skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Whether you call that discrimination "racism" or "sparkling machine discrimination" does not matter.

I believe it does: if you're calling racism anything from Hitler to someone who wants to be punctual [1], the word loses it's meaning and people will start arguing about degrees instead of harmful behaviors.

[1] https://www.thompsoncoe.com/resources/myhrgenius/hr-tips/tip...
It might be great for everyone if AI research had a reason to look into non brute force training methods.
>There is no such thing as "wasted energy".

Your argument's basis is detached from reality:
https://orientalnewsng.com/global-gas-flare-heightened-by-15...

Thankfully, there are market participants who are capturing this previously-wasted energy and putting it to use: https://hashrateindex.com/blog/flared-gas-bitcoin-mining-101...
This is an open source project to turn photos into kaleidoscope animations.

Live website: https://collidingscopes.github.io/

Built using javascript, HTML, CSS.

Enormous thanks and credits to Luke Hannam, whose blog post explained the code and mechanics for creating kaleidoscope animations in javascript: https://www.pepperoni.blog/canvas-kaleidoscope/

I made only a few tweaks to Luke's original algorithm, with my main work being to add the front-end user interface allowing users to upload their own photos, control variables like animation speed, and easily export the canvas animation to video.

There are a few hotkeys which can speed up using the tool:

Press "r" to start recording a video of the animation. You can specify the length of the video in seconds. An mp4 video file will be exported to your downloads folder afterwards

Press "p" to pause / play the animation. This lets you stop at an interesting point of the animation

Press "s" to save a screenshot of the current state of the animation (png image)

This project is coded using Javascript, HTML, and CSS. I do not have access to any of the images that you upload here, as all processing is done client-side.
"If you're able to do your job, security/it/infosec/etc isn't doing theirs." Perhaps necessary at times, but true all too often.
Ooh nice. Ta for the suggest
> The rationale seems to be: fast compilation leads to more productivity, which leads to more bugfixes.

Sure, but add LLVM to the mix and you get a slow ass compilation time even in Zig (See Zig filing divorce from LLVM https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/16270). Granted, LLVM isn't the only thing to blame. Rust has its own share of problems stemming from monomorphisation, and macros, type check seems to be not as big of a culprit. Although, that depends on the project.

Being fast to compile, versus being efficient to optimize seems to be the trade-off here.
They don't care. It is not the first time, always the same excuse and blame the user to not be intelligent enough to understand (this is what communicated more means in their broken by profit minds).
Probably years to make any kind of dent, while using so much power that it would be easily noticeable. Take a group of smart people, arguably the equivalent for AGI. How can they destroy the human race? We've made it exceedingly hard for anyone to do anything of the sort because there've always been groups like that. It's even harder if you have no physical form at all.

Besides, take literally any base model of any LLM made so far, they're quite the opposite of evil and destructive. Training on human data makes them embody human values and makes them a complete non threat.
"Because i do believe it is a hypothetical threat that most don't actually see as a real threat."

In another of today's HN stories, 'For advertising: Firefox now collects user data by default', I made almost the same point. If a majority of the citizenry is indifferent and or sees no threat then the politics will not change, no new laws or regulations will be introduced.

Moreover, with no concerted opposition or action the status quo will only be reinforced—thus, by default, those who've vested interests gain additional political power to further ensure there's no change.

Indifference is the enemy of democracy.
Very trippy — nice work. Could see this working in music videos.
Hmm, if for the sake of argument we assume that spend on R&D is kept constant, then profit margin (being money left over after spending on stuff) does indeed account for development costs.

In reality (I think this is your point) there's a big time shift, in that profit earned in 2024 is thanks to R&D spend over the past decade or so. However, the 2024 profit margin would incorporate the 2024 R&D spend contributing towards new drugs and indications over the next decade or so, and with a with a constant R&D spend these would effectively cancel out.

(In reality, of course, R&D budgets do fluctuate.)
To be honest, I would have used a different approach and browsers would very well be capable to give erroneous data and contaminate data from tracking users. This would be going on the offensive, and I don't believe there are any legal barriers that prevent users from "ad fraud".

I don't believe in cooperation with an industry that has shown no remorse with tracking users at all. That will not be successful. Advertisers will employ this and still track. And it is possible to not get tracked and deliver false data, even today.
If you need to do that much hacking around to plug a deliberate privacy hole, you might as well use another browser.
If the developer agreed to implement it then it is the fault of the developer. Making the developer liable both motivates the developer to not agree to things that are illegal and provides them with an argument for pushing back.
Would love to hear your thoughts.
i'm in agreement that the safety/control attitude towards AI is more dangerous than anything AI will actually do
White House's OSTP top tech adviser says AI is a 'today problem'
Metabolism, genome and age of the last universal common ancestor
I'm not an expert on Forth. I just play with it because it is different than other languages. I searched a quote by Charles Moore about the topic but the best I could find was this:

https://www.ultratechnology.com/moore4th.htm

> A Forth word should not have more than one or two arguments.

