skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The single identifier is what enables them to be linked

> If someone is signed into Google and then signs into their bank, does that mean they're the same person, or just two people who use the same computer?

You misunderstood my argument as “it’s okay to make things worse” rather than “spend your time on things which can matter”. You’re grossly overstating the importance of the unique identifier in era where databases are widespread. In your examples, you’re characterizing as hypothetical risks things which are routinely done by private companies right now. The modern Stasi wouldn’t need to an army of clerks to link government IDs, they’d pay Google or some other ad tech companies who’ve already linked your online activities (how many people even know if their bank uses Google Analytics?) and your email addresses and your phone numbers and your credit card transactions and the location data which the phone companies and mobile app analytics firms have already collected, etc. As a government agency, they’d even get stuff like the precise locations your phone is at. Even if you had your Amazon burner on a separate network, used a different email address with a different provider than you do for everything else, perfectly adhere to not using it for social media, etc. all you have to do is forget to turn off your phone once to link them, especially if you don’t live in a very crowded environment with many new people coming and going at unpredictable intervals.

Yes, having one identifier would make it easier but they’re already doing a good enough job that anyone who cares about it should be thinking about the safeguards which prevent abuse rather than pretending that there’s one weird trick to stop it. If we were in a scenario where any of the feared outcomes of a government are imminent, the range of bad outcomes either way overlap too much for the difference to matter.

The key thing to understand is that they don’t need it to be perfect: authoritarian governments don’t need to jail everyone who disagrees as long as they keep those people from organizing an effective opposition. If you’re opposed to them but keeping quiet and not doing much, they win. If you pull off perfect opsec and stay undetected, but they catch you because someone you know made a mistake, they win.

Worse, in the absence of effective accountability, minor mistakes only help build the fear of doing anything dodgy or subversive – if news gets out that someone went to a protest and the cops busted their roommate after linking the wrong phone, it _might_ help that one person be released but it will definitely ensure that a hundred other people get kicked out or turned in by roommates who don’t want to have the same thing happen to them (read accounts from East Germany, Russia, China, Mexico in the 70s, etc. for a reminder of how toxic the effects on social networks are), and a thousand people will stay quiet and avoid the next protest.
Their name is so hilariously appropriate.
You're actually addressing a few points I'd not covered in my piece, key being how people access news.

I actually do go to the homepages of several news organisations, and read their front pages. I rely far less on social media than I had in, say the mid-2010s (largely Google+ at the time), though I of course use HN as an aggregator, as well as the Fediverse, very occasionally Diaspora* (long story, largely irrelevant here), and a few other sites. I'll also listen to podcasts (largely not news-related, though some are included). I've never been a TV watcher, and have cut back markedly on radio as well.[1]

That said, my practice is probably not typical.

I also find the layout of homepages ... problematic. There are sections I'm interested in, others not so much. It's often possible to eliminate low-interest sections through CSS, though that's not especially user-friendly. Adding in sections that are missing but for which coverage exists is more of a challenge, of course. Of the "text-only"/lite sites I visit (CNN, NPR), the lack of any sensible grouping of stories is annoying, combined with lack of context and often-clickbait headlines. I'm hard-pressed to come up with positive examples, though the sensible grouping and microcontent provided at ProPublica and the WSJ (speaking to layout rather than content/editorial slant) are better than most.

It would be really interesting to find a publication which dropped, say, a PDF or ePub on a regular basis (daily or weekly) which I could read through. I have an e-ink ebook reader, which is the best digital reading environment I've found, but managing content on it is an absolute nightmare, and there's nothing about it which would make a regular subscription easier. Unlike physical publications, you can't "pick it up and throw it away". I do append items of interest to an ePub document and read through that, which has ... some benefits.

I agree with your assessment of the clickbait dynamics. That's part of the problem with present media/journalism models, and is discussed by many people. (I think Ezra Klein's addressed this point well several times on his podcast at the NY Times, possibly also earlier at Vox.)

I'm interested in what your own journalistic beat is going to be: national/world news? Local news? (That's the biggest hole / desert presently.) Are your journalists within your own organisation or are you aggregating from others? And of course: how are you (and they) getting paid?

What's success look like? Failure?

________________________________

Notes:

1. Less for reasons of bias than that I'm finding programming annoying to listen to. The switch to live (rather than pre-recorded segment) broadcast, increased sponsor-slot breaks, and other characteristics make even public broadcasting annoying to me. I find non-live programming such as GBH's The World much more amenable and reminiscent of old-school NPR, of the 1990s or early aughts.
Websites today offer little over the ones from 15-20 years ago functionality-wise. In fact they have less features in the name of 'simplicity' that results in their being bloated memory hogs with javascript.
> As an Aussie observer, I'm seeing more US influence in our region.

