skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
many people will never be able to dunk a basketball no matter how hard they train. Some people will be able to dunk at age 14 without doing any training.

We accepts these types of basic inequalities when it comes to physical ability without blinking an eye, yet if you apply the exact same logic to the brain (a physical organ) people go into hysterics.

Most people could probably get a lot closer to dunking than they think they are capable of, but theres a very obvious hard limit.
It’s all about the taxes.

Income and inheritance taxes have created a biased system that is destroying the economy for average Americans.

PSA: Don't forget to pay your quarterly estimated tax payment by Sept 16.
I'm a citizen and resident of literally the closest US ally, speak the same American, have the same timezone, and I would take that job for half the money minus one dollar.
> Skew in what way?

https://introductorystats.wordpress.com/2011/09/04/when-bill...
Oh so he doesn't focus on "improving society and science" by throwing money into jaws of NGOs but by trying to make us actually spacefaring.
> For comparison an EV can do about 400km on the same energy.

I checked prices here in Norway. My car has a 60 kWh battery and my car can indeed do about 400 km when full. Hydrogen here goes for about 195 NOK/kg at the pumps, so 4 kg would be 780 NOK.

Even if I use an expensive super-charger to charge it up fully, at ~6.5 NOK/kWh it'll cost me 390 NOK. So half the price of H2.

Tesla super-chargers are now available for regular plebs and they charge about 5.5 NOK/kWh, and there's at least one other that charges around 4.5 NOK/kWh.

If I charge at home it's typically 0.8-1.2 NOK/kWh during summer, up to 2-3 NOK/kWh during winter. Since I have this option, I only use super-chargers a few times a year, when on longer trips.
> We're talking key infra

Not in the US. I mean, not culturally. Trains here are viewed as a plague, as stupid, as a waste of time. Of course they're really important and move around a lot of shit.

I would not be surprised that the train company doesn't give 2 fucks about trains. Nobody cares about trains. If you asked the average American if shutting down the railroads would be a good thing, they'd probably say yes. They're old, nasty, derail, loud...
Okay - but the design without padding converted better than the one with padding.

A/B tests don't give you the best possible choice of all choices. They just give you the better choice between A & B.

The business shouldn't delay rolling something out that increases conversions *significantly* because a better design *might* exist.

You can A/B test "better" designs in the future until one converts better.
I’m not dismissive of security related issues. My comment was a snarky reference to some other HN comments on uuid7 some time ago which I’m having trouble finding now. The comment was lamenting developers using uuid7 for many things, presumably without thought, creating loads of security issues for them.

In most cases creation time is not sensitive. Therefore, for most cases uuid7 is the best trade off currently.
All of the funding for Firefox (or nearly all?) comes from Google. There is no way for you as a private person to donate money to firefox development. That of course means that Mozilla needs to keep its large donner happy lest the money go away.
I agree but it's not different than C with a decent library of data structures. And even when you become more borrow checker aware and able to anticipate most of the issues, still there are cases where the solution is either non obvious or requires doing things in indirect ways compared to C or C++.
Corporations recognize nothing but operating cost, so that’s in fact an appropriate lever. The question is if the correct amount of force is applied to it—usually not, but here I’m not so sure.
Implying that Bill Gates buys a lot of real estate? That's probably true – he does have nearly 300,000 acres of farmland after all – but I'm not sure really answers the question.
>why the countries like uk canada and also Europe are incredibly poor

They are not that poor if you adjust for cost of living and hours worked. If you look at the Wikipedia thing "GDP per working hour (2019 US$ PPP)" some results are:

Denmark 76

USA 74

Canada 57

Spain 56

UK 54

So the pay isn't that much worse per hour. People probably work a little less over here, maybe because we don't have the whole if you don't work you won't get health cover and will be doomed thing.

Also life expectancy is 76 years in the US vs 84 years in Spain. There's more to life than working all hours then croaking.
Interesting!

My negative experience with Firefox was with this 6 year old feature request relating to container colors. [0] They have hardcoded some colors & icons (6 or 8 I think?) as possible options. The problem is: If you have more than half a dozen of Gmail accounts that you want to containerize (e.g. for client work), it is really hard to keep them apart at first glance. Compare this to Google Chrome, where you can choose the browser color for each associated Gmail account individually.

I tried to manually extend & build it for myself, but the codebase relating to that was just a mindfuck to work on...

[0] https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/1566

TL;DR: https://xkcd.com/619
Before there was asphalt/tarmac/blacktop there was "macadam", which was tarmacadam without the tar. But it used to kick up huge amounts of dust, so it was normal to pour water on the roads in hot weather.
In fact were talking about a Dutch company, Uber BV. If it can't abide by EU law then it shouldn't exist!

