skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was trained as a cook when I was sixteen at a world class Perkins restaurant. My trainer was a highly experienced chef and restauranteur.

I had to master the dish tank first. Everyone did and everyone dished and cooked. I had to be able to run the dish tank by myself with the restaurant at full bedlam before I was able to progress as a line cook.

We were doing $40-50k a week in the early 1990s. I love doing dishes to this day.
Ask HN: Are indie devs more disturbed by bugs than employed programmers?
And if so, maybe they will try to fix them more quickly?
The Deck of Many Things: Peak Game Design
You can't write software code without the ability to think. You can't tactfully respond to emotional expression without the ability to think. If that is snake oil then we are all walking, talking, snake oil.
Center for Advanced Pathogen Threat and Response Simulation
We are excited to announce the upcoming launch of our new writing contest, focused on the intersection of artificial intelligence and global threats. Hosted by the Center for Advanced Preparedness and Threat Response Simulation (CAPTRS), this contest offers a unique opportunity for writers, researchers, and AI enthusiasts to explore the implications of AI on our world's safety and security.

As AI continues to evolve, its potential to influence global stability—both positively and negatively—becomes increasingly significant. We invite you to submit a story and ground truth that delves into how AI could either mitigate or exacerbate threats on a global scale. Whether your focus is on AI's role in cybersecurity, its impact on warfare, or its ability to address global challenges, we encourage you to present your most innovative and insightful ideas.

Key Details:

Submission Opens: September 4, 2024
Submission Deadline: November 9, 2024
Contest Web Page: https://captrs.org/threats/essay-contest/ai-threat-essay-con... *apply button will be active on our website Sept. 4th
Prizes: $5,000 1st Place/ $2,500 2nd Place/ $1,000 Third Place
Your participation will not only contribute to a critical global dialogue but also place you at the forefront of discussions that could shape the future of AI and its role in global security.

We look forward to your participation and eagerly await your insights on this vital topic.
I guess we're well within the "self-perpetuating feedback loop" at this point.
This is neat. You should post example usage in the README to attract people’s interest
I've only become interested in buying System76 hardware since they released the DE. Simply because I know it will be the best experience for it and the purchase will go towards funding development of Cosmic.
> That's not a meaningful difference from the employee's perspective.

Perhaps for certain types of employees. I know that if the cost of my mistake is much higher then the level of preparation and study I'm going to do before committing to action is going to be greater. I guess some people just can't be made to work that way.

> the worst that they can do is fire you

If I lose a job in a kitchen, I can find work tomorrow, if I lose a job in construction, it's going to be harder to replace that salary. The zero sum analysis doesn't really work here.
Re: hosting your key, I think that's quite reasonable, again, assuming your access control + encryption is good. It's a solid break-glass solution. I would add monitoring that alerts if it is ever used, though. Then you can remediate quickly on the off-chance it is compromised. In day-to-day use I would stick with a different key that only lives on my machine.
Mutool is the one I suggest to people. The easiest way to understand a PDF is to decompress it and then just read the contents.

mutool clean -d in.pdf out.pdf

At that point you’ll realise that a PDF is mostly just a list of objects and that those objects can reference each other. After that you’ll journey through the spec understanding what each type of object does and what the fields in it control. The graphics stream itself is just a stack based co-ordinates drawing system that’s easy to follow too.

By way of an example. Here's an object that represents a Page. You can see the dimensions in the MediaBox. The contents themselves are contained at object "9 0 obj" ("9 0 R" is the pointer to it):

2 0 obj
<<
/Type /Page
/MediaBox [ 0 0 612 792 ]
/Contents 9 0 R
>>
endobj

Meanwhile "9 0 obj" has the drawing instructions. They seem a little weird at first glance but you see the values ".23999999 0 0 -.23999999 0 792" each get pushed on the stack and then "cm" pops them to interpret them as the transformation matrix.