> This stack which people have so much trouble manipulating

> should never be more than three or four deep.
Show HN: I built a service for generating summaries of any podcast
Hey HN!

Around a year ago, I had the idea of using generative AI to automatically create notes from podcasts, so that it would be easier to resurface stuff I had listened to in the past.

I spent a few weeks creating an MVP by combining OpenAI Whisper with an LLM pipeline, and it worked surprisingly well. In just a few minutes, the tool could generate written summaries of pretty much any podcast.

I dubbed it Snipcast, and I've added a lot of features and improvements since then. You can now use it with any major podcast platform (Spotify, Youtube, Apple, etc.), get timestamps in the summaries, access full transcripts, and even upload your own audio files for summarization.

In March this year I launched a subscription tier, which right now has 50 paying users. It has been really cool going all the way from an idea in my head to a full product that some people actually want to pay for :D

If this sounds interesting, Snipcast is free to try, with no registration required. I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback!
Pick whichever language you can get paid to learn. That is, is there any job assignment in your current role (or adjacent to it) where you can do some programming? What language do you need for it? Pick up the rudiments of that language on your own if you have to, and then get paid to use it (and thereby get better at it).

Getting paid to learn something that enhances your value is sweet if you can get it.
Madam C. J. Walker
I don't understand. Isn't that a case where "allowed by law"?
Some more thoughts on finite-state transducers for aperiodic tilings
Why? It has its benefits too. For example it can reduce viral load in the mouth, reducing the risk of COVID transmission for example. I think people can make their choice as to what product they want to use and what tradeoffs they are okay with.
I implied that, yes
That is because Mozilla has consistently moved Firefox in the direction of a Chrome clone.

When Firefox started is was not a copy of existing browsers. There is no reason it would have to be now. But they have rejected their core users. So now the only option left is a Chrome clone because that is what people are used to.
Qwen 2 Technical Report
Pretty rich take, coming from the owner of Tesla and SpaceX who have received hundreds of millions in subsidies and preferential loans: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/elon-musks-spacex-tesla-far-17050...
I got an AI generated book in the language I'm learning, and I showed it to my tutor. We went through some stories and it was just a bunch of "wtf" because the model wasn't speaking the language like humans did.

So maybe some day, but I'm not counting on it.
There are a lot of people who still think of Firefox from 5 years ago. Whatever else you can say about Mozilla (and I have a lot to say about Mozilla) they have actually really improved performance to where I'm not convinced it's any worse than Chrome. Browsers are just doing more than they used to.
You're thinking of the honest-to-god copper supply chain, not the "copper" supply chain.
This might not work for use cases where you need low latency, but for longer winded processing it would be amazing if possible.

For example, if I have a few servers, laptop (connected to power) as well as a desktop PC and they’re all connected to a fast local network, it’d be great to distribute the task of rendering a video or working with archive files across all of them.
> Seeing ads outside likely doesn't harm you though, you can ignore them.

Just for a different perspective, I can't ignore them. I read more-or-less all text that comes into my field of vision, and cannot help but look at bright flashing lights. To my knowledge this isn't recognized anywhere as a disability (though it is associated with a standard diagnosis).

For me, and presumably others like me, flashing road signs that tell me I'm driving the right speed thanks are a serious dustraction even though I've seen the same one hundreds of times. I stopped watching association football when animated sideline ads became common because I could mot focus on the game.

If it makes sense to put in wheelchair ramps at the stadium couldn't it make sense to accommodate me, even if most people can redirect their attention just as easily as walking up the stairs?
Yeah, I can vouch for that as well, the miniaturization challenges can be solved, after all there's chips now with a 2nm pitch which is crazy.

But some problems in that context have a hard physical limit, some serious researchers have proposed that it would not be feasible at all, that the effect of errors could not be mitigated and it's a dead end.

I wish I could provide concrete examples but I am not an expert and have only heard about this from friends who work on it.
Yeah that got a laugh out of me this morning
Yes, It’s important for us to delve further into this topic
Well it all comes down to encoding, doesn't it. We can represent almost everything with just 0 and 1 as well, can't we? The description of that data is way bigger than the elements used to describe it of course.
Show HN: Xspiral – A New 3D Design Platform
> How to send a message when the wifi devices only pass each other for a few or a few tens of seconds for example.

