skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My husband is a normal layperson who treats his computer like an appliance. It's just there to do word processing and web browsing. He's been asking me to buy him a new laptop and specifically wants Windows on it.

I've been struggling for weeks trying to explain to him why Windows is bad and why I don't want to setup and manage his spyware machine.

I've convinced him to at least try a few Linux distros to see what he's comfortable with, but he either doesn't understand why Windows is bad or just doesn't care.

For now I'm avoiding purchasing the new machine, and he's begrudgingly using my manjaro laptop. I really don't know what to do about it. The most solid argument I've got so far is that I can't help him with any of the inevitable windows 11 issues because I just don't use windows anymore.
A 10% option pool, set aside at the beginning, should help resolve this, but employees also need to be educated that dilution is just part of life in a startup.
I forgot to mention another:

(4) Ghosting candidates seems common now. I'd never experienced it before now.
This has been a consistent problem for me as well; Nix is way too concerned about purity. I think it comes from a desire to make package installation fast by using prebuilt binaries. I personally could give or take the prebuilt binary concept; nice to have but I'm willing to pay the time cost to be able to run things on non-NixOS systems.
Nabokov's family was trilingual and he could read and write English before he could Russian. It wasn't really a second language to him.
Yea I get that it's no BT/Wifi so probably USB. But I don't get why USB would require a mac. I personally like the hardware but don't care about the rebase or whatever software addons he strapped to it. If I just plugged in a USB cord and used any OS to copy off the photos, it would make sense. This is basically the same usage as a thumbdrive or point-and-click camera from early 2000s and shouldn't be limited to a particular OS.... if I'm understanding it correctly
They aren't suddenly becoming affordable. They have been gradually becoming affordable over the last decade due to lower supply chain costs and higher demand.
> You don't make money by paying people twice as much interest as everyone else.

The national average is only 0.46%, according to https://www.marketwatch.com/guides/savings/average-savings-a...

I checked many other sources, all reporting in the 0.45-0.6% range.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of banks that offer 5% or more. So merely being twice the average is actually still pretty low.
Isn’t taking risks just a standard part of technological innovation?
Mathematics is sort of strange in this regard in that there's lots of work already done that assumes RH, so many of the consequences of the theorem itself are already worked out. And RH seems to be true on extensive numerical searches(no counterexamples found). So the theorem being true wouldn't be earth-shattering in and of itself.

It's more about the method used to prove the theorem, which might involve novel mathematics. And probably will in this case considering how long it's taking to prove RH. Since this method hasn't been found yet, it's hard to say what the consequences of it might be.

At least that's my layman's understand of it.
MS Copilot Recall Redefined My Security Practices Rule of Thumb
Their language is so difficult that I don't understand how they can function as a nation let alone be a serious competitor for the first place scientifically. Does the language work as an intellectual practice?
> Obvious limitations is that you can't use the fields for sorting in queries (ORDER BY), and depending if deterministic encryption is not enabled, you can't use it in filters (WHERE) either. Same applies for any T-SQL logic on the data fields - because the encrypted blob is opaque to SQL Server - it is decrypted client-side. There is no workaround, except for pulling the data locally and sorting client-side.

This is a reasonable limitation when you're aware of the attacks on Order Revealing Encryption: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2019/02/11/attack-o...
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2595/
You don't need to prove you like something.
Its a personal taste not an objective fact.

Love or hate cybertruck, but don't go around and criticize people who like the look
You can download official ISOs of all of the Windows versions for free directly from Microsoft's servers. Then you just need to activate it and there are plenty of methods to do that without risk of malware. Microsoft seems to care about this so little that one of the most starred repositories in github(MAS) has provided easy one click activation solution for years at this point.
+1 to this. Dealt with the same in consumer PC repair.
"Acting like this invalidates the existence of the whole browser is what makes no sense to me."

