skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been watching the promise of fusion power progress through my life and its been endlessly frustrating. Those involved continue to make unfounded claims and promises when the fact is that we simply don't know exactly how to make it work, or if it will work at all.

Successes in one piece of the puzzle, like 2022's success in fusing deuterium and tritium, are paraded around with claims that we just "solved" fusion. In reality the success was a proof of concept that contained fusion is possible, and that it was done while requiring more energy input then was created.

We're 14 years and $20 billion dollars into a project that was mean to take 10 years and $6bn. What have we learned? Plenty of small things certainly, but apparently they also believe to have learned all the unknowns and can now promise that it will only take 15 more years and another $40bn.

I don't buy it, and no one else should either. They don't know how long it will take or what it will cost. 15 years isn't how long the construction process for a now fully understood reactor will take, its a bunch of fluff time hoping its enough to figure out what they still don't know.

When do we say enough is enough and throw in the towel? Unlimited free, clean energy sounds great and all but it also sounds like snake oil. We would be much better off reducing our need for energy rather than continuing to chase a magic solution that we still don't understand how to build.
Here in EU SSD prices are much higher now but anyway for me the point is not much going "mini" but being accessible and upgradable, in a home setup I do not care much "the NAS" but the homeserver: I do not have a datacenter-as-a-computer where some machines host a gazillion of nvme serving them via nvme or iscsi and so on to some blades allowing easier physical storage administration and greater flexibility, I typically have some desktops used as desktops, a homeserver or two (the second as a spare), so the main point is having a machine to do anything not just backup. A classic desktop rackmounted in a 4-5U, a switch, a patch panel, a UPS, a "router" it's the machine room. Having many small boxes is not much comfy to manage in case of hw issues, having a rack, well accessible, with any component easy to replace is valuable to me.

Since the home already consume much more than few W for ventilation and so on the consumption of a modern PC does not change much, it's not an old multi-opteron server.
I’ve had unrecoverable data errors in mirrored ZFS pools before. I had remote backup of course, but now instead of mirror I use ZFS pools with many disks and set up with groups of raidz-3.
Greetings Ken. Thanks to you and Marc for another great dive into obscure NASA hardware.

They must have considered that the spinning drum had a gyroscopic effect on the shuttle. One of the reasons why the shuttle computers used tape drives and not hard drives was because they would have affected it's attitude in microgravity. Perhaps there wasn't enough mass there to be a problem, and also that it wasn't spinning 100% of the time like hard drives would have been?

I'm also surprised they didn't consider the Teletype Model 40. It was lighter, didn't have a spinning drum, came in a receive-only configuration (no need to hack off the keyboard), was ASCII-based, and was already flight qualified on military aircraft. Maybe my timing is off - I first saw one in 1984 and it was considered "new" then, so it might not have been available in 1981.

The Model 40 used a rotating belt with individual character pallets in it. It also used 80 hammers that would fire at the correct time to produce a printed character. You can see the pulleys for the belt spinning (one is behind the red plastic part on the left) in the video. It would also power down after a period of inactivity. One of the jokes you could play was to swap pallets around. They weren't tracked individually, but the belt had a flag that would indicate the start of the pallet sequence. So any monkey-business afterwards would result in M's for N's etc. being printed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whKVGefscro
The Untold Story of How US Spies Sabotaged Soviet Technology
Sure. My base case is that LLM’s find uses and that compute gets cheaper and more efficient, which helps make more business cases possible. Investing in current state GPU’s doesn’t seem that useful in that world. Nvidia is priced for a monopoly and I’m not sure it is one.
How some of the top athletes rest and recharge
6 years and 50 countries in search of interesting McDonald's restaurants
It specifically says that the use of C as a "portable assembler" is a use that the standards committee does not want to preclude.

Not sure how much clearer this can be.
Hmm... But reading too falls in the "flow" category, I feel...
Don’t we already have effectively unlimited clean fusion energy?
> To be fair to other styles, we generally learned already that shared state is bad. It's avoided in basically every language/service these days.

