skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was born 11 years after the Moon landing. Theoretically, if I lived to be 120, I might see the data from this Proxima swarm fly-by. (Assuming a 2076 launch, twenty years travel time at 0.2c, and four years for the information return trip.)

I know it’s extremely unlikely this program ever gets deployed. It’s also very unlikely that I could last that long, barring some miracle medical breakthrough. It’s still an inspiring thought that humankind might get from its moon to the nearest star almost in one lifetime.

Obviously there’s nothing on Proxima, just like there’s nothing on the Moon. But that’s not the point. Everything of value is here on Earth, in the people we share it with. But we need joint ambitions and dreams. They don’t have to make sense to be worth dreaming about. It’s the opposite: the sense that quarterly reports and performance reviews are made of is the enemy of dreams.
How is that different than saying the function of the lungs, kidneys and heart can't be reduced to matter interactions? How is the brain special?
This article makes a primary complaint of “why isn’t women’s birth control as symptom-free?”.

The difference in difficulty between women’s and men’s reproductive control is like the difference between (respectively) censoring a newspaper factory and censoring a news stand.

The factory has so many different moving parts and a high complexity, which provides many opportunities for intervention. It’s big, so it’s easy to find and work with, but censoring a specific article without destroying the factory’s ability to produce newspapers requires a very targeted approach that does not work with every factory, can cause undesirable knock-down effects elsewhere in the factory, and may even cause damage to one where in another it works perfectly. With that said, the factory’s complexity does make it easier to build solutions for, as there are many, many options available to censor a factory, and with the vast majority of factories you could even stack multiple solutions for extreme effectiveness.

The NYC-style sidewalk news stand, on the other hand, is very simple. It has few parts, with relatively low complexity, which provides only a handful of options for intervention. While this does make solutions much simpler, anything more than the sharpie approach for censoring individual newspapers - which is laborious and error-prone and has very low efficiency - tends to involve a nuclear approach that destroys any functional ability in the first place. As such, creating a reversible censorship solution that can be mass-applied for high effectiveness without permanently destroying publication ability has been fiendishly difficult to find.
> What is this obsession with making computers human-like?

Replacement of human labor on the cheap, the most capital intensive part of many businesses. Alternatively as a productivity multiplier of human labor.
It's 128k double buffer for the 102 colour mode. For 48k it's standard palette dithering. "video" players are available as loaders for 48k and 128k.
IOW you are hardly conscious at all of what the book is about.
The US had slavery over a hundred and fifty years ago, at a time when it was common practice. Over 600k men died fighting to end slavery. When China has such an uprising over its slavery, then you can lecture us about it. Ok?

As for the other stuff you mention, it is well-known that there are sketchy things done by people in power in virtually every country. So in some sense, there are no good guys. But to say China is on par with the US on human rights is ridiculous on the face of it. People are silenced constantly in China over mundane stuff that makes the government look bad. If you won't submit to thug tactics, they will put you in prison.

There are like a million people working to censor the Chinese internet. Just yesterday I heard about a bus crash in China involving the death of a little girl, and the government was threatening the parents and witnesses, and stealing flowers from the site of the accident. If you want to live under that kind of oppression, go move to China. I think you're probably a Chinese propaganda agent but I say it anyway.
That’s exactly it.

Nothing really improves my life in this fad. The promises are not matching with reality and the sacrifices made everywhere else (quality, reliability, security) is where we are paying.
Talos Principle! What a gem - loved the setting and story. Still think of it from time to time. Amazing - play it if you have not already.
Yes, but that boils down to changing the terms of your loan in your favor.

You probably should ask yourself: How much of a premium on your mortgage would you have paid to have the option to pay it off at market rates if rates happen to go up.

A similar example: in the US, typically loans have no prepayment penalty, but in practice you are paying for that option. I'm theory you could get a lower rate if you agreed to a high fee if you prepay.

I think it ends up not being worth it for lenders to give you so many options when picking your loan terms, simply because lots of people won't understand the subtitles/there's not much demand for those products.
They’re sort of doing that already - MS says an “AI PC” must have a Copilot button. Not a generic AI button that can be mapped to competitors as well, but a Copilot specific button.
High fat foods aren't necessarily junk foods, and presumably your intake of chips is moderate/low. They are not satiating and calorie dense, but of course drinks are the worst for that, they offer nearly 0 satiety for the price of calories. Cheese is relatively satiating, milk protein and animal proteins are in general.
Gurman: No New Mac Studio and Mac Pro Until Mid-2025
Thank you! Using a pure functional programming language in a game project has been suprisingly easy. I find an event driven, completely asynchoronus architecture well suited for a simulation game such as Liikennematto. Some events are big (a road tile was placed - this will update the tilemap as well as the road network graph), and some are small (UI events). Everything boils down to how an event will transform the game state.