And does US law really prevent them from handling EU customer data in a compliant way? Could you give a specific example?
Gartner: 30% of Generative AI Projects Will Be Abandoned After POC End of 2025
I asked both ChatGPT 4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet how many letters there are in the word strawberry and both answered “There are two r’s in the word strawberry”. When I asked “are you sure?” ChatGPT listed the letters one by one and then said yes, there are indeed two. Claude apologized for the mistake and said the correct answer is one.

If the LLM cannot even solve such a simple question, something a young child can do, and confidently gives you incorrect answers, then I’m not sure how someone could possibly trust it for complex tasks like programming.

I’ve used them both for programming and have had mixed results. The code is always mediocre at BEST but downright wrong and buggy at worst. You must review and understand everything it writes. Sometimes it’s worth iteratively getting it to generate stuff and you fix it or tell it what to fix, but often I’m far quicker just doing it myself.

That’s not to say that it isn’t useful. It’s great as a tool to augment learning from documentation. It’s great at making pros and cons lists. It’s great as a rubber duck. It can be helpful to set you on a path by giving some code snippets or examples. But the code it generates should NEVER be used verbatim without review and editing, at best it’s a throwaway proof of concept.

I find them useful, but the thoughts that people use them as an alternative to knowing how to program or thinking about the problem themselves, that scares me.
I want multiple Lisp REPLs which run Lisp code concurrently in the same Lisp process.

How would I do it in GNU Emacs?
Yeah. Those who 1) could afford to buy assets a generation ago and 2) could afford to hold them for a generation, those people hold most of the nation's wealth.

Why? Because 1) they were starting ahead of everyone else. And 2) because long-term investing (done reasonably wisely) gives higher returns than short-term investing. So if you started out with more assets than everyone else, and got higher returns for a generation, of course you're far ahead of everyone else!
It’s a shame that there is such a stigma around anabolics for training, or even as a medical intervention. If you want to transition to another gender doctors will hand steroids out no problem; I believe you can even get then from Planned Parenthood these days. But if you simply want to take steroids to address low testosterone (Which is a societal crisis), most physicians will treat you like a drug addict. They will say it’s normal if a healthy 30 year old male has the T levels of an 80 year old.
US citizens cannot be denied entry into the country even if they don't have a US passport. (They can be detained until their citizenship is verified though).
Not sure if you are actually dutch, but it is explained in more detail here: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/225768/uber-krijgt-van-ap-avg-bo...

> Although the fine comes from the Dutch regulator, the investigation began in France. In June 2020, 21 Uber drivers there stepped forward to human rights organization Ligue Des Droits De L'homme Et Du Citoyen. Another 151 Uber drivers later joined that complaint. The LDH took that complaint back to the CNIL, France's national privacy regulator. The latter forwarded the complaint to the Dutch Personal Data Authority in January 2021 because Uber's European headquarters is in the Netherlands.
Was this AI generated? It claims that JavaScript wasn't invented in the 1900's, but I'm pretty sure it was in browsers by the mid-90's.
That you don't like the design is well known. But this is not the reason to lie.

You understand the design quite well, from our past conversations, you simply don't like the fact that we don't recognise user IP address as a permanent user identifier on the protocol level. It is indeed a transport identifier, not a protocol-level identifier that all other messaging networks have for the users (in addition to transport identifiers).

Message routing protocol has anonymous pairwise identifiers for the connections between users (graph edges), but it has no user identifiers - messaging servers have no concept of a user, and no user accounts.

Also, recently we added a second step in message routing that protects both user IP addresses and transport sessions: https://simplex.chat/blog/20240604-simplex-chat-v5.8-private...

In general, if you want to meaningfully engage in the design criticism, I would be happy too, and it will help, but simply spitting out hate online because you don't like something or somebody, is not a constructive approach – you undermine your own reputation and you also mislead people.

> You ask the authors how they solved the problem of server needing to know to which client connection an incoming ciphertext needs to be forwarded, and they'll run to the hills

This is very precisely documented, and this design was recently audited by Trail of Bits (in July 2024), we are about to publish their report. So either you didn't understand, or your are lying.

> They're lying by omission about their security, and misleading about what constitutes as a permanent identifier.

You would have to substantiate this claim, as otherwise it is slander. We are not lying about anything, by omission or otherwise. You, on another hand, are lying here.

That you are spiteful for some reason is not a good enough reason.

Factually, at this point SimpleX Chat is one of the most private and secure messengers, see the comparisons of e2e encryption properties in SimpleX Chat and other messengers: https://simplex.chat/blog/20240314-simplex-chat-v5-6-quantum...
A lot of the time, private equity (like MBAs etc.) is a convenient bogeyman for why crappy underperforming companies are crappy and underperforming. But private equity often gets involved because they are crappy and underperforming (or are just in a line of business that doesn't have good prospects any longer).
Mirror: https://archive.ph/Nbmbk
Every large non-profit in the tech/software space eventually becomes a non-profit that happens to do software, rather than a software organization incorporated as a non-profit. Wikimedia, Mozilla, Canonical, etc.
breaking the law is how American companies grow out of control.
Where does it say that I lived in the US my whole life? You're getting ahead of yourself.

