skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Im kind of surprised that Taiwan has never pursued a nuclear arsenal. They have the resources and technology to do so.

A few nukes is going to be more of a deterrent than any number of reservists.

The past few decades has shown that the greater powers of the world have no problem squashing you — unless you possess nuclear weapons.
AI editorial puts spotlight on disclosure
Ok, as far as the efficacy/importance/tradeoff of optimizing compilers...

How do Firefox and Chrome perform if they are compiled at -O0?
Serial vs. UUID for primary keys when sharding
ive read a lot on here that serials/bigserials should be used instead of UUIDs for PKs in SQL, but how does one go about this if they're sharding? all of a sudden, there will be duplicate PKs across shards, meaning any reshuffling between physical shards cannot be done
Most or all Teletype paper was yellow in the 1970s when I learned to program on Teletypes. Apparently white paper is more common today. (It looks like you used white in one of your photos.)
Good point. Probably the Americans have dissuaded them from building a nuclear warhead in exchange for guaranteed protection?
Bird flu cases among farm workers may be going undetected, a study suggests
Ah thanks for this feedback -- 5 emails/day is pretty good, but I was hoping the service was so cheap that people would just... upgrade and call it a day.

I wonder if there's anything I could do to improve the service that would make it a no-brainer. Clearly it's not a no-brainer yet!
If this topic is a serious concern in your threat modeling, then this is a far better solution than glitter nail polish, and also doubles as a digital identity signature:

https://dustidentity.com/

I'm looking at using this for certain shipping and packaging needs.
Do most places pass the Joel Test? He says that if you answer no to two or more of these, "you have serious problems", and I count about seven that I would say no to at my current big-name (and well-reputed) tech company:

4. Do you have a bug database? ["an organized database listing all known bugs in the code"]

No, each team has one or several poorly organized Jira boards that contain some fraction of the known bugs.

5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code?

Lol? Does any major company do this?

6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule?

No, we have weekly sprints and the vaguest idea of when bigger projects will land.

7. Do you have a spec?

I haven't seen a real spec in years.

8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?

Well, I work from home, but all the fancy offices are open-plan.

10. Do you have testers?

Not for any of the stuff I work on, and I don't know if we have them at all.

11. Do you do hallway usability testing?

Absolutely not.

So that's 5/12. How many companies you know would get 11 or 12?
The AI Believers
I think you're right. It does seem like the models need exponentially larger datasets to get linear improvements, which are now in the realm of having to buy them from large social media companies. The next breakthrough will probably being doing something different rather than doing it slightly better.
Looks like I have some room to raise prices! $12/year is nothing in comparison :)

Guess it's time to write a blog post about how I'm 10x cheaper than Zapier and 1,000 times easier to set up!
Cancel Your Gravatar, Now
The photo with white paper is the Thermal Impulse Printer System, a different printer from the Interim Teleprinter. As far as I can tell, the teleprinter always used yellow paper. (This helps to figure out which printer is being used on the Shuttle in a photo, since the captions are usually wrong.)
I used p5.js to make my "first ever website". Which got me my first internship

https://cody811.github.io/BlockPlacer/Lost.html
I think it’s more reflective of the reality of living in the US than of your company’s selection process. I’m curious what you did after realizing this. Did you pivot away, or create a program designed to be useful for the volunteers? Assuming that the volunteer pool accurately represented the larger group.
Won’t even pretend to have read the article, but I’ll recommend the last book to really make me existentially happy and which helped me out of a bout of depression: The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem. If you liked Gödel, Escher, Bach then I suspect you’ll enjoy it. It’s whimsical but quite deep.
That argument proves too much: you similarly will never pick Pi, or any other irrational. And yet, the probability you pick some irrational is 1.

In fact, the probability you pick an uncomputable number is 1, too.
All the old people are working with me I guess. I recently had a birthday and some co-workers I was on a call with asked how old I’d be. I said 42 and they all told me I was just a baby. I think they are all in their 60s.

It’s an older Fortune 500 company, 70+ years old.
Given that 40GB is like $6 of ssd, it wouldn't be hard to provide an actual useful SSD buffer.

I got a Lenovo laptop for the parents a long time ago that had a hybrid hard drive; I think maybe 8 or 16GB builtin SSD. Man that thing was just absolute trash, so slow; ghastly long boot times or time to launch a browser.

Ideally a SMR drive has a SMR capable file-system, where it can write data into linear logs & them try to batch rewrite the metadata. Even the pathologically terrible random writes can be somewhat coped with via accommodating fs.
This is a sick project -- sorry I'm so late getting to this, it's fireworks season in this part of the world and I almost forgot I made this post, haha.

I'd love to operate opentrashmail as a service along with webhooked -- if you don't mind getting in touch my email is in profile :)
https://archive.is/pwxAk
It's written in Elixir.