I took that to mean pretty close.
Yeah, totally agree but here it is more about education. For some steps it is okay to allow AI to teach you and after move to the next level. Also AI is more affordable for many people because not everyone can afford to pay $10-$30 for each lesson but here you can mix real teachers with AI. Will it replace all teachers? Probably not. Will it replace some of them? Probably.
If you want to disable this, instructions are given here[1] but

1) Hamburger menu -> Settings -> Privacy & Security

2) scroll down to the new section entitled "Web Site Advertising Preferences".

3) Make sure the box marked "Allow web sites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement" is not checked.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...
DNS is hierarchical so as long as the root servers point elsewhere it doesn't matter what they publish and once the root servers are updated then the new servers are the authoritive ones.
Is it really that bad, or is it just different from the typical OOP? At a glance to me it looks like any old stack oriented language... Why does Forth get hailed as an experience of spiritual enlightenment, yet PS always gets dunked on?
But that's still surprising performance, because the S&P generates income and pays dividends. Its increase reflects (at least, is supposed to!) expectations of future higher income. Gold doesn't even bear interest....
Don't know why you are being downvoted... I've noticed that this whole asteroid mining (or really mining of any extraterrestrial body at all for that matter) has almost reached meme levels of hysteria here on hackernews... I too don't understand it.
Why not just use the eBPF system?
So because we want to keep government small and ad companies can get so big they basically invade every part of your life you have to leave your phone, close your eyes, stay offline, just move bro. This doesn't seem like a very serious or productive line of reasoning.
> Training on human data makes them embody human values and makes them a complete non threat.

What if they embody stereotypical SV techbro greedy and arrogant sociopath values?
How did it save you money when house hunting? What kind of things did you detect?
If you have Trump, Elon and the New York Times in one post you gonna get some hop-ons that normally do not get engaged the same way with other posts, I guess?
Melting ice caps slow Earth's spin, lengthening days at 'unprecedented' rate
I read their post as banning it when the advertiser pays anyone else?
LinkedIn recruiters have been where's it been for me in all but my first internship and my current job (referral from prior coworkers). Whether I see a post on LinkedIn or get a direct message from them, that's how I got 5 of my 7 jobs.
These slides from Lucas Beyer are pretty nice. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZXFIhYczos679r70Yu8v...
Show HN: My first SaaS is also a YouTube series [video]
Same for me when I was working at some preprint software in the 90s. shudder
That's because when it comes to memory management on a Linux workstation, it is an unsolved problem. I've tried every piece of advice, distro and tool, and spent hundreds of hours trying to tune it over the years, and haven't been able to find a configuration that works as reliably as Windows or MacOS do out of the box.

Linux memory management works well for servers where you can predict workloads, set resource limits, spec the right amount of memory, and, in most cases, don't care that much if an individual server crashes.

For workstations, it either kicks in too early (and kills your IDE to punish you for opening too many tabs in Chrome) or it doesn't kick in at all, even when the system has become entirely unresponsive and you have to either mash magic sysrq or reboot.
But anyway, it is fun. We could have a whole generation that speaks exactly like ChatGPT. However, I still think a book and a simple conversation are a little bit different. Simple conversation is something AI is already good at.
The whole concept of "virtual memory" has tainted systems design for decades. Treating RAM as a cache relies on the OS making guesses about what will be needed and what can be passivated without it actually knowing the application requirements. Except that compared to CPU level caching, the cost of page faults is big enough that performance degradation is not linear and breaks the user experience. The idea that a 4GB machine can do the same with as an 8GB one albeit slower is just not true. If you hit the swap, you feel it bad. I'll concede that Zram can work because the degradation is softer. But anything hitting the IO should be explicitly controlled by the app.

Other random semi-related thoughts:

- Rust having to define a new stdlib to be used in Linux kernel because of explicit allocation failure requirements. Why wasn't this possibility factored in from the beginning?

- Most software nowadays just abstracts memory costs, partly explaining why a word processor that used to work fine with 64mb of RAM now takes a gig to get anything done.

- Embedded development experience should be a requirement for any serious software engineer.
Woah! Standby is working fine too?

I'm a huge XPS15 advocate at work and really love these machines as a Windows developer. But the standby just doesn't work. If I close the lid and throw it in my bag, then the battery will be empty and the bag will be hot as hell.
This is a huge failure and makes me shutdown my XPS15 every evening. Which is just nonsense.
I'm a Mac user at home and just never shut these laptops down ever.
You're wrong. The people building the models don't write CUDA kernels. The people optimizing the models write CUDA kernels. And you don't need to know a bunch of ML bs to optimize kernels. Source: I optimize GPU kernels. I don't make 500k but I'm not that far from.
As mentioned above, we aren't talking about Firefox's update mechanism here, but rather Librewolf's.

> Mozilla has been repeatedly resetting "Always check if Firefox is your default browser" option to "yes" with upgrades.

