skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An superbly well-put rationalization for banal, business-as-usual cruelty. A desire to demonstrate that "I can go where others are too weak-minded/unwilling/inflexible to go" - to out-smug the smugness one sees wherever they find humanistic purpose, is to put an axe to the trunk of the tree on whose branches one smugly sits. Top kek, and all that.

But maybe you are not trolling. I'll assume rather that you're merely directing a blunt, honest cynicism toward what you see as the shallow, disingenuous cynicism of humanism (which I don't specifically subscribe but it's close enough for a throwaway internet argument). Someone who may or may not come from a place of disillusioned idealism, but in any case is not at all unhappy but rather perfectly content knowing we live in a morally neutral universe. Perhaps even a little pleased with yourself for having the tough-mindedness /so lacking in others/ that enables you to thrive in a hard objective vacuum intolerable to less robust spirits. Since there is essentially no point to anything, there will be no eschatological reckoning, and naturally no possible harm in optimizing for one's own material satisfaction for there is no such thing as harm at all.

Until we are confronted with conclusive evidence of intelligent life in the universe apart from what has developed in our own gravity well (setting aside the possibility of such entities existing outside a mutually impassible causality horizon); which is to say until we find evidence that the universe either has potential for a purposeful complex homeostasis other than the one we ourselves pursue, or else the apparent universal default fate of reduction to an undifferentiated energetic equilibrium, it is neither cold nor kind to act logically on the actual evidence at hand, which strongly suggests we are indeed the sole custodial inhabitants of this universe, conscious of our leverage over its fate, as we are of this planet (insofar as the notion of "custody" is presently confined to it until we learn otherwise - which, as an aside, would be fascinating even if it might trigger our destruction).

Consciousness (and the awareness, among other things, of suffering that it entails) will have to appear somewhere in the accessible universe first if it is to appear at all. So far, there's no basis for thinking that that somewhere isn't this biosphere right here, and consequently, for our purposeful (even if futile) opposition to the universal tendency toward self-consuming annihilation that would, unchecked, smother consciousness in its cradle.
I'm very familiar with the Infocom era and am still in touch with some of the folks. I admit I haven't kept up with the latest developments. Probably should take a look.

For folks interested in the early history, Jason Scott's Get Lamp documentary is highly recommended. (He also has an Infocom-focused edit.)
> If, for achieving zero emissions, all capacity needs to eventually covered by wind anyway...

This is wrong. Solar is zero emissions too, even if the economics are slightly less advantageous.

Both are intermittent sources, so building 100% of either increases risk and requires additional storage. Plus, some areas are more amenable to solar than wind.
well any given week the answer might be different, world is not a constant
Samsung cameras default to AI beauty face enhancements.
I favor the general point here, but the leading anecdote doesn’t really fit with the lessons learned. A government organization generally does not need an innovation doctrine to avoid being outcompeted because they are a monopoly provider. They maintain that monopoly through force.

If you want to get a government agency to perform better, fix the incentives.
OpenAI Acquires Rockset
They mentioned a utility in Utah keeping coal plants open longer.

They kind of imply it's because AI is increasing demand but the article they link to states it is because they cancelled plans for two of Bill Gates Natrium nuclear plants.

And also that a federal court allowed them to pollute more by halting an EPA regulation.

Maybe they'd still be building the nuclear plants if the coal pollution wasn't allowed.

Direct link to the referenced article:

https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2024/04/01/climate-s...

> In their general session earlier this year, Utah legislators went the opposite way from their West Coast counterparts, passing a bill this year that makes Rocky Mountain’s coal plants the state’s preferred power source.

> SB224 essentially upended the paradigm that made the utility prove to the PSC it was choosing the least cost/least risk options for providing power. Instead, the PSC must now assume the coal plants are the best option, and it’s up to others to prove they aren’t.

> Advocates for both residential and business customers say it likely will raise rates for Utah customers because it transfers the risk of continuing to operate the plants from PacifiCorp’s stockholders to Utah’s ratepayers.
Quoting the article: "Meta is applying the “Made with AI” label when photographers use tools such as Adobe’s Generative AI Fill to remove objects."
"Innovation Doctrine" sounds like something you put next to your Mission Statement. How about fostering an internal discussion board where employees can pitch ideas and get hooked up with others who know how to implement them? If you need guard rails around the anarchy, then you can tie action items to a ticket tracking system that's readable by the whole company. I can file a bug in JIRA against any product my company makes, why not the company itself?
CLIPSockets: CLIPS low-level socket implementation
Linux Can Have a "Black Screen of Death" for Kernel Panics
Several decades of published research that hint at correlations between EM exposure and health issues coupled with military grade cynicism about the likelihood that industry players had a hand in late breaking claims that said research was inconclusive.
It will come when our existing generators of electricity are no longer enough to keep up with demand. First, we'll move industries that can be served by both electricity and oil to oil only, and then we'll look to firing up new plants to generate the electricity to meet the rising demand, which will far outstrip the demand we have now. It's a second order effect, but a powerful one.
I particularly liked this part:

> Knowing very little about USB audio processing, but having cut my teeth in college on 8-bit 8051 processors, I knew what kind of functions tended to be slow. I did a Ctrl+F for “%” and found a 16-bit modulo right in the audio processing code.