Maybe it's just a grass-is-greener thing but the more Kubernetes I have to stomach, the more interested I become in BEAM languages like Elixir.

Not like they're alternatives exactly, but I get the feeling that the BEAM way is to solve the ops problems in a way resembles how you solved your dev problems. More holistic, less ad hoc.
This is really about whether reading highbrow fiction specifically can make you happier.

I find it odd. Fiction was created as and remains fundamentally a form of entertainment. It’s like asking if watching Netflix can make you happier. Yes sure but not usually deeply.

This is just another symptom of how we’ve made literature precious, and appreciating it almost religious, certainly a form of snobbery. The New Yorker will write an article like this on “bibliotherapy” but never take seriously the idea you can get the same affect from binge watching the Sopranos.
Computer security is not a serious field. There is no other group that honestly feels "do what I meant, not what I said" is a sign of someone else's bug.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle..., the incremental cost was $6,435 per pound and the complete cost was $27,000 per pound. I thought a lot about this, and there are arguments for using either number.
Oh, those kinds of columns. I thought we were talking text columns, and I was about to relate.

I work at a small business. Despite computer software being about the literal opposite of our business (plants), the founder built an entire suite of interconnected tools that runs off MS BASIC for Xenix, on a single HP machine running SCO OpenServer. The machine has so many customizations, self-scheduling cron/at jobs, odd nooks for files, weird tweaked programs, and special conventions that if a server with a dedicated hostname qualifies as a pet (as opposed to cattle), I'd be THIS THING'S pet.

The system handled EVERYTHING. Accounting, payroll, pesticide management, inventory, attendance, business contacts, shipping label printing... all out of a bunch of terminal menus (which are actually text files with control codes that get `cat`ed out).

But by God, the most horrifying part of it all are those BASIC files. They're IMPENETRABLE.

Firstly, I don't believe this version of BASIC supports named functions or subroutines. At all. But that's fine. MS BASIC being what it is, the interpreter only can deal with a certain number of characters per logical line, and that includes data definitions.

This version of BASIC (like so many others) includes its own serialization format and record/file access scheme. You declare the layout of the data file you want, open that file, and BASIC will handle (most of) the rest.

So when the founder started hitting the internal line limit while defining the data file's fields, he would cut the names of the fields down to fit more on that one line. Over time `30 AS EMPLOYEENAME` became `30ASEMPLNAME`, which became `30ASEMNAME` which became `30ASAF(1)`.

Every cent we transact, and every employee's timecards still flow through this old system, some even using bona fide Wyse terminals. To reiterate, this man was, first and foremost, a farmer. His contraption is terrifying, but commands immense respect. It's lasted 30-some years with continuous tweaking and refining, and we still have yet to replicate even half of its functionality. (Though there are other organizational issues that are making that difficult.)

On a personal note, aside from the calcified codebase and occasional spelling errors, it's a stellar business application. It's fast, mostly coherent, and keyboard-driven in such a way that experienced employees can navigate it faster than the terminal can refresh. We've been working for years to replace it, but at the same time, there's a lot our newfangled Angular+PHP+MySQL replacement could learn from it.
I used RDFG, I needed my pinky to be able to access a lot more keys in games like mechwarrior.
If anyone should get one it's SK given NK is basically a lost cause but that's probably an even more volatile gambit than Taiwan
Thank you for this feature request! Will implement and get back to you -- if you want to send me an email I'll tell you directly, or I'll just make another response on this comment!

"Alerts" is a great feature.
Fortunately you don't have to go 100% one way or the other. Write your code in C, compile and check it's correct and constant time, then commit that assembly output to the repo. You can also clean it up yourself or add extra changes on top.

You don't need to rely on C to guarantee some behaviour forever.
I could be wrong here since I don't develop compilers, but from my understanding many of the undefined behaviours in C are the product of not knowing what the outcome will be for edge cases or due to variations in processor architecture. In these cases, undefined behaviour was intended as a red flag for application developers. Many application developers ended up treating the undefined behaviours as deterministic provided that certain conditions were met. On the other hand, compiler developers took undefined behaviour to mean they could do what they wanted, generating different results in different circumstance, thus violating the expectations of application developers.
I feel like vim is one of those things that requires dedicated time investment: "learn by doing" << "learn then do" in this case. I say this as I have been in the former category for too long. I'll definitely bookmark this link.
Would Taiwan have time to “pursue”? CCP will see this as deal breaker and with the level of spy infiltration Taiwan can’t keep this a secret.

Edit: USA will see this as a huge red flag as well. Remember USA only want to deter but not a real war
This is almost a 100% "divide and conquer", but a good article with concrete examples.

