skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm also curious -- how come you hear big stories about governments going after torrent sites, which don't even host the pirated content.

But I've never heard big stories about the government going after big Usenet providers. Do they? If not, why not? Or does it just not make the news? Or am I just not paying attention?
HN downvoting scientific studies... I'm worried that this site has reached its eternal September. A huge loss since reddit went public and killed all real discussion, this was one of the last places with intelligent discourse.

https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/new-study-disavows-marshmal...
> These events almost certainly cause long-term brain damage.

So do lots of other sports that are commonly accepted today, such as football, boxing, etc. It's difficult to make a societal argument when those things also exist in much greater numbers elsewhere - how many power slap fighters are there?

You can even go outside of sports and find a myriad of other things like alcohol, tobacco, recreational drugs that have a $X societal cost. It is not really that convincing of an argument to me, especially at the scale this event currently exists in.
=======Technical Summary========

Here's a problem with NixOS:

1. Suppose we have a `./nixos_binary_program_with_glibc-newer` compiled on a NixOS machine against bleeding edge `glibc-newer`.

2. `./nixos_binary_program_with_glibc-newer` will have `/nix/store/glibc-newer/linux-ld.so` path hardcoded into its ELF header which will be used when the program launches to find all of the program's shared libraries, and so forth. (And this is a fact that `ldd` will obfuscate!).

3. When `./nixos_binary_program_with_glibc-newer` is distributed to machines which use `glibc-older` instead of `glibc-newer`, the hardcoded `linux-ld.so` from (2) will fail to be found, leading to a launch error.

4. (3) will also happen on machines which don't use nix in the first place.

=======Will's Solution========

1. Use `patchelf` to hardcode a standard FHS `ld-linux.so` location into `nixos_binary_program_with_glibc-newer`'s ELF header (using e.g. `/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2` as the path)

2. Use a metaloader to launch `nixos_binary_program_with_glibc-newer` with an augmented `RPATH` which has a bunch of different `/nix/store/glibc-newer` paths, so that nix machines can find a suitable `ld-linux.so` to launch the program with.

This will make `nixos_binary_program_with_glibc-newer` work on any machine, including both non-nix machines and nix machines (which might be running older versions of glibc by default)!
Thank you. Updated the title.
You can post binaries on Usenet. And a lot of the stuff is dupes (the same content being re-ripped in different formats and posted by different groups).

Any particular piece of content might be uploaded 50 times or more with different resolutions, codecs, sound formats, languages, etc.
The reason we are paying $6k/year for something that normally costa $20 is that we've been with this Marketing Automation provider fir many years, and a lot of our internal training/documentation/integrations are tailored to them. The $6k price tag is not a big enough fraction of our contract to justify switching. And, importantly, all of the other enterpriae-scale marketing automation vendors play this exact same game (the main competitor is owned by Oracle...). We're getting screwed, but I chose to lose this battle in order to reach my greater objectives :-)

The reasons why the stats don't include SES is because the target audience for this article is fairly narrow: it is people at orgs that pay for "Marketing Automation" software. That software has capabilities beyond just email sending, and is used for marketing (hence different deliverability challengea than those at SES, which has a broad customer base and can be used for transactional/alerting emails)

Yes, "deliverability" is often used as something vendors use to spook people. It only matters at scale (like >10,000 people per mailing). And many vendors dont actually know what theyre doing.

