skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I don't necessarily agree, the argument is that the 1970 postal reorganization act required the postal office to be self funded, and that since they are not funded with any federal dollars they are somewhere between a government service and a private service. Some argue that because of this we have seen a significant degredation in the quality of mail, because the USPS explicitly and intentionally delivers the equivilent of spam mail to every address in the country. They do this as a form of generating revenue that wouldn't be required of a proper government service. This ties into the current post as it seems plausible the reason USPS shares customer data with Meta is due to their requirement of self funding.
- I tweeted every time I was thinking about a feature, building a feature, and released a feature

- I tweeted random things I learned about running a business, as I learned them

- I tapped my personal network on LinkedIn to find out what folks were currently using, and how they were dissatisfied

- I charged way too low and attracted un-ideal customers

- I made a free tier to compete with other providers that also charged way too low

- I wrote changelogs for every big feature

- I wrote docs for every feature

- I kept a mailing list where I would update folks about the product's progress

- I kept a mailing list where I would update folks about running the SaaS

- I talked about OnlineOrNot on Reddit, Hacker News, in the aim of inspiring people to launch their idea in a highly competitive space

- I shared OnlineOrNot on popular lists (Product Hunt, etc)

- I made landing pages that resonate with folks looking specifically for my type of product

- I built features customers asked for

- I would spend one week marketing, followed by one week coding, and repeat

- I was extremely responsive to customers via email and chat

- I kept improving the product, adding features, and revisiting features

There's probably a lot more, but that's what comes to mind first.
Mutable.ai (YC W22) is hiring to build an AI codebase expert
We're thrilled to have built a codebase chat that leapfrogs traditional RAG techniques by feeding LLMs a wiki of a codebase to answer questions.

We want to take this to the next level, we're doing cutting edge research on MCTS, agents, to take our expert to the next level and be able to autonomously execute tasks on codebases as well as answer any question on a repo.

Apply to open roles here: https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/mutable-ai

And come work with a team that is formerly DeepMind, Google, and Stanford AI.
Sometimes, but I think I first heard about this experiment in The Drunkards Walk, a book about how randomness affects our lives.
Yes I've thought ahead for that too. I'm just not at a stage where I want to deal with financial data without seeing if people even want stuff like that.

The plan is to get the whole thing automated.
But it could start delivering not-jQuery at some point. Far-fetched on the surface, but it's exactly what occurred with polyfill.io recently:

https://blog.qualys.com/vulnerabilities-threat-research/2024...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40791829
No no, no ads
> This, known as fingerprinting, is collectively considered a bad thing. I am thankful this isn't elsewhere

I mean, it depends, right? If you only surfed the web or connected to chats with a single pubkey, then yes - that's probably sub-optimal.

But pseudonymity, imo, works best when you can consistently prove that you own your identity, and that nobody can impersonate your pseudonymous account. (You can always burn it and get another one, or have multiples, etc, of course.) And pseudonymity is something that is, while contentious, is not collectively considered a bad thing.
You responded to a late 2000s meme, I believe.
Yet another reason I wouldn't care if the USPS shut down for good.

Between delivering spam mail and selling my addresses, they provide net-negative value to my life.
In true South Park style.

Mr Garrison would be proud.
Strong roleplaying LLM with decent general abilities
ssh-chat sort of inspired devzat. here's the story: I used to live in dubai at the time and for some odd dns reasons I could never actually join ssh-chat, but it acted as proof that ssh chats are possible, and so I decided to make my own version of it. then I moved to the us and was actually able to use both ssh-chat and devzat.
My concern with them is that they don't store email encrypted at rest and being an Australian company their laws allow the government to put back doors in and are not obliged to tell their clients.

The government law is out of their control but not having your emails at rest unencrypted.
I expect that that would be the case but I have distinctive features like finding you one-time payment alternatives.
>This absolves the people who said, "Eh, he's just a nut" (as he was). Instead of calmly asking if he had something there, however badly he communicated it.

