skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems like a really elaborate takedown of language ambiguity at best and an outright strawman at worst. The whole thing hinges on:

> If the film 90 percent practical special effects aka SFX, then that would suggest only about 10 percent were DVFX/CGI.

But... is that true? If a real live stuntperson jumps from a real live car to another real live car, but a safety wire is digitally removed and mountains are added in the background, is that a practical effect or a digital one? The article insists it's a binary choice, and seems to say this should not be considered a practical effect at all. And the author's definition of digital effects really is that expansive:

> The film’s color grading process entailed using DVFX to modify certain pre-existing recorded elements within the frame, such as the skies and background environments.

Later in the article a bit of nuance appears:

> What Jackson and the article make evident then is that Fury Road actually had a LOT of CGI quite literally on top of the practical SFX and stunt sequences, which were often enhanced, revised, transformed, augmented, supplanted, etc. through DVFX manipulation. Such changes were, for the most part, microscopic yet their scope was considerably larger than audiences were led to believe.

There are some rhetorical devices that should raise flags, especially the odd "microscopic yet... considerably larger" construction.

Ultimately, when I hear that "80 to 90 percent of the effects were practical", I take it to mean the cars were real and not CGI, the people swinging on poles were real and not CGI, etc. No complaints if the author wants to construct definitions that make those shots no longer "practical", but I don't think many people ever interpreted the claims to mean there was zero color grading or background replacement for continuity.
Can anyone recommend an introduction to PBT for someone who knows nothing about it?

Edited to add: D'oh! There's an explanation in the linked repo.
Same here. Maybe it’s how I grew up.
Gas engine
Electric motor
Never understood why people used the word motor to describe the engine.
Cool, thanks. Figured it was just a preference as I hadn't really heard that before. Works though!
Show HN: Hacker News Reader App
Hi everyone
big HN fan here ... so big, that I always wanted a better UI on mobile (and desktop).
So since none of the existing apps satisfied my taste, I setout to do the only reasonable thing: program an app myself.

It's made in flutter + serverpod (so all Dart) and therefore comes in iOS, Android, Web (future Linux, Mac, Windows)

Yes, it has all the boring parts:
list feeds, read and comment articles, ...

More exciting parts:

- swipe list items for faster actions (fav, upvote)

- customize feed (pure list, preview image, newspaper style)

- Customize click actions (open URL, open comment)

- highlight OP comments.

- collapsable comment threads.

The every exciting parts:

- Offline reading / caching

- Notifications about high-score/interesting/most-commented items.

and

- AI summary, summaries the article as a bulletin

Wanna try out the app (as PWA) before downloading
==> https://app.hn-reader.com

All other info here:
https://www.hn-reader.com

And yes, I'll be in the comments for questions
On height, that is already a reality.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5956020/

https://www.statnews.com/2019/11/18/a-new-treatment-promises...
I understand why this got flagged, but I'm sad that it did.

There are a million places to discuss politics on the internet, but none of them quite have the perspective that HN does. As a relatively long-term reader (I don't think I commented at all for the first decade or so), I find that these days my horizons are expanded more by the non-technical threads on the site.

In particular I was looking forward to learning how the HN crowd in the USA and Europe view our politics at the moment. I'm not sure where else I would go to learn that; I suppose could look on Reddit or a clone, but any unique views there tend to be drowned out by memetics.
Harmonious – The exhaustive chord and scale app
> I worry that someone may be trying to incorporate a sophisticated supply chain attack. Step 1. Troll maintainers, Step 2. Find someone to maintain who can accept malicious code. Step 3. Track where this goes

Maybe. I had not considered that, but it might be right.

There are mitigations of such an attack although you will have to be careful; such mitigations might not really stop it if you are not careful.
Your assertion can be reality checked by looking at the proposed private mission to service HST. This mission would use crew to do manual maintenance, not develop robots to try to do the servicing.