I'll be glad to answer more questions on this thread or through email (its in my profile)
What alternative technology do you propose aliens would be using to communicate wirelessly across vast distances? Even if something new is eventually discovered (like Star Trek's "subspace"), it stands to reason that any civilization advanced enough to explore their own solar system would have been using radio long before then.
Fly.io deleted all my apps without notifying me
I noticed my app was down and went to check it out. Lo and Behold my account had been flagged by their automatic fraud detection algorithm. This is despite my account having close to $500 of credit and being active for around a year now. I was not informed about this at all. I followed the prompt to allow them to charge my credit card in order to verify that I'm not a bot and now I have control of my account again. However none of my apps were restored. Has anyone else experienced something like this in the past?
Could this be your issue? https://zed.dev/docs/linux#opening-files-does-not-work
At least you can be sure that it worked, whereas if he'd actually written the succinct version there was a risk of a subtle bug.
From their FAQ:

We envision Zed as a free-to-use editor, supplemented by subscription-based, optional network features, such as:

Channels and calls
Chat
Channel notes
We plan to allow offer our collaboration features to open source teams, free of charge.

https://zed.dev/faq#how-will-you-make-money
I couldn't find anything resembling "Send code to REPL", so no Zed for me.
They do have Paul Nakasone on the board now. He was a four star general.
It may also depend on the kind of thing that's being shipped. Want to ship something large and monolithic? Want it quick? You need a big team.

If your product can be modularized into small problems/features/projects that are one- or two-pizza sized, and the abstraction overhead to connect pieces together is low enough, then yeah, small teams make more sense.

I suppose the real question is whether the cost of splitting big problems into small ones is worth the productivity bonus of working on those small problems.
A lot of very artistic form of discussion
Today, sure. That doesn't preclude it from maturing into something more generally useful, nor from eventually getting its own repo. I've built more than a few libraries that started out as functions and data structures within application code.
Ask HN: Vim or Neovim?
Which one should I choose and why? Any reasons to prefer one over the other?
> Other architectures, like [...] ARMv8, are much more consistent.

From an instruction/operation perspective, AArch64 is more clean. However, from an instruction operand and encoding perspective, AArch64 is a lot less consistent than x86. Consider the different operand types: on x86, there are a dozen register types, immediate (8/16/32/64 bits), and memory operands (always the same layout). On AArch64, there's: GP regs, incremented GP reg (MOPS extension), extended GP reg (e.g., SXTB), shifted GP reg, stack pointer, FP reg, vector register, vector register element, vector register table, vector register table element, a dozen types of memory operands, conditions, and a dozen types of immediate encodings (including the fascinating and very useful, but also very non-trivial encoding of logical immediates [1]).

AArch64 also has some register constraints: some vector operations can only encode register 0-15 or 0-7; not to mention SVE with it's "movprfx" prefix instruction that is only valid in front of a few selected instructions.

[1]: https://github.com/aengelke/disarm/blob/master/encode.c#L19-...
> Of course, zed has always felt like an osx first project with linux/windows being second class citizen.

Unless I'm missing something, it doesn't even run on Windows...

https://zed.dev/docs/#download-zed
This might work if we were still living in the 1700's, where companies were held in check by the communities they served. Today, they're happy to do the bare minimum required (required today, not in the world you're advocating for) to avoid poisoning the air, water, and their customers.
> why does anybody use Usenet for pirating rather than torrents?

With the exception of the rare, well seeded torrent, a Usenet download will proceed at full speed while the torrent will trickle along at 34kb/sec.

> It seems so fundamentally ill-suited to the task.

It is. But it is there, so....
New Google Tag How Commercial Surveillance Vendors Work
When did they recently try to change licenses? I must have missed that. I don't see any PRs or issues related to a license change, aside from their change from MIT to AGPL 4 years ago.
Thank you for the feedback will look into that

Edit: the sign up works for me, but the spacing is an issue
>The seal performed exactly as it was specified to.

Yeah, no.

The seal never performed the way it was designed to.[1] It was faulty by design. The seal always leaked, but that didn't always lead to an explosion.

There were multiple times where the erosion/blow-by problem was observed; in fact, the O-ring was (unsuccessfully) redesigned by Morton Thiokol to address the issue.[2]

The problem was that nobody really understood what was going on, and waved their hands about it.

Quote[3]:

“NASA had developed a peculiar kind of attitude: if one of the seals leaks a little and the flight is successful, the problem isn’t so serious. Try playing Russian roulette that way: you pull the trigger and the gun doesn’t go off, so it must be safe to pull the trigger again.”