I don't know how true that really is. JavaScript added `class` relatively late in it's lifespan, and most JavaScript/TypeScript projects use `class` to hide shared state/mutations behind that interface, in the name of `encapsulation`, rather than just passing stateless data from function to function.

Both patterns obviously has their places, no silver bullets and all that, but you'll have a hard time finding any relatively popular JS/TS project that doesn't overtly rely on shared state one way or another.
Yes, it has an arm core. The manufacturer pays the royalty to arm. Very different ball game in my opinion to proprietary codecs. There are no non-arm derivatives. The closest non-arm MCU you'll find is the esp32 but that's completely different, and lacking probably the most useful thing about the rp2040: the PIO.
Where I live (250 apartment complex in Sweden) people throw old computers in the electronics trash room, I scavenge the room every day multiple times when I take my dog out for a walk like some character out of Mad Max.

I mix and match components from various computers and drop debian on them then run docker containers for various purposes. I've given my parents, cousins and friends Frankenstein servers like this.

You'd be amazed at what people throw away, not uncommon to find working laptops with no passwords that log straight into Windows filled with all kinds of family photos.

Sometimes unlocked iPhones from 5 years ago. It's a sick world we live in.

We deserve everything thats coming for us.
To your point: check out Supermaven. I have no affiliation. But it has way more context than Copilot and is way better at suggestions that make sense in the codebase.
Facebook seemed to be rather upset at being told they couldn't track users; by my (IANAL) reading, the rules Apple had that Facebook were objecting to were also the law in several places (CCPA and GDPR):

https://hbr.org/2021/02/facebooks-misleading-campaign-agains...
you can look into 'Precision Agriculture' and find quite a few solutions. Deere is pretty much at the front of the game with automation and data that provide farmers with the ability to make super informed decisions.
A Graphical User Interface.
Follow up posts are important! It takes the pressure off having to cram everything into a single publication. Nice!
Good post, thanks for engaging.
I've got to agree with you on this
Which is, honestly, good. Facebook couldn't capture it, so giving it away is far better than the earlier 'keep-it-only-for-us' approach of Google. I don't mean to say Facebook/Meta has anyone's best in their hearts, though.
I want higher quality food than my local supermarket. Tomatoes are work to grow but what you can buy is awful. I wouldn't use this for wheat as I can't tell any difference.
This looks fun but not really useful.

My hope would be that in 20 years everyone has a little bot that 24/7 runs a garden for you and provides every family with 80% of their vegetable need.

Imagine the amount of acreage we could return to nature / co2 sinking.
Few people agree that the goal of SWE is engineering excellence. It is to solve business problems. Engineering excellence is a means to a goal: to be able to solve _difficult_ problems _correctly_ and allow solving new problems _in the future_. All these things can be traded off, and sometimes aren’t even needed at all
> Effectively unlimited clean energy is the goal.
> Let that sink in.

No, this was never the goal. At the beginning, ITER was a science project to get the US and the USSR to collaborate on something even if the Cold War was at its height. Similar to the International Space Station. Some project with no real scientific objective, but that could spur the enthusiasm of the masses, so politicians could gain popular support while covertly pursuing a path to rapprochement.

> Unlimited clean energy.

How exactly to you get the tritium? By running some fission reactors, right? Fission reactors are a reality today, and can provide unlimited clean energy already. Why don't they? Because they are expensive? And how do we know fusion reactors, if they ever show up, will be inexpensive?

Ok, here's something else to let sink in. The best fusion reaction out there (deuterium+tritium) yields only about 5 times as much energy per kg of fuel as the fission of uranium or plutonium. Only 5 times, not 50 times or 500 times.