Yes, HST is close to Earth. It's still in space. This is a demonstration that when costs of getting the people there are low enough, people > robots.
Computers have gotten much more complex. Maybe your OS provides that nice little bubble for you, but it’s an illusion
They pulled the voice because it sounds similar enough, even if you don’t hear it. There are also several long form articles about it this morning to confirm further that it’s resonating as a major tech story because of those similarities. Probably most importantly the “voice of Her” is probably the #1 voice you shouldn’t try to emulate without permission (with Samuel L Jackson next). It is wild this has happened honestly, but I don’t think people are wrong about who it sounds like.
Probably students hang out at the Sheetz because students hang out at the sheetz.

The sheetz is a scene. The library is a scene. That's what matters. If I spend $29 to use your place, it's not a scene unless a bunch of other people pay $29.

Anyway, the premise of your sales pitch was your-scene-sucks. I'm not surprised it didn't go over well. You weren't eating your own dogfood.
Former Timescaler here.

It's about time that Timescale started getting what it deserves.

Sometime in early 2022, just as they raised their Series C, leadership decided that they had gotten what they wanted from the open-source community and TimescaleDB. They decided it was time to focus 100% on Timescale Cloud. Features began to become exclusive to Timescale Cloud, and the self-hosted TimescaleDB was literally treated as competition. At the same time, they managed to spoil their long-time PaaS partnership with Aiven, which was (and still is) a major source of revenue for the company. The reason? Everyone needed to use Timescale Cloud and give their money to Timescale, thus making Aiven a competitor. In short, with the raising of Series C, Timescale stopped being an OSS startup and began transitioning to a money hungry corporation.

In 2023, they conducted two rounds of layoffs, even though the company was highly profitable. Recently, Planetscale also carried out layoffs in a similarly harsh manner as Timescale, but at least Planetscale had the "courtesy" to address this with two sentences in their PR statement about company restructuring. Timescale did not even do that; they kept it all quiet. Out of 160 employees, around 65 were laid off. The first round of layoffs occurred in January, and the second in September. No warnings. No PIPs. Just an email informing you that you no longer work for them. Many of the affected employees were in the middle of ongoing projects. The CEO even mentioned in the in-house memo how they diligently worked on the September layoff throughout the summer. Interestingly, many of these employees were hired by competitors like Supabase and Neon. It’s worth emphasizing that this was not a financial issue—Timescale is far from having such problems. Instead, it was a restructuring effort to present nice financial numbers during ongoing turbulence in the tech market. (And yes, you guessed it! Timescale also hired their first CFO a couple of months before the first layoffs.)

You might say that it's just business, but as an OSS startup, I expect them to live by the values they have advertised over the years and treat their users and employees much better than they currently do. With this in mind, I welcome Tembo as a new player in the time-series market.

Footnotes: Timescale = the company. TimescaleDB = OSS time-series database developed by Timescale. Timescale Cloud = TimescaleDB managed by Timescale on AWS.
+100 to this, I don't think many people reading this thread realize how easy they've made it to run a LLM locally. It's a great start if you want to kick multiple tires (be careful to clean up! the gigs add up).

> wget https://huggingface.co/jartine/TinyLlama-1.1B-Chat-v1.0-GGUF...

> chmod +x TinyLlama-1.1B-Chat-v1.0.Q5_K_M.llamafile

> ./TinyLlama-1.1B-Chat-v1.0.Q5_K_M.llamafile -ngl 999

https://euri.ca/blog/2024-llm-self-hosting-is-easy-now/
It's been sometime since I was there, but it felt like it tried to be a South Park Commons style salon, but promising founders in the Software and Hardware space had plenty of better options like Engine or I-Labs, or moving out West to join YC or SPC.

I've noticed UAV/Autonomous/SpaceTech (UAE and Saudi are on a buying streak rn) and Biotech (unsurprising) startups do fairly well in the Boston scene.
Is it just me or is that site a bit broken? Weirdly dark.