They market themself as standing for the open and free web and digital rights and privacy and what not. And then have the browser spying on every user by default with integrated ads.

So sure, you and me deactivate it, but a common person who just fell for the marketing and who does not even know what "telemetry" is, will have it enabled. The only reason I use their browser is, because there is no alternative - yet.
The old doctrine was that CO2 was a proxy for air quality, and the (somewhat overblown title) is about seeing CO2 additionally as having a causal effect.

For example, under the "proxy" model, if you're worried about infection risk it's sufficient to filter the air, but under the new model filtering will work less well than you'd expect because the viruses you miss will stay active longer.
There is Luxembourgish, which is basically the local dialect codified as one of the official languages of Luxembourg. It's otherwise perfectly understandable for people from adjacent parts of Belgium and Germany. But I guess the locals would see that it really is almost the same.

Similarly to Chinese, Germans see themselves as mostly the same culture. Standarddeutsch is pretty much a fusion between the different varieties and has evolved along with them for a long time; differently from 普通話, which is much younger and the standardized form of a northern variety of Chinese. Germans also really cling to their dialects, and Switzerland and Austria both use slightly different versions of Standarddeutsch.

The opposite example are the varieties of Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin, which are quite inter-intelligible, but which are considered as different languages by their speakers.
very strange that "joy" is not a tangible benefit to you.
If they are selling something that everyone wants and there aren't enough GPUs to around, how else do you suggest allocating those GPUs to the public except by increasing the price?
Why is it that most things you render are far away rather than close?

Because most things are far away rather than close...?
Social media desperately needs a non-advertising and non-subscription business model.

Relying on a billionaire to subsidize losses out of the goodness of his heart because he believes in the importance of a free and open virtual public square is not a sustainable business model. Nor is relying on advertisers who demand ever more intrusive ads and ever more censorship of opinions they dislike. Nor is relying on subscriptions because a platform that excludes people who don't pay isn't useful. So maybe it is a public good that needs to be run by either the government or a charity that rich people fund to get out of paying taxes?

Regardless, a neutral social media platform where people can speak to the general public and say what they believe without any favoritism on the part of the platform towards any viewpoint is as essential for maintaining democracy in the 21st century as the free press was in the 18th and 19th centuries and as the Fairness Doctrine for television and radio was in the 20th century. Society has to find a way to make that happen in a manner that can be sustained permanently.
this is hacker news

makes sense to me
Researchers are people too and incentivized to come to conclusions which results in continuing their employment
Lmao. As if chatbots are going to destroy the world. Give me a break. LLMs, while having some cool uses, are clearly just the next in line of a never ending tech hype scam cycle. Honestly I'm kind of dreading what's coming next because each iteration just gets more insufferable.
I've never easily been to read warc files.
> So if the list of primes is 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc, you could have weights of 5, 2*5, 3*5, 5*5, 7*5, 11*5, etc. for 5, 10, 15, 25, 35, 55, etc.

Fixed the formatting for you. You need to put a \ before * symbols to have them reliably render in HN
Remember, "the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extinction" is just the very end of the spectrum of risks they're flagging. There are still other very serious risks experts are calling out. I hate for the less controversial risks to get drowned out by arguments over the most controversial ones.
Maybe "they can replace the disk firmware during transport while the driver was peeing" kind of attackers?
Show HN: Research paper behind the AI climbing coach
Hi everyone. I've published the project page and paper for the AI climbing coach from a while back. Please check it out!

