skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Aren't these two statements contradictory? Musk's potential business is merely a fantasy once people realize he's emotional and has a tendency to pop-off at inopportune times and that he can't deliver

The measure that matters is Musk's going-forward ability to fundraise. You're noting good risk factors for why that could erode. But he hauled $6bn in May [1]. Everything you mention was known then. As of now, it hasn't hit him where it matters.

Again, Tesla could entirely vaporise and Twitter go bankrupt and the very same banks that Musk defaulted on would still have rational reason to continue to do business with him. That would be true even if having access to SpaceX and now xAI ceased to be a wealth-management gold mine. He's simply that wealthy.

[1] https://x.ai/blog/series-b
Well, yes, this has been going on for quite a while, perhaps even a year before this HN post. It's cool that this article references it, though, but it's definitely not the end of times, as some might proclaim, especially as it legitimately increases traction for those who want to subscribe (and those who might not, but might perhaps want to, which is all YouTube cares about).
If the current Supreme Court is more conservative than Justice Antonin Scalia - then wow! I guess we're going to find out!
"Also, constantly ask yourself how can I make the company more valuable. You do that and you will never get fired"---

In most companies and for most people in them, this would be useless at best and most damaging at worst. Just as an example, if making the company more valuable causes you to come into conflict with your manager/boss, chances are that your brilliant ideas, along with your work, will disappear into the void. No champagne at the end of the quarter, no vacations to the Maldives paid for by the company.

As always in life, it is a matter of probability. If I had to choose between pursuing my ideas, which (perhaps) would make the company more valuable, or hiding them in the corner of my mind because they would irritate my manager, I would choose the latter.

Mileage may vary for smaller companies with a more direct path between the work done and the company's revenues and profits.
> alcohol is only ever bad for your health

False: it's useful for disinfecting the skin around a cut or injection site, and as a mouthwash. These external or quasi-external uses are beneficial for health.

Alcohol can help preserve foods for long-term storage. While it may not be good for you, it's healthier than food poisoning.
> Does anyone really need anything more than Synth 1? https://www.kvraudio.com/product/synth1-by-daichi-laboratory...

Any recommendation for Linux?
> the poor should not be denied access to media: news, entertainment, books, music, video, whatever.

The poor are not denied access this currently. Everything in your argument hinges on the claim that government funded and directed media will be superior to the status quo. Why?
My personal plan is, essentially, to keep using Python while ignoring the PSF's existence, and pointing out (e.g. via blogging) technical faults with whatever new features are added (or faults that persist due to neglect). This applies not just to the core language and standard library, but also popular tools in the ecosystem - i.e. everything under the PyPA umbrella (https://github.com/pypa) and popular tools and third-party libraries now maintained by the PSF (https://github.com/psf). Critique - whether technical or social - is vital for improvement. If their policies tend to exclude what they don't want to hear, say it somewhere else.

I've seen quite a few people talk about forking or abandoning Python. I think both of these would be counterproductive. A boycott of the language can't really harm the PSF, certainly not financially. Any kind of e.g. deliberate nuisance use of PyPI - even if legal (I am not a lawyer; regardless I am definitely not advocating any such thing) -would impact on infrastructure sponsors like Fastly, not on the PSF directly. A fork, meanwhile, would be a monumental effort to accomplish very little; aside from the technical work, convincing others to switch would require building up trust on top of raising awareness of any PSF malfeasance.

Of course, if you're already a PSF sponsor, you could just give up on that.

I would encourage anyone who is in charge of a medium-sized OSS project to be proactive to prevent this kind of situation from arising in the future. Write "code of conduct" documents that reflect your values, so that nobody can say that you're missing a code of conduct. (Note that e.g. GitHub tooling special-cases files named "Code of Conduct.md" in the project root.) Form a foundation with a proper charter if you need to. If you see yourself as a BDFL, make that clear - and proactively prepare an exit plan that can leave things in the care of someone you can actually trust. Proactively consider any ideologies you can even vaguely imagine people trying to splice into your project's DNA (maybe you find some acceptable!) and form your arguments against them in advance (if applicable). Make sure that anyone who tries it gets told - as promptly as possible, and politely but firmly - to go suck a lemon. Be prepared to defend those decisions on social media, ideally by pointing at pre-written statements.

Yes, that's a lot of work. So are unit tests and proper documentation. Entryists (of all stripes) generally operate by taking advantage of your kindness - but that kindness is essential to your existing community. Therefore, you must be prepared in advance to explain why kindness doesn't entail capitulating to their demands.
It sucks, but it makes sense that Game Science has to limit discourse.

Game Science doesn't want to get cancelled - look at what happened to Lotte China in 2017 [0].

Public Relations management is hard, especially given the amount of hyper-polarization

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/article/business/with-china-dream-sh...
This captures a new problem that's sort of sneaked in with the advent of digital publishing.