Though many games have been built with Elm, I've had to implement lots of "game engine" code myself. For example, the collision system, physics (acceleration etc.), and path finding are custom code. It's worth mentioning that this is my fist gamedev project, and I've had to read up a quite a bit on the topic. Still the difficult was not in Elm itself, but in math and data structures, as it would be on any language.

Elm's lack of runtime exceptions and mutable state makes any game quite robust. Most of the bugs in Liikennematto have been of omissions (forgot to update something) and in math formulas. 3rd party Elm libraries are often excellent with great docs and have helped along the way.

Lastly Elm is quite performant (pure functions can be inlined and easily optimized) and I can create a single .js file that contains the game code, UI and the assets (which are still SVG in Elm). The whole game is still about 1 megabyte minimized! I think that's amazing, despite not shipping the runtime enviroment (the browser).
well the brain is special because it gives rise to consciousness. lungs, kidneys and heart don't
The "AI" isn't even good. Please don't force integrate more bad features. I don't need an unavoidable assistant that hallucinates, ignores me, and otherwise can't follow instructions.

How about first making a serious adult home OS in 2024 that isn't a data mining farm, security nightmare, and enthusiastic surveillance portal. What we now have is clownish outside of MacOS, server OSs, or a lot of finagling. The lack of true options at this late date is unreal.
As though its development hasn't been influenced by centuries of Western violence and oppression?
Letting dumb people with biases pick dumb schools is a recipe for a dumb autocracy.
>Science is not conducted through public debate. Full stop. There's a reason why it's peer review, and not talk show host review.

You're only saying that because you happen to disagree with what is being said. Full stop.
Spot on.

Reminds me of a ChatGPT test I did this morning. Gave the bot a tiny Python program for comment. Bot told me it had two faults giving incorrect output. I asked for the output and it gave me output totally at odds with python.exe's (as-designed) output. A fabrication.

I told it the output was bogus and it agreed and apologised but insisted the program was faulty. When I asked for evidence, I got a faulty walkthrough of the program and again bogus output. Repeat, repeat, repeat... with ever more elaborate bogus examples, way past the point any intelligent being would have felt shame and quit.
Respectfully: to the extent that I can understand what you're trying to say, you don't seem to know what you're talking about. Stop trying so hard to bash the whole industry for making tradeoffs you don't agree with, and put a little more effort into understanding how these things actually work.
The kickstand works great on your lap. I understand why you'd be concerned but there are zero issues with it (speaking as an owner of at least 3 successively more powerful surfaces with kickstands)
Yeah I tried copilot and it actually tried to gaslight me into changing the subject. If I want that I would speak to humans.

Incidentally I am 100% macOS now. Not because it’s good but because it’s least shit.
This is also pretty simplistic. All the progress that's made on a variety of fronts implies that we don't have loads of static lockin businesses that bribe bureaucrats.
Personal life is a playground for solving optimization problems
Microsoft Azure Bing Copilot Enterprise Premium Plus Live 2.0*
Why would the cost of housing go to zero?
This is really polished. It's one thing to make cars drive around a city, but really cool to also make them go into and exit parking.

I've done some basic game dev in Elm and was surprised how nice it was. In one game, I had melee fighters moving around a map fighting each other. Much later I came back to add a projectile class.

Having not touched the game code in months, adding an archer was a matter of adding an `Archer` model (with archer specific state) to an enum and then following the errors until I'd handled the archer at every switch site in the code. It blew my mind that I had a working archer system without even running the code once and without having to reload the whole code base into my head.
Bel, not Bell.
Disagree. My walks with my dog are about her, not about my wandering mind
No, two artists are the same.

As an artist, if I’m not constantly pushing the boundaries of how I’m expressing myself via media then I’m just telling the audience the same thing over and over. Im not actually changing as an artist, I’m simply producing the thing regularly that is expected of me.

This is 99% of professional art you find your style and then you do that over and over for money so that you can survive in a way that you like.

If you did this with a Thomas Kincaid, it would be trivially easy because Thomas Kincaid has built his entire portfolio around a very specific type of art that does a very, very specific type of thing.

Similar for Kahinde Wiley

On the flipside you’re not going to be able to reproduce something from Duchamp or Picasso - their styles changed because they as individuals in the world changed, and they had to change their approach in demonstrating how they interact with the world.

