skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> the OSS world desperately needs much more people, and has always needed them.

Nah. Even after reading the Roads and Bridges Report, I disagree with this.

People are naive and too nice, and that's the problem that needs fixing, not reality.

The reality is that you shouldn't do open source work unless you just want to help Microsoft's AI.

Just kidding.

The reality is that you should do open source work without expecting compensation, and anyone that wants you to "maintain" things should be told that's not how it works. How it works is they should fork it and maintain it themselves. Tough, right? Well, it's free code. That's the price THEY pay for it. Making the person who gave it to you for free pay for it is asinine.

It's also asinine to imagine a world where humanity works differently. Roads and Bridges recommended some kind of invasive tracking to be able to figure out how much money an open source project is hypothetically worth to be able to report that to corporations to beg for money to monetize open source more easily (and, of course, help "diversify" it by seeing how many unicorns are doing development and keep that in a PR spreadsheet somewhere), but you can sense that all of this is false dharma. You're doing it wrong. It needs no help or money or diversity; look at all it's given us without any of that. It just needs to be used correctly.

The free software movement started by programmers, for programmers. The expectation is that the user can read the code, fork the thing, and do what they want with it. But in our eagerness to have our cake and eat it too, we imagine non-technical users have some right to demand that the developer fix the code they offered us or change it to implement some feature. And, misconditioned as they are, the devs play along and feel the onus is on them to appease that rabble, and then they get burned out.
Funny you'd say something like this, after somebody made a comment about "sizeable parts" and never an absolute statement.
Some Thoughts on AI Alignment: Using AI to Control AI
Recent news has caused me to think through some questions about AI alignment, so I collected my thoughts here. While I'm sure a lot of this stuff isn't new, I haven't seen all these ideas presented together in one place. I think that some of the approaches that are used in designing decentralized systems can also be useful in constructing alignment systems, so I've tried to do that here. Anyway, I welcome feedback on my ideas.
This article is great use of rhetorical delivery to drive home these messages.
"existing market solution or manual efforts"

This is really the core. How bad are the current solution? How painful is the manual effort?

If the status quo sucks, then you don't need to do any convincing, they'll run to you, beg you for the wishlist. Your job is to make sure it's visible to them. Make sure it doesn't smell like the other startups with crazy claims (i.e. don't say you're top on Product Hunt). You can put ads. You can walk up to them and tell them. You can talk about it on radio. You can post posts on reddit.

Many of these approaches only work for the initial product market fit stage though. Then you have to start thinking about distribution. But distribution is an easier problem.

You'll also fail a lot - most of the time the first thing you make is terrible. But you have to put it in front of someone to figure out what they really want. Assume that first iteration is a the block of marble and not the statue you're trying to carve out of it. The carving only starts after someone rejects it. You carve out a little bit of what the statue isn't, until you end up with the masterpiece.
More "democracy", where you must win every time and the issue will keep coming up again and again, but if you lose once whoops the matter will never find its way back onto the docket and you will never get a chance to have it reversed.
> Then don't choose a super permissive license like BSD/MIT.

One big problem is that you cannot encode all possible wants and wishes into a legal document.

Laurence Lessig, founding member of Creative Commons, wrote in Code 2.0 (1999) about four elements that regulate behavior online: Laws, norms, markets, and technology

- *Code/architecture* – the physical or technical constraints on activities (e.g. locks on doors or firewalls on the Internet)

- *Market* – economic forces

- *Law* – explicit mandates that can be enforced by the government

- *Norms* – social conventions that one often feels compelled to follow

It also doesn’t help that OSI and FSF operate as though they are each other’s biggest enemies instead of all the other threats out there.

I feel like the definitions of “Free” and “Open” are too binary and lack nuance. I wish for something more, an open “score”, for example. Sure the Hipocratic license isn’t permissive but the only limitation it imposes is predicated on committing human atrocities as defined in legal code by the Geneva convention. So maybe it’s “closer” to MIT then say the “business source license” which is actively restricting commercialization.

Or to put it another way: If we want software devs to choose licenses that are closer to their actual goals (like CC-BY-NC) then we need to find ways as a community to distinguish these projects as better than pure closed source, proprietary software. Because right now FSF and OSI classify both the same.
don't we have the same problem with gravity?

we can measure and calculate the effect, but we can't explain it. at least some attempts to explain it call for particles like gravitons that haven't been found yet. this seems to me just like looking for pixie dust to explain consciousness.
When I look into the website source of the book I just see static HTML and CSS as well as a few media queries. Why would you want to use htmx to serve a completely static website?
>NodeJS can officially drop support for require and module.exports in a future version, creating a bit more pressure to migrate.

