skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am currently working on developing a procedural, interpreted language that is amenable to genetic (evolutionary) programming.

I have decided to shelve my work on architectures that are biologically inspired for now. I was getting reasonable results with spiking neural networks and evolutionary training, but there are so many hyper parameters to think about and how they behave over time is really hard to predict. I was also struggling deeply with how to manage topological concerns like network growth over time.

With interpreted evolutionary programs, the memory access patterns are so much more ideal with the program counter stepping through (mostly) contiguous bytes vs totally insane recurrent spiking neural access patterns. You get so many more generations & candidates evaluated per unit time that it can make previously apparent "dead ends" viable, simply because you don't need to have extreme patience to find out anymore. I am discovering that iteration speed is the most important thing in this arena. The faster you find out how bad a certain parameter adjustment is, the sooner you can get to the good ones.

I am also working on an unrelated contract to integrate some back office banking systems. Not much worth discussing there.
Telegram is not a behemoth like Facebook so doesn't have their resources to moderate everything. Even Facebook isn't particularly good at it. They mostly rely on software which often produces false positives.

This arrest is completely preposterous and is just an attempt to get Durov to play ball with France's privacy destroying authorities.
Why do you think that after “no child left behind” the situation is better for talented kids? IMO the situation is much much worse. Many gifted programs are being eliminated and all classes are being slowed down to accommodate the bottom 33%. Even slightly above average kids are going to feel like 2 standard deviation genius doing basic school work because compared to the curriculum they are.
It's been a while, I thought it was something to do with the blocks but it probably depends on what the exact state of the art is for cracking at this point.

Don't put it any higher than 4, that's for sure.

In theory a parallelism on 1 should make it so the information required to do the next step has to be computed linearly (think of the dependency graph, it should look like a line instead of diverging then converging) but it's possible that either never worked or got cracked.
Hmm, the obvious difference is that it's a completely different tool that does a completely different job.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41298522
My most (deliberately) rewatched movies include:

* Breakfast Club

* Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

* Penn and Teller Get Killed

* Chungking Express

* Pink Floyd PULSE

* Black People Hate Me and They Hate My Glasses

* Pulp Fiction

* Fringe (not a movie)

You can probably identity my real identity from this list alone. YOLO.
> I also read that starting with Aldous Broder and then switching to Wilson's Algorithm (reasoning: Aldous Broder is slow at the end, Wilson's Algorithm is slow at the start) is faster than either. However, I haven't seen proof that this combination still results in a uniform spanning tree (where all possible mazes have equal probability).

I did some searching, and the paper at [1] (2022) studies the problem. Based on the paper, a naive combination of the two algorithms can generate uniform spanning trees on complete graphs, but more work is needed for arbitrary graphs. [2] apparently cites this when discussing their hybrid maze generating algorithm, but I haven't been able to find a copy to check.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.12378
[2] https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of...
> If you get caught driving a getaway car for an armed robber, you are going to jail.

Bad analogy.

Better one is that your a taxi driver and someone who committed a crime hops into your car for a ride, then you’re found guilty by association.
I'm working on building an API for getting AIS data for ship tracking. I built an app a few years ago for tracking local ferries and getting the data was a nightmare, so I'm trying to build a simpler alternative.
Some say it began as a CIA project.

> Declassified American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. It funded and directed the European federalist movement.

> The documents confirm suspicions voiced at the time that America was working aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into a European state. One memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.

> The documents were found by Joshua Paul, a researcher at Georgetown University in Washington. They include files released by the US National Archives. Washington's main tool for shaping the European agenda was the American Committee for a United Europe, created in 1948. The chairman was Donovan, ostensibly a private lawyer by then.

> The vice-chairman was Allen Dulles, the CIA director in the Fifties. The board included Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA's first director, and a roster of ex-OSS figures and officials who moved in and out of the CIA. The documents show that ACUE financed the European Movement, the most important federalist organisation in the post-war years. In 1958, for example, it provided 53.5 per cent of the movement's funds.

https://www.quora.com/Was-the-European-Union-a-CIA-project
Oh heck, some time back, I sat down and made a list for myself - the films I can watch, and re-watch again and again (WIP) https://brajeshwar.com/film/
The same is true of computers, in fact it has been mathematically proven that it is impossible to answer the general question if a computer program is correct.

But that hasn't stopped the last 40 years from happening because computers made fewer mistakes than the next best alternative. The same needs to be true of LLMs.
Fair enough on the perf, I get it lol

I'm hunting for names that had resurgence in popularity because of TV shows/movies. The name that inspired the project is Mabel. It disappeared in the 1960s, then reappeared the year after Gravity Falls came out and it's still climbing. https://www.behindthename.com/name/mabel/top

I want to find as many examples of that as I can.
The Mask. It was one of the few movies my grandmother had on VHS, and my sister loved it enough to watch it multiple times, on repeat every time we'd visit.