Edit: Nice try on the vote brigade guys. lol
GNU and BSD tooling differs in small, but sometimes breaking ways. One example off the top of my head is that GNU sed accepts `sed -i`, but BSD requires `sed -i ''`, i.e. an empty string to tell it not to back up the existing file. Or GNU awk having sorting capabilities. Etc.
You are 2.5 years and $375m behind Sam :)

Nuclear fusion start-up Helion scores $375 million investment from Open AI CEO Sam Altman

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/05/sam-altman-puts-375-million-...
The bribery angle is where it appears questionable to me.

And I'm not at all happy with needing to rely on contacts. These companies should not be able to get away with potentially destroying other businesses or adversely impacting peoples personal lives and just handwave the reasoning to be "the algorithm". People should have recourse.
And I’m saying that enforcement and morality are swamped by poverty and inequality.

I’d recommend trying to find any grounding in evidence of your claims because the poverty and inequality links to crime are pretty well established in the data.
> “Engine” is from the Latin ingenium: character, mental powers, talent, intellect, or cleverness.

And thus we get a common root for the words engine and genius. Fascinating.
I agree it's not a silver bullet doesn't begin to address the issue where students aren't learning because of issues they're dealing with outside of school.

I see this as Khan Academy x10. It'll be a great tool for those for whom Khan Academy itself was a good tool. If it's free (or for a nominal free), then parents will use it at home with their kids as a supplement to school. Teachers might use it on a case by case basis with students who want to accelerate or who are behind. It will highly accelerate learning for those who want to and are able to learn. The problems you describe, which are very real and important, are social problems, not educational problems per se or problems solved with technology.
Don't worry, HN went through this many times before. It was Go a few years ago, Node.JS before that. Rust too shall pass.
I had a 3, I still have a 5mx.

What I like the most is that it uses regular batteries. I can put new batteries in and play Infocom adventures if I wish, use the inbuilt programs.

Unlike my early gen iPod Touch which does ... almost nothing now
I studied engineering in university, and as part of that I took enough calculus, numerical methods, statistics, and logic courses to earn a math degree along side my engineering one.

I spent hundreds of hours poring over 1500 page textbooks and being given the driest lectures imaginable by people who were delivering them on autopilot.

I would estimate that one hour of khan academy was roughly equivalent to a weeks coursework, which was 3 lectures and probably an extra 2 hours of self study per lecture. It was undoubtedly the only reason I succeeded in the way I did.
Hang up a QR code for guests.
Again, not pivots. In fact here's a recent sampling of criticisms:

May 15, Safety issues: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/chaos-and-tension-at-opena...

May 6, Tensions with MSFT: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/microsoft-and-openais-incr...

May 5: sama as grifter: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-sam-altman-playbook
Work on the next big thing is pretty useless advice though. If people knew what that was they wouldn’t be going for LLMs
Success has many fathers.
I don't see how a RAG that can cite sources from a document doesn't addresses this already (example [1])? Although I admit it's not a perfect solution yet...

[1] https://mattyyeung.github.io/deterministic-quoting
You can’t just slap 10% more without consequences. You now need to design a spacecraft to dissipate 10% more heat on all phases of the mission including when it’s well insulated sitting on a rocket ready for launch, for a mission that you want to last 20 years the initial heat load can be quite problematic.

And picking a specific end date means giving up on the long tail of overly successful missions. Spirt was sending good data from May 1, 2009 to March 22, 2010 while stuck and NASA kept trying to contact it until May 24, 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_(rover)
> then why do the billions of people subsisting on a few dollars a day around the world do not have society-wide problems with drug abuse and mental illness? Or are you implying that this causation only happens in developed countries?

As stupid as the idea that inequality in itself causes these problems is, it doesn't have trouble explaining why this would only happen in developed countries.

Historic levels of inequality, including urban "anyone can easily see that their downstairs neighbor is a hundred times richer than they are" inequality, were much greater than modern ones and involved a lot less social pathology; maybe look in that direction.