That feeling of saving days of work because you remember a clue from previous experience is so good.
You look for your keys under the lamp post not because they're there.
Which would seem a perfectly accurate description. If an AI tool was used to remove something, thereby replacing the removed pixels with something AI-generated, then the image has indeed been "Made with AI".
Agree with your main sentiment. For accuracy:

> quite a number of languages, such as Chinese and Japanese (and I think Korean too), are written without space between words or characters.

Correct with Japanese and Chinese. Modern Korean (few or no hanzi/chinese characters) does use spaces.

> In fact, until quite recently (last 100 years or so), written Chinese had no punctuations.

Eh… ok, sure, I guess.

Punctuation was formalized in the 20th century, yes.

There are also lexical markers than can be (and often were) used to mark the beginning or end of certain ideas. While not punctuation, these characters serve a similar purpose in delineating linguistic chunks.

The following page gives some simple examples:

https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2021/09/how-china-adopted-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/
I sure hope so. I love compose multiplatform - it’s by far my favorite dev experience.
A 486/66 DX2 would be much more interesting.

(With a Voodoo2 12MB and an SB AWE32! :D)

I do remember playing SQIII on a portable 386. It was usable with Win 3.11 but not great.
Dioxus Labs on High Level Rust
Interesting, I guess I'll have to dig deeper. I definitely want to understand this better.
This can be managed like an induction stove. Many small coils instead of one big one. Small coils outside the optimal position just turn off. Much like an induction stove can detect the pot size
[dupe]

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40723545
Change Healthcare confirms hackers stole medical records of Americans
The US invaded 7 different countries and killed upwards of a million civilians by some estimates in this century alone. Should the same measures be applied to it, or is it “different” and I “don’t understand”. How about Israel?
Pretty light article.

If anyone wants more in depth resources on gifted kids, I recommend two books by Deborah Ruf. Her more recent one follows up on the kids she studied in the first one almost 20 years later.

https://fivelevelsofgifted.com/about/
My browser is configured to send fake referrer and user agent strings. I tried not sending a UA header at all but it broke too many websites.
> how you would learn it online?

Before you look up anything quantitative online, estimate it first.

Were you correct to within a hemibel?
Yes, this is also true. I have some strategies when I speak with others in trying to repeat their answer back to them, but with the correct grammar/vocabulary and then answer their question and I'm pretty sure I picked this up from volunteers at a language meetup who did it to me. It not only provides feedback to the learner, it also helps to confirm that you're both on the same page with the information that was spoken.

Generally, this works well for kids and adults without being demeaning but it's also important that everyone understands their role in the situation beforehand if possible.

Regarding accent, I think it really is a matter of practice and will. I agree that it's harder as an adult, but we shouldn't allow people to use that as an excuse if they want their accent to improve. By no means is that a requirement, but it is something you should ask your adult friends if they are learning your native language. Though, I would argue this is probably not even worth it unless they are at a B1-B2 level. If they come from a similar language family (germanic, latin, etc) as you, then perhaps working on their accent at the beginning will prove fruitful, but otherwise, it's probably a lot of new sounds that they need to learn how to even say "correctly" before they can start adjusting how their mouth moves. For me, I've found that mouth training a little easier when I'm not spending 10 seconds formulating a reply in my head.
Thanks for the recommendations! Guess I'll be watching all these! ...There goes my day :P
You think its opinions would be counter to a child's benefit? Any examples?
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I concur that HN is a liminal superspace whose character is slippery and so fit for rummagings in the murk, dang is a Taoist best sovereign whose existence is only dimly felt*, etc etc but all I really want to for now is to uh serialize something bothering me since mistermann replied.. quite localized to procrustean-physicism...

maybe physicists are hedgehogs who imagine themselves foxes, but then it occurred to me that it might be true that most non-French non-logician mathematicians tend to stay away from wider sociopolitical commentary (unless prodded)

I can think of reasons, but some implications are clear?

1. Kolmogorov thought of himself as more of a mathematician than a physicist.

2. Arnol'd was heavily frenchified, but had to rationalize that. (In particular, his students didn't inherit his attitudes?)

3. Galois was pretty normal.

4. Grothendieck was special but found a way to resolve the inner and outer (cultural) game.

5. Kaczynski.. too much of a logician? (Dare I suggest he was special XD?)

Back to scheduled programming, over and out.