9 0 obj
<<
/Length 18266
>>
stream
.23999999 0 0 -.23999999 0 792 cm
q
0 0 2551 3301 re
...

The depth and detail of all of the different possible things that can be represented in a PDF is insane. But understanding the structure above is all you need to begin your journey!

EDIT The rest of your journey is contained in this epic document: https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/pdfstandard...
This is so great, thanks!
Were these skill "trees" the output of an LLM or something? Of the domains I have a lot of familiarity with, the ordering (if it can even be assumed the easy ones are at the bottom and the hard ones at the top) make little sense.

I think if I were a newbie in any of these subjects and followed the "trees" as presented I would be quickly discouraged and lost.
After 12 years at Google I have a couple million$ in my account so I afford to not give a fuck.
I'm not OP but I am the dude who made freepublicapis.com. Will check it out for sure, thank you so much!
brandishing != carrying
A long, weird FOSS circle ends as Microsoft donates Mono to Wine project
Damn, I've wanted something like this since Microsoft announced the Surface Duo years ago. This is tempting.
How long would it take you to knock up a working imagemagick prototype?

My LLM-assisted web prototype took two prompts and less than three minutes, start to finish.

THAT’s the game changer here. I’ve spent my career building prototypes, and I’m really fast at it. With LLMs I am 5-10x faster still.

Which means I can roll way more prototypes, and I often build prototypes that I wouldn’t have built otherwise - see: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-developmen...
but that is automated already with mouse jigglers
On mobile, I can't see the thread. Just the first message
Now this thing goes in since a few days. Are I'm the only one who wonder, why France does not release a proper press release? Is this really a country in central Europe, they catch a super public figure and just .. say nothing?!?
I thought patents protected functionally, not copyright.
I like the idea of Signal a lot. It works pretty well. Unfortunately, not that many of my friends are on it. However, I have quite enjoyed using Matrix, specifically in the form of Beeper, which has nice bridges for Signal, WhatsApp, FB, IG, and so on. Ultimately, I can talk to my friends where they are and keep it all in one place.
Beeper has been making great improvements but unfortunately it's still not as good as Signal in terms of polish.
What will happen when people learn about Craigslist? Or how trivially you can buy drugs at or near a night club in any capital city? Or how you can search Reddit to get a list of establishments that hire illegal migrants?
This is the real takeaway... not the soap opera-esque blathering coming from folks 10+ years at Google
IANAL but this change doesn't seem to make sense from any sort of "sanctions" perspective. Sure, block sanctioned countries from accessing your website or registry, etc - that makes sense. But removing providers? That doesn't seem to be related.

The thing that makes this *super* f'd up is the fact that #1 - There is no commentary from the group members explaining this or what the policy change is (the few linked TSC documents are just about registry, not about providers). #2 - There is no explanation in the PR and no linked bugs. #3 - The super vague "remove some providers" title.

It's clear OpenTofu devs were trying to slide this change in under the cover of darkness and hope no one noticed. Which makes zero sense for an OPEN source project.

You don't have to like the providers, you don't have to support them. You can even say they are actively deprecated due to the inability to test/support said providers (which totally would make sense). But just to straight out remove functional code with zero warning, notice or explanation? Super scummy.
A strawman indeed. 30 characters is deliberate overkill.

So, thank you for confirming my understanding: keys are just as / more convenient from the ops standpoint than passwords. The weakness is only in short, guessable passwords.
Related. Others?

