skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was skydiving, everyone who is licensed and current in the U.S. received the USPA’s Skydiving Magazine, and in every issue was a report of every death and serious accident, and a “post-mortem” analysis of what went wrong and ways to avoid the same situation.

The 28 people thing strikes me as a bit of tabloid writing. That’s 28 people in like 30 or 40 years, and it’s a big and busy drop zone. I can’t read the paywalled article but you need to compare the number 28 to the total number of jumps over that period, and to the national accident rate. 28 deaths without context is pretty meaningless. Yes, skydiving is a bit risky, and yes accidents occasionally happen. We’ve been losing 30,000 to 40,000 people to car accidents every single year for those 40 years. We’ve lost more than 700,000 people just since the year 2000. How does this country not shut down? (It’s easy to fling incredulity… just sayin’)

Anyway, my local drop zone owner said that every time there was any kind of accident in the news, business tended to go up. The risk is part of the attraction.
> but we've hit a point where even high-end chips from that generation aren't really wide enough for a lot of users; four cores isn't really enough for midrange consumer workloads.

I dispute this - I had an i5-2500K (which is a 4 core, Sandy Bridge processor) that I upgraded about two years. But I didn't upgrade for performance reasons (I was still gaming on it!), but rather because one of my ram sticks had gotten crashy and I wanted to try building a mITX computer instead. It would definitely still be plenty for a lot of use cases. I still have the 2500k and motherboard sitting in a box, just in case someone desperately needs a computer.
It'd be great if that's how things worked. ;)
rented out doesn't revive the american dream, its a way to convert money from people who don't have enough to buy a house into money belonging to people who have more. It also keeps costs high because it turns properties into investments without consideration of people's welfare.

So yes, it may increase supply, but it does less good for society than individual home ownership.
It's not a story about the end of the earth.

It's a story about a regular recurring solar phenomenon.
https://archive.ph/VMjxi
So do the Imans in Iran. Least they stop hanging homosexuals on cranes.
They don't get as much love as the more famous Genyornis, also known as the "Demon Duck of Doom" [1].

[1] https://australian.museum/learn/australia-over-time/extinct-...
Lots of popular torrent sites going down in the last couple of years, all without explanation.
The post starts with a fascinating premise, but then falls short as it does not define search in the context of LLMs, nor does it explain how “Pfizer can access GPT-8 capabilities today with more inference compute”.

I found it hard to follow and I am an AI practitioner. Could someone please explain more what could the OP mean?

To me it seems that the flavor of search in the context of chess engines (look several moves ahead) is possible precisely because there’s an objective function that can be used to rank results, i.e. which potential move is “better” and this is more often than not a unique characteristic of reinforcement learning. Is there even such a metric for LLMs?
> If sound, visual and meaning aren't correlated, what can language be?

Ask someone with an articulation disorder. /s

Still, this is super reductive. Language can be feeling, it can be taste, it can be all sorts of things that are ineffable.

It is weird to me that the research into this assumes there is a baseline of repeatability somehow. At best, this is mimicry, imo.
I was excited to see what sort of interesting trickery was involved in making this app, just to realize all its doing is writing an image to disk and shooting it over to openai.

Well done.

Although I should note, I believe there is a completely extraneous disk write here. I believe you can use pillow to directly read the bytes into memory before sending the image data to openai rather than doing disk write -> read from disk -> byte encode -> openai which is pretty inefficient.
It depends where you live. In canada net migration is many many many more times the building of houses, and impacts the demand for houses incredibly. It also spurs commercial buying of houses - if immigration isn't high you might lose money on a house, but if immigration is high and supply is much lower than demand, you're going to make money on rent and then make money on the property too. People who bought houses previously made much more than is possible to make by selling your labour.
For some, it's about adrenaline. Those people often go on to pursue base jumping to keep pushing the limits. For others, it's about overcoming fear as a measure of personal growth. For me, when I used to skydive, it was less about adrenaline and much more about a brief moment of when all other thoughts disappear and you're fully present. It's a way of getting out of one's head without narcotics and experiencing a unique state of being. I suppose it's a similar in spirit to why astronauts go to space. There's no proxy for the perspective gained in leaving the confines of terra firma. Definitely not for everyone.
Yes, but a bill is still generated.
I guess they tasted really, really good? :)
Show HN: An open source extension to block large media brands from Google search
Google sends 16 large media brands (588 individual brands) a combined 3 billion+ clicks per month. They rank first page on 85% of all searches.

They are inundating the web with things like subpar product recommendations, AI written listicles, and cookie cutter reviews.

