skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
GitHub won because it was good.

SourceForge had a messy interface and frankly I hated it. Google Code was like frozen in time, like most Google projects. Microsoft’s thing — I don’t even remember the name — felt half assed and like they were going to abandon it… and they abandoned it. There were also others… none of which I even think were serious enough.

Also Git won because SVN and CVS were centralized VCSes and you needed a server. I can just make Git repos before I even know if a project is serious.

There were other distributed VCSes of course, like Hg, but they either cost $ or wasn’t backed by a major user… like Linux. I admittedly just waited this one out and chose Git because it was more popular.
Did you also say that compulsion is OK, if Harlem River House-level housing is available?

A little research shows this to be a New Deal project that doesn't seem particularly replicable or sustainable:

https://www.courthousenews.com/harlem-public-housing-tenants...

https://pix11.com/news/3-big-problems-plague-harlem-river-ho...
> VTOL VR is a near-futuristic combat flight game built for Virtual Reality. Pilot advanced multi-role jets, using your hands to flip switches, press buttons, and manipulate the virtual flight controls.

> The game is actively being developed and currently available on SteamVR.
I encountered the hair trick on Ren and Stimpy...Ren's first chest hair was taped across a door or lid to show if it had been opened. Not sure why, but that left an impression on me.
> Silently fail and generate impossible to predict code is a third model that is only of use to compiler writers. Hiding behind the spec benefits no actual user.

A significant issue is that compiler "optimizations" aren't gaining a lot of general benefit anymore, and yet they are imposing a very significant cost on many people.

Lots of people still are working on C/C++ compiler optimizations, but nobody is asking if that is worthwhile to end users anymore.

Data suggests that it is not.
It's not in the spec right now but it still feels solidly in C's wheelhouse to me.
Sara Walker had a great piece in Noema that I just went back to recently and so have at the ready to recommend, called AI is Life: https://www.noemamag.com/ai-is-life/
It would also be nice if hardware would trap on signed integer overflow. Of course since the most popular architectures do not, new architectures also do not either.
Insurers would be well aware of historic risks
Oddly enough, Chrome on my Samsung S24 Ultra renders them OK here on HN, but not on Ken's page. Chrome on Windows and Ubuntu and Safari on iOS are the opposite: OK on the page, not here.

Character encoding is such fun!

Update: Ken, if you see this, it's specifically the characters encoded with numeric entities that have the problem on my devices. I used the Chrome dev tools to replace these with the actual characters on my Windows and Ubuntu devices and they rendered OK.
AI-Made Bioweapons Are Washington's Latest Security Obsession
> He got furious when he was unable to call some journalist, cursed at me in front of the entire team and sent me a termination notice.

Honestly does not sound like a very healthy person to work for anyway.
After watching the most recent smarter every day, I'm blown away with how complex the molecular machinery of even "simple life" like bacteria are. Proteins are just nuts - the ultimate building blocks for nano machines. Proton-powered rotating motors with gears for increasing torque... simply marvelous
It also seems like a potential opportunity for hybrid flash hard drives, where the flash could take over the role of the CMR buffer region and reduce the amount of back-and-forth required of the drive's rw head, which should considerably increase performance.
Building software brick by brick and New Internet
I wasn't familiar with what Ryan Cohen's been to on Twitter, but just looked and at risk of overusing the word, that's some weird behavior. It has been truly strange to see business leaders revert to acting like they have the impulse control, sensibilities and perspective of middle school boys.
The are sold out
So many “Oh, I just didn’t ask because I thought it would take months” saved!
Visit "Musée Méchanique" if this tickles your fancy! https://museemecanique.com/
> Breaking a system you don't like doesn't automatically get you a system that's better.

At this point the US debt is growing by 1 trillion every... 100 days. The system is breaking by itself, not because of Bitcoin.

> While taxes and inflation are generally unpopular they are also vital to the functioning of society and the economy.

