skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
as a years-long customer for whom prices keep increasing while product keeps getting worse (fraud detection and dispute handling in particular), I'm really hopeful that a decent competitor shows up soon.
Chemistry’s the limiting factor for most of it.

You’ll need a lot of energy for complex life. The list of things that can naturally provide enough without having extremely-hostile side effects is pretty much limited to stars, and then only if you get really lucky in a whole bunch of ways.

Then you need to turn that into chemical energy to actually do anything with it.

That’s gonna turn useful chemicals from the environment into waste you can no longer use. If you’re lucky the waste is chemically useful, and if something can evolve to use it, maybe it can turn it back into what you need (happened with oxygen). If the waste isn’t useful, you better hope your planet’s recycling it somehow. Ideally with some kind system that adjusts with a feedback-loop so it doesn’t limit your growth too much.

Our one example sure looks extremely fragile, in that if you mess with any of several things a little bit, you might still get life, but it’ll cyclically wipe itself out, or never be able to harvest enough energy to support complex life, or any number of other problems that end in not seeing intelligence arise.
If you're a lifeguard in a body of water with currents, 500m is not a lot. You can swim a long distance without moving much realtive to the shore.
Corbalt | REMOTE (US)

we're looking for a security engineer to serve as an Information System Security Officer (ISSO) and as software engineer individual contributor.

Security Engineer: https://jobs.lever.co/corbalt/a01feb63-35cc-4fcf-9516-f35c66...

Note: Due to contractual obligations, we are only accepting candidates who are located in and authorized to work in the United States, have lived in the United States for at least three of the last five years, and have at least three years of professional experience.

Corbalt is a small group of technologists working to build better software infrastructure for government. We were part of the tech team that came in to help support the healthcare.gov launch and were inspired by how much everyone cared and worked hard to fix the site (from tech team members, to government contractors, and government employees), and how much progress we all made in a short time.

As we’ve continued to work with the government we focus on opportunities where we can build simple, scalable solutions to help support important government missions like helping people get health insurance (healthcare.gov) and helping ensure healthcare for vulnerable populations (Medicaid). We use innovative technology to create software infrastructure that's easy to use and develop applications that focus on addressing users' core needs.

We're a small team with experience at Google, Palantir, Bell Labs, Microsoft, and Silicon Valley startups. We work remotely by default and are spread across states. We look to hire technologists who are passionate about improving public services, love working as a part of a team, enjoy consulting with clients to develop creative solutions to complex problems, and are committed to fostering a kind work environment.
Companies as we currently know them mostly did not exist in the 1700's. Where they did many of the biggest were monopolies granted by the government.

The free market has never existed on a wide scale, so no company currently has to survive in a free market. It is a thought experiment and in practice regulated markets are far superior because the market is a pretty bad governor for society. Further, to have a free market you need perfect transparency, a state which is not realistically possible to begin with but if it were possible would only be achieved through regulation, such as disclosure requirements.

In that free market, by the way, companies absolutely will poison the air and water, in large part because people do not make purchase decisions based on downstream externalities. Even if they did, they won't be able to prove the company poisoned the river and the company won't be breaking any laws so a lot of people will simply allow it to continue. Now if the products themselves were poisonous, it's possible, but historically this just led to merchants moving from town to town to poison new people who hadn't heard of them.

>The reason companies do nefarious things is government interference in markets, insulating companies from competition.

This is so ridiculous I am not sure you're serious now. Are you just trolling?
As someone who has been stuck in Silicon Valley for 20 years I can say hands down the German and European teams I’ve worked with far outshine the hacker ego Hollywood hipster techbros of San Francisco. Yet the latter make 2-5x the income.
It's still years longer than what you'd get from most other companies, though.
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
That would be Textual https://textual.textualize.io/
> dogmatically following this advice might be overkill

It depends on your appetite for risk and the cost of failure.

A big part of the problem is that general purpose computing systems (operating systems and hardware) are not engineered as real-time systems and there are rarely vendor guarantees with respect to real-time behavior. Under such circumstances, my position is that you need to code defensively. For example, if your operating system memory allocator does not guarantee a worst-case bound on execution time, do not use it in a real-time context.
VLMs like PaliGemma and Florence-2 support object detection and segmentation, so it's becoming more common to have YOLO like capabilities built into VLMs.

Another benefit of VLMs which support object detection is that they are open vocabulary, meaning you don't have to define the classes ahead of time. Additionally fine tuning tends to keep the previous detection capabilities instead of erasing all previous classes like fine tuning YOLO.
It's funny, lots of people complain about it, and I tend to be sensitive to performance issues, but honestly I have zero complaints. I've been using a min spec M1 Air for years and it works great for me. I mostly browse the web and use VSCode remote tunnels and for those purposes it's by far the best laptop I've ever used.
I would just stop watching youtube tbh. It's not worth the horrible ads.
Seconded. A microcoded, pipelined, superscalar, branch-predicting basic processor with L1 data & instruction caches and write-back L2 cache controller is nontrivial. Most software engineers have an incomplete grasp of data hazards, cache invalidation, or pipeline stalls.
Does anyone know why this post no longer appears on HN.

