skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Imagine if LLMs didn't exist, tech companies hadn't massively invested in compute and money was put elsewhere, perhaps dividends.

In that world, a tech company could arbitrarily invest in multibillion dollar high performance computers for no particular reason. Following the argument, with all that compute on site with nothing to do engineers would would find something interesting and all other companies that didn't invest would be missing out on that revolution.

So by the argument, any tech company could gain a competitive advantage by any non-strategic investment on the assumption that it will always work out. But of course, this only works if you have infinite money and infinite opportunity to speculate. As soon as your resources are constrained, then strategic choice becomes the dominant factor and your CEO has a lot of explaining to do.
Show HN: A singing synthesizer for the browser with algorithmic 3-part harmony
Hello HN!

This is a demo I built during my batch at the Recurse Center. It's built using WebAudio, WebAssembly (via Rust), and the Canvas API. The source code for this demo, along with my other vocal synthesis related RC demos[0], can be found at a monorepo[1] where I've been dumping all my RC work and logs.

The sound is generated using a physical model of the human singing voice, using a work-in-progress project called VoxBox [2].

The harmonization is done using something that kind of resembles a markov chain. Only, instead of using weighted probabilities and randomness, I use a selection heuristic that chooses a chord based on how often it has been used and how much voice movement is required.

Thanks for reading! Happy to answer any other questions.

0: https://pbat.ch/recurse/demos/

1: https://github.com/PaulBatchelor/Recurse/tree/main/scratch/t...

2: https://github.com/paulBatchelor/voxbox
oops, I literally forgot to add it, thanks for the heads up, I'll change it!
If it handles 99% of your tasks (making a smart boss fire you), know that you helped train it for that by using it/paying for it/allowing it to be trained on code in violation of license.

Even if 80% of programmer tasks in an org (or worldwide gig market) can be handled by ML, already 80% of programmers can be laid off .

Maybe you have enough savings that you just don't need to work but some of us do!
„You have to think hard“ is just „it depends“ worded differently.

If you don’t have to think hard then it also doesn’t depend on the details/circumstances and the outcome will be fine regardless of constraints.
You have to admire Maria Mazzucato's crusade against the consultancies, but I suspect AI will give the likes of Accenture, Bain, McKinsey et al a second wind - they have all invested heavily in building up AI expertise and whilst revenue in their other divisions are in decline, their data & AI functions are doing great. Corporates need support to become AI-enabled - suspect the consultancies will win again
> but that's not what happens in nature.

Exactly. When it rains in nature, 95% of the times a) there isn't enough sunlight for the droplets to focus and make a burn spot, and b) the droplets don't stay on the leaf but flow down instead.

The original advice is solid and not an urban legend, but it applies to cases like watering plants in your balcony when the sun is out, bright and hot. Source: I have caused burn spots in plants of my own.
~3 years since gpt-4 was finished training in 2021
> Here's the thing: virtually the entire software landscape has been designed with the assumption of internet connectivity.

The thing the drives me nuts is not even that, which is bad enough, but with the assumption that the Internet connection is always stable and it is legitimate to say "wait until some connections are up" again, as though there are no such things as power outages, network-level errors, cable tears, physical socket failures and such.
Whatever happened to swarm? I tried it maybe once, and that's that. Can't remember the last time I've seen docker swarm in a job ad also? Pretty much everything revolves with kubernetes or some combination with nomad.
I totally agree but always find myself in a very small minority when expressing this. People love Python and I don’t understand it.

For me the issue is that one cannot write in a “light functional programming” style in Python. The language lacks many simple things, but chief of them is multi-line lambdas! In 2024 I’m very surprised that people aren’t clamouring for this.
Gates foundation has become complacent and does not take risks required to effective philanthropy.
With annual budget that exceeds that of the World Health Organization, offices across the globe with networks and ties.