I don't like that, so I made an open source extension that blocks all of them from search results. (I'm not a developer, and I made this with Claude Opus's help)
when there are high interest rates, the large loans that are required to front the money to develop the land and build homes costs the developer more, and thus raises t he cost of housing, and also the risk to developers.
The problem is not marketing. The problem is the tool is fundamentally not secure, and in my opinion, fundamentally not securable without major changes.

The core issue is that everyone has things on their computer that they want to be transient. I don't ever want my computer taking screenshots when I'm entering, say, my credit card number. More importantly, though, I oftentimes have text editors containing "scratch pads" that may contain sensitive data that I never want to persist.

Microsoft just never thought through the security implications of this feature.
I found BM25 and everything resembling it (like TF/IDF) to be near useless. It was (back in the day) really necessary to use external semantic info, or at least data gathered by examining the whole document set for stuff going beyond term frequency. I was excited by the first part of the SPLADE article because I thought it was going to use LLM's to somehow find concept embeddings in documents and let you search for those. But as someone said, it turns out to be a version of synonym search except the thesaurus is generated automatically. I remember someone did that with Word2Vec some years back and it was sort of useful, but generally the problem with search systems is too many results rather than missing some that are relevant.
I vaguely remember somebody tasting thawed-out mammoth once. This would be a better story if it had a conclusion.
Supreme Court strikes down Trump-era ban on rapid-fire rifle bump stocks
I love that story, and I remember it from many moons ago! Thanks for the reminder. A choice quote:

> It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic' and ‘more magic'. The switch was in the ‘more magic' position.

That reminds me of this post I recently saw a friend post on Twitter, but apparently was popularized on Reddit many years ago:

https://twitter.com/lauriewired/status/1801488387272282284

https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupportgore/comments/1xq8h8/eve...

"Everything stopped working after I upgraded the memory"

https://imgur.com/everything-stopped-working-after-i-upgrade...
Not all...

> According to the Russian carpentry traditions of that time, the Transfiguration Church was built of wood only with no nails apart from the domes and roof shingles. There are approximately 180,000 nails securing the 60,000 roof shingles.
> I also remember this lunar lander game running on a couple terminals at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, California, also in the mid 1970s.

I recall lunar lander being available on, IIRC, ADM-3 terminals at Lawrence in early 1973, usually surrounded by a cluster of male teens. One "feature" of the kiosk mode for games was that a carefully-timed Ctrl-C would escape kiosk mode, and allow the user to play other games. Happenstance, or catnip for proto-hackers?
Relax. Humanity has always produced stories about the ends of earth, and we always will.

It's just something we do.
Don't worry about up/down votes.

I've had very strange things with a large number of downvotes on a comment and then a very large number of upvotes one or two layers downthread.

Presumably there are some bots/brigades that are trying to create a "good history" to try and pretend they are "organic". The bots/brigades don't care about anything more than the first layer.
Heck, even theoretically 100% within the limitations of an LLM executing on a computer, it would be world changing if LLMs could write a really, really good short story or even good advertising copy.
You’d be surprised how the human mind and body automatically reacts to extreme situations that we cannot fathom while sitting comfortably on our chairs. :-)
It was more confusion. One system was broken, and the alternate was taken out of service. The pilot was then confused because flying with only one sensor was considered acceptable, but he was asking about a both sensors out situation instead. So they did it the old school way with dipsticks, but the conversion formula written on the sheet was wrong because they were in the process of switching. Also, the person who's job it is to get this right didn't exist on the 767 and Air Canada had not finished figuring out how to divvy up the duties when that seat wasn't filled. It's one of those Frogger failures, so many things have to line up just right at this one point in history for the problem to happen. Luckily in this case everyone came out ok.
> The paper suggests that these adaptations might be a sign that the bird was already struggling before the arrival of humans. Changing climate patterns meant that wet areas like Lake Callabonna started getting drier around 60,000 years ago and dried up completely 12,000 years later.

> There are indications that the legs of Genyornis were gradually adapting to this drier climate, but the species would have remained under considerable pressure. This environmental stress is thought to be why the birds had higher than expected levels of bone disease at around the same time.

In this case it sounds like climate change was in fact a stressor, though I believe you're right--even without climate change this bird would have gone the way of the moa. Perhaps a better phrasing would have been "Already under stress from climate change, they are thought to have been eaten to extinction."
Ask HN: ChatGPT Game Bot
I am interested in trying my hand at adding bots to my browser-based multiplayer game using ChatGPT. I've developed a Python API for interacting with the game, but I'm getting stuck on how to get started integrating ChatGPT. Has anyone done something similar that they are willing to share?
It’s easy to setup but painful to keep running and it’s hard to backup.
I don't like appeals to authority as a reason for giving weight to what someone argues, but in the case of Frankl, it's hard to avoid it when it comes to his discourse about finding meaning in life and overcoming difficulty.

