skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It’s literally in the link.

A non-specified amount of code in the MicroW8 runtime which isn’t included in that 256 bytes to implement the graphics layer (320x240 256 colors 60hz) and gives you 256 kib of memory.

256 bytes is the “cartridge” to run on this platform with compression.

It’s still extremely impressive because of the creativity of the generative visual effects they figured out how to fit in 256 bytes.
Improper storage affects longevity. To estimate longevity at a suspect store you need to know actual manufacturing date not manufacturer's arbitrary best before.

But it doesn't even have to be stored improperly. If you see that this loaf is made two days ago, you will go and find a better place with fresher bread with fewer preservatives or whatever. Manufacturers and sellers obviously don't like it though. So they present you a choice between best before 1 or 2 days from now. Good eh? If you see two loaves with 1 day best-before difference, you'll go for the one with lower date and calmly go home eat your stale bread.

Or you learn to simply ignore the best before and buy bread where you know manufacturing date.

Of course if you are in a third world country likely no one audits factories for compliance and the manufacturing date is also pulled out of someone's ass.
It's a ponzi scheme structurally and independent of demographics, this is tautologically true given the definitions of how these systems work and what Ponzi scheme means. Ponzi schemes don't only become so when they go deep into the red, they are Ponzis right from day one if they work by paying out early investors from the fees paid by later investors.

Giving up in this context means switching to a better system, not doing nothing. It's a really bad habit of political debate to assume that if the government provides a service, only the government can provide that service and anyone who criticizes their bad provisioning is therefore arguing for no service to exist at all (and therefore that they must be inhumane and evil). It's just a cheap and nasty debating tactic that you should avoid. "Giving up" means simply for all pension and social insurance to be managed by the private sector. Governments could maybe mandate you buy a policy, and they'd still regulate the private investment funds, but that'd be the limit of their involvement.

The advantage is that governments are much better at enforcing rules on companies than their own departments. There are lots of rules governing how investment capital is managed if you're in the private sector, but if government run pension funds were companies the management would all have been put in jail decades ago, and the Justice Department would be crowing about how it had protected vulnerable citizens from them. Keeping capital savings and management in the private sector (which is good at it) and rule enforcement in the government (which is good at it) would result in a fairer and more trustworthy system over the long run.
Show HN: Making GNU Make a better Task Runner
I know this could be considered blasphemous, but I constantly find myself using Make as a task runner. I have written my own task runner in the past, but somehow I always end up using make.

I went, and I put together 3 quality of life snippets I use all the time and put it in a single makext.mk file that can be included in other Makefiles and wrote a basic readme for it.

This is not meant to be a replacement for other task runners, but I do think it can be useful to some of you.

https://github.com/mitjafelicijan/makext

Check it out and see if it makes sense to you.

Thanks for any feedback or comments.

Cheers
My understanding is that the main limitation of LLM is that their are single pass. I.e. they process once and return they answer. If that answer is correct that's great but if they answer doesn't make sense LLM has no ability to retrace steps. That is exactly why breaking into steps is useful, because each step is easier to quickly answer.
I think at some point people will combine the LLM with some kind of LLM-critic that will enable automatic splitting into steps or reruns of the LLM.
> I could make it more beautiful and all but I dont have infinite time -- in the end im trying to get a job with it

My two cents only, and this is meant to be constructive criticism. Precisely because you are trying to land a job with this I think you should try to polish as much as possible.

As an employer I’d probably get a better impression if someone shows me a less ambitious project, but one where attention to detail shines everywhere, rather than a more ambitious project that looks “half cooked”. The message I am looking for is “I can do things well, and I care” and for me that is more important than the size of the project.

Of course I am aware that this is completely subjective.
Carbon dioxide is a chemical in the atmosphere :-)
Waymo is making 50K paid trips per week
From the tweet:

>> And yet the practitioners of CoT swear that any and every problem can be solved with LLM by giving it a bit of a CoT help.