Why shouldn't they receive their absolution? No one has time to evaluate every idea they come across. As a matter of practicality, one has to put poorly communicated ideas or those for which the data collection is sloppy or otherwise badly done lower on their priority list.

People's lives would've been saved if Semmelweis had been taken more seriously, but how many other advancements would have suffered if everyone followed up on every poorly thought out and represented idea and didn't prioritize?
> Turns out you can just run any old program.

It’s amazing how simple some things are. Similarly, an HTTP server can also run any old binary in response to an incoming request. As long as it produces output that looks like an HTTP response, the client will receive that response.
This is pretty close to what I built for maintaining demo compatibility in Doom engines. Basically it runs a demo and dumps a save game to a file every frame. As soon as there's a divergence it says what the difference is (monster 17 is at (4, 22); should be (4, 21)) and bails. Not a ton of difference between that and diffing the stack.

https://github.com/camgunz/democomp
Unpopular opinion on HN. But governments who have draconian laws against AI acceleration will put their country behind.

When I grew up in India in the 80s and early 90s, the government banned, imposed heavy-tarrifs on computers. The country was a shithole till we were forced to open up the economy.

These kind of policies sets countries decades behind and happens silently.

I'm glad for an AI to record everything of me and help me get better / substitute me.
This is the `/thread` to any post from WFH advocates who tell people that miss the social aspect of the office to "make new friends." It is absolutely not easy to make friends as an adult.
Similar here. My $4k in TSLA's IPO was just a gamble that EVs would not die (per conventional wisdom) but were here to stay.

A few years ago I sold $100k of TSLA and retained the other $100k which is worth more now.

It was just a gamble. I'm not silly enough to think I can pick winners like that all the time.
There is no other choice but Nouveau. But it's not that fine because it means losing hardware video decoding.

> using a card that old on a modern machine suggests

It's an old laptop. Totally adequate for scrolling web, watching movies and arguing about very important stuff on Hacker News. There is no way to change GPU there or switch to integrated Intel one.
I'm still thinking about the integration with the bank for now.

But for the list management. The aim is to get the whole thing updated so you barely have to do any work to track things.
That is orthogonal to the point I am making, which is that accepting the conclusion of a study with methodological issues because the finding "makes sense" is a form of confirmation bias.
Good point about being natural rather than tied to base 10. Though natural conflicts with human convenience and ultimately is is for humans. Even more natural could be using the same unit for mass and energy, and make it dimensionless!
Spoiler: set the user’s shell to any old binary, like a chat app.
> Second is adding simulation.

Can you run https://github.com/dvhx/ngspicejs in a Jupyter notebook?
7 years is basically rounding error from a decade ago.
I really appreciate an old style HN "Hacker" post!
Many outfits have tried to reinvent the Lockheed Skunk Works, but to no avail, because they always tried to improve on it by removing its core principles.

Though I must say, SpaceX may be its worthy successor.
The market force that currently propels whatsapp.
There will still be live musicians, nothing will change that.

But I see it becoming like how people onstage use synths and other electronic gear to make music, maybe they won't use AI exactly realtime, but a mix of real instruments and AI. Also Rap started off using old records for the backtrack, then samples, so its probably going to be similar as that.

But there will be a lot of new music, how anyone finds the best stuff, I have no clue. I don't even listen to USA music or the radio, there is no need for over 20yrs thanks to the internet. There is a ton of stuff out there, and that will only grow.

But some think sites like Spotify and Pandora will use AI generated music so they don't have to pay royalties. It makes sense for study, instrumental type music. AI music is pretty impressive, but the singing is too static to me, it sings too many lyrics too fast and with the same intensity 8 times in a row. Of course it will get better, but it really needs to understand what words really matter.
Serverles was briefly “the future” 2016-2020ish but id say most of its enthusiasm has gone towards Kubernetes, at least in the ponds I swim in
>> I see no indications either that either nvidia nor any of the rest of the manufacturers has moved any respectable amount of functionality to the firmware.