Bill Gates personality seems also be the issue. Buffett is very big on good corporate governance. If Gates fails on that It's not surprise that he stops giving money. Reading between the lines, you can see that Buffet started to distance himself from Gates after the divorce and dirty details. There will be more dirt coming.

Gates has always been a bully in the office (he admits it in his memoir). He is also bad boy in general. Microsoft banned interns from being alone with Gates.

https://archive.ph/ixbir

>Mr. Buffett — known for his love of lean and efficient operations free of bureaucracy — had been bothered by what he saw as the bloat and inflated operating costs of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,

...

>The Gates Foundation had settled into a groove and even become complacent, Mr. Buffett told staffers, which reduced its appetite for taking the kinds of risks that could lead to more effective philanthropy, and that he had hoped his donations would be used for. He was also upset by comments relayed to him by others who had found Mr. Gates rude and condescending, according to multiple accounts. Mr. Buffett had long offered Mr. Gates advice on how to be a friend: Be aware of how your closest friends think of you, Mr. Buffett would tell Mr. Gates, and be good to them.
I don't think that answers my question at all. It wasn't rhetorical

I'm very familiar with COVID having had it it at least 4 times, and also long COVID - two instances about 6 months each

There is no disagreement from me that post viral symptoms need more attention but I don't think it's necessary to downgrade the meaning of pandemic.
interest rates
Location: Madrid, Spain & Istanbul, Turkey

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Javascript/Typescript, React, NextJS, Python (Django, Flask, Pandas), TailwindCSS, MongoDB, Express, Node.js.

Résumé/CV: https://www.furkankalaycioglu.com.tr/

Email: furkankalaycioglu99@gmail.com

I am a recent CS graduate with more than a year of experience. I'm open to full-time, part-time, or internship opportunities.

I'm fine with working for a small wage since I value more on gaining experience and learning at this point.
Well put. This was my experience when working for an AI start up too.

Frustratingly, it’s also the hardest part to solve too. Throwing more compute at the problem is easy but diagnosing and then solving those other bottlenecks takes a great deal of time and not to mention experience across a number of specialty domains that aren’t typically mutually inclusive.
Here is how to think about AI....

1. No one would say the eye is conscious and yet its pattern matching is being re-used

2. The ML in the human brain re-uses the eye-cell wiring to pattern match....yes their was even a post either Friday or Sat here about that...

If we then re-tool the under-pining of AI, i.e. ML to match the new discovery we still get not AI but a new ML tool...

Or in short words find a fund index that is betting against the AI hype as the explosion will be massive.
Hi mate, the link is there in the blog text, just before the summary part.
TVs all used to have an "adblocker" in the form of people just switching away from the channel for whatever time ads last on that channel.

This means that ad companies also had to be wildly creative to make people WANT to watch them.
The Kubernetes code base isn’t great, but the notion that the ecosystem is even nearly as complex as the average EA monstrosity implementing basic forms over data as multi-player Microsoft Access is fanciful at best.
Yes, I also got Python vibes. That behind said, I'm digging infix less and less over time, and I'm actually starting to crave forth syntax, just got the complete lack of punctuation...

but, I actually really like what they have going here. Seems nice and minimalist, while meeting consistent and clean.
This project is just funky OCR, i.e. "offline" handwriting recognition that operates on the pixels of the final image only. That means it works on scans, but can't take stroke order information into account.

What you're talking about would be "online" handwriting recognition, where timing information about each stroke is available.
What it was like to tour with Fela Kuti
As others suggest: Sjunet is not really "private", in the sense that you can bet that there are unsupervised machines connected to it via some of the legit machines (or via some of the comm. equipment), which are also connected to the rest of the Internet via another Ethernet or WiFi connection. These can in principle expose open ports for interested parties to act as they wish on the "private" network. And they do so despite the reassuring contract which Sjunet members sign.
Whoever chooses the next winning lottery numbers could win big...
It's a cool toy, but in the end you're going to be spending more time and money maintaining and troubleshooting this contraption than you would have by just touching grass and getting your hands dirty.
2 things

You did the exact same thing that the author of the article did, then criticized him for it?
I make book notes with AI
> The most influential philosopher of recent times is Eliezer Yudkowsky ... The adoption of his thinking contributed to the formation of major AI labs such as OpenAI and later Anthropic.