Project page: https://virtual-avatar-generation.github.io/

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.01056
Nike's data engineering is very bad. It's hundreds of temporary contractors, mostly offshore, all with 6-18 month tenures, and everyone reinvents their own square wheel. Thousand upon thousands of abandoned confluence pages of documentation. The most convoluted SQL and data architecture you'll ever find. Getting answers to simple questions like "How many shoes did we sell in-store vs ecommerce last week?" is a nearly impossible task.
oh - this is new to me.. great to see it
Some of the AI researchers are probably thinking about future systems only somewhat related to today's systems.
Ask HN: Is it worth to build custom GPT for WordPress theme files?
My WordPress theme sometimes doesn't work as expected. For example, the simple custom Javascript (which works fine in 3 files environment on my local laptop and renders a tooltip with text on cursor hover) doesn't work in the theme's environment.
Is it worth the time to feed the theme files to a custom GPT and expect it to provide minimally congruent answers in human language as well as in code about my WordPress theme?

If yes, then should I pre-train this GPT on a bunch of WordPress themes (I have currently the files of ~5 WP themes) or should I use some type of "zero-shot" training?

(seems like a not bad product idea, but may be not?)
Periodic reminder: at the moment, governments worldwide are literally developing killer robots which can’t disobey their orders. Your fears are comically misplaced.
> currently we have 480ppm

Where are you measuring 480? [0] says the recent global average is 419.3.

[0] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
Your quibble with the title is addressed by reading 3-4 paragraphs into the long story.

This sort of aggressive argument obscures the meaning and intent of the actual article in favor of some kind of editorial flavoring issue.

This behavior is warranted at times but here it just argumentative for no purpose.
Virtual avatar generation models can act as world navigators in complex environments. This is a potential new direction for general purpose robotics as well.
"Your margin is my opportunity"

A ton of companies are dumping R&D into designing their own chips with seeming success. Nvidia will be in tough company quite soon, but for now demand greatly outstrips supply.
I feel stupid asking this, but isn't part of the point of a patent that you have to put the patent out there so that people can verify whether or not something has already been patented (and see other pertinent information such as when it expires and who owns the patent)? This seems almost like it would be done with the intention of making people accidentally infringe on patents so that they can be sued?

Edit: After re-reading the article, I see now (despite the odd choice of words to title it), this focuses on filings in patent COURT cases, not the patent filings themselves
Hi there, I see that the only solutions engineer role available is based in France/EU. Is there a US based solutions engineer role?
PBS is the Proxmox Backup Server, basically it does differential backups of your VMs, integrity checks, and allows you to back up to multiple different servers. Proxmox does have a basic backup system that can save the VM images to disk though but I typically recommend the full PBS if you're building a cluster.

One interesting thing you can do is run PBS as a giant VM and back up or migrate the whole thing, just like you can run a small NAS as a VM as well.
The ideology of this piece is overwhelming.

> ‘Prehistory’, like so many categories that we use to frame the past, is not only a convenient label, but a deeply problematic inheritance.

I'm all for learning everything we can from unwritten sources. The problem is that they're unwritten. Tools, coins, ruins ... all those survive and can be analyzed. But what you notice from the analyses of those is: they're pretty tenuous. Writers make inferences that are, well, open to question, but it's all they can do.

As for "oral cultures" : yes, absolutely, if they survive. But AFAIK no Native American culture has any legend on how they came over from Siberia, nor do Australian aborigines "remember" how they migrated from Asia and Indonesia. Yet we know that they did.
To save 4 seconds when installing dependencies?
The technology is indeed powerful; it's pretty obvious you can make military grade or better propaganda pretty easily with this technology and disseminate it more easily. Let's just classify that as "misinformation" generally, which could also be applied to ideas of teenagers making deepfakes of classmates, etc. So misinformation is a big risk, and already affecting society. It is also clearly useful to whomever is creating the content for whatever their means or ends may be.

There are definitely use-cases being worked out for this technology, and the people who are developing these are using this technology on a daily basis (or creating it); their proximity to the technology and gain in understanding of it probably is helping them realize how this could be truly subversive and an existential threat.
That's pretty much the way to go. Keep the ISP modem, but connect it to your own router/firewall and connect your devices to your hardware and not the ISP modem.
One distinctive feature of the Shire, is that it was surrounded by mostly empty space. A combination of emigration (the Elves), war (Arnor and later Arthedain vs. Angmar), and plague, had opened up a lot of open space. This is not just how the Hobbits got the Shire in the first place (the King of Arthedain had spare land to grant them), it also allowed them to expand when their population needed to. Buckland was described by JRRT as a "colony" of the Shire, and after the LotR they expanded westward again, creating the Westmarch (hence "the Red Book of Westmarch", which LotR was supposedly translated from).

