skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Consider a thought experiment: Imagine an ant colony somehow creates a being with human-level intelligence (their equivalent of ASI). What advice might this superintelligent being offer the ants about their conflicts over resources and territory with neighboring colonies?

Would that be good advice if the neighboring ant colony was an aggressive invasive species, prone to making super colonies?

> IMHO rather than fighting over who develops ASI first, we must ensure that any ASI created is aligned with values like compassion and cooperation so that it does not turn on its creators.

Similarly, I'm wondering how compassion and cooperation would work in Ukraine or Gaza, given the nature of those conflicts. The AI could advise us, but it's not like we haven't come up with that same advice before over the ages.

So then you have to ask what motivation bad actors would have to align their ASIs to be compassionate and cooperative with governments that are in their way. And then of course our governments would realize the same thing.
That is unrelated to the license. They are still free to download and install FreeBSD on any arch supported by the project.
The article really needs to explain how a comparison of Python to Java is supposed to explain what languages people choose for new services in 2024. Why aren't other languages on the table?

Even taking it at face value that the choice is between Python and Java, the article leaves so much unaddressed.

> a good plan executed now trumps a perfect plan done next week

In what universe does this apply to a payments system?

Hatred for Java is burned deep in my soul, and I've spent an unreasonable amount of time on this very web site carefully articulating reasons why I think Java is a crufty relic whose design reflects a bunch of discredited beliefs from a quarter century ago. But gosh, if I had to choose between Java and Python for a payments system, I think I might choose Java.
NVDA and the semiconductor manufacturers TSMC/MU are minting. NVDA margins are ~60% and growth is super. They are the real AI winners.

How long it continues is anyone's guess.

However like any boom and bust cycle, the losers could be AI startups building thin layers on top of apis.

When OpenAI becomes Google and loses product sense, they'll be bust.
The root cause is being hyperactive? Here I thought it was due to a partner having HIV.

Anyways, this isn't an either or situation, we can do both.
> Siri. Introduced 2011.

Not working well to this day. Siri is mostly a joke and a meme, much like Alexa, Cortana and Google whatever-they-call-it-now.

Other stuff: yeah, you can get away with a lot using some formal grammar, a random number generator, and a lot of effort railroading the user so they won't even think to say anything that'll break the illusion. I've had people not realize for weeks that my IRC bot is a bot, even if all it did was apply a bunch of regular exceptions to input (the trick was that the bot would occasionally speak unprompted and react to other people's conversations, and replied to common emoticons and words indicating emotion).

No, only in the last two years we can say that there exist Speech-to-Text that works reliably, Text-to-Speech that sounds natural, and a ML model that can parse arbitrary natural language text and reliably infer what you want, even if you never directly stated what you want, and handling for it was never explicitly coded.
TP was just so awesome, it was like a superpower compared to others waiting 10-20x as long for each build.

For me the big thing was all the latencies stacked together. Slow hard drives, slow floppies, god help you if you swapped, etc. The era was mostly waiting around for the beige machine to finally do its thing.
60 years is way beyond the prediction threshold. in https://dernocua.github.io/notes/backward-exponential.html i calculated that we can produce 16 earth-surfaces of human living space in less than 30 years, using 0.3% of the mass of the moon

60 years ago was 01962, when moore's law hadn't yet been noted, most people were farmers, there was no energy crisis, global warming was a forgotten 19th-century speculation, nuclear energy was hoped to make electricity too cheap to meter, communism was widely believed to be more efficient than capitalism (and produce higher living standards, if you discounted the gulag), mass imprisonment was a defining characteristic of russia rather than the usa, global thermonuclear war was widely considered survivable, overpopulation was driving inevitably toward widespread famine because the green revolution hadn't happened yet, and electric generation capacity in the usa was starting its last pre-energy-crisis doubling
Blaming high water in Miami on climate change is laughable to those of us who have lived here for decades and generations.

