skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I grew up in Ontario and did French immersion schooling with two of my siblings. One year our family drove across Quebec to summer with grandparents in Maine. Along the way we stopped at a McDonalds for lunch. My siblings and I excitedly ordered in French: "Puis-je avoir un hamburger?" Our orders were taken no problem. Our New England anglophone parents then went to order: "May I please have a hamburger?" "Désolé; je'n comprends pas l'Anglais," they were told. The kids ended up ordering two "amburger"s for our parents. We've been laughing about it ever since. Good on em for caring about identity I guess? The stereotype of francophone rudeness is still a running joke in our family 30 years later.

Note: there are some wonderful French Canadians out there. Just not that day at that register in that Macdonalds.
Yeah, I'm using that fork. I also tried Polonium, but I had regular issues with it not resizing windows when other windows were moved/closed.
Wow. I do not think people fully appreciate that when a wildfire rips through a community, it's not just leaves and trees, but plastics and everything else.
So am I :-)

Some things I was warned about but did anyway. The insulation is icynene foam. Some foams disintegrate over time, but this one has not at all. It's far more effective than fiberglass, no breathing in fiberglass, no mildew. I'm very pleased with it.

(The GC made me take full responsibility for it!)
Strategic Defence Review 2024: Call for Evidence

Thank you for engaging with the Strategic Defence Review.

The UK faces threats that are growing and diversifying: war in Europe; conflict in the Middle East; states across the world that are increasingly acting in ways that challenge regional and global stability as well as our values and interests; terrorist groups; hybrid attacks; and instability caused by climate change.

Therefore, on 16 July 2024, the Prime Minister launched a Strategic Defence Review (SDR) to ensure the United Kingdom is both secure at home and strong abroad – now and for the years to come.

It is to be Britain’s review – not just the Government’s – so will consult serving military, veterans, MPs of all parties, industry, and academia.

The SDR will be headed by three external Reviewers in a first-of-its-kind for UK defence:

Lord Robertson - Former Defence Secretary and NATO Secretary General (Review lead)
Dr Fiona Hill CMG - Foreign policy expert and former US presidential advisor
General Sir Richard Barrons – Former Commander Joint Forces Command and former Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff

This call for views sets out specific propositions to be answered that will help our team of reviewers. You are invited to provide responses to each of the propositions by no later than 30 September 2024. You will be allowed to submit up to 500 words per proposition. Please note you cannot submit a response more than once.

Strategic Defence Review Terms of Reference: Strategic Defence Review 2024-2025: Terms of Reference - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
I need to noodle on this. Hmm.
3k a month plus what you have to pay to have someone babysit and feed it. this is wild.
Does your email provider cooperate with law enforcement when they show up with a warrant and want details about an email/account involved in criminal activity?
> It's also not in the class "generating billions of dollars of value"

Clearly not as much as Linux, but almost certainly it's already been a part of asset creation or use within film and video games that topped billions of dollars. The movie RRR alone is 160m+ worldwide (See in part https://www.blender.org/get-involved/user-stories/).
Is that a practical example? Has anyone specified a transformer using TLA+? More generally, is TLA+ practical for code that uses a lot of matrix multiplication?
It’s not cool to feed ai and there are no points for doing so. Ai feeder communities will die eventually
I can tell which side of the track you grew up on. It's called surviving and we do it because the other outcome is death.
Please don't take HN threads into gender flamewar hell (or any flamewar hell). It's just what we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Window shade was a brilliant feature!
Listen my fellow programmer.

You can never learn it all.

You remember a fraction of things you merely touch. More if you narrow your focus.

If you have the passion for programming it will manifest itself by itself over time and with training.

Use all the tools available for learning and doing. Question it just as much. Explore the mind and the different axis of the field. Read the books but think for yourself.

Programming without money involved is creative and fun. Make sure you remember this. It's not a science or backed by natural laws. Don't worry about being wrong, we all are without guidance, but seek the truth within yourself for what you believe is the best path for becoming a good programmer.
Good to know. Thanks for pointing it out.
rqlite: A lightweight, user-friendly, distributed relational db built on SQLite
IT doesn’t like the domain I use for self hosted stuff… ;(
The practical effect of locking up "the people responsible" though (if there's any actual guilt), at least in this case, would deprive people of the product: Durov is the key person for basically all things re Telegram, so his not being available to take care of said things would lead to its eventual death.
Email in profile! That's afaik the common or best practice. I can recommend doing the same since HN has no other way to reach out to an individual otherwise -- I'd already have shot you an email if you had ;)

I expect it'll indeed be good for students, can be fun to parse various statistics out of: from simple day-of-week counts, or how many strikes land near a few given cities/places (coordinates+radius), to exceedingly complex/predictive. We had some fresh-from-university developers apply who were not able to handle it properly, so also from an employer's POV I can recommend using some large dataset as teaching material (too big for RAM after decompression, but easily fits onto your SSD/HDD and it's decompressible sequentially on the fly to work with it)
It is confusing language but basically they're saying "we're giving you this ability, but will be adding a new feature to fix this unfortunate side effect".

