skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They have been fined $38m

This is damages, not a fine.

> for killing 8 people

If this verdict stands, you can bet there will be more lawsuits coming.

> which amounts to a tad over 1% of their 2023 revenue

There's income statements available for some years. Their margins are tiny - usually profits are 10% of their revenue or less. Sometimes much less or none.
I don’t believe this is true. The government and businesses of India and China are both notoriously sexually conservative. That’s a majority of humanity right there.
last 2? weren't they toppling latin American governments since Teddy Roosevelt?
> Also note that some comp numbers get heavily inflated by people incorporating stock value increasing between the equity was first issued and the stock actually vested.

Yeah ever since COVID this has really muddied the water, partially both up and down. Depending on the year combined with the type of company (large cap vs growth SaaS vs finance) you can massively swing the same exact "offer comp" into many communicated effective comps.
It's not the hurt feelings that are elevated, it is the direct personal attack that is elevated.
As a Japanese, I hope this will challenge the dominance of those IT giants.
They should be subject to anti-trust regulations in the first place,
but I think it won't happen soon, so I'm glad they are taking action.

That said, I'm not particularly sure Japanese politicians can handle
those complicated matters efficiently.
I mean, our "cyber-security minister" was accused of never using
a PC and not knowing what a USB memory stick is [0].
I can't help but think that this will end in disaster and
IT giants will use these examples as evidence of how bad
it is to make strict regulations against them...

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/15/japan-cyber-se...
Maybe (2). But it took ~50 years work to build systems that can beat people at poker and I don't think people argue poker bots are AGI.

To be clear, I think we have AGI (LLMs with tool use are generalized enough) and we are currently finding edge cases that they fail at.
Optimal SQLite Settings for Django
Probably not a bad thing from a software pov, both have been giving dimishing returns to users since like 2017
Why would this mean it's a lower tier company to you?
It's a bit late to be saying that to people already using libxml because "It should be able to parse "real world" HTML." https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/libxml2/devhelp/libxml2...
So inserting those type checks automatically will cause regressions because those checks are not free at runtime, and there are cases where the JIT will look at the code and not bother optimizing.
All of Databricks will be available in serverless
It's fair to call that out. Anti-communist propaganda is a problem still in the US as well.
I've used auto-incrementing integers across multiple systems.

There was one system responsible for allocating the integers (what should have been a relational database that held our user accounts & their metadata); once that write was committed¹’² then other systems (e.g., one that kept bulk/frequent per-user metrics (lots of data), but which could shard it better) used it.

I think I'd opt for UUIDs today (the size difference is minimal, and they distribute more naturally if you shard on them), but integers are doable in this manner too.

¹which … this is its own battle. It turned out later our database was less than good here. ("So call me, maybe.")

²you need a lock here. That could matter. But "user creation" is not a frequent enough event for lock contention to matter. We only did this for user IDs.
Oracle had an ad business? why on earth anyone wanted to deal with oracle for their ads
The people who think Musk does not deserve the $50 billion award from Tesla will see how Musk will leave Tesla to wither, SpaceX will become a multi-trillion dollar company, Musk will become the first trillionaire in history and Tesla will hit a market cap somewhere between Ford and General Motors.
The H of HVAC stands for Heating. I presume almost all houses in Europe have heating?
I'm glad Jeff is still keeping his head above the water, but I feel like his fundamental problem - as a guy who was making consciously niche, retro games from the very beginning with the 90s Exile series - is that he's failed to embrace the niche. He's a good writer, but the gameplay mechanics have only become more and more simplified and mainstream-friendly.

It's the old saw about making something that a lot of people might like, but nobody loves. You gotta stand out. There's totally an audience for weird, difficult RPGs with simple graphics, just look at Darkest Dungeon or even Battle Brothers (20k reviews on Steam).

