skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now if you say it like that it does make sense to me why people would be outraged.

While shorter than the very short "article" your comment actually explained it and makes me understand. The article did no such thing.
No. Absolutely No. See the chart labelled "Not So Very Serious Stuff" at https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/

Avoid the Ph.D., take a BS/BA and an MS if you have the time, but avoid even trying for a Ph.D.
The engineering lead seems confused as to either what GrapheneOS is or what "custom ROMs" mean:

> the Starling Bank application does not support jailbroken or rooted devices and custom ROMs. [...]

> However, in this case, it appears that we are inadvertently preventing the app from being used on non-rooted GrapheneOS devices. This is not a deliberate change and we are investigating what has caused this change in behaviour.

Here's hoping that catching on won't mean turning back on this not being deliberate, but rather a reconsideration of their policy...
Weapons in Space Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of SDI
Well, such an optimistic title, considering that greenhouse gases are excluded in the article.
The cost of getting those into space is a relatively small part of the overall cost. The amount of cost benefit one of these telescopes would see just to the cost reductions gained specifically because of Starlink are insignificant.
It takes 2 months in near-ideal winds to cross the Atlantic by (non-modern ultralight) sail, yet that sort of travel was done pretty regularly for business.

When steam engines decreased that time to 16 days, 200-passenger ships crossing Atlantic purely for tourism were very popular.
God is dead and we have killed him - Nietzsche was onto this quite early into modernity.
Seriously, any time you have >3 images to stack satellites and planes are a complete non issue. The median pixel value is always going to exclude those. Five images is enough to eliminate any trails even if they overlap between images.
I feel like nuclear arms are more likely. More easily achievable.
> He's basically the Jimmy Savile of record producers.

No, he is not! Jimmy Savile personally molested hundreds of children. Steve Albini did nothing remotely comparable. He may have looked at some CSAM and wrote some (intentionally) gross notes about it. There are other quotes that suggest he was legitimately horrified by the idea of child abuse, see for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40308528

EDIT: I don't want to downplay his vile comments, I just think that the comparison is not justified at all.
I don't have anything to offer about your comment, but good luck! We did in-vitro and it was a long, stressful, expensive process. I hope you're successful and find parenthood to be fulfilling and joyful. (Ours is in Kindergarten :) )
Thats basically applecare+ already. You pay like $100 upfront to get things like your phone screen fixed for $29 instead of $129. So it works out in your favor if you are one to go through a few phone screens per device. Past couple phones I've had I'm under 1 screen per phone's life on average so it works in my favor not to get applecare+ and just pay out of pocket the few times I go through a screen.
Wow I had no idea. I didn't realize it was possible to become even more cynical about the bullshit people will get up to for a couple bucks.
You mean from M$'s bucket. It's something for the foundation.
Signed up for Beekeeper Studio, no idea how well it performs for a desktop app written with electron and vue.js, but we'll see!

First two code reviews show no feedback.
Taking this a bit further, it's surprising how many companies sell API as a service but provide minimal support for that API, publishing like 1 client/sdk (and often not in the language you need, lol).

Just mindblowing that companies don't adopt a schema-first approach to appeal to a broader customer base. I've lost count of the number of hnd rolled clients I've had to write over the years.

It gets even better if the API itself is backed by some RPC framework. With that, users can simply generate a client and get going.

It feels like we can do better as an industry, this cracked me up because it's so true.

"a single JSON example as the only documentation is... unfortunate"
From outer space? Farmers baffled after discovering wreckage in field
Sorry just wanted to clear this up - do you mean it delivers an extra set of DNA that does its thing alongside what is already there, rather than editing the main sequence like CRISPR wants to?
What's New on CPAN: April 2024
Also, I’m not too sure that saying ‘ok’ is to ‘affirm or to express agreement’. Sometimes it can be used to simply acknowledge that someone has said something, such as when you say ‘ok sure’ or ‘ok but’.