Definition : "A divide-and-conquer algorithm recursively breaks down a problem into two or more sub-problems of the same or related type, until these become simple enough to be solved directly. The solutions to the sub-problems are then combined to give a solution to the original problem."
Working on it https://x.com/adamnemecek1/status/1814071171127935176
Ah, yeah, that's true.
Extract of first comment:

> This paper is most likely complete bunk. The data is very bad, and the conclusion doesn't even match the data.

From another comment:

> The study found people are able to guess the given names of adults from four choices at slightly better than chance, ~30%. With 117 (or 116?) people guessing and 16 images.
The real risk is that... 3 month delay turns into 6 months easily. That said there will be some relief rally at some point into Fed cut hopes
Feature request received!

Pusher as in this thing -- https://pusher.com/ right?

Any other places you want to push to? Slack?
This was a drum printer, the other common fast printed from the same era was a chain printer, essentially the same mechanism with a row of hammers one for each column and a chain of characters that would get whacked on as it sped past the hammers, they were really fast!

The reason why they probably didn't choose a chain printer for the shuttle is likely because they had a failure mode where if the chain broke it would tend to fly out one side of the printer and through the wall - our operators were cautioned not to stand beside it ....
Main limiting factor? Hard to know.

But throw 100x more compute to an LLM (through an increase of both parameters and tokens) and it will undoubtedly beat current models.
Which makes it critically important to see through to the end that Ukraine wins. Otherwise South Korea, Taiwan, and others would be right in recognizing that a nuclear arsenal is the better option.
It's amazing how gladly people are willing to write off existential threats & badmouth & insult those who talk to the high risk situations.

> Such click-baits don't help

You don't help. Not at all.

We should probably start blocking the in and taxing everyone for actual green efforts. The traitors to the species telling us to disregard information & stay the course should probably be gagged & ostracized from society, so that the planet has a chance.
hjkl :P
It's not a personal attack via crappy internet trope, that's the hopefully-now-obvious difference.
Tesla Full Self-Driving data makes Elon Musk lower expectations
Is x < y decidable or semidecidable?

If x and y are the same number, then a Turing machine that compares the digits of x and y to determine whether x < y will never terminate. Doesn’t this mean that x < y is not decidable?
YUP :) this is a great use case.
Wow, somehow I missed the line about “insecure http update method”… crazy
> If it really is an example of an uncomputable physical process

I guess first you'd have to prove that there are physical processes are actually continuous, and that this continuum is genuinely the continuum of the reals.

It is already known that a computer with access to real numbers with infinite precision can perform hypercomputation, I'm not sure how much this is relevant, but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_computation
I agree with you, except your claim that it proves too much. You will indeed never pick pi or any other specific number you can name. I don't know if you were trying to say my argument leads to those results you consider absurd, but they are in fact the correct results.

One way of interpreting this result is to say that randomly selecting a real number isn't physically meaningful and this does not fit into our human brains well. You can do math on the "random number", but you can't ever actually have one in hand (as a sibling comment to yours points out correctly, it is guaranteed to be uncomputable as well), not even mathematically, so you should expect counterintuitive results. Which is generally true of the real numbers when you get close enough to them anyhow. They are popular for a reason but they have rather more spiky bits and strange behaviors than one might expect from a number called "real".

I think both of you may be thinking of "random number" as something like what you get out of a RNG or something, but random reals are much stranger than random ints from a finite range.
Can you elaborate? I’m intrigued.
This is a great idea, can't believe I didn't put in something like this.

Will update the landing page
NYC flooded massively during Hurricane Sandy. Most of the gulf coast experiences the same annually. Now more of the eastern US will suffer the same fate as climate change accelerates.

The rural western US has always been affected by wildfire, but rarely by the type of hyper-fires we've seen in the past decade, again due to accelerating climate change.

Where do homes "belong"? Chicago?

Edit – here's a NOAA map of $1B climate-related disasters in 2023: https://coast.noaa.gov/data/nationalfacts/img/fast-fact-weat...
Cool, but is Selective Laser Sintering less energy intensive than traditional extrusion + machining, or die casting, etc?
Multi mode is cheaper and perfectly fine for these low data rates
Which is why I very, very explicitly presented it as a way to gain some intuition and not as a rigorous mathematical argument. That wasn't an accident.
Electron apps with memory leaks, corporate security scanning software, a huge nix compilation, you know, the important stuff.
They are not meant to fool anyone. Can't say I find them professional in anyway.
API documentation is key to making everything work well. It helps developers understand how to use it, reducing errors and making integration much faster. Good documentation not only makes things easier but also makes the API more attractive and pleasant to use. Without clear documentation, even the best API can be a problem for developers.
Reading, to me, is the best method to learn empathy. We all read differently, in our own headspace, but then need to distill that view through the godhead of a fictional character. Movies and TV can't touch that slow drip of mindcopy a book provides. TV we witness, books we live alongside. Often I'm stuck in the personality of a book for weeks at a time, and it's impossible for the experience not to leave a footprint.