From another blog post:

> I grew up in Europe (mostly Germany, Denmark, Switzerland). I had never even set foot outside the continent until I was 18, when I moved to the United States. I have lived here for 12 years now, with most of that in San Francisco.
There is a good book on how non profits are terribly handicapped by the current system: https://www.amazon.com/Uncharitable-Restraints-Nonprofits-Un...
Someone copied a gist of mine from 2011, changed my name and made a blogpost about it.

Let them be, no point in wasting time worrying about small fraudsters.
Cut them off and blacklist them so you will never have anything to do with them.

I recommend not to shame them publicly if you live in a country without freedom of speech (most of the world except from the USA) or they might have grounds for suing you for defamation (even if you are right and you can prove it).

Source: Someone scammed my landlord (and me) for tens of thousands and now he added me on LinkedIn. He's doing fine, probably doing some other real estate scams on top of some small BS companies that keep failing every 2-3 years (probably to avoid paying taxes). The police is not interested. The court case was dropped. Really tempted to out him online but lawyers don't recommend it. Justice is pretty weak in our times.
> It's probably is doable on linux

Yep. The way you do it on Linux is to grab your distro's package build script and use that. It will specify all of the build- and run-time dependencies (which you use your standard package manager to resolve), and contain whatever commands are required to build it. Usually you just install dependencies and run one command, and you've got a package you can install like any other.

Here, for example, is the script for Arch Linux's Firefox package: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/fi...

Just install the dependencies listed there, run "makepkg", and boom, Firefox pops out the other end. If you're doing active development, you can probably figure out a quicker change/build/test loop, but that'll get you started.

> but it's sounds like a nightmare on windows.

I wouldn't wish the hell of software development on Windows upon my worst enemy :)
AI data centres to go nuclear?
Another day, another data leak.
No sarcasm implied. There needs to be programs at medical schools (or ideally, new schools in the first place) that teach robotic surgery only.

Why would you think this is sarcasm? The availability of capable surgeons is already limited; when looking geographically, they are extremely limited.

You would have surgical assistants and nurses on the ground, but the actual expertise for surgery shouldn't be location dependent.
The Contingency Contingent
A commenter on my blog made contact with someone who had a copy.
I use it a lot, and I run some large groups on it. I don't see any of that stuff, I've never gone looking for it, and I'm not even sure how to look for it. Can you tell me some examples of what to search for to see what you're talking about?
See figures 3 and 11 in this[0] paper - sometimes this is visible with the naked eye, though only up close with your eye practically touching the part

[0]: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4701/10/7/969
They're in Chapter 11, they're not out of business yet.

Why do you think that is what happened? It doesn't seem to be in line with what GGC told their LPs, so I'm curious where you get your interpretation of the events from? Do you have any links or reading you could provide me with?
The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2024 [pdf]
I know a number of nursing homes had >50% mortality from COVID, as there was not even a real attempt at isolation.
While visiting hours may have been restricted, we pretended that nurses and staff (already scarce) were simply unable to transmit COVID, taking them on and off premises on regular shifts, and the result is hundreds of thousands of people killed.

Murdered.
Being a jerk extends all around.

As a manager I’ve had two employees tell HR that I was racist. The evidence? One I fired for performance, the other I had on a performance improvement plan. Mind you I had other minorities on my team in parallel that had no performance issues and strangely enough did not say I was a racist.

Also one time the HR guy (who also doubled as office manager) ran a large scheme where he claimed employees were expensing things, he did it on their behalf and got reimbursed. I found this out after the fact where I was asked if I ever asked him to order laptops or ran up huge Uber bills.
Dankeschön für die Antwort!

You might understand that I read only Bio and LinkedIn, not your whole blog.
Also again very very American thinking. Im just amused.
ZMail on the Lisp Machine would stall the ZMail thread when fetching mail. So you wouldn't be able to compose an email if you'd be fetching 10MiB of mbox.

But it isn't so much about tricks, sometimes it is nice if software just works reliably, GNU Emacs has a great track record on that.
When I first started working, I would respond outside of working hours, work overtime, and try to please everyone. As I got older, I developed a rule: as soon as I finish work, I just ignore all work chats, calls, and emails. Did it affect my well-being? Yes, I highly recommend it to everyone!
In my mind Pinecone is an exemplary example of modern "social media marketing" for a technology company.