I binge certain directors from time to time, but I've really got a thing for reading scripts, especially for films that never got made like the Pee-Wee Herman Story or Ghostbusters 3.
dupe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41331851
They ran it for three or four years floundering and if I recall tried to sell to Excite for $1M but failed before they bought Adwords and it started to work for them.

I don’t think it is some universal truth, but it was the reality of the time that people wouldn’t pay for search so they pivoted into advertising.
Just checked out the MS SQL script. I believe it's vulnerable to SQL injection via table/column/view/index/schema names (however unlikely that may be). You might want a disclaimer not to run the script with object names that could be user provided (especially as a privileged user)
implementing double-entry accounting for the 10,000th time in human history on our ERP/MES product.
Sometimes things click and sometimes they don't. Like when someone tells you not to worry about the things that you can't control. What worked for someone close to me was imagining and believing that everything will work out in the end. Over time they have seen the positive in life and opened more opportunities than when they were cynical.
I moved all my stuff to k3s for exactly the reasons it seems you’re describing. I’m not saying “do it” but… it was worth it for me.

I had a ton of stuff that was important to me running in VMs on a Proxmox server. I had backups, but if anything had happened to that it would still be a nightmare. Most of it had been there long enough that my technical knowledge and knowledge of how I had set it up was rusty to nonexistent. Which meant that I was afraid to touch it. Which made me get rustier… It was starting to be a constant source of stress and anxiety.

Now I’ve got single repository that has everything that isn’t “actual user data”. I can (and have tested) taking a couple machines, PXE booting them, and within 15 minutes with no interaction getting to a fresh cluster. Then redeploying all my stuff takes me a couple hours (mostly due to slow internet) with, again, no interaction besides hitting “go” on a bunch of things. And god help me if I forget how Kubernetes works because then I’m probably out of a job too.

I switched to running on four Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny PCs (like $40 each I think) as opposed to a single large box to provide some redundancy as well. Makes things like hardware failures not as much of an issue, upgrades less risky, etc.

I’m not afraid to do things with it anymore. I never worry that a piece of hardware failing is going to suddenly and unexpectedly mean a lost weekend. It’s made it all fun again instead of stressful and like work.
This is sick and super unique. Gave it a shot, I’ll be curious how the print quality is.
If you have an application/architecture which can benefit from 64GB or more ram, or 32 or more cores, the payoff time compared to running on AWS is probably single digit months. Perhaps twice that for some of the smaller and hungrier wannabe hyperscalers.

From my perspective and this is based on every single project I've worked on in the last 20 or 25 years, the development velocity you can get with a tiny team building a monolith that can be reasoned about successfully by non genius level developers makes it totally worth going all in on a single server monolith. You do need to acknowledge that you'll rip and replace it all when(if) you start to approach the level of growth that justifies having a development team of at least several dozen, who'll need to split into teams of 2-5 working of sub components to be able to have the entire team work well. But until you can afford to pay for that team of 30 or 50 or more devs, stick with the single server approach.
The internet of 2024 is much different than the internet of the 20th century.

It’s become centralized and controlled by the hands of the few.

This is not an improvement.
While I have a lot of respect for Ikey and think he's extremely talented, he tends to start a project and then either move to something else or disappear. Hey, life happens, and doing open source work for free is a grind, so it's not meant as an insult. But I'd see Serpent as a toy/POC rather than a long lived OS. I'm excited to try it, either way.

I -believe- I read that a lot of this work will be going into Solus, a previous Ikey project, which has a new team and small community now. So hopefully this is kinda best of both worlds if true for both sides.
prealpha is such a weird name, just call it a dev/nightly build or an actual alpha
Doesn't work. Looks like it's just not possible
GPT-4o vs. Claude 3.5 Sonnet for coding
What's everyone's thoughts on GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet for your coding productivity? Do you prefer one over the other?
I just started working full time on my mortgage loan officer SaaS tool again. I had started building it when I worked for a mortgage company in 2017 because I was annoyed at having to enter the same data on 6 websites 20-30 times a week. Ended up getting some paying customers but somewhat unconsciously avoiding selling too many, a personality defect I have since seen.

If you know a mortgage loan officer, tell them to email tyler at lightningestimates dot com and mention HN. I'm just trying to fix an industry problem at a reasonable price.
You don’t understand the terms you’re using in the context you’re using them in, and you don’t seem interested in learning to use them in the same way as everyone else. This steadfast refusal is preventing your understanding from progressing.
I quit my job last year as a CIO and have been working on my own consultancy focused on using strategic foresight to help develop better strategies.