I totally can understand the perspective from professional artists who have developed a style and capability to produce something that they feel comfortable with and live on that

we could sit here and debate about the aim of Art or otherwise, but the reality is, if the core of what you do is reproducible because you have focused on commoditizing your medium or expression type (such that it is so recognizable immediately by any human - eg Kincaid) Then you should not be surprised if your limited vocabulary is fairly easy to replace

The art masters cannot be replaced, you cannot predict what they’re going to do next because they change the rules entirely. This is how we know a great artist from a mediocre artist.
What about Apple's practices make the Librem less usable? They don't forbid developers selling versions of their apps on other platforms. They don't require exclusivity contracts with carriers or retailers. They don't control content platforms choices of DRM schemes. How is it that one company, that had never before produced a cell phone, in 2007 managed to make such a complete shakeup of the industry that they are now the single largest player in the industry? How did this company, known for its "my way or the highway" product design and its very consistent stance on locking down the phone OS become the leader in the space? Why has open not won? Why haven't Spotify, Epic and all the various people upset about Apple's policies not poured resources into a unified open phone platform that allows them to have the freedoms they demand and the quality the consumers expect?

If we lived in a world that was like the 90's computers era, where Apple was dominating the software front and by extension the hardware front. If people only ever developed for iOS, and most never bothered with even a cursory port to android; then maybe it would be reasonable to say that Apple's business practices make Librem or even Android unappealing to consumers and anti-competetive in the market.

But the evidence just doesn't seem to support that. Most developers are clearly willing to write two versions of their apps. Certainly the major vendors are. Apple doesn't sell their OS for any other hardware except their own, and there are multiple other hardware vendors, so it's not a case of "have to bundle an iOS license with every phone regardless of the OS shipped".

The conclusion has to be that there's something specific about Apple's combination of hardware and software that makes it compelling despite the lack of open access. So the question then becomes what is it that Apple is offering that open platforms can't or won't offer?
Presumably to fuel things we could not conceive of given our relatively pedestrian in comparison energy needs. But, there is no free lunch. Work takes energy away from the system even with no heat loss by virtue of doing something with that work using energy, as we know from our most basic physics courses that assume a frictionless spherical cow with no heat loss.
Don't worry, you don't have to apologise. Stories often get posted again. Don't let it put you off.
They should charge by vehicle weight as well as miles driven as this has an impact on the amount of wear to roads. Heavier vehicles also produce more waste from tire wear.

It would be interesting to see what effects all this would have on other policies though, as removing gas taxes could encourage more driving or more incentive to purchase an ICE car. Taxes based on weight might discourage EVs, but could also discourage large trucks which might otherwise increase if the gas tax was removed. All very interesting.
Dedicated nvidia GPUs in laptops have been a death sentence for decades. It used to be lead-free solder having poor fatigue properties combined with the GPU going through a lot of hot/cold cycles, probably combined with laptop cooling (with dust in the fins).

Annoyingly the market for "very fast CPU with lots of ram and no GPU" seems to be too small to sell to, even before the current AI everywhere movement. Right now there are 16 core ryzen chips out there (e.g. the 7945HX) but I can't find a laptop with one that doesn't also have an nvidia chip burning a hole through the chassis.

(the above probably holds for dedicated gpus by other vendors, though I can't remember ever seeing one in real life)
Related: "Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model" [0].

It's astonishingly simple to train both LoRAs and Embeddings nowadays -- if you combine it with tech like ControlNet, you can more or less have direct control over the illustration as well (see this example I converted to Hollie Megert's style with barely any effort [1] using the model from [0]) -- but FWIW I was playing with the WhatsApp AI stickers recently and human-made illustrations still have a "je ne sais quoi" that sets them apart, vaguely reminiscent of "realistic" animation vs. "squash and stretch". I would not be worried as an artist*, but I would be worried if I am making assets for corporations in Corporate Memphis [2].

[0] https://waxy.org/2022/11/invasive-diffusion-how-one-unwillin...

[1] https://i.imgur.com/ZwtKug5.jpeg

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis

* In fact, I think I'd be excited, it can be a great tool, and people who lack artistic sensibility might find it almost as hard to use as to make art themselves. However, I do think there needs to be some kind of protection from having your 'style' commoditized without consent, using unauthorized images of your own art.
I was on the Analogue Pocket waiting list and also the Framework computer waiting list. Still on both actually, though I've had the chance to purchase it (well at least the Pocket) and have not yet.
Yes. I literally said that I teach Math. So perfect shapes and multiple colors do come in handy.

And no, I’m sure my students would not like me writing faster.
I agree! These versions are trivial curiosities compared to the originals.
I was unable to find the source code, so it is important to be careful. In my case it sounds like a faith jump that I don't have (my apologies to the developers).

In any case, this is a feature that manufacturers should provide. I wonder how it could be obtained.
My cat sees your notches and raises a paw.
Oh yeah, I had just heard about Talos Linux the other day in this blog post[0], and it seems super interesting. If I was all-in on Kubernetes, I'd probably consider it strongly. Unfortunately, though, there's other stuff that I want to run on the machines outside of the k8s cluster (like the BIND server I mentioned in the post).