Please do some due diligence before simply saying things that feel right for the sake of making a point.

Your point still stands (it was an organizational failure), but premising it on a false statement (that the O-ring performed to spec) isn't a way to make it.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-11-19-mn-4295-s...

[2] https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v1ch6.htm

[3] https://lithub.com/how-legendary-physicist-richard-feynman-h...
I always encrypt my “hi mom” messages as multigigabyte .rar files to blend in.
> what you want is WORSE than the current state.

No, it isn't, because if Congress is forced to make laws itself, like the Constitution says, it will have to drastically scale back the scope of the laws it makes so it is manageable, and that is a good thing. We have far too many laws as it is. The law needs to be drastically scaled back so it only does what it's supposed to, and is not used, as it is now, as an instrument of ideology and failed social policy.
What makes you assume aliens are communicating wirelessly across vast distances?

Earth is home to just one species who've developed wireless communication, and we don't broadcast across astronomical distances if we can help it these days.
be cool and gain traction, to later extract profits?
"metal health conditions" (how ever you measure that in mice)

I know cortisol levels are a way one can diagnose stress/anxiety in animals. (My vet said they look to that as a proxy for "is my animal in discomfort" at times)
Okay, call me weird, but why our standards have fallen so low?

VSCode may appear fast, but still has massive latency. The Zed website claims 97ms.

I can feel it is laggy.

Why can't we have response time under 1ms? Even 5ms would be a massive improvement.

For me latency is a massive productivity killer as it feels like walking in a swamp and it always puts me off.
Afaik, there is no benefit to a VPN for downloading content from Usenet.
I couldn't even get it to run at all. It's in the official repo of my distro, but when I installed that package and tried to execute it, the binary launched another executable with a 'zed-cli://' URI pointing to some socket/named pipe it tried to create under /tmp (but didn't) as an argument, then just sat there doing nothing. Seems like it's doing some sort of local client-server implementation -- not sure why a standalone desktop app would be designed that way.

It never spawned a window, and possibly because the process is itself launching another process, nothing is output to stdout or stderr to indicate what's going on.
My personal Fav group killer is when the organizer announces

"Good News! We finally have a permanent location!!!!"

Then it turns out to be 45min in one compass direction outside of the city. Meaning the location will be 2+ hr drive one way for the 75%'ish of the members that don't live on that side of the city. Essentially killing the group on announcement. I've seen this happen several times.

I do get that running a group is hard, I've done it. Its just that at that point you may as well just throw in the towel.

Also for some reason its always a run down church or VFW location when this happens.
Zawinski's Law: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

Back in the day, we had these things called email clients. A good example was Eudora from Qualcomm (yes, the Snapdragon company). It was simple, straightforward, and handled sending, receiving, and managing emails with aplomb -- and nothing else.

Then Microsoft came along and combined email, contacts, and calendaring in one application -- Outlook. And ate the lunch of all the non-web-based email clients out there. To this day Outlook is pretty much table stakes for working in a corporate environment, especially since all corporate IT has to do is deploy Exchange to handle all three tasks from the server side. And Eudora is literally a museum piece; the software's source was made available as a historic artifact and the trademark rights were transferred to the Computer History Museum.

"Simplicity" in software is a red herring. You need to read your market and find out what your customers actually want, what will make life easier and more convenient for your actual users. Sometimes people actually want the car that grills hamburgers, the cellphone with a built-in camera, the email client that also does contacts and calendaring.
Emacs definitely does this. I have saved many files from power outages. M-x recover-file, but the user has to recover the file right away when he opens it again or else a new auto-save will overwrite the old one. I think that's the case.
Just as an adjacent aside from a random about learning by doing:

Implementing a ThingDoer is a huge learning experience. I remember doing co-op "write-a-compiler" coursework with another person. We were doing great, everything was working and then we got to the oral exam...