Minor point, but I don't think one can reasonably credit Yudkowsky with this. Yudkowsy was no booster of neural nets and was quite surprised by their recent success. He's certainly said a lot of important things about artificial intelligence (mostly regarding the potential dangers of such), but his ideas haven't really contributed to current methods of constructing them.

(And yes you could say that Yudkowsky's ideas about the dangers of AI were influential on Anthropic specifically, but this quote is obviously not referring to that.)
Use the sink instead of the toilet.
What we have here though is the fear of being the company that didn't make that investment while your peers did. That has a completely different risk schedule on it.

If it's a mistake, your excuse is that your competition did it too and you wanted to guard against being left behind. If it works, everyone is happy.

If you're the only company making that speculative investment, it's great if it works and you might be fired by the board if it doesn't.
To be fair I don't think anybody saw the boom in LLMs coming from the initial Attention paper. At the time it was one of many ideas that sounded like they had potential.
This reminds me of The Mountains of Madness, written in 1931.

Back then, Antarctica was still a huge "black box," where anything could live (Cretaceous-era civilizations, for instance).

One thing that has come from our modern day, is that there's very few places left, that are truly "Here, there be dragonnes."
People can leave their home, people can travel. If digital media expose to the curious a given community of shared interests, you have more avenues than ever for discovering it, and making contact. I simply can't see how this is worse than not even being able to find such communities while stuck in your supposedly superior town/neighborhood community of the people who live around you.
> I'm 100% sure that once I left that the devs went back to remote server crash and burn FTP development...they couldn't be bothered with the "hassle" and unneeded headaches of git.

Have you considered introducing Mercurial or even Subversion?

While Git may be a kind of an industry 'standard', if you're starting from zero, some of its concepts may be a bit mind-bending for folks, and it has often been commented that Hg seems to have a more beginner-friendly interface.

And if branching isn't going to be used (a large strength of git/hg), then Subversion may have an even simpler mental model (svn of course does branching, but the others are more optimized for it).

If folks are doing FTP-push deployment, then moving to 'just' SVN-push (commit) deployment can be an improvement.
ZFS is good when someone else pays for the drives. It's a pain in the butt when you have a mismatch of random drives found during sales and want to create a single unified storage pool of them.

Synology's SHR and Unraid do it easily.
The reference manual for Rhombus is here:

https://docs.racket-lang.org/rhombus/index.html

Note that Rhombus is still a WIP, so a guide (and tutorials) will appear later.
You can shoot yourself in the foot and claim you became a better marksman in the process, that doesn't really do much to justify it though.

All other things being equal they'd been better off investing their money or time into something that wasn't a bubble economy. This is basically broken window logic.
Ignoring the social benefits (which is easily the biggest draw of the language), Python feels really optimal for quick, simple tasks. The language lends itself to not overthinking it and building simple solutions.
Very different things. I lived through the dot com bubble (didn't get rich because I was busy doing a PhD instead). Basically, a massive amount of clueless idiots funding companies that were literally nothing more than a crappy website. It was over in a few years. At the peak of the hype, disgusting amounts of money got spent on companies that went absolutely nowhere because there was absolutely nothing there. And then it all fizzled out. But there was also a healthy amount of experimentation and new stuff happening.

This feels different; there's actually some substance to the madness. Quite a few of the companies being funded are actually creating some pretty cool tech. And there's some real revenue potential as well; it's not just investment money keeping everything going. A good dot com era company reference would be companies like Google or Amazon that took the cash and got a lot of that tech making money for them even after the investment bubble burst. They also grabbed some of the smarter people at the same time. There are a few more examples. If you squint a little, you can see a few companies that are likely to be able to start raking in lots of cash soon that are at this point well funded.