Queen's Wish was an exciting idea, it's just too simple and half-baked.
A Metric for the Compilation Hardness of Programming Languages
Thought Slans by AE Van Voigt was one of the classics there. Non-A/Gilbert Gosseyn stuff was also up there in terms of mental powers SF.
Collecting Weather Data at 35K Ft: Community Weather Station and Balloon Network
This is absolutely true. I remember Dan Luu [1] and patio11's [2] blog posts from 9 years ago and 13 years ago respectively, which were widely shared, arguing essentially that you should always prefer to join a FAANG. With FAANGs all downsizing to varying degrees, or at the very least not in growth mode, this advice seems less clear-cut. For better or worse, I think we're starting to see the pendulum swing a bit towards startups with the AI gold rush.

(This is not to imply that compensation is now fair for early startup employees; it's not.)

[1]: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

[2]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...
An outlandish molecule may be lurking inside Uranus and Neptune
I am a mathematician, and the worst that I can say is that, if I were writing for a mathematical audience, I might have phrased some things slightly differently. (Oh, and the title should be "as simply as possible", not "as simply as possible.") I didn't know the GJK algorithm before, but, if I were teaching Calculus III now, I'd probably see if I could find a way to work this in. That's how good your explanation is.
You just use a liquid that boils at a lower temperature
It certainly would have been far more effective for NASA to spend money on private companies instead of spending those billions on their Constellation program. Even today, NASA invests far more money into the in-house project SLS/Orion than into rockets by private space companies.

So there was enough money, it was just spent inefficiently by a government agency.
"equivalent" was the word used by one of the developers working on the Proton stack during a conference talk on the subject. Which is correct usage, since "equivalent" doesn't only mean exactly the same in every way but can also mean equivalent in purpose, which they are.

That is literally what your whole point is leaning on, taking a narrow definition of the word equivalent and spinning up a take that makes you feel right about yourself (meanwhile throwing an accusation at me re: abusing semantics). It's so desperate and stupid.
Swift does that for integers, floats and doubles, too. https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...:

“Conversions between integer and floating-point numeric types must be made explicit:

let three = 3
let pointOneFourOneFiveNine = 0.14159
let pi = Double(three) + pointOneFourOneFiveNine
// pi equals 3.14159, and is inferred to be of type Double

“
however, diffraction gratings do not use dispersion, so the page is confused

this error is not contained in the tech ingredients video the page links; unlike, for example, nighthawkinlight, tech ingredients is careful to get the science correct
sounds like it'll take some work . but these are some great ideas thanks for talking through it.
"To continue rolling out new Google AI features to users at a faster and even larger scale, we’ll be embracing portions of the Android stack". So AI is the main reason to go android?
transmission gratings also do not work by dispersion
Hey, yep lets do it
> We are a bit non-traditional

That's what your standard business says and it is often business with bad practices that say that
This is really cool. I was thinking the one biggest contributions to the feeling of public spaces being "not as nice" in the united states vs Germany/Europe is not the views or lack of money invested, but background car noise. You can hear the sound of a background highway almost everywhere in the USA, whereas the background world in for example Germany is much much quieter. And of all the ways cars make noise, I thought there was nothing to do about the sound of tires slapping the road.

The page points out the intent is to reduce tire noise in the cabin. I can see this being a marketing angle to sell it to the average driver, but will this mechanism lower tire noise for everyone or just the driver?
Great to hear the views on programming from one of the authors of SICP.

The anecdotes in the first few mins are nice as well.
It's worth remembering that in the phrase "dark side of the moon", "dark" means "hidden" not "unlit". The dark side gets the same amount of light as the near-facing side. See dark OED definition II.11.a. (1532–): "Hidden from view or knowledge; concealed; kept secret." https://www.oed.com/dictionary/dark_adj
The Fourth Form of Government
For me I understand perfectly well that my EV cash-wise is lower working for a startup. I just don’t care past a certain income and working at a startup is more rewarding in other ways.
An extra twist in the US is elementary school tends to end at 6th grade and middle school is 7th and 8th or sometimes elementary ends a year early at 5th and middle school absorbs 6th grade to be 3 years long.
Things Get Done on the Go Team with Russ Cox
It is a hand wave. What's driving the infinite demand if humans don't have wages to buy things with?
How to Power Up LLMs with Web Scraping and RAG
Sussman is one of the great ones.
I did a blog post of something related with Minkowski geometry: https://nickp.svbtle.com/asteroid-intersections
Uh, aren’t the paramilitaries explicitly targeting leftists? As in ‘let’s go out and murder some of those leftists’?