And if I am wrong, and it does mean to affirm, then doesn’t that by necessity mean that it involves ‘offering an opinion’? Affirmation and/or agreement is not neutral.
Wow I truly had no idea about this. Thanks for sharing your personal experience and setting the record straight. I wish you and your family nothing but positivity and good luck in life.

Every day I discover a new way that humanity has disappointed me.
The great decoupling continues.

This might be a good thing if you prize western values.
I took a bit more collaborative approach to reading and discussing research papers (https://www.scholars.io or https://app.scholars.io) and allow people to annotate, comment and collaborate on research.
Will be very troublesome for countries with low fertility that can’t attract immigrants to keep the population from declining.
It’s surprising to me why my parent comment was down voted. It’s simple biology and mathematics. If you want culture to survive (if what is most important to you is cultural values) you must have a society with children in order to impart those values. There is no future for a society that discourages children.
This blog post wasn’t written by Google themselves, but by Buf, a confusingly-named startup that makes their own protobuf implementation.
> Masking and stacking can mitigate the problem but it does not of course compensate for the lost area and sensitivity. And the brightest satellites (like BlueWalker) saturate the readout electronics and spoil the whole exposure.

Is this only a problem in systems that aren't aware of where the satellites will be? I naively assume that, if the system knew, it could start exposing in the next clear window. I naively assume that the window is almost always clear, especially for an individual sensor.
Where do you see that the full well of those CCDs are fully saturated by a single satellite streak?

Even if that was the case, that seems a very poor design for a sensor and not really an issue of satellites. If a satellite streak can saturate your well, then so could a decently dense star field.

Do they blow out the individual pixels? Sure. But you just stack.

You don't lose sensitivity just because your stack rejected pixels, that's not how stacking works. You wind up with a tiny bit more noise, how much more depends on your capture. But not lower sensitivity, stacking isn't just average an area
Many ultra-Orthodox Jews use "Kosher Internet filters" – filters that block content that isn't approved by their rabbis. In Israel, you can buy "Kosher phones" which have this software pre-installed by the telco and locked down so you can't remove it.

People assume that technology necessarily encourages secularism, but it doesn't inevitably do so. Technology also makes possible new methods of social control which can be used to suppress secularism.
> They have proposed it. They have also explained [cut]

That is laughable. I've been following this since finding that my code extending built-in elements for progressive enhancement in the Hotwire framework was dead in the water on Safari and no polyfill could resuscitate it because the browser infrastructure was fundamentally missing. In reality, Apple have sat on the pot groaning for a decade without taking a dump, and the stated reason in 2016 was this, entirely:

rniwa> The problem here is that UA internally checks local name e.g. `element.localName == aTag` to do various things, and all of that code needs to be updated to account for the fact there could be an instance of `HTMLAnchorElement` whose local name is not `a`.

Thus frankly placing it in the too-hard-basket, a refreshing piece of honesty from a company that's usually in love with its own bullshit. You don't have to look hard at the WebKit source code to grok that, yes, it surely would require a massive chunk of refactoring. Still, here's the updated response, from 2023, after a flamebait thread on WebKit/standards-positions that attracted a mountain of withering criticism:

rniwa> The position has been established.
[WebKit locked as off-topic]

Which I took to mean, "all of you whinging bastards can get fucked, it's our browser".

So it's fundamentally an effort-reward gap for Apple that has become a dug-in entrenched position over time as more product managers flail around hoping to justify it. Pretending an obviously commercial/resourcing decision is due to <bunch of technical reasons> is a common way to avoid committing resources, but any engineer who actually believes that fiction is a damn fool. I'm reminded of Cisco's hissy fit with the IEEE over PoE. Apple aren't dumb enough to miss that refusing to implement part of a published standard erodes their claim of stewardship over that standard, and if a major customer really wanted it, they'd flip-flip in a heartbeat.