Someone who believes this could easily prove that they are correct by "simply" taking their 4090 and documenting all its functionality, as was done with the [7900 xtx](https://github.com/geohot/7900xtx).

You can't say "I see no indications/evidence" unless you have proven that there is no evidence, no?
The Graphics File Formats Page
Compared to a Patriot missile?
That’s so cool and nice :D

Any idea what we could do to allow all of the people still in Dubai to join chats over ssh too?
Welp, I know what I'm reading on my next flight :)
Titan means money person. What does Woz think?
> adherence to industry standards is of great importance for warranty reasons among others

This is mostly a nice talking point rather than an actual thing, right? Scryer's license contains the usual all-caps NO WARRANTY and NO FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE wording. Also, the links you provided describe these applications without references to warranties and standards and regulation. The users in these super-sensitive domains don't seem as sensitive about them as you claim.
Or (c) anyone with motivation

Which might make us question why anyone has this much info on my without my knowing it
Why Young People Are Worse Off Than Their Parents, and What to Do About It [video]
Such folks usually have modern GPUs, so they don't experience such problems.
A museum of the cryonized brains of celebrities, perhaps behind AR screens giving them eyeballs and mouths and feet and hands, would be great. The costs of mainteinance would be partly from gov. subsidies and partly from visitors and partly from pre-payments. They could also show how scans of the brains looked when they were getting frozen to make the point that there is information there...
You can do it in a virtual machine, and people frequently do. The software can't detect nor escape it.

Unrelated (seriously), there's also OARC, the online amateur radio club. It's on discord (boo, proprietary), but it's got some of the most exciting projects and a really young crowd. I'd highly recommend it.

https://www.oarc.uk/
do you happen to know why the tremendous progress at BL was shared (did it take a long time?) whereas the progress that happens at today's datacenters are mostly secret? I fear that no matter how much progress they make, if it's not eventually shared, it'll just be lost/wasted and others will have to reinvent it.
> Anyway, you're definitely not too old. 30s the new 21 or something. I hate encouraging drinking but I finally just came to the conclusion that I really enjoy going out and socializing and beer just happens to be there so stay fit and try to moderate and watch my liver.

Good NA beer and mocktails are much easier to find in bars now than it was even five years ago. I don't drink nearly as much as I did in the past because of this.
I always wonder, as it is known these software issues caused phantom losses for postmasters, was there also a number of phantom gains?

I would find it difficult to believe that these wouldn't have been reported by at least most of the postmasters, but I've never seen any mention of it.
Previous:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40338619

https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_galloway_how_the_us_is_destr...

(this is a follow up to the original talk)
> the contents of the envelope were noticeable

I've seen that as well, but I place the blame on the sender for using an envelope that isn't fully opaque.
Appsell - intentionally crippling or outright banning the browser client to force users installing your app in hope of better conversion or simply boosting vanity metrics.

Long logout - complete logout needs extra steps after clicking logout e.g. removing/forgetting the account. Often times the action is not even accessible from the logout screen either. On a shared machine it even leaks pii. Linkedin, Gmail, Facebook
No, Lead is not magnetic to any significant degree.

What happens is that calcium is very important for your neurons to operate and signal each-other, and lead happens to be "close enough" that is competes/interferes with those mechanisms, gumming things up permanently.

This causes the cells and their connections to wither and die, or to fail to form properly at all.

https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2016/deadly-biology-lead-...
Government sites shouldn't load any third party content.

For a work project, I recently had to visit about 200 government web sites from countries all over the world.

It's surprising how many of them not only load third-party content, but actually have banner and pop-over advertising on them, especially in Asia and Africa.

By comparison, even America's worst government web site¹ is better.