What the Hobbits would have done if they had been in a place without room to expand, is interesting to debate, but in the actual Third Age they could have lots of kids, and just expand into more good farmland when they needed to, because emigration, war, and plague had cleared the areas around them.
I've been disabling HT for security reasons on all my machines ever since the first vulnerabilities appeared, with no discernible negative impact on daily usage.
It allows for more interactive forms, but also frequently makes cause/effect confusing. e.g. things like autofill or tabbing or sometimes just typing quickly can cause forms to break because they think you have not filled out a field, and it's doing something stupid to make it so you can't fill out the next field, so you end up having to delete and retype text to get it to pick it up.
$40K, "affordable," shows what a bubble NYTimes is living in.

Let's remember that the median income in the US is $37,585. Half of people make less. Don't spend more than you make in a year on a new vehicle.
He's his own person. You want to help him avoid future headaches and protect his privacy but ultimately, he is his own person who should be able to make his own choices. Understandably this is difficult for you since you are being asked to buy the new laptop and have valid reasons for not wanting to purchase one with Windows but none of that changes the fact that he is his own person with his own thoughts. You may feel complicit in any trouble his choice brings him since you're involved in the purchasing process but that's on him, not you, if it ends poorly.
AMD had a chance, they dropped the ball and still won't fix their ways (on devexp, drivers, etc). I think Nvidia deserves the success.
Per usual, it's somewhere in the middle. I find LLMs to be very useful for coding and solving quick tasks, but I don't think it's going to turn into skynet or make humans worthless.

There's a lot of momentum (driven by incentivization) around sensationalizing and storyboarding emerging technology into the "to the moon" and "neo Luddite" camps, and there's far too many people that fall into that uncritically.

My guess based on historical precedent of most emerging tech is that ten years from now AI (my preferred name is machine learning) will settle in as a useful tool for certain tasks, and we will be shrugging about the implications of it.
I'm a little tired of it and I don't even work there; but imagine working at a place where every week there seems to be a new convtroversial public letter...
IIRC you need ~300 plants to offset every one human in a house
Couldn't you just make your own macros?

#define GtkHBox(x) GtkBox(x, GTK_ORIENTATION_HORIZONTAL)
#define GtkVBox(x) GtkBox(x, GTK_ORIENTATION_VERTICAL)

I thought the change to a standard GtkBox made sense given the way the system was built. This made both kinds of boxes the same class, avoiding an unnecessary layer of inheritance.
Raspberry Pi AI Kit
That's a tough situation.

Marriage is one of those relationships where hard-line stances (on either side) can be really damaging.
Guess I'll go confirm my test of "deletable" apps.
So is mitigating them
> The first question to answer when data is being encrypted is, “How are the keys being managed?” This is a very deep rabbit hole of complexity, but one good answer for a centralized service is, “Cloud-based key management service with audit logging”; i.e. AWS KMS, Google CloudKMS, etc.

This is of course the beef. What's the best practice in managing user data keys so that data is available only when there's an authenticated user around? There are ways to derive keys from the secret exchange involved in user authentication.
This is a great way to explain it

But, who/what wants to prevent everything from happening at once?

Interestingly, it seems like that might be the missing piece

Most mainstream physical models try to do away with us. To explain the world as if we weren’t in it. How things “really are”. But it’s an impossible thing to answer, because everything is mediated through our own human experience

Hence, it might be better to include our role as observers/interpreters in the models
Instagram used to be great to avoid all of the BS posts and ads from FB. Now it’s just an endless scroll or reels and I don’t even see anything from the real people I’m friends with.
Thought I hear this "call" year after year -- when HAS a tech company's employees unionized?