For example, see this arxiv paper:

Generalized Planning in PDDL Domains with Pretrained Large Language Models

https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11014

Where the authors conclude:

In this work, we showed that GPT-4 with CoT summarization and automated debugging is a surprisingly strong generalized planner in PDDL domains.

The author of the tweet is an expert on planning and he's responding to that kind of thing.
Because cause and effect need to be simple? Lots of people tune out when it comes to science.

Also the outgroup in this case is science/scientists.
This is what the refrance
Show HN: Wordsweeper – A word guessing game based on levenshtein distance
Hey HN,

I’ve been trying to spend more time working on small fun projects and wanted to share with you a fun word guessing game I made inspired by Wordle and Minesweeper.

Here’s how it works:

You guess a 5 letter word, and get back a score representing the “distance” between your guess and the correct word.

The lower the score, the closer you are to the correct word.

The score is calculated by taking the sum of the distance between the letters of your guess and the correct word, multiplied by the levenshtein distance between the guess and the correct word.

Scores for each guess are tallied into a final total. Try to win the game by guessing the correct word with the lowest score.

It’s also a PWA so it’s installable for on the go playing

I hope you enjoy it!
Stars show signs of hosting advanced alien civilisations
It is undoubtedly one of the best media apps out there. What I really like about this project is the attitude of the maintainers towards open software and donations [0].

Kodi is also an alternative that IMO would work better than SMB and VLC, but I personally don't like the Kodi user interface.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/jellyfin/comments/10pe5pd/a_quick_n...
Thus, the "marketing" (with quotes).

It may actually be a technique, taught in school. There's a lot of underhanded behavior in that field, especially in trying to drive talking points and corporate glossaries.
From maximum force to physics in 9 lines
If it works for easy things, but not for hard things then that's useless. From the tweet:

As you can see, the ease of giving CoT advice worsens drastically as we go from domain independent to domain specific to goal class specific to lexicographic goal-specific.

So he's arguing that CoT needs a lot of work from the user and it can only solve easy problems anyway.
I think LLMs and CoT are powerful, but I agree with this description of what they do.

The important step is that they demonstrate that there are no architectural limits that keep the LLM from acting in these domains, "only" knowledge/planning ones. Once we have a big enough dataset of CoT prompts, the model "just" has to generalize CoT prompting, not CoT following. It decomposes the problem into two halves, and demonstrates that if one half (instruction generation) is provided, the other (instruction following) becomes very tractable.
This doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. No matter what the ASI does with us, it would want to keep growing / spreading. So it would be the opposite imho; AI civilisations would grow into space a lot faster than we would. No need for oxygen etc.
This seems like a huge mistake.

The robots are the whole reason you go to Chuck E. Cheese over say Dave & Busters or Bowlero.

It's the entire differentiator.
Sam Altman Proposes "Universal Basic Compute" Instead of UBI - Through OpenAI
Show HN: es6_maps, new Elixir syntax feature via runtime compiler hacking
Hi HN! I thought you might enjoy this even if you don't know much about Elixir.

`es6_maps` is a small library that introduces a "shorthand" map creation syntax, similar to shorthand object construction in JavaScript/TypeScript. For those unfamiliar with Elixir, the most interesting aspect might be how it achieves this. `es6_maps` takes advantage of BEAM (Erlang's VM) hot-reload capabilities to amend the Elixir compiler bytecode at runtime, adding functions that expand the shorthand syntax for further compilation. I think it's a nice showcase of the power you can wield (with care) when writing in BEAM languages.