You can kick the alpha tires on System76's Cosmic, a new Linux desktop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41234849 - Aug 2024 (10 comments)

Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41192303 - Aug 2024 (198 comments)

Cosmic Desktop Close to Alpha Release, Adds Compositor Multi-Threading - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40948942 - July 2024 (4 comments)

Cosmic Desktop: Hammering Out New Cosmic Features - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40074383 - April 2024 (110 comments)

Cosmic Desktop Is Slated to Debut with Pop _OS 24.04 LTS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39418855 - Feb 2024 (46 comments)

Cosmic Desktop: Closing in on a Cosmic Alpha - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39372762 - Feb 2024 (19 comments)

Cosmic: The Road to Alpha - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38984739 - Jan 2024 (17 comments)

System76's Cosmic Desktop Working Toward Its Alpha Release - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38959271 - Jan 2024 (10 comments)

Pop _OS Cosmic Desktop Improving Multi-Monitor and Multi-Window Support - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38656529 - Dec 2023 (43 comments)

Locked and Loaded with New Cosmic DE Updates - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37970594 - Oct 2023 (28 comments)

COSMIC DE: Desktop environment created for Pop!_OS and other Linux distros - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36725105 - July 2023 (148 comments)

Cosmic DE update: System76's new Linux desktop environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34599094 - Jan 2023 (260 comments)

Pop_OS Cosmic Desktop to Make Use of Iced Rust Toolkit Rather Than GTK - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33066593 - Oct 2022 (93 comments)

Cosmic: System76 take auto-tiling intuitive desktop environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27683615 - June 2021 (1 comment)

System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26798080 - April 2021 (414 comments)
Would Google have been more successful if it had been split up a la Ma Bell?
Limits of TLA+

- It cannot compile to working code

- Steep learning curve

Opportunities for TLA+

- Helps you understand complex abstractions & systems clearly.

- It's extremely effective at communicating the components that make up a system with others.

Let get give you a real practical example.

In the AI models there is this component called a "Transformer". It under pins ChatGPT (the "T" in ChatGPT).

If you are to read the 2018 Transfomer paper "Attention is all you need".

They use human language, diagrams, and mathematics to describe their idea.

However if your try to build you own "Transformer" using that paper as your only resource your going to struggle interpreting what they are saying to get working code.

Even if you get the code working, how sure are you that what you have created is EXACTLY what the authors are talking about?

English is too verbose, diagrams are open to interpretation & mathematics is too ambiguous/abstract. And already written code is too dense.

TLA+ is a notation that tends to be used to "specify systems".

In TLA+ everything is a defined in terms of a state machine. Hardware, software algorithms, consensus algorithms (paxos, raft etc).

So why TLA+?

If something is "specified" in TLA+;

- You know exactly what it is — just by interpreting the TLA+ spec

- If you have an idea to communicate. TLA+ literate people can understand exactly what your talking about.

- You can find bugs in an algorithms, hardware, proceseses just by modeling them in TLA+.
So before building Hardware or software you can check it's validity & fix flaws in its design before committing expensive resources only to subsequently find issues in production.
Yes I am surprised no one else went for it

Great example of riches are in niches
Why I Left the Verge [video]
OpenAI in Talks for Funding Round Valuing It Above $100B
While I admire his willingness to share his reasons, and I'm sure he's right and many processes are broken at Google (pretty clear from using all their recent search updates and amount of talent leaving for startups), trying to reduce duplications is a good thing.
How to build a query language in Python – James' Coffee Blog
Suspicious new account. Russian bot? /s

> so that valuable features and fixes are accepted based on their value to the community, regardless of their impact on any particular vendor.
- https://opentofu.org

It’s sad that everything revolves around politics these days. They claim sanctions but it’s quite obvious this is just the personal opinion of the team.
I haven't read that book yet. I have been meaning to but just haven't gotten to it.

I can't believe we can watch the "mother of all demos". That alone proves its significance.

My favorite aspect of the demo is that it reveals that our human computing desires are universal and have been there from the start. It has taken generations to achieve the mass adoptions of these ideas. This realization takes the mystique away from the BigCo and their services. They are simple human desires for technology that were obvious from the beginning.
We're missing the forest for the trees - the estimate was large ($5T), and the estimate is indeed a lower bound, and it seems like pretty damn important to save F/OSS.
The wharf? Suddenly that name made sense when linking about the heritage and the dock. TIL I guess.
What is the point of posting a bitter public critique of your former employer?

