trusted past a certain point to remain ethical. After all, ethics at its first approximation is only a mechanism to improve societal cohesiveness, and it only works as long as the person doesn't have enough power to "do away" with society.
Do Muslims do it too?
Would those companies otherwise have bothered to do anything productive toward reducing climate change or inflation with those resources instead of chasing novelty toys? I doubt it.
That is a flavor of Ubuntu with Unity as its DE. unityd.org is the website of the DE itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egoless_programming
It definitely exists outside of Utah.
Another good reason for slow adoption is that the pushers of V6 herald it as the death of all nat, and i wager there are certain types of net admins who really like at least SOME nat. I have a longer writeup here http://www.jofla.net/?p=00000113#00000113

granted i would love for more v6, if it yielded a 1 for 1 repacement, with all features .
see also https://amphetamem.es/
As someone who works across the stack, I've come to really appreciate seeing "LTS" and I think for me it comes from Ubuntu directly growing up as a kid in technology, understanding it means that people are committed to supporting something for the long term.

Obviously I know there are business cases for this sort of stuff and whatnot generally, but as a kid first learning what LTS meant, I've always appreciated Ubuntu for this.
Herds don't have an ALU for which to process nuance. Buckle up.
How many of those crashes were caused by memory safety issues though?

A lot of those crashes might simply be called a "panic" in Rust.
Show HN: I built an app for Architects to download tile patterns
Oh, I thought this was going to be a semi-rigorous discussion on computability. It's actually just another "GPT-4 still fails at these prompts" essay.
I had found that GPT4 couldn’t play wordle about a year ago [1]. At the time, I thought it must be because it wasn’t in the training data but now it seems to point to something larger.

I might just get nerd sniped trying to teach it GoL now…

[1] https://www.jerpint.io/blog/gpt-wordle/
Passkeys are being pushed by Government and Law Enforcement because PASSWORDS WORK and frustrate them. Police access 95% of the phones they seize so they want passkeys to be the norm because once they own the phone they own EVERYTHING you secured with passkeys.

There is nothing wrong is passwords.

There is everything wrong with biometrics.

Wake up!
I was hoping this was still being served on the same Next Cube with the "do not power down!!" label, but the HTTP headers strongly suggest not.

Maybe it's pointlessly romantic but I like the idea of machines and software continuing to perform their job well past their life expectancy. Voyager 1 has to be the most celebrated example. Maybe it's because it makes me care more about crafting things if they are a little less ephemeral than the modern software churn would make us believe.
Ubiquiti’s hardware is limited in some respects whereby with Mikrotik you can implement anything, its just a matter of how and the performance. Ubiquiti for core, especially when deploying CGNAT, is a bad idea.
If we truly need LLMs to be research assistants, then I question, are we really still doing useful things or just "playing the game" of research? I mean, if we need datacenters and models that cost millions to train and megawatts to run, is what comes out of it any use for us?

Scientific research has come to resemble gambling more and more these days, where there is an extremely obsessive quest to accumulate more data, theories, and information, rather than trying to figure out improvements to life.
It's not really. I've done the latter.

You just prompt it with "If I'm asking you to call someone, please output only "<CALL>" and the name of the person". Then capture that keyword.

It works fine like that.