skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i don't think having weaknesses like these say too much about the general capabilities or potential of LLMs. try this yourself: generate a novel pangram without any sort of iterative process or revisions -- the first thing that pops into your head you must commit to paper. it's very hard. it's a lot easier if you go in alphabetical order, as you don't need to keep track of which letters you've already used. interestingly, gpt-4o also performs better at this task when you ask it to go in alphabetical order.

LLMs have known weaknesses, many having to do with an inability to "think" without using tokens. so for tasks like these, you can dramatically increase their performance by getting them to think out loud. this was the crux of the "let's verify step by step" paper.

i ran this prompt three times:

### prompt start ###

your goal is to create a novel pangram in the spanish language that sounds natural. it should be grammatically correct and coherent. it shouldn't be just technically coherent and grammatically correct, it should sound like a normal sentence.

first, print out the spanish alphabet. these are your $remainingletters. $sentence = "". then enter a loop where you do the following:

loop 1:
- select a random letter from $remainingletters choose based on which one allows you to add the most natural sounding word to the sentence, do NOT go in alphabetical order
- eliminate the letter you chose from the remaining letters
- ensure the word you chose actually begins with that letter! very important
- add the word you chose for that letter to $sentence
- are there letters in $remaining? if so, go back to start of loop 1. otherwise move on to loop 2.

loop 2:
- go through the spanish alphabet in order and ensure your $sentence contains a word starting with that letter
- once every letter is accounted for, translate the sentence to english
- does it sound like a natural sentence?
- if not, go back to the start of loop 2
- if so, print $sentence as well as its translation in english

think out loud, keep track of your work as you go

i'm not asking you to generate code, i'm just explaining how you should accomplish the task

### prompt end ###

i ran this prompt three times, and each time it generated a valid pangram that was coherent and grammatically correct. i can't be bothered to run it a bunch of times to get an accurate success rate, but i'm fairly sure there exists a prompt with a success rate of 100%. there are a lot of output tokens available, and by asking the model to iterate, it will arrive at something correct far before 128,000 tokens are exhausted.

sidenote: when i asked gpt-4o to generate 5 novel pangrams in english, and it got them all right. so language definitely matters when it comes to getting things like this right in one shot.
The lectures are here https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.S081/2020/schedule.html
It's so weird to me that a company like Microsoft would care that much about "reputation". Everyone basically hates them already. Many of the most successful companies in the US are widely (if not universally) hated by the people who pay them. Nobody loves comcast, or exxonmobil, or centurylink, or EA, or equifax, or facebook. People feel trapped and unable to avoid paying some companies or using their products no matter how much they hate them. How many people have paid Microsoft for their OS at all? How much money would they really lose if they ignored the bad press? How many grandmas would start downloading linux?

I'm glad Microsoft is making changes, but I wonder how much is out of fear for their reputation and how much is just to try and comfort people and get the news to stop talking about it so that everyone doesn't just disable it as soon as it rolls out.
I'm not sure what you mean, I just checked out Odesza, and their album only contains original music. They're not the sort of DJ that would livestream a mix of other peoples music, unless I'm mistaken?
Important to read this first: https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/#how-did-repli...
Lack of automatic dark mode support on websites is very annoying at night, when you've turned dark mode on and everything else is dark, except that one website you just opened, and it now hurts your eyes or bothers other people in the bedroom.
Pretty cool and relevant! From the Chromium commit[0]:

>The CL improves jQuery Speedometer3 story by 2%.

[0]:https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/55...
1. Sure, there may be cases where you already know the source IP or network block. But there are many scenarios where your legitimate users may be traveling, or using a mobile provider that won't guarantee much about the source IP. If you open your firewall too wide, a sophisticated attacker can find some box they can proxy through.

2. Doesn't wireguard then have the same challenge as SSH? Isn't that just pushing the problem around?

Another way to cut down on the log spam is by configuring sshd to listen on a nonstandard port.
Something tells me you felt clever posting this. If you're open to a different perspective:

The underscore makes your text worse to read, IMO. Same with the MD anchor syntax.

HN supports italicizing by wrapping an expression with asterisks *. Why insist on a foreign standard?

HN commenters use the [{i}] notation all the time for footnote referencing. Which can be used for links, declutttering the main text.

Why add a ^?
Ah, but no, I really was assuming we are starting from scratch.
I Open-Sourced KeyEcho: Fast-Responsive Keyboard Sounds with Every Keystroke
And? What's wrong with k8s and containerized setups?

Linux evolved numerous features over the years responding to server room challenges. Some of them look monolithic, others are decomposable, in any case linux became the default dev target platform for everything.

Minix might be nice, but linux has won, and it was NEVER about os architecture.
I had a similar experience where I gained a strong sense of how ancient humans and modern humans are one and the same.