I think it will cause a shift to "screenshots of posts" as is done on Twitter/X when the retweeter does not want to @ / mention the original author.
They're acknowledging that it has some downsides, that they think they can resolve through other features that they'll develop later.

> If you don't want people to be able to reply critically to a post, why not have a private profile or not post it in the first place?

The problem isn't people replying critically, it's people being assholes on the internet, leveraging their follower base to harass someone. This feature gives tool to the bluesky posters to protect themselves against this form of harassment.

Hence why they're going with it despite the downsides: it's a necessary feature for people to protect themselves against harassment.
Kotlin aside, what is the deal with many websites not letting me zoom on mobile? (It is hard to see what is going on in the notebooks without zooming in.)
If I remember right, Best Buy used to run NextStep
If they were why would they raise? They’ve already achieved scale.
That would be O(n^2) though, where n is the max length of the strings to compare, right?
> I think you're giving Trump too much personal credit here

Yeah I think you're right - it's more so his party.

> I don't think Ron DeSantis or any other candidate would have been a stark difference from Trump

Yeah probably not (and maybe worse even).

> we're not going to fix much by electing a "good" president

Probably not, but a blue president won't abolish the department of education. Nor would they instate a requirement that all government employees must pass an exam proving they're conservative (yes, real).

The problem is we have two right-leaning party. The moderate one, the dems, who do almost nothing. And the far-right one, which is dangerous. Like... actively looking to make everyone's lives worse at the behest of corporations and the ultra-wealthy, and then to top it off, enforce religious values and good morals.

It's a shitty situation, but in my opinion an easy choice. At least currently. The repubs have gotten much more radical in the past decade IMO.
There's a 200bn parameter llama model?
Am I in a bad sci-fi novel? People aren't machines! How is this a such a difficult concept? LLMs have as much thought as quicksort. I swear to god humans will anthropomorphize everything except ourselves. Do y'all's salaries depend on this or something?

There is no rule that says "If a human can do something, a computer program instructed by a human can do the same thing." Hell that rule doesn't even exist for humans acting as stand-ins. I can't send someone I hire out of the country and have them use my passport. It's why you can watch a movie in a theater but an autonomous system working on your behalf, a camera, can't.

Github made a tool, it's as alive as a hammer. It "learns" as much as your programmable pad lock. Whether or not the human employees of Github are allowed to use copyrighted material to make that tool, and whether the human employees of Github are performing a copyrighted work when users make use of the tool is the legal question.

Y'all wouldn't survive the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie apocalypse.
This seems significantly more lightweight than bubblewrap -- it doesn't attempt to do much in the way of containerization or isolation, just remapping certain files. I feel like this could be done in a small shell script if you reduce the configurability.
I feel like this is a good time to link that "no profit" skit from Silicon Valley (HBO show)?
I enjoy reading about new languages on HN. It’s weird because the grammar is weird. It’s like seeing start var ! oper addition sub var !! mltplctn var % close close or something and eventually you realize it means a + b*c. Why invent a new language? Why not just write list<int> if you want a list of integers or write Channel<string> or one of the idioms that everyone knows? I don’t know, but it can be fun to play with communication and meaning and grammar, and maybe even more fun if you get to be part of a group that gets paid for it.
yes, and no. Stricly speaking you need a licesnse to allow you to use copyright information. Even if it's non-commercial (obvious example, if you post, say, Jasmine making out with Hitler on some non-monetized account, Disney can take that down. Or try. It really comes down to if the platform wants to argue fair use or parody or whatnot. Most won't defend you, though).

But enforcement-wise, Disney won't bother going after every copyright potential. They will focus on the biggest money makers or the biggest potential to brand damage. So it's not a worry for most people who will just draw some mickey mouse for a friend, or even private client as long as they aren't stupid.
I don't understand what this is, to be honest.

> Each message and interaction becomes a privacy setting, enabling constant negotiation and adjustment of privacy boundaries.

How? What does this really mean, in concrete terms?

I have more thoughts, but since I'm not understanding the proposal, they may not be relevant.
The issue is still open for GNOME, so I would assume it still is very much a problem:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/9
The US has done much much more nefarious things. I think it is totally possible – and convincing for that matter.