In a print book, you can make corrections or revisions in a new edition, but the old edition is still potentially out there, in libraries and private collections, preserving its own history.

In a digital publication, if you make a revision, the old edition disappears by default; older versions are only preserved if someone does so deliberately.

At the very least, the reader should be informed of the initial publication date as well as the dates of any revisions, which I believe is already standard practice in the print world. This is essential context for the reader.

When a text revised in 2024 purports to be [entirely] from 1948: bad. When a revised text mostly written in 1948 purports to be [entirely] from 2024: also bad. To me, this is way more important than the question of whether or not to make revisions per se.
One time I deleted all of them; can't say I regret it.
> Your winning ticket doesn't affect the average number of winners.

I think this is a good hint that the conclusion isn't true. Just think about what it would mean if this were true for a sample of lotto winners. For a winner, if they win, their average number of winners is higher than the global average. Repeat this logic for each individual winner... And every winner wins with a higher number of winners than the average. Which is clearly impossible.

It would be true if you were guaranteed to win, since that's the assumption you have conditioned the probability on, but that's not a lottery then. If you want to get the actual expected value across all samples you need to take a weighted sum including the expected value when you don't win.
How I animate stuff on Desmos Graphing Calculator
I mean, they have auto generated subtitles so of course they have a text to reference.
Average lifespan has increased, meaning more people survive early deaths due to disease and injury that we can now prevent, but as individuals we haven't broken through any maximum age barriers.

That said, sun bathing is a modern phenomenon. Our ancestors knew enough to assess that painful sunburns were bad and mitigated their exposure by wearing large hats and clothing with long sleeves. I'm sure even primitive peoples would cover themselves when necessary. If you spend a lot of time working outside you also develop a very dark tan which helps quite a bit. Modern people seem to suffer mostly from spending so much time indoors that even moderate sun exposure on the weekend produces a damaging sunburn.
If you watch the channel you'd know it was HC - high capacity.
Ask HN: Why don't banks render numbers as PNGs instead of using HTML?
I've been thinking about scammers lately and thought about rendering numbers as a png in browsers instead of displaying them as HMTL for banks. This would ensure scammers can't just go in and edit the html on the fly potentially saving some people from this kind of attack.

I played around with libvips and can easily create a png with any text.

vips text x.png "1,234,567" --width 100 --align centre --dpi 340

Any thoughts on why this shouldn't be done?
> If the compiler can prove there isn't action-at-a-distance between those lines (this might be non-trivial), then can't the destructor be called before running bar?

Yes; there is an "as-if" rule in the C++ standard that says that the implementation must emulate only the "observable behavior" of the abstract machine defined by the standard. The observable behavior is: access through volatile lvalues, data written to files, and I/O to interactive devices.

Does the C++ spec necessarily say that destructors are called at the end of the block, compared to, let's say, as soon as the variable is no longer used?

Yes, as long as the destructor has any side effect:

> If a variable with automatic storage duration has initialization or a destructor with side effects, an implementation shall not destroy it before the end of its block nor eliminate it as an optimization, even if it appears to be unused, except that a class object or its copy/move may be eliminated as specified in 11.10 [1].

Other wise things like std::lock_guard[2] would not work; that's an example of a type that is never explicitly used after definition, but used purely for the side-effects of its constructor/destructor.

1: https://isocpp.org/files/papers/N4860.pdf

2: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/thread/lock_guard
I think it's a middle path thing. I like toast error messages but for simple confirmation actions like Saved, Deleted and Copied, the text change is better. HTMX makes this really easy to do :)
Haha, yes! We were doing the exact same thing. Also, there is so much context you can't capture with just table schema that you can if you integrate the extension deep into the tool. It also unlocks cross-app contexts (we're working on a way to import context from a doc to a metabase query, or from a sheet/dashboard to a jupyter notebook etc.

> Is there a way to select which model is being used?
Not at the moment, but this is in our pipeline! We will enable this (and the ability to edit the prompts, etc.) very soon.

Do try it out and let me know what you think!
OpenAI haven't documented if they do this, but it should be reasonably easy to determine via experiments against their API.

Claude's prompt caching gives a very material performance improvement - they claim up to a 4x performance boost in https://www.anthropic.com/news/prompt-caching - so if OpenAI have similar techniques, even undocumented, they should become visible through sending the same prompt a bunch of times and measuring the latency.
Title is completely misleading. There was no ethics breach in sourcing the original Lena photo.

It should also be made explicit here, that for decades Lena herself had no issue with the photo or it's use in CS.