Look at Sky News Australia, literally all they talk about is US politics.

My theory is that as US focus shifts to East Asia, Australia is being groomed as a proxy state. Not as a deliberate effort, just as a consequence of a lot of different things coalescing.

It's kind of interesting to see.
This is a big part of it for me. I used to subscribe to a news site that I generally liked, and when I went to cancel it for financial reasons, the experience was so painful that it turned me off of wanting to engage with the entire company again, even though I liked their writing and coverage.
The judge got suspended. Whether illegal or not, his behavior was sanctioned one way or another.
no. only 4 categories can be blocked, while the others cannot be disabled.
That was a blast, MrStoofus waves goodnight!
> He was introduced to me by my 5th grade calculus teacher [...]

5th grade calculus!?
yes, that
That doesn't seem like a solid strategy - for example, here in Australia the current opposition are the ones who did appoint the heads of our national broadcaster (when in Government) and were widely condemned for the political nature of the appointments (actually bypassing an independent selection board to make ideologically motivated appointments) and also for their political interference (or attempts at it) both while in Government and while in opposition (as they are currently).

Their attempts at political manipulation is arguably even stronger while in opposition, so if anything they would be even more likely to make politically and ideologically motivated appointments!
As a compromise, perhaps a different implementation could be considered: instead of rendering every page during the flipping process, the content around page 100 could be rendered only after rapidly flipping to that point.
This is true only in cases where the correct way to do something is known. In the face of unknowns, it is frequently more efficient in terms of time to iterate multiple times as a method of exploring the space to determine proper paths forwards.

SpaceX would be one example of this.
>Isn't it wiser to stop at some point, and find other stuff to do, even if all your nerves say otherwise?

No, you make tools which are easily copied and spread which disempower states and groups and instead empower individuals to act unimpeded. You make tools which make it impossible to enforce copyright or any other state imperative because everybody has the tools needed to neutralize the group attempting to use force.

The correct answer is to formulate software and memes (human software) which act as viruses which infect the local carriers of the overall social operating system (in America it is some flavor of American Westernism), turning the original operating system non-functional (Bezmenov's demoralization), and steamroll the reigning technocratic elite off top the tiger and install yourselves, or your StateDAO, or whatever.

When the system is going to take at least a decade, that should be treated as a pending life sentence or execution, and I admire anyone who fights it to the death even. Just don't go in, get housed in concrete, work for $0.68/hour they deduct 75% for housing from and then sell you bricks of Ramen for $1, while dodging shivs from behind. At that point it is too late to act to defend yourself!

You need a year of this treatment if you disagree with me!
Cue wave of "micropayments" deja-vu from the 1990s.
I'm in a similar boat as well, and most of the time I just make sure to take the new models for a test drive. Just trying to use them here and there as well, figuring out their capabilities and shortcomings. Makes it much easier to smell the vapourware when I hear the news.
Because it's not a good and it's not a service. It's not enjoyable, not pleasurable, and usually not well-made. It doesn't inspire thought or confidence and it's not actionable. It's my responsibility to be informed and it's a requirement of a free country that we all be informed, but it's not something I'm willing to trade for money because money is valuable and knowledge of current events is just drudgery (pun only intended after the fact).
The web totally could not exist without QUIC. At no point in history did the web exist without QUIC. We must praise Google for inventing the web.
https://web.archive.org/web/20061107120353/http://www.merit....

> Of course you should understand that I ate the column only because the
Internet, as far as I can tell, did not suffer a gigalapse during 1996
-- a billion lost user*hours in a single outage. The Internet has
indeed bogged down (hit STOP much?) and has indeed suffered large
outages (the biggest being a 118 megalapse at AOL in August)

He was only wrong by a factor of 9.
Ask HN: How is the job market for remote SWE jobs?
My current company is a hybrid company where upper management is really putting the screws to remote employees. No team transfers for remote employees which in turn leads to stagnation and lack of career development. Enforced RTO is coming up for non remote employees and I fear it’s only a matter of time for all employees.