But another commenter already pointed out that she was pressed to write the book like that.
Show HN: Repo2vec – an open-source library for chatting with any codebase
Hi HN, We're excited to share repo2vec: a simple-to-use, modular library enabling you to chat with any public or private codebase. It's like Github Copilot but with the most up-to-date information about your repo.

We made this because sometimes you just want to learn how a codebase works and how to integrate it, without spending hours sifting through the code itself.

We tried to make it dead-simple to use. With two scripts, you can index and get a functional interface for your repo. Every generated response shows where in the code the context for the answer was pulled from.

We also made it plug-and-play where every component from the embeddings, to the vector store, to the LLM is completely customizable.

If you want to see a hosted version of the chat interface with its features, here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNVzmqRXUCA

We would love your feedback!

- Mihail and Julia
The fact that you can still access hidden quotes/replies/etc from the API makes me think it's a client-side (i.e. app-only) feature.
I think they’re intending to address something like THE X GROUP DID Y THING TO THE Z GROUP (which we will assume to be false) by allowing for factual corrections via “community notes” and “labels” that I assume the T&S team plans to control. Depending on how the specifics of this future plan manifest, I think this could be useful for quelling legitimate adversarial or genuinely uninformed and harmful misinformation. I still worry about the bias and transparency of whoever controls these labels, and the general potential of these features to enable the creation of echo chambers, but least this will all be transparent and observable via the developer API so factual investigation and reporting can be done on how this actually plays out in practice. I hate censorship and the general cowardice of people who would abuse these features to stifle legitimate dissent, but I think these features are a good compromise between that and the opposite real problem of malicious/harmful legitimate misinformation.
Bill Clinton is definitely far-right.
This is a "gotcha" mechanic, not a feed filtering mechanic.

Platforms are not only turning people thin-skinned, they're actively amplifying the desire for us to control the behaviors of others.

This is why we need true P2P social media instead of platforms or cabal-led federation.
Sounds like they are making a tradeoff of creating community bubbles or silos in order to limit unwanted interactions.

Seems like safe spaces online, where people can be happy but perhaps they will be sharing opinions and information that are incorrect, but they won't be unhappy from people they disagree with providing the facts.
Even the best gamification model is not worth very much IMHO.
Loved reading this. I admire your courage and ingenuity to dress as a poor person. If you haven’t already read it you might enjoy Orwell’s autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and London, your story tangentially reminded me of it.
>If you don't want people to be able to reply critically to a post, why not have a private profile or not post it in the first place?

Exactly. Someone will post something abhorrent, critical replies will be removed, supportive replies will stay. It will make echo chambers worse than they ever have been. Then again, that may be exactly what the users want.
We live in such interesting times regarding space. Between Stoke, Rocket Lab, and SpaceX, we have three fully reusable launch vehicles being built today!

I am really excited about Stoke. They have done so much on a relatively limited budget.

For anyone unfamiliar with Stoke, here is a great recent interview with CEO, Andy Lapsa:

https://mainenginecutoff.com/podcast/284
Probably similar to the concurrent chat server from gopl[0] then. The pattern is a bit surprising at first, still fairly readable.

[0]: https://github.com/adonovan/gopl.io/blob/master/ch8/chat/cha...
I'm building an app where the competition basically is all about AI. It's a "continuous screen recorder" to look back at what you've worked on over the days or weeks. https://ScreenMemory.app

All other similar apps (Rewind.ai is the most notable, or maybe Microsofts Recall) basically focus (focused?) on summarizing your day through AI. Personally I am fine with a smaller scope, instead focusing on the visual aspect of a day.
Hungry people tend to not care at all who smiles for show and who actually cares, as long as the food is served. Just my 2 cents, but I get where you're coming from.
You are a bad bad man
The boat isn’t even here yet. We’re watching it maybe getting built.
We can't appreciate it because it's unknown to the public. For Waymo's detractors, the assumption is it's AI stands for Actually Indians; for its fans, it's Nvidia GPUs and Google TPUs with zero human input. The truth is somewhere in-between, but as a customer of their product, how much do I need to care? if the system requires an army of contractors to actually work,
rasing costs, that's between the Waymo investor and their balance sheet. Though I guess as someone that owns Google stock I technically am an investor.
Something being true only by definition is unfortunately a very weak claim.

For example the company servers could be hosted on an island with armed guards instructed to burn everything if anyone approaches and the decryption happens only on those servers: sure they have access by definition, but they really don't.
Humanity could survive on geothermal if Earth was known to face ejection from the solar system. There could be civilizations on those planets.
There was talk about intranasal vaccines against Covid in 2020 already. But there was a catch: they need to be tested really, really well.