[0] https://xeiaso.net/blog/2024/homelab-v2/
You'd think they'd learned their lessons with clippy, but I guess not.
Makes perfect sense. And the parents suggestions for books is what I needed. Fun summer project. Learn svc and Mvc together with my Rising junior. What can go wrong.
Weird thing to joke about.
I am hopeful that advances in brain-computer interfaces will start to provide a partial answer to the question of "what's there" and why it's there. It seems to me the ability to controllably augment one's own consciousness with precision will tremendously clarify the necessary ingredients for consciousness.
Probably because they sell them as luxury addons.

https://fryxgames.se/product/tm-dual-layer-player-boards-5-p...
Look at american shipbuilding in 1938 and compare it to 1944 and understand looking at peacetime warmaking capacity makes zero sense.
Oral immunotherapy is indeed dangerous. Eosinophilic esophagitis is real. Anaphylaxis is common. It's a long, tedious road, with daily dosing for years, and in many people the treatment ends in failure rendering the effort wasted.

Although many do achieve remission, there is no guarantee that the allergy is gone for good. The immunity obtained by immunotherapy is not necessarily the same as natural immunity. It may not be complete and it may not be long lasting. The immune system has a long, long memory and we do not have any reliable tests to determine if anyone's immunity is permanent. For that reason allergists recommend continuing dosing indefinitely to maintain immunity, and continuing to carry an epi-pen. For the rest of your life. You will get sick of peanut butter.

All that said, we are doing sublingual immunotherapy for our son. But I am hoping that within his lifetime new treatments are developed that will free him from allergies completely.

Precise control of the immune system would be the holy grail of medicine IMO. Dysfunctions of the immune system are at the root of so many diseases, not just allergies. If the immune system could be easily trained to ignore or attack arbitrary targets at will it could likely cure almost any infection or cancer. And I bet it could be useful in treating the diseases of aging as well.
Exploring Stock Correlations in Postgres
I thought that was the point of windows, since 7ish and very obviously since 10? It exists to echo interesting information about the users back to microsoft who then profit from that. I hear the security model is getting better of late, perhaps because the information is less valuable if it's available outside of microsoft.

Or if you're less cynical, stream information back to microsoft so they can improve the product in other ways.
Ask HN: Fav FFmpeg hacks/tricks/tips?
Inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40407526 (Timelapse with FFMPEG) and using it for another solution the other day.
> When one cell is read in the vertical stack, the interferences produced by the traces in the area increases the cells that need to be rewritten, what consumes the life of the device, by design.

You should try being honest about the magnitude of this effect. It takes thousands of read operations at a minimum to cause a read disturb that can be fixed with one write. What you're complaining about is the NAND equivalent of DRAM rowhammer. It's not a serious problem in practice.
I wish the Internet Archive would split itself into two entities: one that simply archives web sites, and the other that does everything else (e.g., edgy IP testing of ebooks and video games). That way if the "other" entity gets sued into oblivion, the web sites remain. I think what the former is doing is a critical service for humankind, and I do donate, but I worry about their future.
My argument is we have not outsourced bombs and sensitive military technology building to china. It is mostly the stuff we can stand to tighten belt on. Even if there is some demand for things like chinese medicine or whatever, its a market effect and not because only china is capable of making this medicine like how only US defense industry can make some of its secretive military tooling.
Eh, I think that’s a slight exaggeration. In Ireland you can get a 3.8% 30 year fix which allowed overpayment of up to 10% of balance/year, and redemption penalties capped at 2% of balance. This is, in practice, cheaper than virtually any US mortgage today, unless you’re only planning to keep the mortgage a few months.

Granted, that’s kind a _weird_ product; I think only one lender provides it, and the market norm is definitely for fixes in the 5 year range (often with redemption penalties waived if you’re moving); after 5 years, you either transition to a variable, move lender, or re-fix. This seems to be more of a market norm/preference thing, though; Avant, the lender who does the 30 year one, appears to be able to make it work economically.

One oddity in the Irish market that maybe makes this easier is that mortgage lenders are only allowed charge, essentially, at most the cost to _them_ of breaking a fix as an early redemption fee. In practice, this is usually not all that high and may be zero. I’m not sure how many other countries have this rule.
Voice Actors Sue Company Whose AI Sounds Like Them
It would be nice to train a neural network to adapt images in a similar way to how ZX artists did it - fitting objects to the boundaries of characters, avoiding attribute clashing and getting pure colors.
The problem with consciousness is that it’s both a vague term that’s been difficult to define and it has social roots that are not really universal.

The debate reminds me of a sequence in Werner Herzog’s 1972 documentary ‘The Flying Doctors of East Africa’ where multiple people are asked to point at a picture of an eye. Some have difficulty with the task. Even though it’s not scientific it makes you realize how much of what we see and recognize is a learned behavior through year of social training rather than an innate ability.

Here’s the scene (starts at 40min it’s in German but you can auto translate subtitles): https://youtu.be/MZ3MMEe3Qmk?si=i0ydc3DN3aohnrIO