Some taxes and some inflation. We're way past these.
They would have to send one up unmanned. Cargo dragon flies unmanned so surely crew dragon can. Expensive but better than losing the crew.

Send Boeing the bill. Not really kidding.
4. Provide free housing and attempt outreach.

It’s cheaper than jail or forced rehab.
I don’t know if I agree that it’s unnatural.

It only takes doing index73.php and index_old3.php for a few months and then eventually screwing up (unless you’re perfect) to realize how dumb putting numbers and _old4 at the end of names is. Then at that point, you naturally go look if there’s a better way.
Given their track record, I do believe you.
Perfect NAS Solution
zzzz, where are the competing storage solutions?
Technological feasibility is not economic feasibility. We spend a minuscule amount of our resource budget on science without short term profit .

There are orders of magnitude of things we can achieve as a species with current technology if we all work together efficiently but we don’t .

We ascribe to aliens a singular purpose that we have never achieved in our history as a species.

Our competitive, acrimonious past is fundamental to our scientific progress (we research more during war than peace) . A peaceful civilization may not reach technologically maturity.

It could also be just that Interstellar travel is not simply be economically viable in time frames that those civilizations optimize for. Ours can barely look beyond a quarter, why do we think any other civilization would plan for hundreds if not thousands of years .
I’ll temper that by saying, without quoting anything, that the insurance industry has long been aware of the climate crisis and it’s implications. Over the decades, i’ve read much on how it’s dealing with serious customers.
How are alloys a worse source of pure aluminium than natural deposits? Are natural deposits available where the aluminium is very pure once you squint hard enough to not see anything else in the mix that has sufficiently different properties to be easily shareable?
Holy shit, for the third time in a row, no, I am not okay with authoritarianism. I said that with sufficient housing, it should not be necessary. No. No compulsion.
For very rough prototypes, a XAMPP localhost with plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; ready to go in about 10 seconds. The bottleneck then becomes how fast you can "Ctrl+S, Alt+Tab, Ctrl+R" (or insert a 1 second refresh meta tag on a split screen and "Ctrl+S" only...but after a while even a 1 second refresh starts to feel slow).
Assuming a key repeat rate of 15Hz (a number I admittedly just pulled out of thin air), they would have had to lean on the Tab key for almost exactly 1 week.

The guy ate, slept, possibly got married while his finger was still accidentally holding down that key.
My three reasons:

1) it is vital for earthlings to simplify chip design down to the materials level. XC2064 FPGA best starting point for moving logic away from the CMOS paradigm, it is the simplest yet has all important details. If you are thinking about merging memory and logic, or even excitonic/polaritonic optical switching, XC2064 good to keep in mind?

2) I saw the your other post on the front page

3) Reverse engineering is sacred work, no harm reposting and recelebrating past work, 4 years is nothing on the glacial pace of realigning incentives :)

That said, I have a few questions:

The XC2064 uses a variety of highly-optimized circuits to implement its logic blocks and routing. This circuitry required a tight layout in order to fit onto the die.

Seems like you might have more info about the optimization details. Do you maybe have access to Ross' design notes or something?
Nice! My next tiny machine may be a Radxa Zero 3E. A tiny form factor machine with ethernet is definitely appealing.

My current portable uses a Raspberry Pi Zero (not Zero 2). Lower overall power is much more important than performance, and for my use, 700 MHz single core and 512 megs of memory is more than I need. It has been a good project to learn about power controllers.
> We use optimistic versioning, with a dedicated "version" field (that is actually always pulled out of the blob in all tables).

All well and good but you do need to handle failures elegantly in code. The nice thing about flat DB tables and SQL is you don't really have to care if your goal is to update a single column authoritatively. The state of the other values in the table are, often, immaterial. It gets even more complicated reconciling deeply nested conflicts in open schemas.

Not knocking your approach, it's just a trade-off I guess.
> It's a $0 "type in your password or we're sticking you in a cell and leaving for the weekend" scenario.