Anything that gets snorted into your nose has a pretty short path to the brain, with potentially "interesting" results (cocaine, Naegleria fowleri etc.). So you have to be extra sure that your intranasal medication is harmless.

As the article mentions, this particular vaccine has been developed for four years. That seems to be long enough to be sure. But I wouldn't be taking it back in 2021 or 2022.
While most people came to Walter to ask about programming languages and their design, or Empire, you knew better and focused on his true talent: tactics and strategy of North American residential structures.
I built this page 'cause I like to use Emacs' EWW and Lynx from
terminal windows sometimes. It's sort of thematically related:

https://ohmeadhbh.github.io/bobcat/

Greycoder.com had the same idea at around the same time:

https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/

And this is the typeface I use for my xterms:

https://github.com/lalo/VT220-mod-font

Monospace is awesome. I love what Oskar has done here.
Musk has done some impressive things for himself. Along the way he’s helped out society. Now it seems as though he’s done with that and cares more about changing it match his image.
The government is literally the reason the rail costs so much. They created the regulations that force the cost so high.

Your argument appears to be sure, the government spends a ton of money on useless things and overpays massively for the end result on the ok things but hey at least that's something?

Which is a fine argument I guess if you think that wasting tax payer money for poor quality outcomes is ok because its better than nothing.
Historically, here in the US, things like 40 hour weeks, two-day weekends, overtime pay, safety protections, etc. came about because of union actions and the political climate they created.

small example - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Friday_(Minneapolis)
I've searched 'Orwell' on this page with no results. Feel like someone should mention the first half of Down and Out in Paris and London. His first book about life as a 'plongeur' in twenties Paris is very memorable.
Disbarred celebrity lawyer Tom Girardi guilty of stealing millions from clients
OpenAI's revenue is more diversified than just having the "best" LLM (ChatGPT+, enterprise deals, etc).

Only developers care about the academic LLM benchmarks and even fewer will switch all their code to a different LLM provider and spend the time implementing it.
If China was allowing Signal to operate within China, the most logical and simple explanation would have been that China had backdoor access.

To you point though, it sounds like Signal is not actually allowed to operate in China so there's nothing to explain after all.
According to the application page it is indeed a 5 km beam.
For electronics, some reputable places are B&H, Digikey, Mouser
Clever! I found another simple alternative though.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/why-openai-could-los...

If you take this at face-value, they probably aren't profitable (to the tune of a $5 billion loss). I don't like idle speculation, but having actually read this their analysis seems pretty sound. Their numbers on training costs and hosting actually came from an anonymous insider. Impossible to say how reliable this anonymous insider is, but planting false, exaggerated numbers to outwit competitors seems a bit too much like a hare-brained scheme, hence why I opt to go with the numbers. If anything, companies tend to downplay costs when lying.

The one thing that caught me as a little bit crazy was spending $1.5 billion on employees. They have ~1500 employees, so that's $1 million per head. That seems insane, but then again, AI researchers are a valuable commodity these days.

Even if the cost of employees was $0, you'd still be looking at estimated losses in the billions.
Thanks for sharing all of this, typical HN at its best. Off the top of your head can you think of any other books like "Common Sense Pest Control" that served you well in a similar capacity?
"Hallucination-free" gets my vote!
Pretty much, the first one being more like you can hide a comment that you don't like and if someone wants to see it they can click "see hidden replies"
Please don't take HN threads further into gender flamewar hell (or any flamewar hell). It's just what we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You can't just say it's unreasonable without providing some justification for this point of view.
Anthropic and other models are roughly par with OpenAI.

I would value each of those companies' practical revenue potential as equal for now.

The operating costs themselves are eye watering, and the hardware is deprecating. So that has to be subtracted from revenue projections to get something like a real valuation.

I would invest in anthropic today, they seem to understand use cases better at the moment.

I also think LLMs are wildly over hyped, and they will be shunted to a niche in the next few years, essentially providing autocomplete or search for business tasks for the most part, with strong inroads on video analysis, automated translation, and other classic machine learning & neural net tasks.
Ouch: conversation got dragged away by wild oxen.

Back to Grace Hopper:

What I lived most about the first presentation was her questions about “Valuing Information” and getting nothing but blank stares whenever she asked this question.

This is also a huge missed research domain in biomedical research. For me the vale of information (data utility) is a function of data connectivity potential. If I have one vector of data that connects to 1000 other vectors of data then that vector has much greater utility (all else equal) than onr vector that only connects on one other vector. The first vector is “smart” data that leads to valuable information, the second vector is “mute” data—just barely information at all.

Link on this general topic hat I hope GH would have enjoyed as much as I did her luminous and funny talk: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2751652/