The last high water event which affected Miami as they do every few years was the result of heavy rains hitting during high tide. When water has nowhere to go it stays. Living at sea level has consequences.

That may be a foreign concept to a lot of the transplants from other states that have not experienced a hurricane yet. Despite the annual fear-mongering by politicians and weathermen most Floridians and especially those in Miami and the Conch Republic have grown to accept the normalcy of the occasional flooded Street as we have the occasional 200 mph coconut taking out windows and buildings
> the prevalence of rape in the DRC

This was in South Africa. You might as conclude on life in America based on observations in Caracas.
I use a `TODO.md` file.

GitHub flavored markdown will format a list like this:

1. [X] Dockerfile
2. [ ] Bulk Inference
3. [ ] CLI
4. [ ] Logging

as a neat little list of checked/unchecked checkboxes. I create a section called "Backlog" for future ideas, a section called "Bugs" for bugs to fix, and an unnamed section at the top with current items. Once I reach a milestone like a release, I delete all the completed items.
Oh, no. If the Economist says it, it won't happen.
This was the opposite approach governments took towards Covid in many countries.
I think it lacks /s at the end.
No. Even if each LED was a good light sensor (it's not good) the control circuitry is output-only. And you need a lens, or else every pixel receives the light from all around it, and reads just the average brightness of the room.
This is interesting, but from my experience ChatGPT is terrible at security focused code review.

How does this work? Are you sending each request or webpage to the LLM and asking to find security issues?
AI's $600B Question
The "D" in LED is "Diode", commonly referring to the "P-N Junction" and its capabilities.

A CMOS sensor is an array of thousands of photodiodes. So erm... diodes are _already_ used as the basis of modern digital cameras.

I guess building one out of LEDs (diodes designed to emit light, rather than receive it) is feasible but I can't imagine it'd work very well. If you build a big enough camera and calculate the right lenses, it probably would work. But it wouldn't surprise me if the proper size of such a camera was on the order of a 20-feet by 30-foot room (with a "camera sensor" the size of maybe 5-feet by 5-feet, composed of thousands of LEDs acting as terrible photodiodes).

--------

A proper CMOS sensor miniturizes all of that to happen on a micrometer scale, so you can shrink modern cameras down to... well... the size of our phones.

But the principles of light, sensors, and cameras in general work even with larger / inefficient objects. You just got to build a "large enough" camera to compensate for all the problems.

EDIT: And also what the other poster pointed out about the control circuitry. The circuits in a typical LED Screen are all "output only". There's no way for the information to come back / reverse the LED Screen because the circuits are already set. I'm assuming you're somehow building those circuits and have embedded them into the LEDs somehow.
Say you're a small or solopreneur company, and you don't have any enterprise customers yet.

What do you put on a features/pricing page to help you start finding out what your enterprise customers might actually want? (Not the generic stuff like SSO and audits, but specific to your product/market).

Just a generic "Don't see the features you need? Email us!"?
"Audio engines" exist.. they are called VSTs or plugins. The ones with the most physical modeling are echo and reverb plugins.. modeling a physical environment and then reproducing it digitally. Or noise reduction plugins - reverse engineering various "noise" sources and then subtracting them. Very math intensive.

There are also analog versions of this.. guitar pedals that create echo and reverb that "model" a room sound via physical internal parts
I can imagine a single uncaught exception bringing down the entire payment system...
Somehow, all those jobs got done without commutes for years during COVID. So a lot don’t seem to require commuting.
What are the 3 most important things you measure?
I was very fortunate to have worked on Arvind's Monsoon project as a contractor for Motorola. He was the very model of what a professor ought to be: an active and outgoing researcher, an natural educator, a good organizer, and a lively, witty, and gracious man in public. What a loss.

The last time I saw him, at a dinner in Champaign IL around 2005, he told this joke, apropos of MIT's reputation for arrogance:

Someone called a faculty meeting at MIT and said, guys, we have a problem. People say that we're arrogant. We need to come up with some ideas for being less arrogant. Who has an idea?