¹ https://njfamilycare.dhs.state.nj.us
What self driving cars? None of them are up to the task from what I've seen.
I presume they loose a fair bit sales. It will be interesting to see any data on what happens to the customers who try to buy something on a Sunday and realize they can't. Do they return another day or purchase somewhere else.
Heraclitus plead, "Listen not to me but the logos (word)"

i.e., to honor SJ, it may be best to pick up his work - to respect what he respected - instead of lining up in idolatry.

In this case, the key insight about design is not that it's beautiful.

Because the personal computer would be so useful that it would become pervasive, it was an incredible opportunity to inject some beauty and joy into many, many interactions, and thus if not enliven people at least counter the deadening effects of continuous interaction with purely functional affordances. Steve was asking designers to see it as such (and not as a threat to their traditional tools and value vectors).

We in society are trapped by the things we need to live at this scale and level of coordination. At a minimum, don't be evil. But that's not all.

In 2024, the situation has reversed: generations have become conditioned by the attention economy, to the point that everyone - small children to our best tech leaders - are making sound-bite reactive emotional decisions shaping our future.

Tech affords not just the opportunity to influence. It's realizing that other people made your capabilities and everything you depend on, and you're responsible for doing the same, to make it possible for future people to live a good life.

I think SJ took it as a responsibility instead of an opportunity because as an adopted person he directly experienced the contingency of nuture and appreciation for the people who did raise him.

"the ability to put something back into that pool of human experiences is extremely neat" - SJ, remembered by Jony Ives
:( Cloudflare automatically adds client-side JS analytics in pages it serves, unless you opt out: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/how-to-remove-analytics-t...

Though uBlock Origin blocks the JS tracker already.
SAME!

I'm often just bored. and on shrooms. Which is fine, just a bit unpleasant.
It is a mystery to me how Europe operates.

From the outside, it feels like some "tacit trade" where poor Eastern European nations provide the labor, the rich western countries send "funds" back to them, and it all works until there is an imbalance between the rich and the poor.
Is it also Apple's fault when people send inappropriate messages via imessage?
Also, it seems like promising (a real promise that can be backed up) researchers a comfortable upper middle class income, job security, good benefits, and light-touch supervision is a good match for the type of person who excels at basic research.

Too little security and nothing ever comes to fruition. Too much money sloshing around and you attract the wrong sort of crowd.

Public entities are best suited to providing this type of compensation and employment arrangement.
Not just frivolous designer eyewear. Massively inflates the pricing of a lot of pedestrian eyewear too.

Clever monopoly, most people like having eyesight.
'Musk Is Supporting a MAGA Ticket That Will Just Hurt Tesla'
Can anyone confirm if there are tracking pixels or similar on the emails themselves? I too never visit the website, I just look at the emails.
Then what are you saying? If I as an individual don't want to "work with the national security community", that's my right. If they want to compel me to do so, they have to go through the judicial system and get a warrant. At what organizational size should a corporation be "brought to heel" and the right to refuse to do something for the government (without sufficient legal reason) go away?
The EU president is not even remotely comparable to the US president.
Ask HN: Is it possible for the world to lose track of what time it is?
Say there's some world wide computer glitch and the clocks have to be reset. Is it possible that we lose track of exactly how many seconds passed since the epoch?
Let's not ignore AutoGluon:

https://auto.gluon.ai/stable/tutorials/timeseries/index.html
AI generated music is not protected by copyright, at least in the US, since copyright can only affix to works created by humans (the "human authorship requirement").[1][2] Without copyright protection, there is no "economic value" -- at least directly tied to the songs themselves. AI generated songs are not paid royalties at e.g. The Mechanical Licensing Collective for US streaming use.[3]

[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2023-03-16/pdf/2023-0... (Copyright Registration Guidance section)

[2] https://ipwatchdog.com/2022/02/23/thaler-loses-ai-authorship...

[3] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/USCO-Guidance-Letter-to-The-MLC...
I am sorry to hear about your friend.
I've played around with Prolog on and off for 7 years. Still a novice. It's one of those languages that forces your mind to grow in new directions.