How is the job market for remote first companies? Working remote has been hugely beneficial for myself and my family and I’m really looking to work remote someplace where I’ll also be able to progress in my career.
Great to see the Sipeed Tang Nano modules being used - they are based on a Gowin FPGA chip and the dev modules (with HDMI and a stack of GPIO pins broken out) cost peanuts on aliexpress compared to equivalent FPGAs from more popular vendors. The vendor IDE is usable and open source tools are improving. Exciting times for embedded hobbyists.
You can not lose your private key, if you drop it first
Hasn’t Europe already figured it out? Not that that would mean the USA would accept it. There will be an amazing amount of mark of the beast talk etc. from the people that thought Bill Gates was going to track them with nanobots in the Covid vaccine.

https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
If you're serious about it, there is an entire cottage industry dedicated to precisely this (especially popular amongst new MBAs): https://hbr.org/2017/02/you-should-consider-buying-a-small-b...
Biases in which direction?
Having wrangled toddlers, I'm entirely onboard with the idea that a smaller opponent fighting in unexpected ways can be surprisingly difficult to handle even with a clear weight and strength advantage.
Be that as it may, Llama 3.1 70B is not the big Llama.
You know, I do believe this ship may sink.
System-wide clipboard for Zsh on Linux
Meeting with current and prospective clients is not leisure, it's stressful as fuck even if it's over dinner.
The problem with dumbphones is that they’re almost useless, spam calls are not filtered on dumb phones. If that problem could be solved somehow they’d be good. I get at least 10 calls my Iphone filters out as spam every day, it would be a big problem to be bothered by those, at least that’s opinion.
> Fox News is an Australian product

lol, no it isn't. Don't try and pass the buck.

Murdoch is a US citizen and has been since the 80s. Fox news is purely and always has been an AMERICAN product, regardless of the birth citizenship of the CEO of News corp.
FSF requires signing of a CLA. A CLA would let them change the license to whatever they want, just like these companies. Some people were not happy with GPL3 yet that didn't stop the FSF from changing the licenses on their software.
Ask HN: Which apps tell you about which shoulders of giants they stand on
I'm thinking about apps that tell you what their stack is (in newsletters, landing pages, support docs, etc.)—bonus points for apps that rely heavily on open source and are proud of it.
Honestly, I don't know how I would have been as a concentration camp guard. In my mind, I wouldn't have accepted it, because thankfully, I am not in this situation. But if I really was in this situation, who knows, we tend to underestimate how easily influenced we are.

Ethics gives us more questions than answers. The trolley problem doesn't have a true answer for instance.

The human rights are a social consensus, it is even made explicit by being a signed declaration. It felt good to the people who wrote them, it also feels good to me, because I was born and live in a society that has these values. It is only truth because by social consensus, we decided it is. In logic that would be an axiom and aligning an AI would mean implementing social consensus as axioms.

There are some fundamental reasoning that can justify human rights. One can use game theory, or the idea that human rights promote free thinking and free thinking is what brings the most value out of people now that machines do better than slaves for menial labor. But these are, I think, not enough.
I don’t understand your point. Every town in existence was “out in the country” at one point. The land owners/community made the choice to subdivide and develop the land. But it was their decision as a community to do this.

My town was a bucolic paradise at one time and then in the late 19th century a few of the regional villages merged and the community of land owners began to subdivide and develop the land and establish a new town. And now it’s highly desired. This was their choice to transform their holiday community into the bedroom community it is today. And now us, as the land owning community, get to decide how further development goes. Not interlopers with no skin in the game. And we do develop new things but they’re rightfully contested and very carefully decided upon because this is our home.
Deobfuscated, for the curious: https://pastebin.com/091KB37u
This article argues that people did believe it, or at least believe that their rituals actually matters https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polythei...
I don't know about that. Everyone and their mom is Founder/CEO of some business now days.

Almost everyone in my network that can't get a job is running a "company".
I would think it isn't needed. Australia is a leading country for R&D and they have the money to fund their own designs.
So what is the issue again? Or all resolved?
The closest you've come to a solution is to pay for it with taxes. Is there an example of this working in the wild? Why do you think this is the best solution? Why is the status quo a problem that needs your solution in the first place?
> Executives work insane hours.

Often quite a bit less than it looks on-paper when you remove the "working lunch" and "client dinner" and "meeting (at the country club)" and "reading emails while lounging on the private jet" bits.
> immune to location specific pay ranges in most companies

The next version of the equal-pay-for-equal-work fight is going to be pretty interesting, and will probably start to boil over sometime in the next 5-10 years.

More telecommuting is going to be generally unstoppable despite a few fits and starts, but since NYC and SF can't afford to just get completely hollowed out in the space of a few years, they need Kansas City to help out with the rent. And it will work too, since some places are more politically important than others. But it won't work forever.
It was Judo and I was a scrawny teenager, but a black belt used to hold me to the floor by doing head stands on me so... you hear those stories a lot because they're true.