It was individualistic in that the sense came from my own embodied experience of being in the world, and I was thinking about myself, but it was an insight about contextualizing myself in a much larger thing.

It made me feel special, personally, for being a member of such an incredible group, but anti-individualistic because I extended this specialness to everyone.
And afaik that is sometimes a thing via gettid()
You see Paris as a museum because you visit it as a tourist. I see it as a business place that's cumbersome to reach and navigate because half of the clients I have to visit are there. I have visited Paris for tourism as well, but it's much more than that (for one thing, it's about a third of the GDP of France).

As for true Parisians, they have been a minority for ages, there are famously more Bretons in Paris than in Brittany and true Parisians will always tell you that they are actually from Paris. That's not one of the new changes of Paris.
> Sidebar: I'm a founder of a self-bootstrapped startup to build a better weather data broker that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. If that's something you are passionate about solving, feel free to reach out :)

Would love to hear more about this. I’m a researcher and a lot of my work revolves around machine learning applications to building energy modeling, and one of my projects actually revolves around the difference between using TMY vs AMY EPW files in automatic calibration of models. Would be great to chat more. What’s the name of your startup? I can shoot you an email at the official email.
install DarkReader and never be mad about this again
ERA5 [1] will get to back to 1940. So not exactly 100 years but darn close.

[1] https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/dataset/ecmwf-reanalysis-...
Oh, excellent! I will check it out. Thank you!
My use case is the same as yours. Malware can steal your credentials, it cannot steal mine. I also don't need fail2ban or to configure any of these new OpenSSH features. Users added to the server can't get compromised due to use of weak passwords.

Passwords are obsolete in 2024, and using them is very nearly universally bad.
Which is less than a decent electric bike. Good luck.
Once the central government has decided what they want, China absolutely has a track record of extremely heavy subsidies, both for domestic market and for export. Like you say, it is to get to that sweet 'economies of scale' (or to say it more honestly, pricing others out of the market).

There is one other interesting tidbit about the pricing of energy projects. Renewables have been scrutinized about their price to an unprecendented extent. Before renewables, costs were usually a minor concern in the public debate when it came to build-out of energy infrastructure.

In the nuclear heavy country like France (which did benefit from the so called 'economy of scale' most, in their case it was more the will for nuclear armament), the government decides the prices for households. They had to increase it steeply in the last decade, and a government commission suggested to further increase it by 74% this year. The government decided to only increase it by 10%. I guess they are a bit afraid of the protest-loving population. Nobody cares for costs, if they don't see it.

In Germany meanwhile the subsidies (for renewables mind you, not for all the other forms of energy) actually work in a way that they are added to the price of all electricity. So while German and French prices get closer and closer now, the German household electricity prices reflect the total cost much better than the French prices.

Now we have enough data to not just project costs, but also we know what we actually pay. And contrary to what everyone believed, renewables are actually the cheapest form of energy we can get. And when you look at the fundamental physical process, it even makes sense. No need to dig anything out of the ground, because the source that put all this into the ground actually is accessible on the surface. No need to create a process that biological beings never used for energy. Wind and solar are just technological variations on the theme that evolution put into live and proven for billions of years. It just makes sense to leverage for the bulk of our energy needs until such time when our energy needs overtake what is accessible so easily. That may be a century from now or even farther in the future.
What happened to Captura? OSS maintainer burnout (2023)
I don't know how much this costs, but it's only a meter, 65 kg, and runs on a 110 volt outlet. I'm thinking high ones of thousands of dollars, maybe low tens of thousands.

https://www.furuno.com/files/Brochure/448/upload/WR110_EN.pd...
South Africa floats universal basic income for all
I hope that AI improves discoverability. It would be great if an AI agent can give me a list of books which I am likely to enjoy, based on the books I have enjoyed in the past. Even better if some of those picks are obscure.
There's tons of stuff of the kind you're describing in Rust, more than I care to list but I'll offer you some [1-3] that I think would interest you (based on this comment alone). If your perception of what people are doing in Rust is driven by what people post to HN, it may not reflect everything that is going on in that ecosystem.

[1] https://os.phil-opp.com/

[2] https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/redox

[3] https://oxide.computer/
I can't help sharing one of the loveliest uses of `kill 0` I know:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Usage: upto LIMIT COMMAND
# Run COMMAND until LIMIT seconds have passed, then exit.
#
test "$1" -gt 0 || {
printf '%s\n' " Error: first argument must be a positive integer."
exit 1
}

sh -ic '
sleeptime=$1
shift
exec 3>&1 2>&3
{
"$@" >&3
kill 0
} |
{
sleep "${sleeptime}"
kill 0
}
' sh "$@"
That won't work because many people here post anonymously. They have a throwaway account and make a new one now and then to leave no trace to their real identity. Leaving an email address would mean having to maintain a throwaway email in sync with the HN account.