This will never, ever happen. Too much of the foundational ecosystem relies on it.
Or you can use Bun and have it handle all the nonsense. Or esbuild, but then you get a big blob, which isn’t really usable for a lot of things.

The extensions were always silly to me. Who changes only a few files to esmodules? You either change your whole project or not at all.
From the beginning, Bun was designed to be a drop-in replacement for Node.js. That’s why Bun implements Node’s globals. That’s also why Bun automatically detects when CommonJS is used in the entry point and ensures CommonJS is loaded. require and many other Node.js features “just work” in Bun.
When it comes to analytics or machine learning type products, the scaling without massive implementation effort problem seems to be pretty universally hard to solve. Of course the usual big names seem to manage this on some level but startups seem to get stuck at building a handful of great solutions for a handful of clients/problems but unable to increase the number without also increasing the effort proportionally.

Do you know of any examples of small scrappy places that have figured this out? Is there any good writing on what kind of organisational and engineering approaches are necessary to make this step?
> Banana is a clicker Game, in which you click a Banana! In Banana you click the Banana to gain even more Bananas! Every 3 and 18 hours, you get dropped a banana. Each banana is also made by the community in discord. Come hang out with us and let's grow into something awesome !

What's banana?

On first glance it looks like a mashup of NFT without the crypto, RPG frog-kill grinding, and slot-machine style compulsive level pulling all rolled into one.

Do people or bots play?
I really don't think that's a generous multiplier, at all. I'm pretty sure it's not manufacturing doses that's costly, it's probably nearly free on a marginal cost basis, the costly part is trying a huge number of options, getting all the way to testing on them, and then it not panning out, and paying the researchers who are doing that all the while.

Another comment nailed it, this is a power law return market, like startup investing. Those very few 100-1000x returns pay for everything else. You can't look at one of the most successful drugs and the costs of making it and decide that they should get a 50% return on top of that, it needs to cover a huge number of failures.
What sort of stuff do you use it for?

I learned a bit of Prolog a long time ago (as part of a philosophy course at university!) and it sounds interesting but I have no idea of how useful it is.
Agreed, I tried for years to self motivate to go to the gym/workout at home. Often complaining of back discomfort. I found a personal trainer about a year ago and haven't looked back. So many body ache issues have gone away by strengthening my core, back, etc.
This explains a lot about the study. Is the study, normal steps didn’t increase that much, on a percentage basis, but “brisk steps” nearly doubled.
Oh, that sounds really weird to me.

Ours are basically just normal booze shops. Most people would be buying slabs of beer, bottles of wine, etc. Definitely convenient when you just need to grab something on the way to a party or a dinner or something.
And you know, fund lobbyists. Shocking I know, but it's not just corporations who have lobbyists, NGOs too.
Can confirm about ZFS - at anything above 85% space utilisation under high load it gets bad on FreeBSD and impossibly weird on Linux.
But the hardware does expire. Computers aren't just magically "faster" than they were decades ago; they're altogether different under the hood. An immense number of abstractions have held up the image of stability but the reality is that systems with hundreds of cores, deep and wide caches, massively parallel SSDs and NICs, etc. require specialized software compared to their much simpler predecessors to be used effectively. Feature bloat is a major annoyance, and running the old software on new hardware can give the appearance of being much faster, until it locks everything up, or takes forever to download a file, or can't share access to a resource, or thinks it has run out of RAM, or chews up a whole CPU core doing nothing, etc.
> governments signing contracts that guarantee they'll pay $X hundred million for a solution BEFORE the research has been done

Did you say "hundred million" intentionally? Because the average cost of a drug has been estimated in the billions for over a decade now. [1] I'll take a listen to the podcast, I'm generally skeptical of the government deciding funding levels since they're likely to be worse at assessing demand than consumers.

[1] https://www.appliedclinicaltrialsonline.com/view/tufts-cente...
The unfortunate truth is that for too many businesses this is equivalent to "stop running your business"
Why would hardships lead to investors chasing social benefit instead of returns?
I accidentally publish confidential documents to my website all the time. My finger just slips and all of a sudden it's in the directory with a link from the home page. Mystery.
4. doesn't have a frontend build process

I'm curious about how does that work? TypeScript isn't supported in the browser nor is JSX.
Is that really "a lot of assumptions" that a piece of software can clone itself? We've been cloning and porting software from system to system for over 70 years (ENIAC was released in 1946 and some of its programs were adapted for use in EDVAC in 1951) - why would it be a problem for a "super intelligence"?