They started on vector search at a time when RAG in its current form wasn't a thing; there were just a few search products based on vector search (like a document embedding-based search engine for patents that I whipped into shape to get in front of customers) and if you were going to use vector search you'd need to develop your own indexing system in house or just do a primitive full scan (sounds silly but it's a best-case scenario for full scan and vector indexes do not work as well as 1-d indexes)

They blogged frequently and consistently about the problem they were working on with heart, which I found fascinating because I'd done a lot of reading about the problem in the mid ought's. Thus Pinecone had a lot of visibility for me, although I don't know if I am really their market. (No budget for a cloud system, full scan is fine for my 5M document collection right now, I'd probably try FAISS if it wasn't.)

Today their blog looks more than it used to which makes it a little harder for me to point out how awesome their blog was in the beginning but this post is definitely the kind of post that they made when they were starting out. I'm sure it has been a big help in finding employees, customers and other allies.
On top of that, the recent google monopoly ruling means that most likely Google cannot continue to donate the massive chunk of change yearly to firefox that they have been. That could mean the death of firefox.
looks pretty cool, a bit like the SimulaVR devices.
but 7 hours on 16000mAh sounds hungry
Reminds me of the advice that, if you need to join two mismatched pieces together, you have two options.

1)Add an adapter that’s customized on both ends, or 2) subtract the differences so they mesh directly.

Always look for opportunities to subtract, rather than add. Your system gets easier to understand over time as it becomes the purest representation of itself, instead of a collection of gap-fillers.
MTProto is pretty much transport layer encryption. After the MTProto decryption occurs, Telegram servers still ultimately receive your unencrypted message encoded as a https://core.telegram.org/method/messages.sendMessage to send it to the recipient and to store it. How do you think it is possible that you can sign in on a new device and get all of your old messages? There's a reason Signal can't do that.
$600 for veneer? Inflation-shock still gets me sometimes.
You could argue that the CLOUD act is in direct conflict with European data laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

However, it does not prevent data at rest being stored in the EU. Only that if requested the american company has to exfiltrate it to the states.
Silly question, the EU simply has stricter privacy and data protection laws. As these came into effect relatively recently, a lot of these companies are trying to see what they can get away with. Or at the very least taking a calculated risk that the regulation authorities are not going after them.

So the only way to actually get them to respect these laws is by attaching actual tangible consequences to breaking them.
I just finished Crime and Punishment (translated by these two). What an excellent experience.
Yes, it is! You are the lucky one
It's not that easy really. Several European countries have FISA s.702 functional equivalents that enable intelligence to get orders for interception of personal information on servers and entities within their legal jurisdiction. (e.g., The French Law on Intelligence and the German BND Act)

It's easy to say that the US should just scrap s.702, but unless it's reciprocal with Europe scrapping their interception powers as well, that's a pretty unrealistic ask.
The Valentine is famous among the designers, but the truly popular model is the Lettera 22[1]: many journalists and writers, famous or not, used it, and of course it had a hipster revival. (Also a beautiful machine.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_Lettera_22
Do not develop new cancer drugs too, because people in Africa are dying in masses from HIV and Malaria.
Do not invest in sustainable energy solutions because that would benefit only the rich who could afford the costly infrastructure.

Making change through politics is great, but not everyone can do it.
But aren't those anabolics with a very significant trade off and health implications?

I'm not sure if stigma should exist, but if something gives someone a huge advantage over a natural, but at the same time at the cost of life or health and other things, without telling they are doing it, it gives a false impression to everyone who may be comparing themselves to these people.

Not to mention the issues some young people get into when they work out a lot and compare themselves to those people and think they are never big enough, and then they get into this state of big, that is only appealing to the very same community, but not average person being misled by groups of celebrities, influencers and other people.

And also if you do go on TRT I think there's no good coming back, so usually it would be much better to try to achieve normal test with natural means first, because otherwise you are going a path with side effects and dependence for life.

Also young people wanting higher test don't understand life very well yet, they will tunnel vision on their single insecurity and think this is the golden path to solve it, while with a little perspective this understanding can change a whole lot.
Emmanuel Macron about the Pavel Durov Arrestation [FR]
Oh wow, how have I not heard of this? I assume Firefox can still strike some deal for revenue sharing of people who choose to use Google on Firefox, though? Or was the money purely for having Google be the default?
If I had a choice between ugly and rich and pretty and poor I'd be sorely tempted by ugly, particularly if I was making the decision for an organization.
I'll tell you what it means for my iPhone. It means it's going in the trash.
Freight rail is absolutely key infrastructure even if the average American doesn't think about it day to day. No, except for a few places (including commuter rail in some cities), Americans don't care about and aren't willing to pay for passenger rail given that they can drive or take a plane.
Should've Bought a Playstation
Something I didn't see mentioned in the article about AVX512, aside from the xsave/xrstor overhead, is that AVX512 is power hungry and causes CPU frequency scaling. See [1], [2] for details and as an example of how nuanced it can get.

[1] https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/central-libraries/us/e...

[2] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...
I don't think Canonical ever was a non-profit.