One of the faculty members stood up and said, I know! I'll teach a course on humility!

The meeting organizer said that's a great idea! A course on humility is exactly what we need! And the meeting was adjourned.

At the end of the semester, a follow-up faculty meeting was called.

The organizer asked, so, what about our course on humility? Let's have a report about it.

The faculty member who taught the course stood up, and said:

We have the best g*d-damned course on humility!

---

RIP Arvind.
"They just don't want to pay for it" : yes. And why would they ?

SQL server supports compatibility level up to sql server 2005. So you can install SQL server and run your application without any change. What it is to pay, exactly ?

There are two possible answers to that question, as far as I know:

- the hosting provider is a greedy crap, who leverages "security reasons" to racket some extra money
- somebody made the (bad) choice and setup multiple unrelated software on the same instance. Instances, just like containers, must follow the simple rule : one box = one app software. So maybe those people bundled together various software, and are now living in a compatibility nightmare where everybody is stuck ?
I’ve always liked that being disabled in America isn’t necessarily the death sentence it is in other countries that have no accommodation for disabled people.
What the grandparent post was referring to as "obvious reasons" must be the high prevalence of HIV in the study countries[0]. Why wouldn't they test in countries with the highest infection risk?

There may be common reasons to trial there like it being cheaper or less regulated. But there is a good reason for this specific medication to be tested in those specific countries. Criticizing the study authors for being "cheap" is uncalled for in this case.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-infec...
This is just a system to bilk money out of people.

Midway down https://whatif.xkcd.com/23/ will explain how terrible an idea this is:

If everyone put little turbine generators on the downspouts of their houses and businesses, how much power would we generate? Would we ever generate enough power to offset the cost of the generators?

—Damien
[a house uses rain that falls on its lid to run a turbine]

A house in a very rainy place, like the Alaska panhandle, might receive close to four meters of rain per year. Water turbines can be pretty efficient. If the house has a footprint of 1,500 square feet and gutters five meters off the ground, it would generate an average of less than a watt of power from rainfall, and the maximum electricity savings would be:

(math that works out to $1.14/year)

The rainiest hour on record occurred in 1947 in Holt, Missouri, where about 30 centimeters of rain fell in 42 minutes. For those 42 minutes, our hypothetical house could generate up to 800 watts of electricity, which might be enough to power everything inside it. For the rest of the year, it wouldn’t come close.

If the generator rig cost $100, residents of the rainiest place in the US—Ketchikan, Alaska—could potentially offset the cost in under a century.
I didn't make any sort of claim like that. The parent said most people have social media compulsion, and I doubt those claims. If you are going to ban something from an entire population of people, why should they not study the actual prevalence of harm.
If you need for game reasons, I would advise to inspect the code of OpenAL soft which has lots of interesting concepts implemented and also to read the documentation on Steam Audio - this one is also open source too, so you can take a look on valve's implementation here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-audio

I would at least take a look on how HRTF works as you need to account how humans experience sounds too when simulating audio things.
Yeah, that's a good point, I've just been looking at - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-photon_source#Character... which talks a little about what deterministic means with respect to a single photon source.

It sounds like if it's probabilistic it could also generate multiple photons.
> the root cause—being hyperactive

They’re being hysterical!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_hysteria
Except all the topics/benefits I mention apply to our day to day lives and communities, not Somalia.
What turns a crisis into a moment for substantive change? Essays
I hear you. Logic based and relational languages, like Prolog and miniKanren, have captured my attention a lot lately. One reason: I wondered if they might complement LLMs nicely, or if LLMs might be a good tool for helping people learn/understand logic languages.