Happiness I've found easiest to achieve with that empathy. Understand those around you and know your place in the world and what is and is not possible to change. Being malleable in a group while still retaining a sense of self provides a way to travel and adapt in whatever situation you find. Only books provided me with enough experience to "know" myself and how I'd react in certain scenarios.

I don't think it matters much what you read. Whatever challenges you and gets you to see the world slightly askew.
My experience working on ml at couple faang like companies is gpus actually tend to be too fast compute wise and often models are unable to come close to theoretical nvidia flops numbers. In that very frequently bottlenecks from profiling are elsewhere. It is very easy to have your data reading code be bottleneck. I have seen some models where our networking was bottleneck and could not keep up with the compute and we had adjust model architecture in ways to reduce amount of data transferred in training steps across the cluster. Or maybe you have gpu memory bandwidth as bottleneck. Key idea in flash attention work is optimizing attention kernels to lower amount of vram usage and stick to smaller/faster sram. This is valuable work, but is also kind of work that is pretty rare engineer I have worked with would have cuda kernel experience to create custom efficient kernels. Some of the models I train use a lot of sparse tensors as features and tensorflow’s sparse gpu kernel is rather bad with many operations either falling back to cpu or sometimes I have had gpu sparse kernel that was slower than cpu equivalent kernel. Several times densifying and padding tensors with large fraction of 0’s was faster than using sparse kernel.

I’m sure a few companies/models are optimized enough to fit ideal case but it’s rare.

Edit: Another aspect of this is nature of model architecture that are good today is very hardware driven. Major advantage of transformers over recurrent lstm models is training efficiency on gpu. The gap in training efficiency is much more dramatic with gpu than cpu for these two architectures. Similarly other architectures with sequential components like tree structured/recursive dynamic models tend to fit badly for gpu performance wise.
Ecclesiastes 1:18
Yup. Search is gradually (for about 15 years now) being transitioned from a search feature to a self-serve ad-requesting platform. “Show up, type a term, and we will select 10 ads for you.”
What problem does your proposal potentially solve?

A strip of heads that move in unison won't be able to operate in parallel, for the same reason that on real hard drives heads serving different platters cannot operate in parallel without being mounted on independent actuators. So it seems like your suggestion only reduces the distance that any given head needs to move, at the cost of greatly increasing the mass of heads+wiring that needs to be positioned quickly and accurately. You've seriously inflated cost for no gain in bandwidth and likely no gain in latency (and even if everything worked out in favor, it couldn't do anything to improve rotational latency).
For some values of "open source": the datasets used for information about the plants and such are unavailable as of the last time I checked.
This reminds me of working with a company that provided market-wide pricing data for a particular commodity across the US. They were the de facto aggregator of pricing for the sector and at the time I worked for one of their larger customers. We requested they add another vendor’s pricing in a particular region and received a response along the lines of “Sure, as soon as we can figure out how to add another entry. We’re at the maximum row count on the system.”

Needless to say it gave my team a few days of flabbergast and speculation on what system they must have built on to hit a row limit at only 5 digits. And yet for a non-tech industry it was mostly working.
There is quite a lot of circumstantial evidence that the US's industrial capabilities have mean-reverted from the middle of the century where they were a stand-out superpower (partly because the other industrialists, Europe, engaged in something that looked like a big civil war). Things like energy trends, growth rates, locus of new industries, the decline of the US to using money printing strategies, environmentalism in the West, etc.

It is plausible that China is the economy in the global drivers seat now. If they are, then attempts to limit their economy will probably bounce off - unless violence is used, the laws of economics favour those who work hard, invest and are honest about what is affordable. The evidence suggests China does those things better than the US (although it is probably fairly knife-edge, both countries have out-of-control levels of government intervention in markets but at some point China will probably do something stupidly authoritarian).

This report is interesting in light of that frame.
I think they're calling the bug or design flaw "intel sabo".
If there ever was a major conflict with a diplomatic alternative, this is it. China's attitude towards Taiwan is mostly petty and dates back to the drunken bar fight with Chiang Kai-shek, who's been dead for 50 years.

The key to peace is the general understanding that the two countries will be reunited at some unspecified future point. Historically, this has been the keystone that let the doves carry the day. In the 2000s the Taiwanese were floating the idea of an EU-style arrangement, which could be the bridge there.

We keep letting Putin's stooges egg us on against China, which he needs to do to keep it firmly in his camp. I wouldn't be surprised if confrontational fervors in Taiwan were being stoked by outside sources.

The one thing that's changed the most in recent years is that China's military might has been increasing steadily. This both increases the risk of war and is motivated by the antagonism. De-escalating the Taiwan Strait with diplomatic means can pay off handsomely.
US military doctrine doesn't _use_ dumb artillery shells, because it assumes total air superiority.
We were never at war with Eurasia. We’ve always been at war with east asia.