What else could you call anti-leftist but that?
Literally reading this as we are driving up I5 in a 2019 Honda, and I'm hearing a ton of tire noise right now. Haven't done this drive in a different car recently, so can't compare, but it seems to be a "normal" amount of road noise.
They just take up so much space in your luggage though
The man has moved on to functional programming since then. People are allowed to change.

I have 211+ programming books in my library going back to 1998. I don't consider any books from 16 years ago to be valuable or relevant today.
I enjoyed the FAQ on resolving conflicts - basically don't be a dick, resolve the few conflicts that may arise by friendly consensus (or at worst flip a coin)
> I think we have AGI

That seems a pretty extreme position!

What's your definition of AGI ?
A lot of that doesnt apply to old dwellings does it?

I recall in my great grandparents old terrace house, the kitchen was set behind the neighbors fireplace. The only rational place for the fridge stand effectively copped 50-80 degrees from the neighbors fire, just radiating from the brick. This lead to the fridge running constantly and having an extremely short lifespan (and sometimes not functioning at all)

That said because it was old everything was air dried.
that’s a big debate beyond the scope of this format but they at least should need to pass a law first before just taking power, otherwise you risk a situation where any time someone wants power they declare an emergency, or worse, cause one… imagine if they released a virus for example, knowing they can then shut down a society for whatever reason? it’s a real threat and shouldn’t be hand waved away in a time when powerful people openly claim the biggest threat to everyone is everyone
Using the internet would leak the test data, a big problem with ML benchmarks, and also allow communication with humans during the test.
Requirement: Angry customers should be actually pacified, not get pacified in post.

Implementation: BoomGPT

Configuration: BCA (Buddy Comedy Agents)

Example Script:

BoomGPTA: [Karen detected]

BoomGPTA: [Karen factor: it's over 9000!!!]

BoomGPTB: [What, 9000!??! They're using ableist slurs!??!]

BoomGPTB: [Deploy pacification boom]

Customer Phone: [BOOM.] {The sound takes out the customer's phone speaker, and sends them into a little coma.}

BoomGPTA: [Ahh. Peace was restored.]

BoomGPTB: [And how sad it is, when peace requires war...]

BoomGPTA: [Well said, my friend. Well said]
> if you could make 400k at FAANG but you take 180k at the startup, you're basically betting 220k a year on the company.

Even worse, your bet is on common shares. Far better to work at FAANG and Angel invest so you get preferential shares.

The biggest scam of VC is that the dollar value of your time is hugely undervalued compared to a $ from VC that gets preferential shares.
Why replace? If it must be something, maybe something like the linux distros? They come with package managers.
Harry Potter and the Secret to Learning
PFAS stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, so no. I don't think so.

There's however tetraethyllead/alkyl-lead, which are compounds that are considered PBTs or POPs. Tetraethyllead used to be a fuel additive that is now banned.

Honestly my head is already spinning after 5 minutes of trying to make sense of all this terminology. Good luck.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent,_bioaccumulative_an...

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organolead_chemistry
Who prosecutes, when the ones who have jurisdiction are the ones overthrowing gov’ts for ‘the bad guys’?
They thought of that and so have yearly $100,000 in yearly prizes for the best results as well, so things can build up towards someone winning the $1 million over time: the yearly prizes require you to publish the techniques.
I think Japan should build software which competes with these “giants” rather than try beat them through regulation.