Nowadays that's even harder to do since HN shadowbans new accounts for a while. You write a comment and you are surprised that nobody replies. It's because nobody but yourself can see it.

Which, ironically, contributes to the issue disussed here.

I'm also using a rather new account, let's see if this msg actually is visible now.
The author didn't like how the alternative definition was highly likely to cause misapprehension by likely user audience, who generally use a different interpretation.

That's nothing to do with a monopoly.

I completely agree with your post-SSPL view of the OSI. Just because all of the big cloud providers are unethical does not give them an escape card. Still, that has no bearing on this essay, which are specific clauses in the FUTO definition.

Saying that I cannot change parts of the code is anathema to the underlying concepts behind all generally accepted uses of FLOSS, including Debian's.

On a practical side, what happens if/when FUTO-the-organization no longer exists? Or if a future FUTO license change in a way that people don't like? (The FSF, as an example, has legal agreements with its contributors that any future license changes will only be within a certain framework of free software.)

On a legal side, what is "advertisement"? If the credits say "Portions copyright eesmith. Contact eesmith@example.com for paid support and consulting.", that's clearly advertising, right? Why should that be prohibited?

Is "CV at https://example.com/~eesmith/" also advertising?

Similarly, what is "malware"?

The recent Microsoft Recall debacle tells me the difference between "malware" and "not malware" is that if somewhere, deep inside the terms of service that few read but everyone agrees to, there is a description of the functionality, then it's not malware.

As part of the utopic vision, I'm one of the supporters of universal basic income. Amazing's copying and cloudifying should lead to taxes which pay stoners to sit on the beach staring at the waves, coders to sit behind screens writing FOSS, and parents to have extra time and security with their kids.

I simply don't think it can be solved through copyright law. Licensing is a very small lever.
Ah... now I see what you meant. Indeed. + is an operator in langs like Javascript and C++ - a built-in, rigid syntax construct. You can't redefine it, you can't extend it, you can only use it for addition and string concatenation. You can't even extend it in JS to let's say, merge two objects together.

Lisp doesn’t even have "operators" — everything is a function. Gosh, the more you learn about Lisp, the more it feels like we went backwards. We tried to simplify programming, only to find ourselves buried under layers of complications. Just think about how many times we've reinvented state management for React alone: Redux, MobX, Recoil, Zustand, Jotai, Effector, XState, Overmind, Hookstate, Easy Peasy, Rematch. And that's not even a comprehensive list. What's funny is that some of these are "improved" versions of previous "improvements". Each time we try "improving" the previous "improvement", it seems we continually need to reinvent another layer of "improvements". Dafuk are we doing?
Replit didn’t make any specific claims about IP rights or non-compete (and if they did, the onus would be on them). When their behaviour was made public they immediately backed down and didn’t proceed with any legal fight.
Rust does not guarantee absence of memory leaks, does it?

I think this is the general "rewriting solves all problems" fallacy, which is rarely true, but who wants to maintain existing code, if there is something new and cool? So we get rewrites which largely just add new projects that then have to be maintained in parallel, because they rarely are to completely replace the old (if at all) and at some point the new is not cool anymore and that it is just another thing. I like some key ideas of Rust, but overall I still like many things about C much more (stability, fast compile times, simplicity), so I would much prefer people improving memory safety in C projects.
Small island, 4 days, 6 hr lag to report missing, not carrying a phone.

Regretfully in these situations, it's not usually a good outcome. Assuming only injury, 4 days without access to water in 36°C temperatures won't help.
“Scientist”? Is this like Software Engineer?
> is probably 10 pages long

I’ve seen one recently. It’s about 60-200 pages long book (multiple languages) worth of legalese. Same with most appliances and child car seats (which is especially cruel when you had a baby, no sleep for days and try to install one).
I can't point at a single reason, but I got sick of it.

The interminable solves were awful. Mamba made it better, but can still be slow.

Plenty of more esoteric packages are on PyPI but not Conda. (Yes, you can install pip packages in a conda env file.)

Many packages have a default version and a conda-forge version; it's not always clear which you should use.

In Github CI, it takes extra time to install.

Upon installation it (by default) wants to mess around with your .bashrc and start every shell in a "base" environment.

It's operated by another company instead of the Python Software Foundation.

idk, none of these are deal-breakers, but I switched to venv and have not considered going back.
While there really is a trend to overly dumb down things, I'd just like to speculate that the "message no longer exists" part is simply these when someone adapted the reasonable error for a delete message, and forgot to actually check if that phrasing work anymore.

Small changes creeping up into something stupid is a common thing as well when everyone just does a tiny isolated part.
> Heres something I just don't get.

> And then someone goes and invents Recall

Maybe you should read about the history of Microsoft, especially about its security.