Hell, it's even in Asterix and Obelix https://www.facebook.com/judoclubsaintaubindaubigne/videos/a...
The comments here are very focused on LLMs, which makes sense - that's where the hype is. If you really don't mind ignoring the nuts and bolts, you can treat all the large language models as black boxes that are getting incrementally better over time. They're not difficult to interact with from a developer perspective - you send text or tokens and you get back a text response.

It's definitely worth trying them out as a user just to see what they're capable (and incapable of). There are also some pretty interesting use cases for them for tasks that would be ridiculously complicated to develop from scratch and "it just works" (ignoring prompt poisoning). Think parsing and summarizing. If you're an app developer, look into edge models and what they can do.

Otherwise dip your toes in other model types - image classification and object recognition are also still getting better. Mobile image processing is driven by ML models at this point. This is my research domain and ResNet and UNet are still ubiquitous architectures.

If you want to be sceptical, ignore AI and read ML instead, and understand these algorithms are just another tool you can reach for. They're not "intelligent".
Any other Simon Lizotte and/or disc golf fans here? :D
Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi.
> All journalism has a point of view and its impossible to be completely unbiased...

So the alternative is to not even try? To double-down or triple-down on bias and shamelessly continue to self-label as journalism? To whine & cry about "the threat to democracy" while neglecting their duties as The Fourth Estate?

I think not.

The problem is simple: stop lowering the bar. Stop calling things journalism that don't qualify. If your pet barks, would you call it a cat?

You've got Jim Leher is turning in his grave.

https://www.openculture.com/2020/01/jim-lehrers-16-rules-for...
I remember two yeah I took a 360 cam through them and some day I might chop it up and run it through some photogrammetry to try to make a model of the insides.
My take requires a lot of salt, but… this time it’s different.

Try writing single page web app or command line python app using the Claude 3.5 chat. Interact with it like you might in a pair programming session where you don’t have the keyboard. When you’ve got something interesting, have it rewrite it in another language. Complain about the bugs. Ask it what new features might are it better. Ask it to write tests. Ask it to write bash scripts to manage running it. Ask it how to deploy and monitor it. Run llama 3.1 on your laptop with ollama. Run phi3-mini on your phone.

The problem is that everyone says they aren’t going to get better, but no one has any data to back that up. If you listen carefully it's almost always based on a lack of imagination. Data is what matters, and we have been inventing new benchmarking problems because they're too good at the old ones. Ignore the hype, both for and against: none of that matters. Spend some time using them and decide for yourself. This time is different.
to be fair most of that is GCC/C's fault. C has tons of UB that is very difficult to reason about, and GCC chooses to do weird things by default that are at best ambiguously standard compliant (e.g. evaluating floating point expressions in higher than specified by the user). Compilers of languages with more intuitive semantics tend to get less user error bug reports.
For web apps, see https://stackshare.io/

For many desktop apps, if you go into Help > About, you'll see a list of all the open source libraries used, and their associated licenses (as required by the license).

In Chrome, go to chrome://credits/
It looks like the RNode firmware does exactly what you're looking for with its "RNode Bootstrap Console": https://unsigned.io/rnode_bootstrap_console/

Documentation is surprisingly hard to find, but from blog posts on the site it looks like if you press the reset button twice within one second, an RNode will turn into a WiFi access point and host this website. From there, you can download everything you need to create and use another RNode (including Reticulum, Nomad Network, and Sideband). I find this notion of RNodes being self-propagating really compelling!
https://archive.is/dwCFL
he must be getting a bit twitchy lately then
Hey Swyx, I'm a dev who did your (excellent!) email LLM course, so maybe I can give some info. I'm in the Latent Space Discord and have been trying to figure out what's next after the course. The challenge I've found is that most online discussions about LLMs are either very basic or assume a fair amount of context (true for the Latent Space discussion/podcast, as well as Karpathy's videos).

I've been trying to find the best next step and what seems fruitful from my vantage point are:

1. Cohere's LLM University - Seems to go more in depth into terms like embeddings that are still pretty unclear to me.
2. promptingguide.ai - For similar reasons, that it covers terms and concepts I see a lot but don't know much about.
3. Reading survey-level papers.

I'm including this info just in case it's useful to you, as I've really appreciated all the content you've put together.

One specific thing you or someone else could do that is simple yet high value is to create a list of "the first 20 LLM papers you should read". I've looked for this to build out more base knowledge, but have yet to find it. Suspect it would be helpful to others as well.