> Tell me you know nothing about the topic without telling me that

Aw, you're gonna hurt my feelings.
I assume the above commenter never witnessed how abusive authorities were historically to young kids, from 8-18, who were just skateboarding for fun, wherever they could. Having skateboard parks - with safe skate zones, is relatively recent in cities and towns.
Sweet, that's good news. Thanks for the update!
In Japanese, ‘NG’ is used for ‘not good’.

(Japan seems to like its pseudo-English initialisms — BGM [background music], SNS [social network services], OP/ED [opening/ending], etc.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_Latin_alphabe...
By statue, the NSA can't actually do that. The mass unwarranted surveillance of phone conversations was a short-term program that was ultimately shut down as soon it's existence became known outside the Oval Office. Even Bush's Attorney General said he couldn't do it. The bulk collection of telephone metadata lasted for maybe 15 years but was ultimately allowed to expire due to both ethical concerns and because it didn't yield a lot of value.

The NSA is primarily tasked with overseas collection. IE tapping Osama bin Laden's satellite phone. And they report up the chain to the DoD. Meaning they aren't even looking for domestic criminals and may not notice if they surveilled one. If they're doing anything beyond their legal parameters or beyond their remit, they wouldn't broadcast it or expose themselves by using it to arrest someone.

I like to point to the Gestapo as a counterexample. They are the archetype for police state surveillance. And they did it in a country where most people didn't have even a rotary phone let alone the internet. The distinction between a police state and a free society is entirely up to will and not technology.
Automated review seems like a hard sell to me.

If humans participation is reduced they could approve PR's without proper reviewing.

Eventually this stochastic parrot could throw an ``rm -rv ${TEMP}/`` in there and you are roasted.
Mars is regularly irradiated by solar radiation. This is very different from being radioactive.
I think it helps to show user numbers to such people to bring them back to reality.
Silent Spring was published just 61 years ago (and on top of that into a world with less than half its current population!). Seems like we did pretty well, to me.
> the miracle of exponential growth means that within 2-3 centuries,

I don't know if any realm of human sciences where extrapolating exponential growth yields trustworthy results, outside maybe of wealth accumulation, and even then not for 2 centuries.
> Wow, seeing peak baby is a little scary honestly

Are you worried 8 billion is somehow not enough humans?
I’ve been following sweep and aider for awhile and really love what they’re both doing, especially sweep.

Would love to get your thoughts on sweep. Does it meet your expectations? If not, where does it fall short?
What Is the Point of Xbox?
The training sets used for current models, even the largest ones, is nowhere even close to "the entire Internet". Some napkin math based on known sizes of public datasets says it's less than 1%.
> If the network connection is lost due to external circumstances (say your modem crashes) then how would that information propagate from the point of failure to the remote end on an idle connection?

Observe the line voltage? If it gets cut then you have a problem...

> Either you actively probe (keepalives) and risk false positives

What false positives? Are you thinking there's an adversary on the other side?
Here's a couple of explainers on LAB/InstructLab that may help
https://research.ibm.com/blog/LLM-generated-data
https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2024/05/07/instructla...
Sold a company in 2014 that categorized 65M videos a month using a number of techniques such as object detection (soccer ball), scene classification (soccer pitch), and face recognition (Ronaldo). Used YouTube as a training ground. Marketed as ad words for video. Way ahead of its time. Did $60M in revenue the year after we sold it. Face. Palm.
> Maybe it will actually be 2213 or 2313 instead. Our descendants (if one happens to have them) will find out.

Peak-anything is just shorthand for "the first peak on record" because our culture and ability to record-keep has only really existed in a population and resource boom period.

I agree that circumstances might mean that the global peak baby might be 200-300 years away, but the thing that makes the current round of peak-anything relevant is that we don't know how our social and economic systems will function when certain things are in long-term decline (even if they do pick up again in a few hundred years).