It hasn't been flagged.
The difference right now is that many people are paying for it. It feels odd to pay for something that could give wrong answers.
Which is harder to detect: replacing reference 17 with the one you're trying to pump, or adding reference 35 when the bibliography in the original paper clearly stops at 34?
As someone currently chilling in my car (better than cooking in the house!) on the North side of Houston waiting for power to be restored, I feel relatively qualified to offer some insight. I won't get into any of the politics of things as I'm not an expert on energy policy. Also, posting from my phone so I'll definitely mess up formatting so apologies in advance.

To start, this has little if not nothing to do with Ercot and all the stuff that's been brought up repeatedly since the freak winter storm (which I also went through), we aren't low on light juice, no rolling brown outs, etc.

Onto the the important points, a few things I've seen posted in comments here stuck out to me as being inaccurate:

>> No outage tracker available

No, we don't have a "down to the house" level outage tracker but that's not unreasonable given the large number of circuit level outages. That said we have had the following:

- Published sometime Monday and updated every 5 minutes: https://gisoutagetracker.azurewebsites.net/

- A much more detailed map that shows the status of things down to the circuit level: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/195bcf03ae0c491f9f14bf7...

>> It was just a small category 1, how could it be so bad?

As an outsider, I'd probably be asking the same thing but there were a few things that made this situation worse than it would normally be.

- Lack of preparedness

But not in the way you're probably thinking. Our forecasted tracks when it was coming off the Yucatan started out with this thing staying well South of the Houston area. As of July 6th, 2 days before landfall, it was confidently projected to make landfall around Corpus Christ and Houston would just get a bunch of rain. But that's not what happened, It ended up being a worst case track with the eye going right up the west side of Houston putting the entire city under the "Dirty side" of the storm.

- It's been wet AF the last month!

We probably got lucky that the week before the storm it finally stopped raining for a while. I bring this up because just in my neighborhood alone, I saw at least 5 old and very very large trees that fell and had huge chunks of root system pulled up out of the ground. These are trees that have survived at least 2 major hurricanes in the past that just popped out of the ground and laid over. I suspect, especially in the suburbs on the North and West side, that a bunch of harder to get to lines were damaged which, in my mind, helps explain why there are a ton more complete circuit outages (No traffic lights, major buildings like grocery stores completely disconnected) in our areas.

All that said, it sucks and is uncomfortable but on the bright side, this time last year we were in the middle of a month long heatwave (hitting 100°F+ almost daily) but since the storm blew through it stayed relatively mild and even fairly pleasant. It was actually really nice out just chilling under a pop up tent yesterday afternoon!

Hope this helps give some insight into things from a first person perspective.
> I think this is a communication issue and you're being a bit myopic in your interpretation. It is clearly an analogy meant for communication and is not an actual hypothesis.

I don't know, words have meanings. If that's a communication issue, it's on part of the authors. To me, this wording in a what is supposed to be a research paper abstract clearly suggests the insufficient resolution as the cause. How else should I interpret it?

> The shockingly poor performance of four state-of-the-art VLMs suggests their vision is, at best, like that of a person with myopia seeing fine details as blurry

And indeed, increasing the resolution is expensive, and the best VLMs have something like 1000x1000. But the low resolution is clearly not the issue here, and the authors don't actually talk about it in the paper.

>I find it hard to believe that there is no example you can give.

I'm not the person you're answering to, but I actually lazily tried two of authors' examples in a less performant VLM (CogVLM), and was surprised it passed those, making me wonder whether I can trust their conclusions until I reproduce their results. LLMs and VLMs have all kinds of weird failure modes, it's not a secret they fail at some trivial tasks and their behavior is still not well understood. But working with these models and narrowing it down is notoriously like trying to nail a jelly to the wall. If I was able to do this in a cursory check, what else is there? More than one research paper in this area is wrong from the start.
Yeah it should, it pretty much just checks what's in the installed libraries of the given project/path.

I typed it up: https://git.sr.ht/~jlambda/docs/tree/docs/item/python/python...
Yes. The last operational towers were a few up in the Appalachians operated by US Cellular and were shut down in January of this year.
Using VLC to watch an m3u8 playlist at a URL with custom Referrer and User Agent
Fair points.

Instead of the simple-complex spectrum, I think about the big problems are usually made up of smaller problem spectrum.
I consider any perspective held by approximately 50% of the population to be worth the time it takes for me to understand it and accurately articulate it.