It seems hard to recall. Though it would be a great way to alter the power dynamic with management.
I'm not sure if that post is going to do the pro-privacy crowd any favors...

> Let's call it what it really is, Gates power control issues because he wants to rule the entire world!
> It sounds like Epoch Times found a platform where such fraudsters were offloading their phony unemployment debit cards at a discount [...] and tried to flip them around as legitimate donations and subscription revenue for an easy profit.

Just to be clear, since the framing here doesn't make it clear if you understand: that is textbook money laundering. "I didn't know where the money on these cards came from I was just buying them as a product" is not remotely a defense. AML/KYC laws apply to all financial transactions, not just to banks, and yes, "buying millions of dollars of pre-paid debit cards for real money" is quite clealy a "financial" transaction.
If people would stop fluttering from one walled garden to the next, and embrace an open Web, they wouldn't have these problems.

It's not entirely the users' fault, but people need to learn to be smart consumers -- er, participants -- because many business leaders and techies have conflicts of interest wrt an open Web.
Ethics aside, what is characterful about saying no to money? Should I say no to my salary for character reasons?
> Pre-industrial CO2 levels were at 280ppm, currently we have 480ppm, rising & accelerating. Give it three or four decades and ventilation won't help anymore

Just to add a little context, here's a table from https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/chemical/carbondioxide.htm

400 ppm: average outdoor air level.

400–1,000 ppm: typical level found in occupied spaces with good air exchange.

1,000–2,000 ppm: level associated with complaints of drowsiness and poor air.

2,000–5,000 ppm: level associated with headaches, sleepiness, and stagnant, stale, stuffy air. Poor concentration, loss of attention, increased heart rate and slight nausea may also be present.

5,000 ppm: this indicates unusual air conditions where high levels of other gases could also be present. Toxicity or oxygen deprivation could occur. This is the permissible exposure limit for daily workplace exposures.

40,000 ppm: this level is immediately harmful due to oxygen deprivation.
Bringing in external air (and filtering it, if it's polluted) will be way cheaper than scrubbing CO2 at current levels.
Part of me questions the ethics of taking money as an employee to build something dangerous, and at the same time seeking protections to speak about it. If truly concerned why still work there?
Trey Hunner has created a ton of useful and interesting Python articles. Although I've been programming in it for 20+ years, I always learn new things. He's a national treasure.

Pythonmorsels is a great subscribe.
Yes but paying is not going to save us from this pattern. The corps are just going to milk the users via both subscriptions and ads.

And then the users will flock to the new product anyway, as you said. But with paying for a subscription it's just more money ending up where it shouldn't: in the hands of corporations.
Good. With all the services becoming increasingly painful to use, it makes it much easier for me to quit them. I still procrastinate on Instagram and a little bit on LinkedIn but both are losing appeal by the minute so I suspect I will be able to let go of both soon.
"The average life expectancy of a pioneer man, woman or child ranged from 30 to 40 years, if they were fortunate enough to survive childhood." -- Google "life expectancy of colonial americans"

> More often we used to do it with a chainsaw

Right, because chopping down a tree with an axe and then cutting it into suitable lengths for the stove by hand is a massive amount of work. I have some experience cutting logs with saw and axe. There's a reason people invented chainsaws.

> some nasty feudal lord

Irrelevant to colonial America.
If I encounter any software or service that uses opt-out rather than opt-in for important stuff like this, I will always opt out by ceasing to use that software or service. I am no longer willing to put up with companies that engage in such a level of disrespect.

This is doubly true if the company requires you send send an email to opt out, like Slack does.
Completely agree, but for that reason also think we need to be more specific when discussing AI safety. Both "AI" and "safety" are overbroad in the extreme.