If we knew what a few centuries of low birth rates or low oil consumption looked like, we wouldn't be nearly as interested in what "peak-those-things" means, the same way we're not all that interested in specific market peaks because we understand the boom/bust cycles and long-term productivity increases, etc.
What environmental impact? So far there have been 162 Starlink launches. Each launch uses around 200 tons of RP-1, which is equivalent to the fuel capacity of a Boeing 747. In other words: A single 747 burns more fuel in a year than all the Starlink launches in the past five years.
You can say whatever you want, there are studies backing up the beneficial impact of quantitative over qualitative.
India has transformed its ports
When I did fetal pig dissection, nothing bothered me until I got to the brain. I dunno what it is, maybe all those folds or the brain juice it floats in, but I found it disconcerting.
Posted from a huge house with air conditioning while using multiple petroleum products (iPhone/computer, chair, desk, fleece, etc). The pollution lifted every single person’s standard of living across the globe to levels unimaginable 100 years ago. It’s easy to be in Seattle or New York and say we gotta stop burning oil and coal but there are trade offs that were worth making. If you live in a developing country without aircon those trade offs are still worth making.
People in Saratoga successfully stopped the development of rail in that corridor.
I think that one depends on the system. I had a highrise fire safety training and I asked how other sprinklers knew to fire if they were heat activated and it turns out the pumps would kick out enough pressure to knock the other caps off.
Same as if you're a contractor. You propose a plan so they can track progress, estimate it so they plan for dependent stuff, and adjust the plan/timetable when issues arise (and communicate plenty and plainly). While I don't know GP's project context, I'd go with a test checklist and measure against that.
If we could keep running this era of civilization forever, Matrix style, I'm sure that would be true. But how many more generations will there be before AI+biotech lead to us, I don't know, 3D-printing people? The old laws might not have many cycles left to go before the new ones show up...
Historically, Valve has acquihired promising mod makers or smaller game companies and told them to take their ideas and make a full game out of that. Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, TF2, Alien Swarm, DotA, I might not even know of them all.
The good news is you’ve taken your foot off the gas. The bad news is the car is going 100mph and there is a cliff edge in 10 feet.
Very few?! I really doubt that. Most people use their pet password everywhere.
I don't understand why this is a problem. It's not uncommon to see multi-decade old systems refactored for extensibility and maintainability every once in a while. What worked when it was initially designed won't work forever, and it's hard to make users lives better if the maintainers can't make their own lives better.

(BTW, this isn't "shipping their org chart.")
Ah yes, the mobile typing got me again.

Thank you for the good chuckle and have an upvote for that.
100% agree, this is not a real problem and is better than the alternative.
The timeline depends on when the project will stop being useful to generate promotions.

Thanks Sundar for great org incentive structure!
start here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Poland
Then I don't see "yes" as being opinionated or biased.

I'm assuming "OK" was needed because "yes" is otherwise used in so many contexts, including just as a nod to keep a conversation going, in no small part because of its neutrality. So a new word allows for more intentionality (which is important, and we still agree fills a really big gap)
Is this something I should also adjust on my personal Ubuntu machine for better network performance?
What a wild take. This is like claiming gay people will "die off" in 2 generations because they don't reproduce.

1000 years ago some subset of people chose not to have children, and humanity did just fine, and that same group of so-called "non-breeders" still exists today. Therefore we can conclude it's not purely a matter of genetics. There are a huge number of reasons people make that choice. People even change their minds during their life. It's not just a YES/NO switch in your genetic code somewhere.
I would think that due to the rampant narcissism that has become a blight on society and which is way above and beyond any levels seen by any previous generation that the word 'selfie' is a newly coined word.
JSON with a good schema if you're doing it across languages?
I feel exactly the same as you on not wanting the character of the place I live to change, in a nearby city. I made tremendous sacrifice and investment to live somewhere pleasant. Increasing density will make it exactly like the other places I did not want to live.

That said, $30m will buy a lot of freedom to live like this somewhere else.
IIRC I had to do some of that calculus stuff before cutting loose on writing upwards and downwards magnetic field continuations for geophysical exploration software suites, so, yep, cheers for that.