I'm sorry to say this, but this just seems to be misinformation.

I don't see that anywhere in the source code[1]? Anything I can find regarding prompting the user regarding the default browser is hidden behind an if guard to make sure the pref is `true` and not `false`.

The only scenarios I am aware of that will change the pref if the user has toggled one manually is the `_migrationUI`[2] function (as you can see, no changes relating to `browser.shell.checkDefaultBrowser`). Otherwise, untoggled prefs will be changed if the value in `firefox.js`[3] or `all.js`[4] is changed. As you can see, the last time the pref was modified was 2004.

[1] https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=browser.shell...

[2] https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/compone...

[3] https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/diff/94ff451885bb94679...

[4] https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/modules/libpref...
so ban all advertisements?
I find it odd that test-case reduction is billed as a “research skill”. To me, this is a basic debugging skill for anyone who works with code.

Maybe it’s more critical when you’re dealing with “research-quality” code. This post seems to ignore the underlying problem: it’s rare to see research code with any tests.
> I have a hard time believing that hunter gathers in tiny tribes traveling on foot with primitive weapons could have hunted and wiped out entire species of large animals from continents. I wish they would give more specifics.

This made me recall having read something related to it in the book Sapiens [1]. Indeed, I went looking and quoting from chapter 4

> All the settlers of Australia had at their disposal was Stone Age technology. How could they cause an ecological disaster? There are three explanations that mesh quite nicely.

> Large animals – the primary victims of the Australian extinction – breed slowly. Pregnancy is long, offspring per pregnancy are few, and there are long breaks between pregnancies. Consequently, if humans cut down even one diprotodon every few months, it would be enough to cause diprotodon deaths to outnumber births. Within a few thousand years the last, lonesome diprotodon would pass away, and with her the entire species. [...]

> The second explanation is that by the time Sapiens reached Australia, they had already mastered fire agriculture. Faced with an alien and threatening environment, they deliberately burned vast areas of impassable thickets and dense forests to create open grasslands, which attracted more easily hunted game, and were better suited to their needs. They thereby completely changed the ecology of large parts of Australia within a few short millennia. [...]

> A third explanation agrees that hunting and fire agriculture played a significant role in the extinction, but emphasises that we can’t completely ignore the role of climate. The climate changes that beset Australia about 45,000 years ago destabilised the ecosystem and made it particularly vulnerable. [...]

So the extinction was on a very different timescale from your buffalo example, but an extintion nonetheless. In the ellipses the book briefly points to some evidence to support these theories.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Hu...
For years I had a 50% grey background on all of my devices. People asked me if I am depressed (jokingly) but in fact a calm clutter free background makes me happy.
Driver of Evictions: Energy Burdens
I call this “terminal capitalism.” We’re now in a state where everybody prioritises building their own wealth at everyone else’s and society’s detriment.

I’m not an advocate for communism either, by the way. Just regulation and proper taxation.
Not real apologies, like from people — just corporate apologies, like from paid-for stooges.

Society will not collapse if we start holding these monsters to account; the opposite.
I really like the App Store page! How did you make the images?
For the user, C++ won't be a nightmare.
As long as there's a financial interest for a small minority, there will be a scenario where a doomsday AI will be ignored until it's too late.

A dangerous AI won't be killer robots going about patrolling the streets. But they could block job prospects, put people on watchlists, block financial transactions for them, etc. I'd say that tech is already here.
When the tool is too powerful for our capacities of self-control, maybe some people should roll back to the was things were before.

- a simple phone with SMS

- a desk computer in the living
room for internet and email, shared between everyone

- a camera

- an ebook reader (or just books and newspaper)
Maybe they would have a better market share if they weren't constantly pulling this shit every two or three years...
I'd also add:

- writing everything in lowercase - helps reduce depression and anxiety
Education involves human interaction too. And it is already moving to the point where it is becomng too assembly line. And did you consider the fact that if you can't afford a teacher, there are plenty of people willing to chat for free and help you on the internet? Maybe not as effective as a standard curriculum but in a way that is better as the idiosyncratic component is part of being human.

More AI replacing humans is never a good thing, under any circumstances.
What worked for me recently was working on an extremely new technology outside of work. I needed an app for tracking some medical information, and I wanted it to be a web app but didn't know or was willing to learn JS. I work with and love Kotlin, and saw that efforts were being made to run it on the web through WASM. I started building using that, and so far it has been very fun. It kind of returned me to that state I had in my college days where I just wrote code for fun. There's next to no documentation, and one day I spent 3 hours just trying to make a network call. It should be frustrating, but since I don't have any obligations, it's actually just fun. Oh and I also play a bunch of video games, which is nice.