Missing the point: the point is - they're not listening at all. They don't care. You're not a problem to be taken seriously and carefully investigated. You're going to be stuck in the cell and forgotten about anyway. Your equipment will be destroyed. No one is looking.
> I'm saying that a computer (RAM sticks, registers, etc) is extremely unlikely to have actual conscious experience.

And yet a bag of proteins, mitochondria, water etc. somehow isn't?

> The point is, consciousness doesn't emerge purely from computation alone.

[citation needed]

> It's technically computation, but should we seriously expect real consciousness to emerge from a purely mechanical computer just because it performed the right computations?

Of course yes. I don't see why consciousness couldn't theoretically emerge even from computations made by a really bored human placing stones on an endless beach, or in an anthill with any single ant being completely oblivious of what's going on. Such consciousness will only be conscious of data that's provided to it as its input, but conscious nevertheless - just like we are only conscious of a specific representation of the real world as perceived by our flawed senses. I don't expect any meaningful difference there, other than our minds being at least a few steps ahead of anything we can build at this moment, which is hardly surprising given how little we know about brains and bodies even today.
A computable number is real number that can be computed to by a finite, terminating algorithm.

x<y meets that definition because you can compare digits until one doesn't match.

The same can be done for not equal, testing until there is a difference.

Real real numbers are infinite precision.

Showing that a number is not, not equal always requires you to normalize, truncate etc...

No matter how many digits you test, there is an uncountable infinity of real numbers between you epsilon.

That means you do not have a finite terminating algorithm.
Eldred v. Ashcroft (2003) [1] was bad enough (applying the 1988 copyright term extension to existing copyrighted works, including those about to enter the public domain), but there was also the Golan v. Holder (2012) [2] ruling allowing the same term extension to apply to foreign-made works that had already entered the public domain in the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_v._Holder
Private property.
I stopped buying WD after they slapped the Red label on their SMR drives. I’m sure there are good uses for them, but being a member of a RAID ain’t one.
Gary Marcus is having his moment in the sun, but the title tells all. “Be afraid” is just stripped down click-bait.

“Isn’t entirely candid” is the smoking gun of this article, which is frankly an absurd standard in today’s political environment, anti-tech media, and just the general hunger for an axe to grind 24/7 online. While I agree with Marcus’ critique on the vibe of the Senate hearing, it is a very strange pillar for proving Sam is “the man you should most fear on earth.”

Arguing that AGI hype/fears were caused by propaganda from Sam/OpenAI is recasting recent history. The entire media & cultural zeitgeist went nuts for a couple quarters when chatGPT went viral. Those fears have been around for a long time. A leap in perceived progress made them the Luddite topic of the day.

It doesn’t seem that hard to read the tea leaves here. If OpenAI could release GPT 5 like they released 3.5, they would. OpenAI’s greatest threat is that a genuine escalation in the publicly known capabilities of AI could exacerbate political push back and kill it. Involving government partners, in or adjacent, slows things down. Big surprise.

We can make regulation without claiming to be AI experts, ex: we can make deep fakes illegal where harm aligns with existing law, which many jurisdictions have already done. When AI regulation gets insane & dangerous is when people think they can invent levers to pull (like policing training data) that will supposedly ensure compliance. We all know what safety really means - a filter layer on interactions with the LLM. There is no fundamental solution to AI safety or regulation that OpenAI is abandoning here.

Marcus ends with his real starting line - he just doesn’t believe in GenAI. Fair enough. But building a massive ad hominem attack with a hand wavy “and some how Sam is still there” ignores the reality that OpenAI’s board now has some of the most trusted & trust-worthy people in tech on it. Sam’s level of accountability is higher, not lower.

The timing of this article is after the significant work OpenAI has done to re-affirm commitment to AI safety. Marcus here, and everywhere, deliberately ignores the mounting evidence that AI’s value is growing.

Which makes this entire campaign feel timed. Marcus’ is calling that the sky is falling right now. why so urgent? The investments have been made, the public markets are off the exuberant irrationalism, the major players are plowing generational levels of engineering into the quest.