I built a bunch of consultant led tools (Jupyter notebooks mostly) using LLMs to help with this, and saw how customers reacted to what they could do. So I decided a few months ago to bundle them together into a SaaS app.

I’m just about to release the beta of https://www.portage.so to my waitlist in the next couple of weeks.

The main use case is using a virtual whiteboard (ReactFlow) to string together a series of nodes that do a different task through the strategy development process. For example, you can generate scenarios, then analyse the impacts, then create courses of action in response to potential disruptions and so on.

I do a fortnightly dev diary as well, the latest one shows off creating the final output: https://youtu.be/nD_FhWkREhE?si=JK60fVlT7wmmONW3
I'm working on a Tournament Manager for Pickleball at http://pickleballtourneypro.pages.dev because the current incumbent is very difficult for non-technical people (aka volunteers) to use, and super expensive (10-15% of tournament revenue).

Lot of fun ideas, and hopefully will get used by a large variety of volunteers.
I wrote a musical (or otherwise) pitch guessing game inspired by my partner's love for minimalist, but engaging, games like Wordle.

Still tweaking it, and it could use some better instructions. But the thread's here now so why not.

If you see confetti, you answered correctly. Otherwise the points are added or subtracted in a "hot or cold" fashion based on your answer's distance from the actual pitch.

https://abitpitchy.com
I also really recommend this book. I've been working through it over the last few months and expanding it and I've still got a lot of book to go! Really fun, interesting, and a great change from some of the usual work.

I've been posting my progress with it on mastodon. Generating animated GIFs of the generation and traversal to solve it has been a whole fun sub-topic I've been working on too. I render each computation step to a PNG, and get ffmpeg to build GIFs or MP4s.

https://mastodon.social/@lloydjatkinson/media

The same author also has a book on raytracing. My wife got me both books for Christmas and I didn't realise just how much building/hacking/creativity/fun I'd get out of them.
Lufthansa is using artificial sharkskin to streamline airplanes
Over-researching is probably better than under-researching. To reduce time spent researching, try imposing a deadline. The difficulty will be sticking to it, since nobody but yourself will be breathing down your neck.
Things improve with practice though, at least they did for me. I largely sucked at action video games as a kid, I also didn’t have interest probably because I wasn’t good. I took to learning musical instruments and now in my 40s I accidentally found Im pretty good at videogames, much much better than when I was young. Coincidentally I got better at sports as well.
Yeah, and probably "boring technology" in a good way. Shared hosting using CPanel and Plesk used to run a huge percentage of the SMB web/email/filestorage market.

You need to work out whether you can trust all the multiple app devs enough to take on the risk of bugs slowing or crashing the entire server and how that impacts whatever uptime and SLAs you need. (and whether you trust all the app devs to write secure-enough code...)
My wife has a nephew that is insanely smart. Like, aced the SATs at 15 smart.

His mother insisted that he have a fairly normal-paced education, and it seems to have paid off.

He’s a really decent chap, who teaches at a university, is married, and has a kid. His college career was at top schools, though. They pretty much threw scholarships at him.

I like the article. Very humble and encouraging.
We’re working on our contract management system for dev and design agencies. Been in beta for a couple months, working as always on that elusive product-market fit.

Besides that our team is always working on cool stuff for our clients. Lots of interesting work these days “in” AI, plenty of cool stuff going on in health tech.

Got something cool you need devs for? Always happy to talk shop — wyatt at apsis dot io.
Well, this is all positioned as "possible technosignature," there's not some black hole orbiting around a planet that we've seen that has us going "that's weird must be aliens."

Though, a black hole of the size we're talking about is in and of itself potentially evidence of aliens - as noted in the article, they would evaporate within a year and a half without a constant influx of mass. Most places where you would find a black hole that is accreting matter is going to be a place where there is enough matter for it to become significantly larger, and once it's away from places rich with matter, space is emptying enough there's basically no chance it's having that much fall in.
Those are indeed very important things to consider!
My perception is that AR is also a gimmick that won't seem to take off any time soon. How many times AR technologies have come and went in whimper?
Hi, I didn't comment on the cancer part. The discussion elsewhere in this thread connecting this to exercise seems specious to me. I was just trying to put in a good reminder to warm up before you exercise. I appreciate your clarification nonetheless.
Reproducing this cheap optogenetic rig to control e. coli gene expression using light.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.13.499906v1
I actually haven't seen that one, I'll check it out.

I liked the visuals in Life of Pi a lot. Also, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, for obvious reasons.
I tried

tar xvzf 1.zip

and got

xvzf: is neither a valid subcommand, option, or argument.
You are missing the point. I was talking about theory, not practice. I said very clearly that the current crop of AIs can't live up to their hype.
> Dunno if it helps, but just know most of us are at least a bit of a mess.