Let me know what you think!
No reason in principle, but for practical reason that probably will never become common. Seems more likely we'll get "hybrid EVs" with batteries and capacitors working together, capacitors acting as buffers for batteries. Until the technologies converge into a single thing that does both, but I'm guessing that'll take decades rather than years. (Then the only question that remains will be, will they be called batacitors or capatteries? :-)
Why was the feature removed?
Isn't the solution to just train the tokeniser on the same corpus as the LLM? I'm not sure why reusing tokenisers is so common. Anybody know?
Tom Scott: The city of golf carts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcVGqtmd2wM
I have a friend like that. He has M.A. in computer science, is pretty smart overall, but believes all the dumbest conspiracy theories, including the contrails one.

It's fascinating and scary at the same time. It's what happens when you do motivated thinking for decades. He believes in all the alt-right crap about "gender ideology", "fake climate change", "fake pandemic", etc. He just completely ignores any data that contradicts what he thinks.

In middle school he "just" disliked gays and was pretty normal overall. Now there's no subject on which you can talk with him without some batshit insane views.

A big part of this is splinters of American culture war that spreads over the rest of the world as a side-effect. I can understand why some people in US think cancel culture and wokeness went too far. But then you have people repeating the same "antiwoke" alt-right points imported from USA in countries where you go to jail for criticizing Catholic Church and president together with main bishop go on anti-gay hate campaigns on state TV. And somehow it's still the alt-right that fights for "free speech", when they have no problem with "go to jail for blasphemy" laws.

Once you buy into this culture war and decide you're on one side - you interpret all new data accordingly. So you cannot believe in climate change, cause that's what leftists do. So if you see climate change - it's because NWO causes it with contrails. Trump is your guy cause he hates gays. So if he does things that benefit Russia - it's his brilliant plan to deal with Putin that you simply can't understand yet.

Always add more hidden variables that make your worldview consistent.
Emojis capture emotional context. Definitions would track with groups of similar temperament.
yeah I know... I had attention but too much to core features but not exacly the ui, I knew ui is flawed, honestly I thought its not as bad as it seems to be, but those feedbacks opened my eyes and so maybe I will try managing to have some more time to polish it, I mean now after this much recognition on this post I really started reconsidering where I want to go with this project ...
And further, since it is ambiguous, would it be so difficult for us to come together as a nation and, well, reduce the ambiguity? It's not like the Constitution is a suicide pact, we are allowed to make changes.
Does anyone want a Palm like pad? I feel pads like iPad is trying to do too much that they are essentially computers.

I'd like something that plans things for me, shows a well designed calendar, can show epub/pdf files, a simple text editor to write my thoughts and save as text files, a screen size of iPad mini, and with no Internet.

Wait! Let's get a cheap Android pad then -- but then the preinstalled softwares are a headache to remove. Is there a Linux pad available?
Nothing you're saying conflicts with what I'm saying.

Death and disability is not likely when working a keyboard, but those aren't the only things determining the working environment.

I'd be excited about overtime if we actually got overtime. I've worked other types of jobs with overtime and enjoyed getting it. I'm not excited about working 60hr weeks on a salary when a similar rate of pay can be had at 40hr a week, even if it results in a lower salary.

Yes, most HN users are likely paid above average. That's part of the reason the person doesn't always have to look for a higher salary but can look at job details. However, I don't believe they're all in the top 10% for their locality. There are other high paying professions, and plenty of lower paying dev jobs. I actually make below the median nationally and for my locality.

Ok... so you agree that it's not always feasible to take a higher paying job...
I did at one time grind peanuts(not fresh) with Bamix... It is not actually too fast process. I would say that some salad dressings are much less work. At least without proper tooling.

Still, now I wonder what exactly would be "fresh" peanut?
In the race for space metals, companies hope to cash in
Don't half ass two things, whole ass one thing - Ron Swanson
Education is a process - let's stop making it an RoI.
Food is already abundant but it rather gets destroyed than sold for nothing.
With similar topic like that it is very obvious but if you compare different topics some cant get enough articles while others must be merged and reduced to a stub. The best examples I know of is to have the entire discography with each album and each song their own article vs anything (historically significant) covered in skeptic wiki where no amount of sources is enough for a single article.