But people forget easily.
The famous Arnolfini Portrait [0] by Jan van Eyck also has quite a bit of symbolism depicted in the hands of the portrait subjects.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnolfini_Portrait#Interpretat...
What's the Deal with std:type_identity?
And the CEO was right, you can’t copy cat the idea of the place you worked at no matter how simple it is.

It’s common sense - he did behave in an unethical way.
Not according to the Guardian

Infant mortality is rising and births are plummeting. This is the legacy of 14 years of Tory cruelty

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/0...
You're just making things up. Nothing you've said is true.
"Svelte"
Wim98SE was actually good though! Well, it was way way better than win98. Win2k and 7 (the last windows OS I ever had for personal use) were good too. The writing was on the wall back in the 98 days for sure though. MS decided that your computer was theirs.
Since the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act of 2017, Congress is requiring NOAA to start acquiring data via commercial partnerships.

NOAA has already made some contracts with Spire [1] and Saildrone [2]. I am sure there are more but these are the ones most familiar to me.

Your weather data broker startup sounds very interesting!

[1]: https://spire.com/press-release/spire-global-awarded-nationa...
[2]: https://research.noaa.gov/2022/08/03/noaa-and-saildrone-team...
White background is fine.

What is not fine is gray text on white background.

Sincerely, anyone who utilizes low contrast between text and background has utterly no respect for peoples' eyes. Yes, that includes Hacker News with downvoted comments.
MLOps, sure.
> There's no need to "dumb down" anything ever, not even for children.

This is so wrong that I can't imagine you actually meant it in the way that it quite obviously reads like.

When my 3-year old just saw is favorite toy fall from the sofa because he put it in an .. unstable position, then obviously it won't help if I explain the theory of relativity to him, cause ultimately it was gravity causing the mess. It won't help either to "dumb it down" by only explaining Newton's mechanics. What he actually needs to understand is that things fall down. Why exactly can be explained later. Much later. When he goes to university perhaps, if he chooses to and still wants to know.
South Africa has (or had) an interesting approach to life essentials with costs: if you fall into arrears on water in some townships they fit a flow restrictor to your supply: if you leave a tap on you get survival water for a day, slowly.

I suspect UBI will fall into the same bucket: if you blow it on cigarettes and booze then it gets you starch and water. The extent to which Inflation for non essentials sucks value (inflation) will be interesting.
Funny that the author himself failed to reproduce Feynman's quote: it should be "And there are now sixty two kinds of particles", not "And there are not sixty two kinds of particles".
I think this is a really underexplored use case for LLMs. LLM embeddings are really good at encoding rich semantic information that’s easy to query and hack around with in a variety of ways. Retrieving primary sources that correspond to one or many thematic dimensions is one such case for embeddings, but most applications that do this portray it as a driver of RAG chatbots, when it could be an end in and of itself.

I have an app that does your book recommending idea but with Wikipedia articles. I am trying to release it soon, once I get past my perfectionism, if anyone is interested. Expanding to non Wikipedia sources is an eventual goal.

I basically never want to read chatbot output for pleasure. I want to read primary sources.
I wonder how long that will work... https://www.howtogeek.com/windows-11-just-killed-a-local-acc...
Definitely.. :)
Let's not forget the time they just turned it off for the winter holidays because they didn't want to be paged about it going down!
Who is “psychosaurusx”?
If the orbital period was 80 minutes then that is 1/1,200,000th of a period and with Earth's circumference being ~25,000 miles that should only be about 0.02 miles.

Or if the orbital velocity was 17,000 mph and neglecting the height of the orbit, 17000 / 3600 / 250 = 0.018 miles.

So either way, about 100 feet.
Humans might have migrated because the Ice Age ended. Correlation ≠ causation.
I don't know about Paris, but I live in New York and I can see how it is both less and more than what tourists come there for. It is constantly changing including the people who live there. You can't really get a grip on it it is elusive. It is all around you but where? Tourists come there to find something which true New Yorkers themselves cannot find. But it makes me feel I'm not alone. I have the same destiny as everybody else. There's no us vs. them we're all in the same boat.
> do a lot of things with the cloud that I could not do if I had to rack servers

It's not a binary choice between cloud and physical racks in a data center. There is a wide range of options. Companies like Hetzner enables you to click a button and get a dedicated instance, while Digitalocean can provide you with a VM. Both options are cheap and doesn't require much time.

If you do this often, you probably also have an ansible setup to install the base software (like k8s or a simpler stack), you are ready to go within minutes. Just like you would have a terraform config for your cloud
I don't understand the need for all the high tech electronics in this. It looks like it could straightforwardly be done with 19th century mechanical linkages and a binocular microscope. Maybe it was. Also, the word "Waldo" is missing :(.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certified_email