*Preceding Jefferson, Spinoza, etc
https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%81%93%E5%BE%B7%E7%BB%8F%C2%...
Ask HN: Midlife crisis, which direction to go with?
I am in my late 30s, European, with kids, can't say I am a successful engineer at this age. Most of my life I did CRUD/backend services initially Python, later Go.

As I get older, I feel urgency to be an expert in area and go deeper, but I am still storing/pulling data from DB, transforming and presenting through REST/gRPC APIs.

Ideally, I would love to have a single area to which I can dedicate rest of my professional career, be it ML, ML Ops, Data engineering, Infra guy (AWS, Azure or GCP), maybe a security?

Any recommendations?

UPDATE: Thanks everyone, so many valuable insights are shared.
The Internet is full of bots. It is full of corporate bots that scrape data for AI. It is full of government surveillance. It is full of North Korean Lazarus hackers. It is also full of tech enthusiasts that have various projects. It is full of people that use various RSS readers.

I often am repulsed that servers reads user agent. It is often not used for compatibility reasons, but just to detect if you are running official browser, or if you are 'privileged user'. This leads, obviously, that some programs needs to use disguise, which would not happen if servers were friendly toward friendly bots. Imho there is a problem with bad-bots, not all bots, that take away your bandwidth, processing power, etc. etc.
Easy money and generally low education
Given how much post-processing and/or Photoshopping is done on "real" photos, I see no problem here.
Some of the stuff I've struggled with the most over the years have been SQL constraints that are not documented. I remember (probably like 10 years ago), I deployed an update to an ancient Windows Forms implementation that deprecated some login and instead made use of Windows Authentication. It worked like a charm for all users, but one! Checked everything, replicated the machine, tried so many weird stuff, and in the end, what was happening is that the "Users" table had a constraint in the number of characters for the username. This username was over the limit and was not being validated... Another one was a report that was giving the wrong amount, but getting the data from database seemed to do the math right... it was the damn Money datatype, changed to decimal, done...
> A government organization generally does not need an innovation doctrine to avoid being outcompeted because they face no meaningful competition

Maybe true for some government organizations, but not true on the whole.

Governments spend billions (and sometimes trillions) on innovation to compete with each other. Collectively, government programs probably account for 99.99% of all "innovation" spending.

And they have the highest stakes when it comes to being "outcompeted".
This is a nytimes article. Not a dupe of the https://ssi.inc announcement.

edit: looking at your account, about half your messages seems to be [dupe]. https://i.imgur.com/RomLfQG.png

Are you automating this? I wouldn't recommend because of false flags like you just did.

edit2: seems like i hit a nerve. got instant -3 votes for pointing out this is not a dupe.
Introduction to Software Reverse Engineering [to Non-Techies]
Initially, I thought the value was in the readability gain in my projects' codebases. because a simple API call allows me to generate PDFs instead of hundreds of lines of garbage code.

But digging deeper reveals that there are three main ways to generate PDFs today:

- The worst way: People who will define elements programmatically by indicating the x and y of each element (text, blocks, etc.) > a real nightmare when you dealing with dynamic content...

- The false good idea: In some langs, HTML/CSS to PDF conversion packages > But does not support recent CSS rules (flex, grid, etc) & configuring fonts can take hours.

- Best way: Generate PDFs via Pupetter (chromium rendering engine) > But you must setup and maintain this.

In all cases, the value is found in the generation of the PDF, in the management (apart from the codebase) of the templates + bundle of tailwind and google fonts.

So Yes, you can do it for free...
but this will result in management costs + dev time which will not be used to do real value-added tasks.

I am eager to have your feedback
I had so much fun with this, but what's going on with the new domain?

Also - the share link is broken, it states .com instead of .co

Anyway, me and my friends greatly preferred the 23words.com branding
> Meaning that you're not going to have people drive off while still plugged in, or not plugging in properly

Are there any electric cars which let you drive while plugged in? I own an EV and have driven a couple others. None of them allow you to leave park while plugged in. I also can't imagine how you'd manage to plug in incorrectly. Is this something people routinely do?
Ah, OK. My hazy memory was that it was the goatse.cx image, which is for most people more unpalatable than a testicle in an eggcup, but I didn't check exactly what it was :-).
Are you admitting that you only believe in a "free market" because the alternative is run by corporate lobbying. Not all regulation is subject to capture by default. It has taken a lot of work to erode the system enough.
State of JavaScript 2023 Survey Results (released in 2024)
I played quite a bit with AI photo detection tools, and they definitely trigger on high-quality portraits with bokeh and specific color mood-setting combinations that are overused by generative models (e.g., orange-teal or orange-purple).