I totally believe that Google is very different from 12 years ago and that they are now ponderous, bureaucratic, and dysfunctional in the ways that mega-corporations almost always are. So what? If you've decided to move on, just move on.
Successful by what definition? It would probably be less profitable. It would probably have had more impact on computer science and people's lives, and be more popular.
Distributed Password Cracking on the Cheap Using Salad Cloud
Discussion (1293 points, 1 day ago, 429 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41371106
I actually generally agree with you. It’s amazing. And I actually feel safer with waymo than human drivers. But the idea that running a stop sign is safe because there aren’t other cars is the issue here.
Really excited to see Rerun get fleshed out as time goes on. I've used it at $WORK in spare time to visualize multi-agent telemetry and event information for remote operated robotic systems.

To me the most useful feature was actually just the timeline view. Being able to see all of the events and telemetry updates from all agents and correlate them to some line plots was already a huge help. I think Rerun should actually make the timeline view just another "view" [0] so that I can have additional timeline views with specific filters. Seeing the discrete pips in the timeline for different events and channel updates is really helpful.

Also we already have infrastructure to log and for live telemetry streaming so we don't integrate with the SDK directly in the deployed software and instead just have an adaptation layer to take logs or live data and push it through the Rerun SDK. I generally feel it's better to separate the data generation and logging from the data visualization, though I could understand directly integrating the SDK as a fast solution if the infrastructure is not already there. I hope the use case as the data offload/logging for a system doesn't become a focus sink for the Rerun team.

That said, I do appreciate the simplicity of the Rerun SDK API design. At first I wanted to try Foxglove but it seems pretty tied to the supported formats (which we weren't outputting for heritage reasons) and my eyes glazed over when I saw how much work (I perceived) it would take to integrate with their custom websocket interface. This was all spare time exploration so I basically dropped it once I saw how much code there was in the example [1].

[0]: https://rerun.io/docs/reference/types/views

[1]: https://github.com/foxglove/ws-protocol/tree/main/python/src...
He probably should have said that if it's what he meant. In his answer he implies that he could in fact back door it but chooses not to because of the liability.
It wouldn't be efficient if the only thing a flat roof bought you was added strain. But, for the most part everything is a tradeoff. Maybe the practicality of extra floor or head space is worth increasing the strength of the structure.
Yes, that's an interesting implementation. I'm using Firefox, and the jumps to the notes and back to the paragraph are recorded in history, and has the expected effect when clicking the back and forward history arrows/buttons.
since when have Americans turned down excessive square footage? see: McMansions and McModerns
How Pre-Commit Works – Stefanie Molin
Yes, I'm very very familiar with this :) I stand by my assertion, "correct-horse-battery-staple" is a weak password to use today. Zxcvbn reporting it as secure is an example of where it's weak.

That XKCD comic came out August 2011, and this article was released April 2012, eight months later. At the time, it made sense to use that as an example of a "highly entropic password" in a blogpost targeting a general technical audience.

It has now been 156.5 months since that comic was released, and 164.5 since zxcvbn was originally trained on its 2011 dataset. "Correct-horse-battery-staple" and its variations are widely used strings and is no longer an example of a strong password.

It's worth being careful about our definition of entropy. The same highly-entropic source generates "hunter2" just as often as it generates "aaaaaaa" just as often as it generates "jpnj6i3".

A "good password" is one that is unlikely to be guessed by an offline cracker. But there are countless strategies an attacker might choose, most of which involve taking a list of passwords and applying rules to them. This is why a highly-entropic source is important (e.g. of all the 32-character passwords, 'weak' ones like "aaaaa..." make a negligible percentage of them) as well as uniqueness ("mP7t6e8TAH..." is a weak password the moment it's leaked in a breach.)

You can't know what strategy the attacker will pick beforehand-- the idea is that it's negligibly likely that an attacker chooses a strategy that cracks your password in a few guesses.