Building good software is still in reach. You don’t need to have an Apple or Google behind you to be competitive. Especially in Japan where just making a native Japanese <whatever> will lead to dominance. Look at Line. It’s atrocious rubbish. Everyone in Japan uses it.

Japan makes the worst software out of any developed nation I’ve ever seen. Even Nintendo stuff is mostly terrible. Sony is a joke.
> Post-M series I hear this from time to time and always ask people to show me something in the same weight class with equivalent battery life, performance, and screen quality

Law of diminishing returns. If I
only need 8 hours of battery life, the fact that the M6 MacPro has a 48-day battery won't move me - a Framework/Dell with a 12-hour battery life would be on par as "good enough for me" on the battery life metric.
When I was in USAF, the pilots said, "When your fear of staying in the plane exceeds your fear of the ejection system, it's time to eject." That wasn't really a joke.
My preference would be not to refactor it at all. It works, you can figure out what it does, and the tests pass. Forget about it. Whoever wrote it, wrote it to the best of their ability to implement the requirements and style that existed at the time.

The requirements changed and it now has to handle a new case? Now you can refactor it. What refactoring to choose depends on the new case you have to support - it's going to look a lot different if you need to accept a new "language" parameter than if you need to special-case another number.
> ready to alienate 30-50% of your friends, even though you were 'right'

If your friend is a fraud, that's a separate problem.

I'm not concerned with alienating fraudsters, though the people on their gravy train aren't as easily dismissed. The cost is in collecting the evidence, putting it in the right places, following up, and then continuing to be helpful as someone in a position of authority connects the dots and prepares their response.
But if I observe a Shroedinger's cat after opening the box every morning, I do get at least duplicated. Repeat this lots of times, and MWI says there are for sure 2^n copies of me as the lowest estimate.

Counting all daily QM-influenced events everybody experiences (a cosmic ray either passed through me or decayed before it reached me, a radon atom either decayed in the air right next to me or not when I went to my cellar etc.), I think it is fair to say there are nearly infinite copies of you in various multiverse branches (of course, some who collected lots of radioactive decay events are already dead from cancer by now).
Is there any evidence that this has anything to do with nudity filters? The article doesn't provide any evidence beyond "user's are blaming it on filters". Given most of the mangled parts appear to be hands (something AI already sucked at), and some of the photos generated are women with reasonable cleavage or showing a lot of legs, it doesn't seem obvious to me that's the case. Certainly there's plenty in those images more suggestive than some fingers, but I'm curious if there's any actual supporting evidence.
This article does not cast itself in a strong light by immediately calling the lab leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory. The lab leak hypothesis is another valid and plausible theory that could explain the origins of the pandemic. One must question the motives and obvious bias of anyone who feels compelled to call a scientific theory or hypothesis a conspiracy theory.
> They should be subject to anti-trust regulations in the first place

> I mean, our "cyber-security minister" was accused of never using a PC and not knowing what a USB memory stick is

From what I've read about Japan it was probably the usual small set of local megacorps that Japanese politicians protect heavily that seeded the regulations, not out of a genuine interest in the protecting or improving regular customers lives or opening up competiton to smaller players.

But regardless hopefully it is more than just the pipe dreams of the existing entrants and there really is upstart competition that is capable of operating in a meaningful way.
> In the report, Washington’s Gallup divides workers into three groups: engaged, not engaged and actively disengaged. Those in the not engaged category are considered to be quiet quitting. Those actively disengaged are hostile toward their employers and are trying to undermine their coworkers.