More interesting, there must be literal miles of senseless discussion about this if what you describe came out of it.
I find describing Climate change is easier when you explain it like milk going bad. You can have milk that's old and fine, and then bang, the next night it's bad in a big way. The change in that milk was happening all along, it just took the right amount of time to get past that tipping point, then things got really bad.

A LOT of the CC talk in the media is too complex, abstract and focuses on engineering or financial concepts that many people don't really grapple with day to day.

TV shows like Clarksons Farm are better at conveying the complexity of the changes.
I think the original idea was vampires don't stay dead unless they're staked through the heart.
People will stop making it an RoI once it costs nothing in both time or money.
Has anyone been to the HAARP research facility in Alaska? As a part time radio nerd I'd love to visit it.

Also, did they discover something "big" there? From reading the Wikipedia page I can roughly tell what were they trying to do, but it feels like they "merely" optimized existing comms setups, especially for HF and lower frequencies, then handed it back to the local university.
I enjoy pointless nitpicking about details as much as the next person, but low tech magazine seems to always combine that enjoyment with some wrongheaded but feel-good opinions that spoil it for me.

> The globalization and automation of the bicycle industry make bikes less sustainable.

He doesn't really support this claim.

Later:

> Reverting to local and less automated bike manufacturing is a requirement for sustainable bicycles. The main reason is not the extra energy use generated by transportation and machinery, which is relatively small. For example, shipping from China adds around 0.7 to 1.2 gCO2/km for shared bicycles. 8 More importantly, domestic and manual bike manufacturing is essential to make repair and refurbishment the more economically attractive option. By definition, repairing is local and manual, so it quickly becomes more expensive than producing a new vehicle in a large-scale, automated factory.

This seems a bit of a broken window fallacy. We need to stop importing automated bicycles so that bikes are more expensive and expensive manual repairs are price competitive.

Personally, I'd like to see more automated manufacture of e-bikes.

Sure, make the parts standard and interchangeable but frankly absolutely nothing brought up here rises to the level of an actual problem. More bikes is basically an unalloyed good regardless.
If you need a huge debt to get it ROI becomes important.
One thing that I think doesn't get enough attention in these types of discussions -- not just this article about ROI, but also earnings disparities between (e.g.) genders and other groups -- is that income isn't the only measure of happiness.

Many people would take less money to do a job they enjoyed more. My older sister "gave up" a sales "career" to become a fiction writer. It's enough to pay the bills, but pays less than she could have had at a corporate job. She got an English degree and couldn't be happier with her choice.

My younger sister got a Theater degree and is a "struggling actress". Same deal: she's happy with her choice.

ROI is important for some aspects of the discussion. But it is not the whole story.
Well I guess I just suck at life.

I assume even highly paid people eventually want a "better" job. Something like fewer hours, a more interesting problem, a worthwhile mission, coworkers/ bosses that aren't jerks, etc. I see the posts on here all the time.
But you're missing the real point of university, which is to broaden your mind for the low price of 30-120k - and by that I mean pay to do the same thing as free courses online and then regurgitate exactly what your professor tells you for non-stem subjects.
Chuck E. Cheese was founded by Nolan Bushnell of Atari fame, just 5 years after he created Pong. I didn't expect this connection at all when I first learned about it.
Is it practical or should I just use i2c expander?
No firefox extension though.
I disagree, especially in cases, where it costs you 100k dollars, and leads to years of debt.

If it is free, it is a different story, but not here in US.
There is more to having an education than earning a higher salary. An educated population is more resilient and more flexible. Want to solve the worlds problems, the big ones like extreemism or climate change? Start will a better-educated population.
sin and cos are often used to rotate vectors. In these cases, a trick with a CORDIC is to avoid the traditional sin/cos/multiply calculation by using the vector to be rotated as the input to the CORDIC. The CORDIC will directly produce the rotated vector, without having to compute sin/cos or do a complex multiplication.