And even if it was originally designed to run on some really unique ASIC hardware, by the Church–Turing thesis it can be emulated on any other hardware. And again, if it's a "super intelligence", it should be at least as good at porting itself as human engineers have been for the three generations.

Am I introducing even one novel assumption here?
More than half of the components on https://status.canonical.com/ are marked as down, too.
Still, there should be a mechanism to avoid bringing up the same issue every year or two. Maybe 5 or 10 years.
Neat! Looks like there's one coming up in Seattle. Might have to drive up for that.

Can public audience members just show up out of the blue (wander out of the woods?) or do we have to sign up or buy a ticket ahead of time? Not going to climb, just watch and clap giddily.
Right; what does it look like with bun?
Mapping the biology of spinal cord injury in unprecedented detail
I miss the old "bayonet lock" ones, like on this page - they don't make them anymore. The special thing about them was they were "bistable" in both the locked and the unlocked positions, whereas twistlocks these days automatically go into the locked position if you let go of them. For the obvious counter-argument, that you can forget to lock them: that's true of screw gates as well, and yet we still use them.
Didn't they can Dr Who finally?
Devils advocate that them being popular does not mean they’re necessarily solving a serious problem. Coming into gnome I used these because community consensus seemed to be they were essential (and still is).

2 weeks of forcing myself to do a trial of vanilla a couple years ago and I completely flipped on most of those “essential” plugins that I’d installed by default for years.
Show HN: I created a free minimalist tool that sends articles to your Kindle
FOMO vs investing in actually viable/valuable products
<mild storyline spoiler alert> except if You're in the void just outside the main continent </spoiler>
I don’t know about the lower back specifically, but I know that hiking/ walking long distances is medicine for your knees. And running is medicine for your whole circulatory system and spine. If I don’t exercise, I begin to feel the difference within a couple weeks. But if your knees start to hurt- you need to walk. Standing is no good. It’s walking that helps, and especially walking up and down mountains. Your knees might be sore the first couple times you do this but after a while they will respond to the stimulation and become much tougher.
The value is easily calculated by taking the potential number of patients times how much their insurance will pay, which is itself easy to calculate based on historical information and quality of life improvements. Adjust for risk based on the stage of development etc.

This is all really really basic stuff. Please just google the rest yourself: https://www.baybridgebio.com/drug_valuation.html
There are a lot out there but take it easy at first. I started trying to do leg lifts and planks while my back was still hurting, and it only made it a lot worse. Stretching and walking until the pain subsided and then strengthening very slowly is what has worked for me.
I remember a project in Scientific American many years ago which proposed using a distributed bunch of sensors using reverse-biased green LEDs to measure atmospheric pollution levels, but I can't immediately find it now.
I do a ton of open source but I don’t beg. I negotiate with my employer to find a common goal that advances the business and the community.

Companies don’t donate out of (pure) goodwill. Lots of talks about risk mitigation. Even if they don’t donate money, the devs who rely on dependencies can still donate time as they choose (within limits).
Incredible ...

(The Tetris pieces going up upon backspace are a riot :)
Ask HN: Where to store compiled binaries for distribution?
Crypto should be permissionless and certainly neutral. Regulators from different countries can choose to apply whatever rules they want.
Damn... i looked there like 10 minutes ago and it have only been like 3 servies marked as down. Either there was monitoring delay or something is spreading.
I don't think there's that much thought involved, they're just aping their Republican heroes.
Why we like coffee more than Duolingo
This "story" is a never ending nightmare for these people, very sad.
Serious question that sounds like a troll: Given that VC returns are historically extraordinarily poor, should one generally invert the consensus of the VC class when looking for guidance?
What are your recommendations amongst open sourced + decentralized + bring your own federation then for Signal meets Discord replacement?

Your points are pretty accurate and yet lead folks into 'shred your social networks, the other side is greener'. I've been generally following the advice wherever I can without success for long term now.

- First it was dump Gmail etc taking aim at Google messenger / Google Chat, folks ask why you are walking away from the connection / leaving them and only your parents install Signal, and a decade later one sibling does but only uses it every other time they message.

- Dump Facebook and What's App, recommend folks snag Signal etc, none do since all their international comms are What's App only. Take a look at options beyond Signal and laugh.