While exploring the logic language space, I recently reacquainted myself with a branch of logic based languages based on *Clear/OBJ* that were born in the ‘70s at the University of Edinburgh. It never took off like Prolog, mostly because it was a research language focused on specification and verification, but a lot of the ideas have lived on in many modern languages. (Haskell, OCaml, C++, etc…)

First, imagine you wanted to create a Prolog inspired language that allowed a person to create their own domain specific languages like they were abstract data types. You can also create abstract data types. The goal of this language isn’t to create a lexer/parser tool, but rather a more integrated tool that is capable of specifying both abstract data types and DSLs with a formalized logic. Oh yeah, let’s make it modular, so you can mix and match specifications.

Clear/OBJ did just that, but they did it in a way built on a foundation of formal semantics. What I mean that is, Rod Burstall and Joseph Goguen used Category Theory to create an abstract formal specification that answers the question, “What is a logic?”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institution_(computer_science)

With this framework in place, Goguen formalized order sorted equational logic and used it as the basis for the OBJ language in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Jose Meseguer formalized rewriting logic (for rewrite based systems) and used it as the basis for his language Maude. Most recently, Grigore Rosu lead the creation of Matching Logic (Used by the K Framework) for specifying the semantics of full programming languages, as well as automatically generating the lexer, parsers. This system of logic lets them define the operation semantics and prove the properties using Hoare logic in a single language.

This one reference language semantics can derive program behavior (compilers/tooling) and verify programs.

This works because we have a framework for defining a system of logic like Matching logic, which isn’t based on True/False and predicate logic, but pattern matching and power sets.

Instead of defining Top/Bottom as True/False, what if Top/Bottom corresponded to pattern matching primitives like MatchesEverything/MatchesNothing?

My point is this: While I am loving this resurgent interest in Prolog, I feel like it’s easy to overlook the wider world of logic programming beyond Prolog & Datalog.

We have 50 years of incredibly insightful research that we can use to build the next generation of tools and systems to serve us.
are non-snake oil prompting techniques described anywhere?
Ha yeah, my previous company had some "most green employee" award, and praising people who biked in or took transit to office - I was told I wasn't eligible because I worked from home..
Only 2 equally contributing reasons:

1. UI is inherently a very complex problem, because of the state. Most of the so called web apps are thin clients with most of the state machine delegated and spread over backend services.

2. Android platform was shitty designed to begin with. Terrible architecture, ugly UX, frustrating docs etc.
The thing with type erasure is that reflection is a big part of Java - but it doesn’t work too well with generics.

With optionals, I had hoped they would be a huge benefit to catching potential NPEs at compile time. But it was just lipstick. It was half assed. The reasoning was as you say - telling the caller about nulls - but IMO it adds complexity without benefit. They could have just defined a standard annotation. Or… made the compiler enforce them.
How do residents feel about insurance rates changing or insurance being cancelled?
One huge leg up here is ChatGPT defaults to outputting (and actually displaying, if you're using the default client) LaTeX. Between that and this being one of the few places high verbosity is actually helpful I preferred GPT4/4o for helping learn calc 2. It's well possible Claude 3.5 Sonnet gets the final answer right on the first try more often though.
I heavily dislike Pug, just because it depends on indentation. Maybe I'm just my IDE somehow wrong, but trying to rearrange things seems always so much more complicated and trying to learn this clever syntax instead of doing normal html.
That’s cool. I can see them expanding to become the Intercom for Developers.
It's noteworthy that it's impossible, by design, to write a statically linked Wayland executable. You have to load graphics drivers, because there's no way to just send either pixel data or drawing commands to the display server, like you can in X11. You have to put the pixel data in a GPU buffer using a GPU driver, then send the GPU buffer reference.
This sounds like voters are not responsible for voting. But in the end they are.
The Case for AI Optimism
Apple wouldn’t know but OpenAI gets fined and Apple still doesn’t know? Who is issuing these secret fines?
I think its a combination of:

* Android having made lots of compromises to get Java running on resource constrained devices, leading to things like manually saving state in Bundles, Parcelables, SavedStataHandle, etc in combination with Component Lifecycles. These deep seated things remain.