Years ago, I tried to quit my job because I was feeling terrible about how I was doing. My boss gave me one of the best pieces of advice anyone's ever given me:

"You know, Rachel, the suicide rate among founders is..."

This probably sounds like one of the most unhelpful things someone could say in that situation, but it was EXACTLY what I needed to hear. I didn't need someone to say "oh, it's ok to feel bad". I needed someone to say "feeling bad doesn't mean you're not strong enough to be great". I needed to hear that ambitious people who are trying with all their might to be better are still constantly struggling with the idea that they aren't good enough.

YC's own founder school doesn't quite put it in those terms, but there's a LOT in there about the importance of human factors. Arguably more than there is business advice, actually. They explicitly say, for example, "don't pick a co-founder who has complementary skills, pick one that won't drive you insane, because breakups and not lack of skill are a more common failure mode". And there's like half a dozen videos on how to keep it together when you're stressed beyond breaking. It's pretty reassuring.

To really make the point: my company became profitable for the first time yesterday afternoon, and I spent a good chunk of the 24 hours since then ruminating on how now we might fail because I'm not sure where the next bit of revenue comes from. Never mind that the things I was worried about one, two, three, or four months ago have all gone better than I feared - anxiety doesn't care about that. It'll just glom on to whatever excuse it can get - see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40191179
Encryption is really not the main issue here. I think nerds may not fully grasp Telegram's security model: it's essentially stateless, not tied to any particular country. Its infrastructure is distributed across various jurisdictions, with no official representation in many countries—no subsidiaries, nothing.

As a result, it doesn't respond to authorities because it doesn't have to. However, this approach is unsustainable and unacceptable for many governments, both in the East and the West. That's why he's being accused in France: he is not "cooperating with law enforcement".
General understanding is that the flamewar detector is triggered when posts exceed 20 comments and total comments exceeds votes:

<https://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-reall...>

It's not perfect, but it really does often correctly identify flamewars. If you feel a post has incorrectly triggered the flamewar detector, email mods at hn@ycombinator.com.

As I write, this thread doesn't trigger the criteria.
> I'm surprised this is seen as a liability of mmap rather than a cooperative scheduler that isn't using native kernel threads

Indeed. In practice, though, it's easier to write high performance servers and storage systems with async runtimes (like tokio) than with native threads, at least with the current state of the ecosystem. That's not for some fundamental reason - it's possible to get great threaded performance - just the current reality.

So, whoever's fault this is, it's useful to have good evidence of this downside of async runtimes (and worth thinking about ways that OSs could let runtimes know when they were about to block on IO).
I wasn't literally suggesting that you store offsets. Or timestamps. There are way too many weird cases around doing that. But "America/Los_Angeles" is a reference to a file in tzfile(5) format, which contains, among other things, the UTC offset. And a function that produces the correct date and time in Los Angeles at any point in the past has to know (among other things) if that offset was ever anything different, and if it was, when it changed. And many other things.

There are date/time libraries that can't get all of this right, but you'll come a lot closer using them than you will rolling your own.

Don't store raw timestamps. Don't store offsets. Use date/time data types.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested in France
These results are promising and hopefully carry over to the upcoming Strix Halo which I’m eagerly awaiting. With a rumoured 40 compute cores and performance on par with a low power (<95W) mobile RTX4070, it would make an exciting small form gaming box.
Not an SEO expert but I've found that adding your business to Google Maps will get you many more eyeballs.
Anthropic Claude 3.5 can create icalendar files, so I did this
I don't know the author but it's worth keeping in mind that... Sometimes people end working on a project because

- it has no future, ran its course, proved wrong somehow

- cannot add more that others could do better

- an alternative makes more sense long term

It's true that many people end working on something because it gets too hard or they lack focus.

But in this case, seeing the breath of the projects, this is not the case.
So a website you don't like you would ban for everybody else as well just because you decided that it is merely marketing crap there making you nauseous. So you then conclude it should be banned for everyone else? How do you think the world would look if everybody had the power to ban things with similar reasons? We'd have nothing left in the world. Scary.
Agreed, and there's a few projects with CLAs that are ranked lower due to mitigating factors, like K8s [1]. I honestly don't get why they have a CLA, anyone know?

The impact of developer good will is difficult to measure, so I don't attempt it. Redis burned community good will so badly with their relicensing that several forks rapidly emerged. Seemed like a predictably poor decision to me.

I also don't want to pick favorite companies, because it's subjective, companies can change strategies or even sell projects off. What if Meta decided to sell React to a patent-troll-like company instead of just abandoning it?

[1] https://alexsci.com/relicensing-monitor/projects/kubernetes/