Isn’t this what we should be proud of? The willingness to drive innovation forward without knowing for sure how the road will go?

Expecting giant technological leaps to deliver on massive value in a few quarters is for Wall Street. It has no place in science, innovation, or policy.
Looks nice. Does anyone know how the keyboard feels compared to ThinkPad?
> Yet ESDF is objectively better [...] crouch is A!

I think you've forgotten the hardware limitations (rollover/ghosting) that usually made it objectively worse instead, where "A" often wouldn't behave the same as ctrl or shift when multiple keys are being held down.

Being able to strafe while holding crouch is a handicap.
> The war in Ukraine is over.

What do you mean by that
I remember something about a home game that involved dropping bombs. Can't recall the name though.
About one year ago was a little discussion of the much older Nimatron, maybe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36856755
I’m always disappointed when the government’s response to worries about other people spying on us isn’t to enforce privacy. Instead they just say no to specific outsiders invading our privacy. Seems so broken.
5 ghz (across 8 of its 16 cores) cpu, the 5.6 is the ram.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/236851/...
To be fair “defending two sovereign states from invasion” isn’t really war mongering. No comments on Lebanon tho… fingers crossed the bluster dies out before more innocents are killed. Not looking good.
How does everyone continue to get the keyboard wrong on these?

If the left and right arrows are full-size I know it's going to be miserable to use. Probably worse than miserable, because clearly nobody who ever uses the keyboard a serious amount has actually sat down and used it, or the arrow situation would have been fixed _immediately._ Who knows what else is terrible about the keyboard, given that it was pretty obviously not seriously tested?

(I'm poking a bit of fun here, but this _is_ still a dealbreaker for me. I use those keys plenty, and full-height left/right arrows are indeed _miserable_ to use - it's basically impossible to quickly center your hand on them from home row.)
The relevant book Computability in Analysis and Physics by Pour-El and Richards is from 1989 but it is quite readable. The main requirements are a strong mathematical background (mostly in analysis and PDEs and an acquaintance with computability theory) and perhaps some appreciation for physics.
Depleted stores from fighting in Ukraine plus a hot war in the Middle East probably would make the defense of Taiwan impossible. If I'm Taiwan, I really don't want things in the Middle East to get out of control.
> It’s possible to write a language without it

Whenever you do that, programmers deride the language for being "excessively academic" or something
Sure but aren't they all on the number keys?
A better term would just be “mystery.” If you assume life is at least somewhat likely and do some simple math we should see evidence of aliens. We don’t so something is either wrong in the assumed probabilities or there are unknown unknowns.

My favorite hypothesis is that we are early. Due to low metallicity in the early universe it’s possible that advanced life only became likely “recently” (as in the last few billion years) and we are part of the first crop. We may be an early example in the first crop because our planet is particularly friendly to advanced stable life, so maybe a bit of rare Earth mixed in. Most other biospheres might be more hostile and take longer to produce anything capable of space flight.

We don’t see star travelers all over the place because for the most part it’s too soon. There might be a few early birds out there but few intelligences are that advanced yet.
I got this one without realizing the complex basis for it... there's an infinite number of real numbers between 0 and 1, compared with a limited proportion of rational numbers.
x > 0 and x < 0 are both semidecidable. Which is to say, they can be decided, but their converses cannot. So if either of those are true, they will halt (by running them in parallel, and halting once one halts), but if neither of them are, it may not halt.

If you remove 0 from possible inputs, you no longer need to worry about that possibility, and the problem is then decidable.
Haha the first one, but also "small-sized" (in addition to mid-sized)

Also want to point out to academic spinoffs (which most of these SMEs are) like

https://www.kit.edu/kit/english/pi_2023_041_nanomaterials-3d...