Also a lot of the current investment money is being converted into GPU hardware. Which is of course nice for companies like NVidia, whom are probably a bit over valued currently. But the point is that hardware is tangible. Even if the companies that buy it go bust, the hardware just ends up in the hands of others. We're talking many millions of GPUs that are being deployed and that, like it or not, will be doing a lot of AI workloads for years to come for whomever ends up owning it. And there are a lot of smart people trying to make that hardware do all sorts of cool stuff. Hardware is a much better asset to have than useless websites. And I don't think a lot of the software is that bad either.
Nothing, that I'm aware of, is stopping extroverts from going out and meeting other people. They just won't run across as many introverts to feel superior to. Introverts can finally get the peace and quiet they desire. Unfortunately, they still have to hear about how they should get out more, smile and "just deal". But, it's a little easier to ignore now.
I grew up in a family of 6, we had a 1 acre garden and 3 acres for goats and sheep, 2 acres of fruit trees. Yes, it was a full-time job for my parents, but we canned and froze everything for the winter and only went to the store for sacks of flour. It's possible to do on less land. It took about 5 years to get to the point of sustainability.
No paywall: https://archive.is/NyEQo
not a good argument given the fact that underscore _is_ already a bold markdown syntax
Sure, but I do not feel like it’d really affect the broad strokes of ‘criticized in front of the entire team’.
There are lots of problems with this approach, but one of the bigger ones is that if everyone has their own keys, then everyone can create signed images that have been manipulated.

So even if you you can get people to actually verify images (and bear in mind how hard it is to get people to manage keys and use something like GPG), not to mention the technical issues with image reproduction, this would only give you protection in cases where someone is claiming that an image was created by a specific individual and it wasn't. But that's not the problem in the vast majority of instances.
>This is Venezuela. If the people want the country back, they can't expect to simply lead regular lives.

Really, so in order to change their government they should be forced into even worse miseries of being exposed as so-called traitors to the ruling regime by having their specific vote known? What ridiculous logic. Anonymous voting at least gives that modest avenue of protest towards a change that might not require a personal blood sacrifice. It's grotesque to push for even more risk against civilians.

Your last sentence on the other hand is a complete non sequitur.
Dude totally. And now my 3 year old lights up when we draw rhombuses (rhombi?). Such a fun shape.
A couple of hours ago on HN:
[Open Source Farming Robot](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41150095)
Crazy coincidence that this cogent anti-Trump guy has the same name as the weird chap running to be GOP Vice President in 2024.

Reading this it can't possibly be the same guy, right?
Private Home Surveillance with the WebRTC DataChannel – WebrtcHacks
A different way to think about TypeScript
Her argument, which is a bit vague, kind of seems to be that at the moment there's a problem with seeing

"humans are no more than mechanical generators of economically valuable outputs"

rather than

"humane, nonmechanical, noneconomic standards for the treatment and valuation of human beings — standards like dignity, justice, autonomy and respect"

and that 'superhuman' AI will make it worse. But that seems unproven - things could get better also.
Legitimately look into custom farming practices. The level of automation, data, and general technology in use in farming today is amazing.
Yes. On macOS we would generally use osascript on the command line. Apple Script Editor shows which functions each app exposes. Very powerful combo.
I was referring to the bathroom sink. Potential cross-contamination is much higher there than from any other usual tap source, especially in a public bathroom.
A sanitizer could have transformed this into a run-time trap.
A lot of people outside rich outside run old computers and like I said webviews usually are the one first released with the OS and dont get updated.
The above is a super concise syntax example that showcases multiple things at the same time. It is function definition mixed with pattern matching, with some advanced pattern matching features, like the '...' and '||' symbols. You can rewrite the example into the code below, if you find it to be more readable.

fun is_sorted(list):
match list:
| []: #true
| [_]: #true
| [head, next, tail, ...]:
head .<= next && is_sorted([next, tail, ...])