He didn't just survive Auschwitz, he survived multiple slave labor and death camps under the most hellish of conditions such as those the Nazi monstrosity created, all while seeing the murder and destruction of virtually all his family inside that machinery of death. This included seeing his wife and daughter die too.

None of this to even mention the total loss of his livelihood, everything he'd owned and the need to entirely reconstruct his life and health after surviving several years of hell. Neither was he so flexibly young as to be more resilient than some when it all happened. The man entered the world of the Nazi camps in his late 30s.

Despite all this he went on to be extremely productive and lived to the age of 92. A vast number of people who fall apart through suffering do so after going over less than a minuscule fraction of the traumas this man endured and never recover afterward. His was a remarkable personality for doing the opposite after so much worse.

Even Solzhenitsyn's life in the soviet GULAG was comparatively mild when held against what Frankl lived through. Primo Levi is another example that reminds me of Frankl, but he was quite a bit younger when he was put through Auschwitz.
OpenAI CEO says company could become benefit corporation
The original freenet was the Case Western freenet; I still remember my email as it was issued sequentially as aa000 to zz999, skipping some. It was `freenet.edu`

Primarily used it for research and usenet, most of the time through uucp to get the updates.
VyOS and MikroTik – VLAN-a-rama (2021)
Go is an OK language, but that's all it is: OK. It doesn't excel at anything or teach you any new paradigms, really. It was designed to be friendly for junior programmers so that they don't need much training to become productive.

C++ is a bit of a mess due to its long, personality warping, traumatic history. There are many awkward parts to it due to fundamental designs that have since been discovered to be bad (although we only know that through hindsight). So you have things bolted on like smart pointers, which give you reference counted memory management (and that really is the recommended way now, because the old way of purely manual memory management was a disaster).

Rust is an attempt to give the power of C++ without the mess. It's also a lot harder to grok from the start because they front-load you with a lot of required knowledge before you're able to do even the simplest of things.

If you have the ambition, I'd suggest diving into rust. The concepts you learn in there will cross over into many other languages, and you'll have a very strong foundation in ownership, transitional dependencies, and temporality in general (which you can get away with not knowing in most languages, but really should be aware of if you want to avoid some nasty bugs creeping in).
From personal experience, a skydiving crash happens in a surreal moment of calm. There isn't much time to process what's going on when the ground is rushing up at you. There's little to do but kinda surrender to what's happening. Fortunately, my accident was much less severe than hers. I walked away (to the hopsital) after being knocked out for a bit. The weirdest part is waking up on the ground with people looming over and kinda freaking out.
> And the odds of such an event are quite low
low is an understatement. You're talking about a single event that happens every billion or so years.
I use sentry selfhosted and started with Otel under gcloud and grafana and everything worked. Perfectly even, with low effort in dotnet.

However with sentry it’s still a pain and the visualization in sentry is kinda weird, since it goes beyond tracing.

And since sentry itself has no otel endpoint it is also really hard to do things like tail sampling.
Post-meteor earth by far. Post meteor Earth has been habitable to every ancestor of all life living today. Mars in inhabitable to almost all life except extremophiles.
Hmmm I’m pretty sure my total expenditure for several years of jumping, with a parachute purchase, a USPA C license, and a few boogie trips, was less than the cost of my dirt bike. I agree on the stress relief part, but I’d say don’t understate the risks or think it’s super controllable in traffic. Motorcycling is the most dangerous form of road transport. Cars and their drivers take bikers out all time. I looked and can’t find it right now but I remember seeing an NTSB report a couple years back indicating a serious uptick recently in motorcycle accidents by middle aged men.
The fuel gauges were inoperative. Apparently this condition does not ground the plane, however the crew has to maintain awareness of the fuel level via alternate means. on the ground you put a stick in the tank and in flight you know how much fuel was loaded and you know much was burned(airplanes tend to have good fuel per hour meters). Only this time the amount of fuel requested was in gallons and the amount loaded was in liters.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider

But absolute respect to the pilot for getting it down in one piece. I mean on one level he was just doing his job. but sometimes that is all it takes to be a hero, to do your job in the face of adversary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=686xoeQAVA4
There's risk associated with many activities that are enjoyable yet not 100% necessary to sustain life. Why do any of them? Because they enable someone to enjoy said life.