It's difficult to make a case for it. The declarative paradigm is nice, but compared to other languages you're only saving a couple for-loops. I think its benefit comes from expressiveness for problems where clpfd can be applied. I once built an internal tool with Python and SWI Prolog that combined user input with CLPFD to configure test accounts in a consistent and useful way. Users could provide partial constraints, and the system would fill in the rest. Again, the ease of clpfd is great.

I've had some fun generating Prolog facts/databases with LLMs and it's something I want to explore more.

Note: I was just messing around with Prolog this week: https://hpincket.com/adding-an-easter-egg-to-our-numeronym-p...
I’m guessing it’s actually răchie from pine cones, not needles. Either way, now I’m curious to try it.
That's funny because the third paragraph of the article gives the term a precise definition and cites sources for it.
Did anybody notice just how fast their website loads? I didn’t even look at the content yet and I’m already impressed.
I noticed the same problem but on 4, it was super-weird, everything was fine except one character, and it occurred consistently in the second and the next answers, never in the first one.
X accused of withholding critical data in Epstein defamation suit
Efficient Possession Ratio: A New Football Performance Metric
Very cool, the site's entire 'materials' archives is really interesting as a layman in Materials Science. [0]

This kind of reminded of the sense of wonder of reading through Encarta entries in the late 90's and how I assumed the internet would look like in the future.

[0] https://sciencenotes.org/category/chemistry/materials/
> a lack of data is the one thing preventing us from achieving AGI

There is precisely zero evidence for this.
I liked Bell Labs ever since 1986 or 1987 or so. I was considering developing a C++ compiler, but was concerned about:

1. would I need a license to develop a C++ compiler?

2. would I need a license to call it C++?

So I called up their head intellectual property lawyer. He laughed, and said feel free, and thanked me for asking. He said other people just went ahead and copied things hoping BL wouldn't notice.

So thank you, Bell Labs! You guys were the best.
They put forward the legislation. It got called out for how obviously corrupt Santorum was being in that case (Santorm got $2k literally two days before he submitted it!). That bill is still there, waiting to be called up. There hasn't been a vote either way on it.

They tried appointing the Accuweather CEO, which they didn't call to a final vote (for unknown reasons). That Senate was pretty incompenent and barely able to function though and only had majority briefly, so its not really a surprise they didn't pass something they claimed to want to do. After two years the nomination was rescinded.

I'd put it at being too obviously corrupt and too incompetent instead of all talk on the subject.

And even if it is supposedly all talk, why would you vote for the guy who's talking about hurting you all the time? Hey this guy's been swinging a knife at me for a while now. He's probably not going to stab me though; I'll ask him to hang around.
My take is that it’s related to the parent commenter’s thoughts on the relative monopoly that Bell had.

If you’re a monopoly with no practical competition, sharing your accomplishments gets you good will and has little downsides. But if you’re Microsoft, and one of your big moats and competitive advantage is the massive fleet of data centers you’ve been building up over the years, you don’t want to hurt yourself by giving your competition the information they need to build new, more efficient data centers.
> - I made landing pages that resonate with folks looking specifically for my type of product

As a consumer SaaS tool, what kind of data convinced you to go with a landing page over directly to the tool itself?
When some people were proposing Swift remove the ability to use Emoji in variable names this was my reply:

> It’s hella presumptuous to decide that I’m not allowed to express whimsy, frustration, humor, or any other emotions in my code. Or to tell an 8 year old using Playgrounds on the iPad that he/she can’t name a variable :pig: purely because they find it funny. We don’t have to squash the joy out of everything.
Also Peter Cotton has done some good work comparing these various packages.

He has a wrapper for all of these:
https://github.com/microprediction/timemachines

And he compares their performances against each other:
https://microprediction.github.io/timeseries-elo-ratings/htm...
Wireshark it yourself.