There's also a dot in `head .<= next`, because the syntax is sugar for `head.<=(next)`. Not sure why this is needed, but a quick read on the docs suggests this is done to enable static dispatch for some calls.
Why ? Openbar readonly ssh servers exists.

Also, cloning private repo via http is a pain, when MFA is involved
I guess if you are a multibillion dollar company, you can keep that in the bank (stock buybacks or whatever) or invest. So the question isn't really if AI is overhyped or not at the moment. The question is really do you know anything better to do with all that money to make your company future-proof.
It is supported and probably works, but everyone just uses Kubernetes. If you're big, you want to use managed proven solution. If you're small, you expect to get big one day, and you want to use future-proof technologies to avoid unnecessary migrations. I think that's the way it works.

Hashicorp was bought by IBM, so I don't have high hopes for Nomad, either... IBM is a graveyard of good technologies.
To some extend. But some must be pretty dedicated to find something you said even several days ago in a public discord. Coupled with the low stakes communication generally going on there it seems unlikely to me anyone would ever bother.
I don't mean I've never heard of clear fraud. I mean I've never seen it myself among colleagues.
The UK did the same in Australia [1] and there is still significant contamination in some parts of South Australia. Both governments showed total disregard for the safety of native people of course, including locals being blinded by the tests.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/14/australia/australia-uk-nu...
- [FarmBot | Open-Source CNC Farming]

https://farm.bot/

- [A New Open-Source Farming Robot Takes Shape | Hackaday]

https://hackaday.com/2021/03/05/a-new-open-source-farming-ro...

- [agricultural-robotics · GitHub Topics · GitHub]

https://github.com/topics/agricultural-robotics
Sega released another electromechanical stand-up, "Killer Shark," at about the same, and apparently using the same technology. Its cameo in Spielberg's Jaws fascinated me as much as anything else in that movie when I was a kid. There's a great write-up, including video of gameplay, here:

https://www.remindmagazine.com/article/15694/jaws-arcade-vid...
Reading between the lines it seems to me that Taiwanese political leadership may have forgotten to ask themselves this rather simple question;

What, exactly, would the average taiwanese benefit from risking their lives in behest of the political leadership?

You don't get second chances in life. You don't get a new body after you've been mangled. Or starved to death, as would be the likely scenario in a armed confrontation between China and Taiwan. Politicians would be fine as usual in their ivory towers.
Seeking Feedback on a New Tool to Automate Brag Sheets for Engineers
Hi HN,

I’m working on a new tool called bragsheet.io, designed to automate the creation of brag sheets for software engineers. For those unfamiliar, a brag sheet is a document where professionals track their accomplishments and contributions throughout the year, such as PRs, code reviews, documentation, presentations, and shout-outs on social media. These sheets are often used during performance reviews to highlight achievements and contributions.

I'm seeking feedback from the community to help shape the development of this tool. Your insights will be invaluable in ensuring it meets the needs of software engineers like you.

https://forms.gle/6RY1a8TPKjvkdtDJ9

The survey should take about 5 minutes to complete. If you’d like to stay updated on the development of bragsheet.io or participate in beta testing, there’s an option to provide your email address at the beginning of the survey (completely optional).

Thank you for your time and feedback!

Best, Jeremy
More US schools are taking breaks for meditation.It helps students mental health
Invest in Interfaces
Fun fact about The Art of the Deal: Trump was so desperately keen to have a book ghostwritten he ignorantly gave Tony Schwartz one of the best ghostwriting deals in publishing history (if not the best).

From Trump's perspective it was about the worst possible deal he could have struck if he'd approached it from the point of view the book is trying to portray.

I've always thought this to be enormously instructive about who he is. Strip away the politics, the authoritarian-populist schtick, and he fails on his own terms, again and again and again.
> They are not "hostage" they can leave.

Bad choice 1, or bad choice 2 is not really choice. At this point a phone is a utility, as it’s nearly impossible to get through life without one.