This comment exemplifies the kind of unthinking elitism that landed us with Trump in the first place. You treat half the population of the United States as non-persons whose perspective you can't be bothered to even attempt to understand and then you're surprised when they elect an extreme candidate rather than try to engage with you?
The Atom editor is being maintained as a fork: Pulsar https://pulsar-edit.dev

Zed is co-founded by one (or more?) original developer of Atom. So, it's a successor in a sense that it is a new project by the same author.

Atom was developed at GitHub, and GitHub Inc remains the owner of the original Atom project. From their perspective the successor of Atom is VSCode - developed by their parent company, - despite the claims by a former Atom engineer.
While real-time does not mean fast, micro optimisations are frequently used. No one likes slow DSP audio software.
I agree with the sentiment of the blog, but it doesn't present a very compelling argument. Just relies on authority rather than evidence or logical reasoning. For a more impactful and well-reasoned discussion on this topic checkout "Simple Made Easy" by Rich Hickey (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4)
Quant Mutual Fund Defies Industry Norm with Leveraged Nasdaq Bet
> it's harder to find a profit motive for dropping legitimate citations

Competitiveness for citation points, especially with someone in or adjacent to your niche?

Also, the non-profit: pettiness.
Yes! I still meet too many people who think what we are manufacturing software, while what we are doing is designing it. The manufacturing, that is, the building and deployment is already highly automated and very cheap.
> I've never heard anything about these sorts of graph algorithms being possible with good asymptotics in an array style

yeah—idk graph algos really, but have heard parallelising combinatorial search in general (eg sat) is hard because forks and joins happen heterogeneously and erratically. this 2001 vintage has a bunch of completely sequential graph colouring algorithms in j https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/570406.570416 (and j at least has sparse matrices!)

> Constant lifting within the compiler is pretty cool, I'll have to look into that.

hrm, it seems to refer to 2 things: 1) constants allocated in a special space; 2) interning. 2 is obviously worthwhile; 1 i would guess is related to memory being weird on the gpu?
leveraged tech has absolutely killed it this year
Sure. And the slogan "Trix are for kids" means it's made specifically for adults.
It reminds me of the trend just before, massive hero images for no good reason. This seems to be the next step in the wastage of screen real estate.
> I’m left with [...] is anonymous online commenters vs. the publication of 2 prestigious universities. Whose word do I take on this?

Maybe you need to judge the contents of those online comments and the contents of the publication, instead of relying on argument from authority.
And https://www.map.signalbox.io/, which tries to interpolate signal locations onto a geographic map (with the expected level of inaccuracy, though still not half-bad)
You seem to still misunderstand what I wrote.

Do you know the difference between infrastructure and ideas?
This is an illusion and a red herring. RTL synthesis is the typical functional prototype stage reached which is generally sufficient for FPGA work. To burn an ASIC as part of an educational consortium run is doable, but it's uncommon.
Arguably, Chromium is more important to Google than Chrome is.

By controlling the engine, they have de facto control over the standards.

By keeping Chromium open, they incentivise forks. Most people who don't want to use Chrome because it's Google's or for some other reason will use one of the forks or Chromium-based browsers.

By keeping this illusion of choice, Google extends its control.
This was specifically written in response to comments on his blog post from a few days ago regarding the new discovery in Busy Beaver functions.
Edith Clarke: Architect of Modern Power Distribution
> What alternative we have?

A monthly plan: https://stripe.com/billing/pricing

Ranges from ~0.62% (up to $100k/mo) to ~0.57% ($1M/mo).
Honestly I don't think that the problem with VSCode is speed, even. It's bloat. It uses gobs of RAM just to open up a few text files. I compared it to Sublime Text a while back and it was something like 500 MB (for Sublime) to 1-1.5 GB (VSCode). That's not acceptable in my view.
Apparently, this system statistics API is generally available to extension developers. The underlying issue is that they bundle a hidden "Hangouts Service Extension" with Chrome. Zoom, Teams, etc. would have access to this API through a Chrome extension, although they wouldn't have the advantage of having that extension pre-installed.
Compliance with what?

Security of what from what?

What’s the context?
Neo Social Darwinism
How to Read Plato
To exercise great opsec, one would have to be a psychopath. Most folks aren't, hence at least in the US, banks aren't allowed to excuse themselves by customer's lack of opsec ("regulation E").

The effective monopoly that banks has gotten isn't free to them, even if they do try very hard to avoid paying the cost asked.
But it is as human-oriented as other science fields that are typically considered as more people-oriented and these fields attract a bigger proportion of women.

Also, one of my point is that the "non human oriented" is also part of the image, but not of the reality. I see more and more successful developers that explains that "sit down and write or debug the code" on your own is not a fundamentally big part of the job, but it is in practice a big part because of the current mentality and because some developers want to work like that.