That aside, fifty years ago was when the dangers of increasing atmospheric insulation was raised as a serious potential issue in the UN, and fifty years ago was when the think tank ecology surrounding fossil fuel producers started churning articles on ice ages, Climate, who really knows?, killing public transport initiatives, etc.

Hindsight is famously 20|20 but it serves us well to remember past playbooks; it wasn't just pure stupidty, there were people who knew better actively promoting larger cars and greater per capita consumption rather than looking to lower total emissions.
While under-researched statements aren't good, personal attacks don't help either. Prefer to educate instead.

C structs have packing, alignment, and endianness gotchas that can be portably addressed with byte-level de/ser.

Example: https://gist.github.com/cd089675a6088b0b8482c005a0e3897a
It once was a tradition for the English upper classes to send their young sons on a "grand tour" of the Continent, which would last for many months, sometimes even a year or two.

So, yes, some billionaire paying for their kid to spend 12-18 months on a Mars trip is a possibility. Or maybe even for themselves if they retire, or as a sabbatical.

However, I think the much greater time and expense is going to make Martian tourism a much smaller market than lunar tourism.

I think in the medium term, the Moon is a much more feasible destination for humans than Mars is. It is much easier for an ultra-wealthy person to take a few weeks out of their schedule for a trip to the Moon, than months or years for a trip to Mars. Since it is only a bit over a light-second away, they could even quite feasibly work remotely from there – the delay is small enough that real-time audio and video calls are possible. Mars is 3–22 light minutes, which forces all communication to be asynchronous.
completely agree, except one thing. If we shift manufacturing to space from space mined/sourced resources we care a lot less about mass optimization.
I browsed Instagram.com while on NordVPN. Instant ban. Had to wait weeks to get my account back by submitting reviews. This happened 3 times. I learned my lesson and simply blocked Instagram.com at the browser level so I never accidentally go to it while on VPN.

Such a shame that Meta's anti-spam algorithm can so easily misidentify good actors.

I'm a normal user. Private account. Just photos of nature I collected over 10 years. Never write comments on public posts.
Feedback on NanoDL: A library for building custom transformers from scratch
Developing and training transformer-based models is typically resource-intensive and time-consuming and AI/ML experts frequently need to build smaller-scale versions of these models for specific problems. Jax, a low-resource yet powerful framework, accelerates the development of neural networks, but existing resources for transformer development in Jax are limited. NanoDL addresses this challenge with the following features:

- A wide array of blocks and layers, facilitating the creation of customised transformer models from scratch.
- An extensive selection of models like Gemma, LlaMa, Mistral, Mixtral, GPT3, GPT4 (inferred), T5, Whisper, ViT, Mixers, GAT, CLIP, and more, catering to a variety of tasks and applications.
- Data-parallel distributed trainers including RLHF so developers can efficiently train large-scale models on multiple GPUs or TPUs, without the need for manual training loops.
- Dataloaders, making the data handling process for Jax/Flax more straightforward and effective.
- Custom layers not found in Flax/Jax, such as RoPE, GQA, MQA, and SWin attention, allowing for more flexible model development.
- GPU/TPU-accelerated classical ML models like PCA, KMeans, Regression, Gaussian Processes etc., akin to SciKit Learn on GPU.
- Modular design so users can blend elements from various models, such as GPT, Mixtral, and LlaMa2, to craft unique hybrid transformer models.
- True random number generators in Jax which do not need the verbose code.
- A range of advanced algorithms for NLP and computer vision tasks, such as Gaussian Blur, BLEU, Tokenizer etc.
- Each model is in a single file with no external dependencies, so the source code can also be easily used.
- True random number generators in Jax which do not need the verbose code (examples shown in next sections).
- There are experimental features (like MAMBA architecture and RLHF) in the repo which are not available via the package, pending tests.

I appreciate feedback if you have the time, a dev pre-release is available via pip, it is ideal for building models with no more than 1B params. Lots of improvements to make. If feeling generous, you can contribute or leave a star.

Thanks.