Whats the criteria for Engaged? "Hostile toward their employers and trying to undermine their coworkers" describes basically every single person with an MBA, but by all metrics that companies have they would be considered some of the best.
Here's an interesting old training video from the RAF that shows the details of how the ejection seat works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU7A2Q9sSCw
I'm curious about this as well. Often, structures that cancel waves by interference end up effectively redirecting those waves elsewhere, rather than destroying them altogether. But when it's very close to the source emitter, it is possible. Hopefully this doesn't just double the tire noise outside the car.
Yes. That's why I wrote, "Through at least two administrations". Personally, I consider the scale of injustice in Latin America alone at the hands of U.S. policy to be vast and unsparing in the culpability it lays at the feet of every American. I recognize that not everyone will be joining me out on that limb, however, so I chose to make my opening bid smaller but more unassailable.
:) yes. I saw that error and wondered whether someone would point it out. I think the author fails to acknowledge that the use of variables like "verb" just make the code much harder to understand than a string that reads mostly like English.

question = "Is";
object = "this";
adjective = "easy";
String.format("%s %s %s");

vs

String.format("Is this easy");

The second is much easier to understand than the first, so one should be careful when pulling out too many variables.

Seems like someone should write a book called "Clean Code Done Right" that has actual good examples of code. Maybe Rich Hickey? The high level advice is good, code should be written as simply as it can be. Functions should have a small clear mission and it should be easy to argue that the function is correct locally. That is to say: a functions correctness shouldn't depend in a complicated way on other functions, just a reasonable expectation on the behavior of the functions it calls, and a reasonable simple description of its mission. Easy to state this objective often difficult to achieve in practice.

Maybe a book showing elegantly coded solutions to actually difficult programming problems would be good, e.g. a system with maybe the complexity of high performance sharded fault tolerant Redis. There would be a lot of interesting topics there.
I am always amazed by the sheer ego of the "Geneva conventions" or any other "rules of war".

Maybe I don't understand how the mentality works but for me, once you are at the point you are killing people - and killing them in the thousands - you are already either crazily desperate and/or have a complete loss of empathy for your opposition.

Once you are in this alien mindset, why would you pay attention to any "rules" that might limit your murderous psychopathy?!?

And this worries me. Seeing the world increasingly brace itself for war I fear there will be someone who thinks COVID was a great trial run for a bioweapon.

And that is my simple unimaginative first grab at horror. I am sure smarter minds than me can think up worse.
Or we can do both? Encourage competition from smaller businesses while curbing the power and influence of these behemoth monopolies that control basically all of modern human civilization.

Apple, Google, Microsoft and all the rest of them should've been nuked into a trillion tiny little pieces years ago.
Allies/friends -- doesn't really matter what you call it. It's people in your corner. There's no gaming that I'm aware of. You just have to hope that you are able to get on peoples' good sides. Usually that works alright in the normal course of being a friendly and contributive coworker, but god forbid you have someone who has a chip on their shoulder about you.
Muchas gracias, I am but a beginner still in Mexican Spanish, however my only slightly engaged over the years gringo brain remembers "mordita" instead of "mordida".

google translate says for both: "bite".

I have slightly worried for a long time that nuance will be lost via translate devices, and here we are.
Banana republic the term was coined in 1904 - right when Teddy was in charge.

Excellent reference!
> If you take cheap worthless forms of vitamins or minerals when better forms are available, that's on you.

Is there some sort of readily available system/metric/standard that a normal consumer can use to evaluate the bio-absorbability in a bottle of vitamins? I know some of them have higher-than-recommended FDA daily values, presumably to make up for the availability, but... as with so much of the supplements industry, it all seems like mostly untrustworthy marketing?

Shouldn't it be possible to calculate (and label) dosage * absorbability of a particular source in pill form = effective dosage?
I can't take you seriously if you think a typo invalidates someone's argument or opinion.
It probably is.

Really, we should look down on adoring people too much. It’s one thing to respect and admire accomplishments of other, and another to become a sycophant.
It's actually not Electron, it appears to be Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), which is what Spotify desktop app uses. I'm speaking completely separately from OP's product:

CEF was supposed to be more efficient than Electron, but I think that framework heavily missed the mark. I'd be interested to know why the dev chose CEF instead.