"Why is your Stack Pointer growing upwards"?

... I was kinda stunned. I'd never thought about that. We understood most of the things, but sometimes we kind of just bashed at things until they worked... and it turned out upward-growing SP did work (up to a point) on the architecture our toy compiler was targeting.
How a Trip to Germany and Some Advertising Genius Made Miller Lite Famous (2023)
Sky City 1000
Is there any high quality sci-fi that explores the second type of solar systems?
I worked extensively with India (Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad), Poland (Krakow) and Kenya (Mombasa, Kisumu).

You can find good people everywhere but due to education (real, useful education - in my case IT and dev) there are real differences in the average competency. Poland is by far the best.

And then there is culture, especially communication culture that is hugely different between these countries. I am French so the easiest was Poland.

When you go to Krakow you are for a treat as well - but Kenya and India are fantastic as well (just way bigger)
Well, naturally, in the sense that naturally occurring chromium was converted to its very dangerous hexavalent state by the intense heat of the fire(s).

The that this hexavalent chromium is ultimately of natural origin and not man made does not make this any less of a concern.
> Uncomfortable as it is, we must Accept* the following:

I'm going to say the same thing this disclaimer says at the bottom of the page. No, you don't have to accept the following because it's not based on anything other than regressive projection. There is no empirical or even historical evidence that suggests superhuman intelligence will exist or supercede human potential. There is no written rule or law that suggests we can get there with statistics or LLMs. It's conjecture, in it's entirety.

> If you disagree with my reasoning – convince yourself that you’re not in Denial [...] or Anger

As an author, you should be asking yourself the same question. When we write hyperbolic think-pieces about burgeoning technology it's often dominated by a tone of sensationalism and hysteria. Red mercury, "China's Final Warning", the missile gap, stoplights for flying cars; all of them are overeager histories that paint a post-something world before said 'something' exists.

If you want to talk about coping, try writing the same article without ascribing any hypothetical capabilities to AI. Now you're trying to get people to be afraid of a random-number-generator with a personality.
Re: #2, use

"buffer_font_weight": 600

in the settings.json to fix the font rendering.
> how they interact with the FS/GS prefixes (64/65)

For memory operations, they are ignored: 64-2e-65-3e gives 65 as segment override. (From my memory and the resulting implementation, I did some tests with hardware a few years back.)

I do need to check myself how 2e/3e on branches interact with other segment overrides, though.
> needs less words

Yes I'm aware of this, and work in ML -- the thing is embeddings are not designed for faithful image reconstruction, and aren't even trained that way. You can easily find two images that have substantially similar CLIP (or whatever) embeddings that are visually very different. If you query the LLM about that difference, the LLM wouldn't even have the information to differentiate answers for the two images if you only supply it with the embedding.

On the other hand, SDXL autoencoder latents passed into an LLM alongside the embedding might be a step up from just an image embedding, since they are designed for image reconstruction, but I don't have access to the compute or data resources to attempt training this.
From the article:

>“Losing to A.I., in a sense, meant my entire world was collapsing,” he said in a recent interview with The New York Times.

>Mr. Lee had a hard time accepting the defeat. What he regarded as an art form, an extension of a player’s own personality and style, was now cast aside for an algorithm’s ruthless efficiency.
--------

He also retired 3 years later and has had some time to reflect on the situation.

For people whose sole source of identity is their job/profession, Lee Saedol is a cautionary tale.

What used to take a dedicated research team and millions of dollars of compute (to play professional go), can now be done with a sub $1 gpt4 call (to do something like make strategy slides).
Why would such a system assure someone that it worked? Conversely, why would only the succinct version lend itself to a subtle bug?
The Drake equations are the most convincing assessment of where we’re at and why that I’ve read — upshot, the fact that nobody is near us is a GREAT sign that we’re likely going to have time to expand out of our solar system before some dominant civ just eats us maybe without even noticing us.