> What can you do to refute the idea that instead of drug abuse and mental illness being caused poverty, the same factors that predispose one to drug abuse and mental illness also predispose one to poverty?

Looking for a root cause seems unnecessary for this question; mental illness can easily just cause poverty directly.
They've built those in the lab decades ago [0]. I don't know what the large drawback is that prevents them from being more widely used.

In the thermophotovoltaic case they were looking at emitter temperatures between 1,200 and 1,350 K.

[0] https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1867178 ("Thermophotovoltaic Converter Performance for Radioisotope Power Systems", 2005)
> If you want to learn something, and have the motivation, then reading the textbook is easily good enough (for theoretical subjects) and for less theoretical subjects you barely need a textbook, just lots of practice.

This may be true for the average student, but I don't absorb content from written text very well at all. The single biggest reason why I got A's through college was being able to listen to video lectures (YouTube, Khan Academy, and occasionally the professors themselves) at 2x speed. I absorb and retain information that way extremely easily, but put me in front of a textbook and I can't focus on it.

YouTube may not have been an education revolution for you, but it's definitely changed my life.
This is the worst behaved bot I have ever seen, I suspect it is AI related. I recently decided to block all the AI crawlers - unlike search engines I get nothing from them.
Can large companies not be faulted for ignoring robots.txt? Seems like something GDPR could enforce for personal(ly owned) sites?
I recently learned to grasp harmonics from learning how saturation works, this provides a good visualization using a sine wave: https://youtu.be/NO2OZ3UTy2k?si=2gS4vETZKiYli4DY&t=183
> Countries including Germany and Sweden have ceased or dialed back EV subsidies in recent months, which has put a damper on Europe’s sales growth.

> Manufacturers including Volkswagen AG and Mercedes-Benz Group AG have meanwhile been rethinking product plans, with VW preparing more plug-in hybrids and Mercedes keeping combustion cars in production well into the 2030s.

Seems like max demand for EVs have been hit in Western Europe much like the US.

I'd be curious what is going on in the mind of an EV PM targeting the European market.

Edit: Was wrong. It grew 14% as bryanlarsen below mentioned

I'd recommend taking a look at the Industry data used in the article - https://www.acea.auto/pc-registrations/new-car-registrations...

Much of the growth seems to be driven numerically speaking by the Spanish and German markets.

In Spain, that growth seems to be mostly caused by Tesla [0]. MG and Volvo XC30 (Geely) make a showing, but the Model Y sold more in a month than both combined.

[0] - https://alternative-fuels-observatory.ec.europa.eu/general-i...
I didn't see it mentioned, but why not just use robots.txt? Does Bytespider ignore it?
Not intended as one. Merely something to indicate there is a market for it
> but fiscal policy prevented that.

That fiscal policy prevented collapse in 2008 by creating an unimaginably large asset bubble we're still living in.

> We're still feeling ripple effects from 2008, but things aren't nearly as bas as they could have been.

Those aren't ripple effects, it's the strain from an unsustainable "solution" to a crisis we still haven't really felt yet.
Is returning a 403 based on the user agent worth a blog post? Also, can't Bytespider just change their user agent to Byte-Spider? Or, just make their user agent a random string? It will be a forever arms race and require constant code updates to keep chasing that bot by user agent. You're probably better off whitelisting the known user agents and blocking everything else.