AI text detectors are not perfect, but they are right most of the time. These photo tools are absolutely atrocious in comparison. I'm sure it looks good in Meta's metrics, but they almost certainly just have a detector that tells middling photos from good ones, and confuses that for AI. As it happens, for user uploads, it overlaps pretty strongly, but it's still wrong.
Genuinely curious, what are the advantages of a CO2 monitor?

I mean, I get you can “track air quality” but what exactly does that mean on day to day basis?
Why would NASA use their real names if they hired some random group of people to play astronauts that died in Challenger? Or, why would NASA not give false identities to their astronauts that faked dying in Challenger and instead gave them high profile jobs that would have required real resumes? And what is the point of blowing up a space shuttle? If NASA is faking space launches all the time, it seems easier just to declare each one a success than to manufacture a tragedy and congressional investigation. This guy is an absolute kook and that "documentary" is complete nonsense.
Aren’t you describing infinite acceleration, or discontinuous velocity?
What are they going to learn? That’s it’s by far the best fixed-size approximation to real number arithmetic we have, sufficient for essentially all of our scientific and engineering needs?
I feel you.

About a year ago, I was trying to get a very concise query from GPT-4.

"Do not write anything else but the specific answer the user requires."

"Be extremely brief and concise."

"Do not write <this> and <that> explicitly."

Nothing seemed to work. GPT always wants to put a little bit more out and that was really bad for my use case.

I asked about this on the OpenAI community but the reception was poor (it is a very toxic community, btw, I'd advise readers to not engage with it).

I'm surprised to see this is still an issue a year later with top of the line LLMs.

Disregarding that, Claudette looks pretty nice, thanks for putting it out for others to use :).
As others have said, a big part of the problem is the need to eat.

I have a family. I work for a company that does stuff for the government.

I'd _rather_ be building and working on my cycling training app all day every day, but that doesn't make me any money, and probably never will.

All the majority of us can hope for is to build something that helps people and society, and hope that does enough good to counteract the morally grey in this world.

Nothing is ever black and white.
I wonder how often things like that happen.

The launch could have gone right, and no one would have known anything about the decision process besides a few insiders. I am sure that on project as complex and as risky as a Space Shuttle, there is always an engineer that is not satisfied with some aspect, for some valid reason. But at some point, one needs to launch the thing, despite the complains. How many projects luckily succeeded after a reckless decision?

In many accidents, we can point at an engineer who foreshadowed it, as it is the case here. Usually followed by blaming those who proceeded anyways. But these decision makers are in a difficult position. Saying "no" is easy and safe, but at some point, one needs to say "yes" and take risks, otherwise nothing would be done. So, whose "no" to ignore? Not Allan's apparently.
That's why Microsoft tell people to distribute software via .exe
> I never imagined I'd be part of the last generation to see a night sky that isn't full of satellites.

Are you also worried about the sky being full of aircraft? There is fewer than 10,000 satellites in orbit, but more than 30,000 civilian aircraft flying, and around 140,000 commercial flights per day. [1]

> There's nowhere to go, no frontier left to conquer.

Which is precisely what SpaceX is trying to fix.

> now even the sky is full

Nowhere near it.

1. https://www.flightradar24.com/data/statistics
Is this a death knell to many of the vector DBs pushing RAG solutions right now?

(Or maybe it’s validation in RAG and these companies should rejoice)
Roosterjs – a framework-independent JavaScript rich text editor by Microsoft
Sure, but any supply that is consumed can be exhausted locally, including dirt.

Maybe the restock was in the .0006% of containers that fall off ships yearly! Who knows.

I’m not even arguing that this is what happened here; just that a lifetime in ops and logistics has taught me there is a steady, non-zero failure rate.
I could name some companies where you don't need to be an "innovation hero" to feel like the "innovation hero" from the anecdote and "Please ask next quarter" seems to be the motto :)
There’s a few reasons but a General from STRATCOM leaked it from memory being a major one and I generally think there was probably a bit of a messaging component going on there where the US wanted to flex both in terms of their capabilities but also as to what they considered to be “norms” in the cyber context.

I.e here is an example of what we consider to be legitimate use to compare and contrast with say North Korea’s Sony hack.

But also it lost a lot of its value as a secret once it was already done.
If you're comfortable financially where you are, go with the flow, relax, buy a Miata, do what is interesting for you. Maybe think about some larger impact you can have in the world other than work that will be discarded in 12 months or less.

I did the "hyper-focus-on-one-tech" thing for ~15 years. Talk about burn out.
Its polynomials all the way down.
It's even counterproductive. Because it adds ambiguity on whether the "more seriously..." part is from Douglas Adams or from the LLMs general knowledge, leading the user to put additional effort into clarifying this
More tags => more power
Doesn't the leading anecdote give an example of a (dis)incentive that needs fixing? That it takes 10 months and lots of head-banging and then you get a $100 bonus, that would certainly disincentivise me to do any type of innovation.