That said, so many of these ‘intelligent life’ things have so many baked in assumptions, I’m constantly frustrated: “Must be water based, since that’s what we know,” “Must communicate via radio like we do in ways that we could recognize”, … The assumptions are legion.
Apple slowed down old phones with old batteries.

Apple is the only malicious perpetrator here. For many years they had specifically denied that they were doing this. That is malicious and borderline criminal damage.

Then when they got caught they came up with plausible deniability. It was evil, it was dishonest and it was awful.
Ooof, I have dealt with some fun balls of mud.

Had a customers app break when they used zips that contained over 65k separate files. Sent it to dev and they said "Oh use this other API we have". And yes, the file 'worked' but the api didn't do what the customer needed. Got back with the developer and saw

We had two api's that did almost but not quite the same thing. Ok, it happens, maybe there was a reason for it.

We also had two different zip libraries built in. At some point a dev ran into issues with legacy zip support not working on large files and added a new library. They converted about 10% of the API, enough to cover what they were working on and stopped.
Yes, of course. In fact it is a pretty bad idea to use the same profile for an employer. Always treat an employer as disposable, along with the respective GitHub username for it.
Sounds like more than enough
iPhones and MacBooks have always been expensive luxury products for anybody outside of the tech bubble.
niche?

WSL (all distros combined) is the 2nd most popular Linux environment. Only behind Ubuntu.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-most-popular-t...
I agree with you -- but aiming for 1ms performance is pretty hard. That is 1/1000th of a second. Your keyboard probably has higher latency than that. Physics cannot be defeated in this regard.
What they don't do is cold approaches to candidates. Candidates applying to their website is - actually what they do. It sounds like they would probably do listings when they are big enough, so I don't see how it's a differentiator.
If you want a fast, low-memory-footprint editor with no spurious network connectivity and a conventional desktop UI, check out Geany: https://geany.org/
My mind goes to: do we want an outside context problem to be our problem or a neighbour’s problem? I choose neighbour’s problem unless they are extremely benign. Like, extremely.
Even with old GPT, if the summary is decent, it works reasonably well with even no RAG. We are a data management platform and allow users to build data pipelines around a data model. This is basically a DAG. We autogenerate documentation for these pipelines, using gpt4, and feed a summarized version of the data pipeline - expressed as graphviz dot file format in the prompt. gpt4 understands this format well, and seeminlgy understands the graph itself reasonably well!

It performs poorly expressing the higher level intent of the pipeline, but tactical details are accurately documented. We are trying to push prompting itself more, before turning to RAG & finetuning
I think some of those assumptions are questionable and that thought process suffers from black and white thinking. I dont want to torture the analogy any more, so I will just be candid.

First, I agree bad interviews are bad.

That said, bad or un-necessarily difficult hiring processes dont automatically mean there is a better company out there.

IF there is, it isn't a given that the better company will hire you.

Similarly, it is not even a given the employees jump through hoops and get in are inferior to those that do. This is a numbers game, and can go many different ways.

On one hand, I appreciate the uncompromising nature of refusing to play the game, but on the other, I dont think that everyone is doing it with open eyes to the costs they are paying.

I have seen a few people progress from: 1) being uncompromising to 2) worse outcomes than if they compromised, to 3) bitterness and anger.

Back to the analogy: If your life dream is to play chess but you refuse to play poker to get in the door, you may end up bitter and playing with mud in the street.
Everything you need to know about Formula 1 in 5 minutes or less
You are able to do so, but is it allowed by the website's terms of service? It may say that you are granted the license to extensions only with Microsoft builds of vscode.

Microsoft isn't a stranger to distribution restrictions and software usage limitations. I remember uploading Visual C# Express 2010 (freely downloaded from Microsoft's website, without license keys) to a local file sharing website to ease the downloading for my local study group and got a letter from Microsoft's lawyer to take it down.

After that our study group transitioned to Mono with Monodevelop.