Other people began to complain, and Lena felt they had a point about exploitation of women, and agreed to back that cause.
I think I’m not understanding what goes into making this available. Fine-tuning is a known technique, why is it available “only” now?
2d Circuit Holds Lawfully Possessed Gun Does Not Constitute Probable Cause
When we jumped too machine guns we had WWI and people weren’t prepared either. That’s how technology usually works.
Does this relate in any way to the phenomenon of "lighting a smoke to make the bus come?" you see, you're waiting for the bus and after a few minutes you realize "man, I could have had a smoke by now" so you light a smoke, but sure enough the bus will come before you can finish your cigarette. This seems to happen every time you light the cigarette waiting for the bus. So this time you get to the stop and light your cigarette right away so that the bus comes, to no avail. What gives?
I hate that most games now only have first-party servers. If the game developers are responsible for server hosting, they're also responsible for what happens on those servers, and rules for conduct end up coalescing on the most sensitive parties.

It's insane to me that there are games rated T or M where swearing isn't allowed. Overwatch made saying "ggez" a bannable offense. The discourse is becoming sterile.

I liked it when people could run their own servers with their own set of rules, and each server had a different sense of character stemming in part from the rules. There were servers stricter than modern game moderation that were "family friendly", and the spectrum ranged all the way to places where the average message contained 4 innuendoes and had more curse words than not. You could choose your own adventure and community.
If you rarely ride though cash is easier. I won't use the app again so I don't want it. Fortunately in the us multiples of $1 are good price points so exact change put it in the safe works well.
I don't understand how... You always have two thumbs there which means you can contrast the state of being just an outline with the state of being filled in.
A standard for straightforward integration and compilation of C projects
> When I was a kid, they said people shouldn't get tattoos because you'll never get a real job

I'm from such upbringing and then after exiting the study and full time job marathon in mid 30s, I realized that everyone have tattoos including doctors and policemen. Nowadays the first thing kids want when reaching age 17 is tattoo. Some major cultural shift happened when I was stuck in libraries and offices. Now after few years and with gaps in CV I'm the unemployable.
Making database systems usable
> This article is bullshit. It fails to mention the many limitations of analog hardware.

Right.

The actual paper cited: [1]

That's an unrelated result. It comes from the observation that some functions are not usefully differentiable by sampling and differencing. If the function has fractal-like infinite detail, two samples taken close together have somewhat arbitrary differences.
Some people who get wound up about the halting problem have latched onto this idea and
try to make a big deal out of it.

Any analog system with non-zero noise, which is all of them, effectively has the same problem. You get a very noisy derivative if you try to generate a high-frequency derivative, because you're amplifying noise. This is why differentiators need a low-pass filter in front of them. This introduces some lag in a real time system. Aircraft vertical speed indicators are a classic analog device with this problem. A VSI is a barometric altimeter feeding a differentiator. They lag by several seconds. There are "instantaneous vertical speed indicators" with an accelerometer to provide some short-term correction.[2] Same problem, with a time constant of seconds, and in an analog device.

I ran into this problem in the motion interpolation of a virtual world, and fixed it.[3] A low-pass filter on velocity computed from position needed to be added. Completely different domain, same problem.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.12626

[2] https://www.mcico.com/resource-center/articles/instantaneous...

[2] https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/451190-merrily...
The real blocker to building more housing is overbearing local codes.

Local municipalities adopt building codes that are so stringent as if you were building some kind of nuclear bunker, and local builders/developers happily use it as an excuse to gouge potential home-buyers to extract the absolute maximum they are willing to pay.

Let people build what they want on their land. Someone wants to build an ADU in their backyard? Let them. Let them do it shoddily if they want.

Building more is 90% of driving down costs.
But is that not what MoE is supposed to solve already? Why no it bake whatever Cosine does into the coding expert?
I've got a similar problem because google keeps saying my site doesn't have enough content. I add content and still get rejected. The thing is my site is a data tool site and not content based.
I have seen so many mocked tests where you end up asserting the logic in the mock works; effectively testing 1=1.

The number of issues that can be prevented with an acceptance level test that has a user log in and do one simple interaction is amazing. Where I can convince the powers that be, PRs to main are gated by a build that runs, among others, that simple kind of AC test. If it was merged to main, you _know_ it will not totally break production.

We had regular outages with our internal emailing system at a small e-commerce shop. I stepped in and added one test that actually sent an email to a known sink that we could verify and had that test run pre-deploy. We went to zero email outages. Tests had the occasional flake that auto-retried. Also, if your acceptance tests are flaky, how do you know your software isn't? Bad excuse to avoid acceptance level testing
Watching my 91 year old mother try to use a computer, I can see that messages that flash up and then disappear are extremely bad for individuals with slower reaction and processing times.
No, but the question bears discussion. Many of us have high powered GPUs in our machines that sit idle during audio production. Could they be leveraged? Not just for reverb.
So it's not just that people who go outside more are generally healthier: "Solarium users were also at a lower risk of non-CVD/non-cancer mortality."
I was under the impression that recent consensus was that Vitamin D supplementation has much less positive health impact than sunlight exposure?
I'm sorry to hear your situation. Thymosin Alpha 1 (abbreviated TA1) is a peptide that upregulates T cell responses in the body. This directly helps the immune system perform better.