They have been "incorporated" but still seems like they haven't got the attention they deserve? (Okay the temp/volume is maybe not low/high enough, but the process is almost domestic kitchen level simple)
Show HN: Skygripper – Price alerts and Bitcoin cashback for travel
Hi HN,
I'm excited to share Skygripper, a travel site I've been working on that combines price alerts with Bitcoin cashback rewards.
Key features:

Price tracking for flights, hotels, and car rentals
Customizable alerts for price drops
Bitcoin cashback on bookings
Integration with major travel providers

I built Skygripper because I noticed two trends in the travel space: the growing popularity of price tracking tools and the increasing adoption of cryptocurrency rewards. By combining these, I aim to offer a unique value proposition for tech-savvy travelers.
The Bitcoin cashback feature works by partnering with travel providers and converting a portion of our commission into BTC rewards for users. This creates a win-win situation: users get crypto rewards, and we differentiate ourselves in a crowded market.
I'd love to get your feedback on the concept, implementation, and any ideas for improvement. Are there any other features you'd like to see in a travel platform? How do you feel about crypto rewards in the travel industry?
Thanks for checking it out!
Morally right or not, even the US and allies have a limit to how many military resources exist and at what rate they can produce more. Fighting on three fronts at the same time, especially when one of them involves a country that supplies much of your industrial capacity, just isn't viable.
Yeah, makes sense. To write safe code though at that point don't you have to enforce rigid schemas?

An example would be updating Kubernetes resources, the admission controller will verify the correctness of the change you are trying to make and reject the patch if it's non-comformant. Nested values have... value... in terms of contextualizing and isolating/localizing data leaves but at the end of the day aren't you still dealing with strict schemas and, when those schemas change you have to reconcile schema migrations?
> time scales that matter to us have shrunk, not grown

I don’t think this seems right. More realistically, the further back into the past we look, the more we notice people, institutions, and changes operating on longer time scales, partly because our knowledge becomes much less granular the further back we look and partly because slower changes are less noticeable or impressive when examined from partway through without the benefit of hindsight.

Unless you just mean that with improved technology we can now do a better job inspecting and sequencing things that happen very quickly. That’s clearly true, but is substantially unrelated to human-scale goals or the behaviors of larger organizations.
> Totally abnormal to human life.

Which era of our history might best reflect "normal" human life?
You underestimate the US military industrial complex.
Hear, hear

Git was too weird for a team, but svn with its linear timeline was a hit. They are still with svn, and for a small shop it's ok
Nothing revisionist there, everything I said is fact. It was so plainly thinkable, people went from thinking it to doing it.
The Chinese understand plausible deniability.
Err, ASDF? What did the "F" key do? I think it used WASD, and was probably one of the very first games that did. Screenshot: https://www.mobygames.com/game/110/dark-castle/screenshots/a...
lol. bloomberg parroting any press releases they get.

i don't even have to click to know this is a scan trying to get stupid investors with fomo
Discussion (45 points, 3 days ago, 106 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41121718
Right, so to be super pedantic:

Dreamliner is the Boeing 787 passenger jet.

Starliner is the spacecraft that has been on orbit for the past month, not cleared to return to Earth due to multiple attitude-control thruster failures.
No those people just get recycled.
This happens to me all. the. time. (with me, it's "wait" and "what?" not "huh?"). In a normal speaking conversation, it flows naturally. In writing, it doesn't come across as conversational punctuation so much as a kind of dunk. It might just be something you'll have to be vigilant about.
unify is so meme.

i bought into it thanks to their extremely aggressive marketing on reddit. one look at their controller and ap image and i was shocked i feel for such low tier scam.

stuck on old java (and that was when 8 was the bleeding edge). outdated mongo build. undocumented protocols everywhere. centralized passwords and backdoors.
It all depends on how far back we want to go to find the 'true' owners. Is second generation living there enough. How about third not living there? There are parallels here. Jewish are willing to look as far as two millennials back. Most americans don't get even close to Columbus days. Anyway, the 'facts on the ground' are the facts.
Discussed at the time:

The First Law of Complexodynamics (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14966873 - Aug 2017 (6 comments)
No further production is necessary. Simply loan out a few fully stocked Ohio-class subs and watch how quickly the bullies back off.