Also, does it really require a specific "gem"? This is HTTP request filtering, the router (as in the real router, like the metal box with network cables) can probably do it by itself these days.
Easy to Use Performance Modeling
Yeah...I suck at optimizing for dark mode and I think I'm about to get too much traffic from this post so I can't fix it right now. Probably a tomorrow task haha
Don't worry, AI and LLMs will save us.
Which is what it makes easier for you to do, it makes it easier for you to find a partner while searching, It's more like you search for a specific type of personality, characteristic, work type, body type and it scrapes the internet and looks for people that fit into those criteria and returns the twitter handles of those people to you
Can you explain further? Why would it not be free if it's running locally
A bit late here, but...
You are ignoring a lot of evidence. SJ stating they asked for permission twice. One of which was requested days before they released it. The Her tweet would seem to corroborate it's meant to sound like her. They then take it down (presumably since they aren't confident they'd win and don't want to be subjected to discovery.) Because of their tweet, even if the voice actors normal voice was identical to SJ, it's pretty clear they were trying to profit off her voice.
Similar for me, except that I always saw engine as specific type of motor. Hence "motorsports" was perfectly normal for gas burning vehicular racing.
> I recognize that there are social and economic advantages to allowing people some exclusive rights of access to some land. I recognize that there are advantages to allowing some people some limited rights of monopoly when they make improvements to land. But I do not recognize that a private entity can truly "own" land, completely and in perpetuity, as if they had created it from whole cloth.

What's the difference? Of course nobody truly "owns" land in the cosmic sense, for the reasons you stated; and of course most societies nevertheless permit the legal fiction of "land ownership", also for the reasons you stated (that generally it results in more favorable outcomes for society as a whole). So you're back to square one.

A Georgist land-value tax is the fairest solution to this problem, I think. Let society as a whole enjoy the fruits of that which no landowner caused to happen (the value of the land without any improvements), and let the landowner enjoy the fruits of his own improvements upon the land.
Not super sure so this felt like a faster way to plug it ASAP.
A really good composite shot is a practical effect IMO.
Anyone can communicate or do other stuff that will affect anyone, and they may make decisions based on that. Therefore, it is both of their fault. Whoever wrote the email message should not have written like that; but, it is the receiver to decide what (if anything) to do about it. The maintainer can choose to decomission the project; whether or not that is the best thing to do is a different question (although, considering what the first paragraph of the README.md file says, there are some reasons that they might not want to work on this project, especially if all it results is email messages like that one).
> Seems like max demand for EVs have been hit in Western Europe much like the US.

EV sales are up 14%, according to the article.
I think with llvm, the ability exists for much less experienced folks to create languages.

We now have a ton of “not-major” languages. It seems that we get at least five, mentioned here, every week.
So what are you able to do with C that you can’t do in Rust? Somethings are more difficult to pull off, but everything possible in C is possible in Rust. Worst comes to worst you can always drop into unsafe Rust

This “sometimes you need a knife" argument just doesn’t make sense. You can have the power and the safety. Stop cutting off your fingers.
Developers does not care about poisoning attacks in LLM code assistants
Same! Any chance you can share a list of the bots you're blocking so I can add them too?
Given that Sal has never turned Khan Academy into a commercial product -- despite its resounding success and popularity, and the large amount of $$$ he could have made -- has proven he's not in this for the money. So I expect the AI version to also be free or at least have a free version for parents (and schools who can't afford it).
even htop needs sudo to run properly
> Look at it from an IT security perspective: it's great that most users are acting in good faith and are not trying to exploit your system, but you still need to plan for the worst and make sure your system can survive hostile encounters.

I think this is exactly the opposite of the right perspective for law and ethics. Society runs on trust, the more trust the better. ITSec runs best on zero trust. Applying the latter to the former lead to absurdities like "code is law" "smart" contracts.
I am really not following the point the author is trying to make. Fury Road clearly uses practical effects and real actors/sets throughout.

Yes they did a bunch of image composition and post-processing, but that doesn't change the point of practical effects. The actor was directing real people doing real stunts, and was finding ways of putting things into film. They aren't mutually exclusive.

Compare it to the average Marvel sequence now where glassy, unconvincing scenes are computer generated from scratch and it's night and day. It doesn't matter that both spent time on a computer when one actually starts with something real.

It would be like saying Who Framed Roger Rabbit didn't have practical effects because it was a cartoon.