CORDIC really shines when latency doesn't matter so much. You can pipeline every stage of the computation and get a huge throughput. It's well suited for digital mixing in radio systems.
Out of touch / delusional. And according to this Twitter person, it's 'responsibility of the people' to have an income. As if some 'law of nature' says this is a thing. It's not, it's just what happens when there is scarcity.
The phrase "a ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) phenomenon" means something that [the speaker thinks] is egregiously inefficient but which people got away with because the cost of money was low.

VCs do care about these things, I remember hearing there was at least one well known VC that insisted that its startups all used AWS even for services that weren't cost competitive. They didn't want their startups to go viral and then not be able to scale, and if that meant some marginal businesses went from "profitable but unremarkable" to "unprofitable and dead" then so be it. This strategy worked because the sizes of the funds raised by the VCs were very large, and so investments were large, and so startups could afford to not think too hard about the costs of things.

So the path DHH is arguing goes:

1. ZIRP pushes investors into high risk assets like VC funds.

2. VC funds give out huge investments to software startups.

3. Startups do lots of expensive things without worrying about the cost.

4. Having lots of microservices is expensive and the cost isn't justified by the benefits.

5. Therefore, microservices are a ZIRP phenomenon.
The biggest barrier to learning is having a real motivating need to learn the thing. Young people aren't as dissolutioned about the uselessness of what they are learning relative to all the demands of adult life.

I've learned amazing things when I had a real reason pop pup, after a decade of idly wanting to learn it.
Climate change denial/misattribution that has been taking place across South America in recent years was analyzed in this paper from 2023: https://www.purpose.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Report_Mi...
In my experience, employers aren’t really impressed by “I made this project so you’d give me a job”, they’re impressed by living breathing projects with actual users which solve an actual problem.
I got reminded of a rather cute snippet of code I had a part in.

One needed to find the coordinates of the bisector of an angle subtended by an arc of a unit circle. They (x,y) coordinates of the 'arms' were available. The existing implementation was a mass of trigonometry - going from the x,y coordinates to polar (r,θ), then making sure that the θ computed was in the correct quadrant, halving the θ and converting back to x,y coordinates. All in all, many calls to trigonometric functions and inverse functions.

This was in Python and thus we had first class access to complex numbers. So all that was needed was to define two complex numbers. z1 from (x1,y1) z2 from (x2,y2) and then take the geometric mean of the product: √(z1*z2). Done.

No explicit trigonometry and no explicit conversion and back in the new code.
My understanding is that you do your math over some field F.

But then when you choose a random point to test your polynomial, you randomly select from G = F[5^1/3], an extension of the original field. And test your polynomial using arithmetic in that larger field.

The increased entropy happens when you select at random from the extended field — there’s more elements in G than in F, so an attacker has a lower chance of guessing your random value.
Honestly thought it would be worse
> low price of 30-120k

Couldn't help but chuckle.
As written on that wiki page it’s completely impractical:

> Others are able to purchase the property from the owner at the taxed price at any time, forcing a sale.

The idea is apparently supposed to “improve societal welfare”, but the reality is it would favor the wealthiest who could afford to have and hold property, while everyone else would be at the mercy of those richer than them.
Agreed as a former scientist (theoretical high energy physics). I’ve yet to meet one person in related fields who’s enthusiastic about giving paper mills a 2000% productivity boost while giving honest people a 20% boost at best, and by the looks of it, this kind of data-to-mindless-statistical-correlation agents will hit the already bullshit-laden, not very scientific fields the hardest. I’m not sure that future can be deterred though, the cat is already out of the bag.
I'm thinking about the same thing. Maybe I can make a native application that sync photos between the phone, the PC and a cloud bucket? And put up some code to display the photos.

Doesn't sound too hard?
If the world is given no choice but to give you money, you're not going to be careful with that money. DHH argues that careful engineers would use microservices a lot less.