This is hardly a cure all, but has certainly proven to be effective in other cancers (couldn't find references to gliablastoma) and conditions with compromised immune systems.

This is a summary of usage and safety profile: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7747025/#:~:tex....

You may have some difficulty initially locating it. It may technically be illegal - the FDA banned many peptides recently. It is still findable by searching for clinic that supports the use of peptides (they would have sourcing figured out).
This is why good back office daspatch is needed. If the bus is late slow the following but and/or add another.
The worst toast I've seen is on Android Auto (itself already a veritable petri dish of awful UX) where, when the on-screen keyboard appears, a toast helpfully pops up informing you that a keyboard is also available on your phone... Thus blocking the on-screen keyboard from being used until the toast fades (and no, tapping it does not dismiss it).
Loss Rider
Absolutely I have skin in the game. Do you never benefit from free content, tools or services that exist only because the opportunity to monetize through advertising is possible?

I display a single banner ad on a website that offers a free business tool, as an example.

I also do the same on a free business tool where I also offer a paid, advanced, ad-free version. If a user sticks around for 30 seconds, which most do (average time on both ad-supported sites is more than six minutes), then the freemium site pops up a message alerting them to the paid option.

No obligations and no restrictions on the free versions.

I don't make significant amounts from ads or subscriptions, but I would have no incentive beyond this to continue to offer these services, which many appear to find valuable and use for commercial purposes.

I frequent many free sites/tools that benefit from my visit, and I benefit from their offering for both business and personal reasons. I understand and agree to the transaction occurring.

Outlandish comparisons like you offer completely miss the mark and dilute the legitimate arguments for the use of ad-blockers, which I do believe exist. But I will offer an equally outlandish counterpoint: You prefer a world where over-policing would occur and round up innocent victims with criminals? "Most crimes are committed by males aged 18-25, if we round them all up, we will drastically reduce crime!" Hyperbole, I know. But probably more applicable than your argument for the use of ad blockers.

As I said before, I am not accusing anyone of wrongdoing. Using an adblocker allows for a cleaner, safer internet for the user. No doubt about that. It also, it has to be acknowledged, sweeps the good under the rug with the bad. Period. All-or-nothing enforcement is your proposition. Again, that simply has to be acknowledged. There is no debate there. If you believe that will ultimately lead to a better internet, then that is where we can disagree, as that is entirely subjective.

Marco said said it better than me: https://marco.org/2015/09/18/just-doesnt-feel-good
Web of Angels (1980)
Uv 0.3 – Unified Python packaging
Github's Copilot Workspace or Cursor's new composer beta feature. That's where you'll be in 6 months.

Multi-file code suggestions with an intimate understanding of the entire code base.

https://x.com/aantix/status/1819794837375263228

P.S. Or Plandex, https://plandex.ai/
Then how do access people with vision problems the website? Afaik only the banks in Germany use FINTS for banking
Hi all! Yucheng (CEO XetHub) here, happy to answer any technical questions anyone might have. Our current tech is a significant enhancement over the original Git Is For Data paper we published last year https://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2023/papers/p43-low.pdf . Hope to write more about it soon! (Maybe with follow up paper or at minimum, a blog post)
I suppose the problem with moonshots like "X can cause cancer in the long term", replace X with "alcohol", "cigarettes", "cola" or what else, is that "in the long term we're all dead. sometimes unexpectedly". The unexpected part is key. If it were guaranteed you live 100 by abstaining from vice then by all means. But illness and death can and will come out of nowhere and it leaves you even more bitter: you didn't even allow yourself to enjoy life and now it's taken from you.

So like vice, also abstinence: in moderation. In fact abstinence is itself a vice if taken to extremes I would say.
Did I read Huawei in the list of solar power plant management providers?
I'm not sure if this is true, as large jackpots see a higher than average number of tickets sold.
To this point, guaranteeing that your fine-tuning doesn't actually weaken the hallucination-resistance of state-of-the-art base models, by overfitting to specific examples in your training set, is a really hard thing to measure. Unless you have robust ways of validating LLM output so that you can do real cross-validation, few-shot prompts, where you can instruct the LLM exactly how much you want it to generalize from those examples, may be far better at achieving many goals.
It speaks to the fact that things that are most beneficial to Google have been finetuned to exploit eyeballs and pocketbooks. If they wanted to, or if their hand was forced, they’d be able to do the things that benefit the greater good.

Don’t get started with the “it’s a slippery slope” kind of shit. Short of living in some society where it’s every man for himself, kids shouldn’t be playing lotteries