And of course, we don't find tritium in nature, so we need to breed it from lithium using a source of neutrons. You could use a fusion reactor as the source of neutrons (deuterium + tritium = helium + neutron), as you can read on this ITER page [1]. What that page does not tell you is that you would need 100% efficiency to be able to breed your own tritium. Good luck with that. Any deficit will need to come from fission reactors.

Somehow the dream that is sold to people is that once we get fusion reactors, we can stop using the "dirty" fission reactors. It is just a lie.

[1] https://www.iter.org/mach/TritiumBreeding
Putting things in context is something that responsible journalists would do, and it never happens, because it would take more work and scare the shit out of people less, so what's the point? Thank you so much for sharing this.
How does preregistration factor into this? It seems to me that it would make sense to do at least some review before the bulk of the money is spent.

> But you can be highly critical of a paper and that paper can still push knowledge forward.

Can you give a concrete example of this?
> It's strange, I assumed this so strong I never thought anyone would ever start writing and essay from the beginning without considering more of it, similar to just starting projects or code, I guess they do and it works really well.

It really depends on the task/text at hand. With some things I set out to do, I know I want to reach a concrete goal, then it's easy to do an outline first with the finish point being the known goal, then fill out the middle-pieces.

But at other points, you're not 100% sure what the goal is. Then starting from the beginning and just going with the flow until you reach something that feels like the goal is the way to go, and you'll adjust as you go along.

Other times a mix between the two is optimal, where you think you knew what the goal was, but as you're half-way of filling out the outline, you see that another goal would be better fitted, and you adjust. Or you realize what the goal was all-along as you're nearing the finish, and you go back and adjust.

Basically, there is no single path/process that fits all types of problems or people even. You try out different things until you find the way(s) that fit you and the stuff you typically handle.
I kinda wonder what the percentage would be for my use of autocomplete. I only ever write out variable names once, the other times they are completed. Like I write "wacz" and it sees it matches with WArehouseZoneController and inputs that.

I probably type less than half the code I commit, even without AI assistance?
Disclaimer: have a PhD, went to industry

I think the biggest institutional mistake of the academic system is the over-production of academic bound PhDs.

People are strung along for years thinking they have a shot at some professorship, so they work for low pay over their prime societal contribution years before realizing there are no spots left.

Academics afraid of their future security will be more prone to fraud, and more of them need enough FU money to try things that go against the grain.

If we pre-filtered academics half way through their training based on the number of faculty positions that are available it could help curtail the fraud ridden rat race.
I'll have to read about why they made the choices they made, but it reminds me of going to a microbrewery: You tell them you like simple (American) macrobrews, and they say they have just the thing. What arrives is a light lager that tastes awful because they think macrobrews beers are awful. So they made an awful beer that doesn't taste like a macrobrew.

I don't think Rhombus is going to appeal to people that are comfortable with Python, C, Java, Go, JavaScript, etc... It's got infix, but it's cryptic. It seems like a step back from StandardML or Ocaml.

Maybe there's a justification in terms of how the macros work. Maybe they're poisoning the well to make Lisp syntax more appealing. I'll try to reserve judgment, but so far I'd rather program in Scheme/Racket than this.
A real model of rigorous analytical thinking here: there are cases of fraud in academia, therefore all of academia is entirely fraudulent and should be dispensed with. Or it should take lessons from... the financial sector?!

Yes, there should be effort to address academic fraud. But no, we should not buy into conservative propaganda and torch our institutions of higher education.
'Not stranded in space': how NASA lost control of Boeing Starliner narrative
On my iOS, after clicking that link you provided I immediately got a pop up I have never seen before:

“Failed to Add Pass
An error occurred while adding the pass to Wallet. Please try again later.”

Brave on latest iOS. Lockdown mode enabled for 6 months.

There’s something not right about that PDF.
They also drifted fallout across Adelaide and dusted a future UK Prime Minister as a young boy.