63% of American adults voluntarily drink carcinogenic poison, for fun.
From the article:

```
Anxiety has often been interpreted as the consequence of an excess of freedom, of there being too much that might happen and not enough that definitely will. Existentialists and psychoanalysts agreed that anxiety has an anticipatory quality, stemming from the indeterminacy of the future. A person with acute social anxiety may have experienced many social situations that passed off without a hitch, but there’s no guarantee that the next one won’t be catastrophic. When this converts into somatic symptoms – racing heart, tightness of the throat, sweating – fears become self-fulfilling prophecies. Rituals and traditions are useful protections: they demonstrate that, contrary to our worst fears, in important ways the future will be like the past. By the same logic, modernity generates anxiety by insisting that change is constantly round the corner.
```

Bang on. A lot of the material here is a re-tread of stuff already discussed here on HN, but it is still very relevant.
The Nissan GT-R Is Dead
I don't want to be spied on at work or at home. These companies are so painfully American in what they think is acceptable.
There's a lot of divided opinion there in the informed community, not many think that humans soley wiped out the megafauna, a good number question whether they played a significant decisive role in their demise, most think humans killed and ate a few.

What is certain is the same change in global conditions that allowed humans to walk to Australia and later filled the moat coincided with the fall off in megafauna. There's correlation, but causation??

The divided opinions:

Climate change not to blame for late Quaternary megafauna extinctions in Australia (2016) https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10511

Humans killed most of Australia’s megafauna: study (2017)
https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2017/01/humans-...

Did people or climate kill off the megafauna? Actually, it was both (2019) https://theconversation.com/did-people-or-climate-kill-off-t...

Humans coexisted with three-tonne marsupials and lizards as long as cars (2020) https://theconversation.com/humans-coexisted-with-three-tonn...

It turns out humans coexisted with the megafauna over about 80% of south-eastern Sahul for up to 15,000 years, depending on the region in question.

In other regions such as Tasmania, there was no such coexistence. This rules out humans as a likely driver of megafauna extinction in those areas.
I’m fairly certain that while schools might be capable of teaching calculus at this level, the amount of interest in that roughly corresponds with the number of students that already know calculus at that level anyway.
It would be cool to annotate the lifetime using this syntax instead:

-> &map’s mut V

The apostrophe here matches the syntax of lifetimes roughly and to me makes it EXTREMELY clear whats going on.
WWDC24 Highlights: Apple's Big Announcements and Innovations
Oh wow, I forgot about this. Syzygy was supposed to be like PMOD but higher speed capabilities. I actually put it into a design, but never got around to fabricating it.

https://forums.sifive.com/t/friscy-new-high-performance-pcb-...

(Warning, hyperlinks are definitely gonna be broken from that post). I wonder how popular the interface has been over the last few years - I haven't really paid attention.
It's illogical and naive to worry about death if you can't do anything about it at the time, no?

Anyway of course if you fall off the roof and say you worried about dying while falling then it's kinda nonsensical for me to doubt that.

And that's the point of my comment
Searching on Google was nothing compared to detailed conversations you have with the AI, mirroring your mindset. Would be interesting that will recognise you based on way you talk and think like real friends would do.
As an indie developer - sometimes I need a logo. I cannot afford 10-50k USD to hire a studio to make me a logo for an app. I had experience with websites like 99designs. Used it 5 times. Only once I got something OK out of it, I mean it was simple, and it was ok to use it for my needs. Every time the process was a week or two. I tried to explain what my business does, what an app will do, but the results were very plain. And I understand why, if at the end this designer will get only $500-1000 for his job, and only if I choose them, what the point of so much investment.

Currently, I am able to use AI, I can spend 2 hours of my time to get something out of it that I like, spend another day in Photoshop/Designer to fix some glitches, and at the end I can get a logo that I can use.

In this workflow, I can only see how AI can improve things. (a) designers on 99designs can use AI to generate some ideas for me without spending much of their time drawing, if they are creative, they can write their thoughts, and provide a "low-quality" idea but nicely made with AI, and I can continue to work with them, so they can transform this idea to vector (b) I can use AI to brainstorm ideas I like, and after that hire not so creative designer, but knowledgeable in tools to create for me a vector.

My point is, this is not the first time things have changed. Those are just new tools we can use. Sure, somebody might get affected. But I don't see how creativity will erode. You still need to be creative to generate a picture.
The climate change gave them fewer places to hide from the humans with clubs.
It seems to show up mostly in Python-based applications. Recently, I tried adding pyinfra to my system, but it failed to run because of some weird missing dependencies that I could never figure out.

The other big issues are languages. Most compilers and what not will build artifacts linked to the Nix store, which can result in surprising side effects. I tried switching to pyenv using Nix but then I had strange side-effects when trying to use it with poetry. So now I just install all of my language tools using homebrew and have had zero issues since.
Yes, this is going to accelerate the transition to a world where:

• X drafts a set of bullet points for an email

• X uses AI to make it into a full-blown email, with various pleasantries and appropriate padding

• Y has an email client that uses AI to distill the message to its essence

• Y reads a set of bullet points not unlike the ones that X originally drafted