* Lots and lots of undocumented behavior, poor documentation, etc. The Javadoc is in disrepair for many APIs, being just skeleton but not mentioning semantics, arguments, return values in all scenarios etc.

* Lots of API churn, stuff being deprecated constantly. You may need lots of compatibility paths.

* Just straight out bad ideas like Content Providers, which are still used in various
APIs like DownloadManager (getting status, etc).

* Still have plenty of fragmentation and behavior differences (Samsung devices, etc)

* Google Policies continue to become more onerous. Seems like more of my effort goes towards administration than actually building. I suspect this is intentional, so only larger teams can get their stuff in Play Store.

* Mobile development in general is still kinda like shipping software on CDs, there is some delay for approvals, and some people won't get your update for a bug fix etc
How is it discriminating content?

It’s not putting restrictions on content that can be shown.
The sex and blowing things up industries are always early adopters.
This is also one of the first things I test with new models. I did notice that while it still plays very poorly, it is actually far more consistent with the board state, making only legal moves, and noticing when I win than is GPT4o.
Scrap paper with list of todos. Throw away or transfer to new list if down to one or two items.
I remember the original splash screen ;)
https://bear.app with GitHub flavoured todo lists
>IMO, it's the best thing to happen to Node. It (kinda) unifies browser and server syntax, and across competing server-side JS frameworks (Node, Deno, Bun). CommonJS was clearly a NodeJS thing.

what the fuck was the point of unifying this particular thing at such a great PITA cost, when obviously none of node APIs work in the browser?

should things like Buffer be removed too? the browser only has Uint8Array, after all.
Intent is when someone mentally commits to an action
Yes:

https://www.suse.com/news/New-suse-liberty-linux-lite/
Python here. And like they said, only noticable in the last few weeks.
I make daily/weekly/monthly goals, and structure it in whatever App I use e.g. Linear, Todoist, or Notion.

- Monthly goals are very high level and few (e.g. “Make PoC for this”, “Redesign and relaunch blog”)

- Weekly goals are more tangible and limited (e.g. “Settle on approach for calling Rust from Swift code”, or “Finish design and styling of posts”)

- Daily are very concrete (e.g. “Set up UniFFI pipeline to generate Swift bindings” or “Implement new theme across blog pages”)

Sometimes things come up that I discover during implementation, and then I typically shift a daily goal to the next day.

Has worked well so far for giving me focus, and I then pick the daily goals based on the weekly focus from the list of many open tasks/issues I have in my various projects.

I set up each thing I’m working on as a Project in e.g. Linear, and immediately add a priority when I add things, which allows me to easily keep an overview of many smaller or larger projects I might have going on or want to do in the future.

While I do like paper, for me that’s only for ephemeral things. I prefer to keep things digital, allowing me to easily add stuff from my phone in the go when I get an idea while being out-and-about. I also write much faster on a keyboard and use the various tasks as the dumping ground for info while I’m working through something or researching something.
These people should maybe go to co-working places then. Can still work without the butts-in-seats managers over looking every move you make while also getting the social aspect.
It is e.x.a.c.t.l.y the same. Instead of selecting an image for the virtual dvd drive, you select an image for the hard drive, or an image for an usb drive. It is as fast and as simple either way with the advantage of not having to go through the install process if you just start fe the hard drive image. The downside possibly being download size compared to say, downloading a netboot iso that will install the latest packages from the very start.
iOS development is honestly the worse.

It got a bit better with Swift instead of ObjectiveC but you still have to deal with XCode and a stupid process to sign and publish your apps.
My laptop (a Dell Latitude 5490, i5-8350u) with the screen backlight off and at idle goes down to 2.5w power consumption according to the battery statistics. An SSD idling at 1.9w would nearly double it!
Florence 2, Microsoft OCR Modell
Try Handwriting, Task prompt "OCR with Region"