My name is Yami Lester
I hear I talk I touch but I am blind
My story comes from darkness
Listen to my story now unwind
This is a rainy land

First we heard two big bangs
We thought it was the great snake digging holes
Then we saw the big cloud
Then the big black mist began to roll
This is a rainy land

~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHY13PCeSxc

In the USofA they just went straight to testing on home soil and wafting fallout across Los Vegas and elsewhere.

SGS Maps Radioactive Fallout from U.S. Nuclear Weapon Tests, Beginning with July 1945 Trinity Test

https://sgs.princeton.edu/news-announcements/news-2023-07-21

https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-fallout-nuclear-weap...

and then there was the seal level coral reef blast that won the record for fallout across the Pacific: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo and spawned a generation of mutant radioactive skyscraper toppling lizards and tutles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla_(franchise) .
For example the recent realloc change in C23. I was surprised the previously used behaviour, even if inconsistent across implementations, was declared UB. Why not impdef?
>I can't envision a decentralized technological and scientific world that wouldn't set us back 300 years.

And yet you are here arguing for more capitalist market-based solutions, which are inherently decentralized and have a tendency to create unrelated, wasteful (duplication of effort), and often pointless competition and profit-seeking?

Very odd.
Here's a wild thing: at many of the high end vineyards they'll do low-level helicopter flights over the vines every time it rains to blow the water off the leaves and fruit specifically to prevent infection and rot.
Funnily enough it kind of isn't. From the perspective of the company itself, it's performance relative to the competition that matters. Not buying the machine when others do is a win if the machines don't work out.

From the perspective of the people running a successful company, it's much more important to make easily defensible reasonable decisions than to make ambitious ones. You protect the capital in preference to maximising returns. Major gains are somewhat rewarded and major failures severely punished, with a comfortable baseline if you maintain the current positioning.

If you're not yet a successful megacorp, all the dials are turned in favour of risk because you need the reward. Lots of incomers doing riskier things seeking to overthrow the incumbent is roughly how we get a turnover of companies and a degree of overall progress.

I think this round is interesting because the incumbents have seen substantial competitive risk which could otherthrow them on an alarmingly short timescale (i.e. while the current leadership are still there), and that has induced otherwise fairly unlikely massive capex spend.
There's a Tool to Catch Students Cheating with ChatGPT.OpenAI Hasn't Released It
Wow, cool.

Too late to edit, but I think the main point stands, the founders and early employees were all from giants with feet of clay who collapsed because they ignored the consumer market.
https://archive.is/pV9p9

This was funny:

'Last year, Josh McCrain, a political-science professor at the University of Utah, gave students a writing assignment that included, in indecipherable small text, instructions to include a reference to Batman. If they copy and pasted the assignment into AI, the instructions would be incorporated.

Sure enough, a handful of students turned in papers with nonsensical references to Batman. Going forward, McCrain is tweaking writing assignments to focus more on current events AI is less familiar with and beseeching students not to outsource their work to AI.'
I have a strong suspicion that previous generations of TPU were not cost effective for decent AI, explaining Google's reluctance to release complex models. They have had superior translation for years, for example. But scaling it up to the world population? Not possible with TPUs.

It was OpenAI that showed you can actually deploy a large model, like GPT-4, to a large audience. Maybe Google didn't reach the cost efficiency with just internal use that NVIDIA does.
does it? I've used both quite a bit and ssh certainly "feels" faster to me (with multiplexing)
I think that 20 billion euros is like the 20 million dollars estimate in the clip below (from the Big Bang Theory)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLF-8uiiTJ4
> ...okay on simple tasks, but actually misguides, confuses, and in fact breaks your flow of thought on anything beyond that.

Beyond the LLMs themselves, don't you think this is related to the data used for training? I mean, this echoes what you find as a developer on the wild, you can find answers to "all" simple things, much less discrete answers to complex stuff, and almost nothing for very complex stuff and/or specific programming domains.
I have a Fuel with an SSD drive. Unfortunately it wont boot off of an SSD so I have to move everything to a network drive before the SCSI drives die.