I keep seeing developers thinking that they are "special". But in practice, it is a job very similar to other role in a company. An accountant, for example, also need to sometimes sit down and do careful work that requires not being disturbed. It often feels like developers are talking about "breaking the flow" or "all these useless meetings" or "the managers that invent work to justify their role" or ... as if it is not identical for all the other roles (there are small differences, but nothing justifying that developer is somehow less human oriented than accountant).
If they spent the 665M on improving ROCm instead they'd get a hell lot more return on it.
They did, many of the controls in the recovered cabin were found in positions that correspond with the crew following emergency procedures. Obviously with the rest of the orbiter missing those procedures were useless, as would've been anything else they attempted.

Which makes it little more then a sad footnote to the whole thing, there was nothing the crew could've done, but they died knowing they were in big trouble and were trying to restore control of a scrap of their former vehicle.
The Circos authors invented those charts. D3 got another implementation later.

https://genome.cshlp.org/content/early/2009/06/15/gr.092759....
FWIW here's all 700 lines of Blink's x86 decoder. https://github.com/jart/blink/blob/master/blink/x86.c
Some lines on the London Underground do use ATO without platform barriers. The driver closes the doors, checks that the platform is clear, then starts the train. ATO takes over until the next station, where the driver watches to make sure there's nobody too close to the edge, ready to slam on the emergency brake.
Absolutely agree, the collaboration features put me off a bit. I think it can very well become a very successful and popular editor without those features. Perhaps they can invest in those feature when they have a much bigger market share.
There are several other publishers who regularly go after gameplay footage of people playing their games. It's not as visible, because it's hard to notice the absence of a thing.
The software is free, the extension site is not. I agree that's a shitty practice by MS, but it doesn't somehow make VSCode not free software.
> Most actual solutions that people need are solving complex problems.

My general experience has been the problems people want me to solve are not the actual problems that they need to solve.

The problems that need to be solved have very simple solutions.

The purported solutions to the purported problems are usually a way to avoid doing the simple solutions because it is "inconvenient" to people who want the other solution.

Maybe I'm jaded. Maybe I've had a bad lot. But it's happened enough, and in enough disparate instances, for me to think this is just humanity being humanity.

edit to add a caveat -- this applies generally, i.e. to most people most of the time. i feel like i cast a bit of a wide net with how this comment has been phrased.
There aren't any official universal tests that I know of. Different trainers might give a certificate, but most of it is very informal in the US. The standards are extremely low.

Organizations like BSA have different courses and tend to certify their members by different levels for what privileges they have in the water. The Red Cross and YMCA have the most recognized certifications, mostly for their lifeguard courses.

If you want a good idea of how much of a joke the standards are in the US, the basic test to be in the Navy is only a deep water jump, 50 yard swim, and 5 minutes prone float. Most other branches don't even have a swim test requirement.
Most of the complexities lie in managing the various configurations of total system compatibility emulation, especially for timing, analog oddities, and whether to include bugs or not and for which steppings. If you want precise and accurate emulation, you have to have real hardware to validate behavior against. Then there are the cases of what not to emulate and offering better-than-original alternatives.
Generally a big fan of Zed. Super fast and quite innovative in their grep UI. My biggest current gripe is Zed's filesystem watchers are either broken or misconfigured on Mac. If I do a `git rest --hard` via terminal or github desktop UI, zed doesn't detect it and I'm forced to do a hard reset of the app to get back to a synced state.
This is an indictment of Lisa Su's own ROCm strategy. An implicit admission of failure, without explicitly admitting it. I predict this acquisition will cause even more software schizophreny inside AMD as multiple conflicting teams pinball their way around towards nowhere in particular.
Ha, I think she retired before she could be prosecuted or anything. Should have stuck it out!
As an aside... from 2016 this is what was a valid use case for a blind person with an app.

Seeing AI 2016 Prototype - A Microsoft research project - https://youtu.be/R2mC-NUAmMk

https://www.seeingai.com are the actual working apps.

The version from 2016 I recall showing (pun not intended) to a coworker who had some significant vision impairments and he was really excited about what it could do back then.

---

I still remain quite impressed with its ability to parse the picture and likely reason behind it https://imgur.com/a/JZBTk2t
Microsoft, Apple Drop OpenAI Board Plans as Scrutiny Grows
That's why I made this!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36849502
I found your podcast a few days ago on a different book. Keep it up, I think you have a good niche and doing something you rarely see, which are deep dives on programming books. The only other one I really know of is Connor Hoekstra has a couple nice playlists on SICP and something else but this is a little different, good job.
What War in Space Might Look Like Circa 2030-2040? [pdf]