Zxcvbn intentionally takes compromises to be a performant best-effort estimation of how many guesses an attacker would take for your password. (It would improve its estimation of guesses by actually trying to guess your password with `hashcat` and the antipublic combolist, or whatever people are using nowadays, but then it would take eons to provide an estimation rather than milliseconds.)
In the US, labor unions are required by federal law to negotiate pay and benefits on behalf of all employees at a particular workplace, rather than just their own members.

Because of this requirement, some people argue in favor of permitting mandatory union membership, on the basis that without it, individual workers can free-ride, enjoying the superior pay and benefits the union negotiates on their behalf without joining and paying union dues.

Others argue that forcing people to join a union and pay dues is illiberal, and should be outlawed.

This is the crux of the "right-to-work law" debate, where "right-to-work" describes laws that make it illegal to require union membership as a condition of employment.

Personally, I find it odd that federal law requires labor unions to negotiate on behalf of non-members, but I am also not particularly well informed on the topic.
HP and Ferrari are not the oracles of what can be compatible with their products or not. Compatibility is a physical trait, not something you can license or gatekeep.
So what is the end game here? IPO on the stock market for over $500 billion or stay private like Stripe, SpaceX or Bytedance?

Nobody can buy them without bankrupting themselves many times over, unless the big companies buy them (very unlikely)

Or is OpenAI just going to keep raising and raising more and more?

Is OpenAI even profitable?
Would also explain all of the strawberry hype here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41377329
Nautilus seemed much cooler in those days.

I think the whole file manager as "browser" was interesting - the idea of blurring the boundaries between local and server, support for webdav on the major platforms came from a similar place and also would have been interesting if used more.
I'm pretty unconvinced.

I think the author thinks the primary motivation for open source is companies making a donation out of the goodness of their heart.

While that does happen, i dont think that is the main cause. Most companies participate in open source for their own selfish reasons. Sometimes that is to attract talent, sometimes it is to attract people to their propreitary platform, sometimes it is to commodify the parts they dont want to compete on, sometimes its something else. The companies do get benefits here. They are probably going to continue so long as the benefit > costs.

As for non corporate open source. It may not be a healthy hobby, but i dont see anything changing here. If people have been doing it as a hobby for the last 20 years, why would they stop now?
There is a Go developer that defends using channels four times like in this blog, he also made some great medium posts in which he details real use cases.
His name is Christopher, if you want to find more about him, just Google “chris chan 4chan”.
It's alpha. Of course not.
But the fact that is has one at all, is an improvement over GNOME where the plugin "api" is just javascript injected into the main gnome shell process.
Allegedly yes (excluding all of the existing AI researcher costs).
I'm left a bit confused still about using ChatGPT and Claude as someone who's still learning (2nd year CS student) and nowhere near being a professional dev.

I'm sure if I was was dev who had learnt and worked in the pre-GPT era I'd have no problem using these tools as much as possible, but having started learning in the GPT era I feel conflicted. I make sure I understand each line of code generated whenever I use AI. Despite that I have a feeling I'm handicapping myself using these tools? Will it just make me a code reviewer/copy-paster rather than someone who can write something from scratch?

If it is reasonable to use these tools, at what point does it become so? like at what point can I consider myself well enough at programming to be able to use it like in the post.

Right now I'm purposely restraining myself from using these tools too much because what I can make using them is much better than what I can make myself, so as to get upto a certain level myself before I start making use of these capabilities

Am I thinking about this the right way? At what point does it make sense to start using these tools more freely without worrying about handicapping my learning?
>are those issues worse than the current issues?

That's what I consider the correct way to think about this. So do you have thought on what metrics you'd use to measure the net effect?

One of the nagging facts that bothers me is that, even as we see increases in minimum wage, there seems to be certain segments of society (particularly young men) who are disproportionately dropping out of the labor pool.
Censoring the Internet Won't Protect Kids
Can you point to a source that Pavel durov beat children.
So, quantum computers are doomed to be perpetually cool.

Sorry. I couldn't resist.