Meanwhile there are other ghosts in it that make it a lazy booter.
you don't need anything fancy for drip, a small hole in the pipe and a timer on your pump is is generally enough. If you really want to go fancy you can isolate the system and use moisture sensors, which are cheap.
Every family having to have a robot instead of a handful of tractors for every ten thousand families or so. And that is likely a less optimal use of acreage. I think what you might actually be advocating for is “people should convert more residential land into gardens” which is always fun. I love my garden as a hobby.

We keep trying to un-invent the division of labour.

Edited for unnecessary pre-coffee poor behaviour. Sorry.
A Personal Assistant leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and the LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instant Large Language Model (LLM). This tool is designed to revolutionize PDF document analysis tasks by combining machine learning with retrieval-based systems.
Q and E are lean left, lean right!
He could visit all the apps in the world from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube to Spotify on the web, right? Of course, he cannot use Friendster or Tumblr or Vine — all great iPad 4 era apps but can you really blame Apple for those apps _not_ existing anymore? — So I wouldn’t say “there’s nothing he could do with it”

Well if your argument is: “a perfectly good 10 year old iPad is held hostage by Apple because they don’t provide side loading” then isn’t that the same case with your perfectly good 10 year old Toyota? Or 10 year old Target Toaster oven or 10 year old Samsung fridge?

I think we will live in a strange world if we start demanding our refrigerators allow side loading YouTube.
True on both counts. (They’re never going to be able to kill TFVC entirely, but it’s disabled for new projects by default, and they’re going to take away the switch to reenable it.)
I wish someone would explain to me why confiscating my clear plastic water bottle from me at the airport is such a security priority.
more tricky frequently because you need to measure the moisture for each plant as maintainance is difficult without, but this is generally the most efficient low cost method in very arid regions from what I have seen (dad is prof in the field, so exposure is years of unpaid labour as a child and student)
Yes, governments typically have Separation of Powers.

It's crazy that we don't have this kind of thing with digital platforms. Basically the platform owner is legislator and judge at the same time.

Let me say it again, if you hate government regulation then you haven't seen a company regulate a market.
Belenios: Verifiable online voting system
Very strong difference.

But he explained that shallow pools can be also be fast for fluid reasons, and not for psychological ones (better coupling of the arms for propulsion by using by viscous coupling to the floor?)
> If we pre-filtered academics half way through their training based on the number of faculty positions that are available

Meaning what? Kick out students despite that they're on track to graduate?

Plenty of people get a PhD with no intent of going into academia.
I'm a terrible developer, most people here wouldnt even consider me one. I have thought about this a lot.

Lets follow this all the way to the bottom: all coding employees are replaced by one very senior one who is AI assisted.

One thought -How are juniors turned into seniors? Lets say that we solve that with some yet to be invented educational solution, and then companies that arent code heavy would hire them for much less money or something like that.

The senior developer always keeps his job, because we cant have non technicals deploying LLM code yet. Then maybe that becomes solved, so your non technical CTO can deploy code.

This then creates an environments where fuck ups are on the CTO for being non technical. The blame aspect is the reason for this, its political.

Or it creates an environment where infrustructure and software becomes a solved problem altogether.

Then we start considering if AI can replace all engineering altogether in many fields. All of commerical writing and commercial creative arts are mostly taken over. Occasionally a brilliant human example moved things in a different direction, but this is quickly fed to the incumbent AIs and then it becomes commercialised.

What happens now? Everyone moves into hardware work?
I find that this has much more promise than all the crap about Secure Boot and the like for the far-fetched "evil maid" scenario. NO ONE I know is going to react to Windows going batshit and requesting the Bitlocker key for no reason as "my laptop has been tampered with!". Heck, given large enough number of employees, IT has to hand out the bitlocker keys almost every day due to how frequent false positives are.

On the other hand, I'd think they'd pay attention to actual tampering evidence.