- Telegram is like for like situation as a friend tried to do the same with his graph that I did with mine on What's App, unsuccessful and he's back to Telegram as the graph is more worth it to him.

- Drop Slack or other group chats w/o E2EE, even though they are technical groups maybe 1 in 20 grab Signal, losing the group aspect of that social graph. They won't still have Signal installed 5+ years later.

- Dump discord next too? What replacement would you consider for that last centralized bastion providing voice + text? Self host matter most with me and myself while walking on my social friend groups on Discord next?

- Do we draw the line before or after HN?

Why isn't the recommendation to just run away from anything social graph related at this point? The experience of swapping and dumping for better options never brings along the social parts that brought you to the bad option in the first place like Discord or Facebook.

TL;DR:
I've been shredding my social graph in the name of privacy for quite a while, it's an efficient means at losing friends along the way though.
Apple Is Bringing A.I. To Your Personal Life, Like It or Not
And the Android phone bricked at the distance....
I don't know which is which. I don't care. I don't understand the benefit of a top-level await if I can simply await in a different file. I use Typescript which adds a layer in-between anyway. At work, we use Angular, which (I think) uses both Typescript and maybe esbuild. Or Webpack. Does it compile to ESM, or CJS? Who knows, and it will change in 2 years again anyway.

All of that is something that I consider to be platform-level. It's insane that millions of feature-writing devs are expected to know all these arcana.

Then again, it might be fixed™ soon Ⓡ

https://joyeecheung.github.io/blog/2024/03/18/require-esm-in...
Those licenses are all a joke. If I need a library like libcurl for a commercial application, then GPL, AGPL, EUPL and even LGPL are non-starter. MPL-style licenses are fine, but it doesn't really make you any money, it just forces me to publish my patchset for the library (except not really [1])

The solution really is to use a serious license. Add a "if you make more than $X you owe us $Y" clause. Or use a Qt-style dual-license, where your users can buy their way out of the GPL, this way you can keep the moral high ground of using a "FSF-approved license". But putting yourself in a position where your work can be easily exploited and then complaining when it is is ridiculous.

[1] MPL works on a per-file basis. Technically I can extend it the library with a new file that contains no MPL code and won't have to release it. The LGPL has protections against this, is worse in other ways.
I have to admit I did not know where it was going at first but was thoroughly delighted once it finished stacking up haha
Yeah, it's kind of ridiculous given that parts of the EU has a living memory of living in a system like this. This isn't some imagined hypothetical scenario. The east bloc had this exact type of arbitrary mass surveillance 40 years ago. It wasn't great.
The rebuttal from The Beat flowed

I see no joy
I see only sorrow
I see no chance of your bright new tomorrow

So stand down Margaret
Stand down please
I think the title is backward — the article discusses power as a threat to privacy and encryption, which is often the case. If everyone had perfect privacy from those in power, the tax system would be entirely based on honor, and no one would have government-issued IDs. Encryption does not significantly impact metadata collection, and its use could be a signal (no pun intended); and a single warrant can revoke a fair amount of the privacy that has been granted.

I believe that an educated population poses a greater threat to "power" more than anything else. If more people understood what encryption is and how it affects the integrity and confidentiality of communication(and understood what those terms mean) and why privacy is important, we would be having a much more constructive discussion or at least adopting a more united adversarial stance against attacks on these technologies and rights, similar to the 90s when the online population was generally more technical and concerned about these issues as a whole.

More than anything, attacks on encryption and privacy should be seen as attacks against the social contract we have with those in power, and they're failing to provide adequate justification for the mass erosion of privacy.
It'll be a cold day in hell if someone that high up is prosecuted over this travesty.
It might not be so clear for a nonnative speaker, since "walking" sounds very similar to "ooalking".
Full disclosure, I'm an American, and one thing we've done very well is made it super easy to rent cars. You arrive, go to the lot and pick out your car, and drive off. They take care of the transaction when you go to get out of the garage.

Returning the car is just a drop-off. No interaction is even required.

As far as getting to the car, I use the airport's car rental. In the States there are HUGE rental car inventory at the airports. I either have someone ride with me to go out and get the car, so I can drive the rental back and they can drive my car back, or I just uber out to the airport. For reference, I live 30 minutes away from the airport.
Well, howling of wind can be achieved with simply low-pass filtering white noise and varying the cutoff frequency.

What you are referring to is known as physical modeling, and there are many techniques employed, depending upon the sort of system one seeks to model.