skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This website makes some claims about what has caused both growth and decline that are pretty contentious.

I think that many would argue that the growth following the second world war was the result of massive state investment in public services like creating the NHS and the building of council housing.

They baffelingly attribute yhat growth to the Conservative Govrernment of the 1930s rather than the post war labour government.

Similarly this page attributes growth in the 80s to the Conservative government privatisation program. Again many would argue that was actually the start of the decline which we are feeling the pain of now with things like a terrible and fractured rail service and not enough housing.

I think a perfect example of this is our water companies that have been private since the 80s and have done nothing but pay dividends to shareholders and now we have a disaster with shit being poured into all our rivers and costs to households rising dramatically.

Edit: I read on and they use the drop in passengers in the railway in 1965 as an argument against nationalisation of the rail service, somehow neglecting to mention the beeching cuts! That is incredibly missleading given 55% of stations were axed due to a /reduction/ of state infrastructure at that time.
> Is it all due to the prospect of finally seeing a feasible road to AGI?!

Or just hope. AGI is a capitalist's wet dream: it would completely undercut labor's power or allow it to be replaced completely, and it could also allow the developer to muscle out a large fraction of other capitalists from the economy.

Even though AGI would be terrible for the rest of us, it's got so much upside for VC types they can't help themselves.
While this is better than loading up a coal power plant, the way I see it, it's still a tragic situation. Even if AI used purely fossil-free electricity (which it doesn't), it's still putting pressure on our grids and energy production. The green energy AI consumes if the green energy some other less lucrative industry will not consume. Big tech is currently scraping their net neutrality plans left and right...
> * P(correct) = (1-e)^n
* This diverges exponentially

I don't get it, 1-e is between 0 and 1, so (1-e)^n converge to zero. Also, a probability cannot diverge since it's bounded by 1!

I think the argument is that 1 - e^n converges to 1, which is what the law is about.
It's the national religion.
War is pretty hard when a decent portion of the thing you need to actually do war are made by the country you're at war with. Sure, you can start a war, but it'll be over when your local warehouses run out two weeks later.
Bank Rejected My Wire Transfer Due to My Birthplace, Iran
Earlier today I attempted to pay my developer (less than $5,000 USD) via wire transfer from my bank in the Philippines to their account in the US, and just this evening I received this SMS from my bank:

----

Hi Mr. *, Good Afternoon! This is * from **. We regret to inform you that the telegraphic transfer that was processed earlier was returned due to declared Birthplace. Funds were credited back to your USD account.

----

For context, I moved to Canada when I was three years old and this is the first time I’ve run into this issue.

I've very worried right now, because I don't know what I could possibly do if these kinds of restrictions start to escalate. I can't change my country of birth. The whole thing is humiliating and seems it belongs to a bygone era.

EDIT:

I asked my bank representative if the receiver's bank rejected my transfer, and their response was:

"No sir, unfortunately it didn't reach the [US bank name] yet since we cannot proceed with the transfer outside the Philippines due to the aforementioned reason."

I've done numerous international wire transfers with my bank, and this is the first time one has been blocked due to my Birthplace.
Microsoft TypeSpec
> Anyone living on their own sees all their income drained by landlords

The entire country's economy feels like a property-indexed Ponzi scheme, with everyone (including the government) rather keep fueling the ponzi as long as possible rather than breaking it up.
I don't think that's what they're saying at all. They're talking not about qualia in the human sense, but specifically about "the qualia of their own training". That is, the corpus that LLMs "learn" from and the "experiences" of those texts that are generalized during the training process. Both the raw data and the memory of "learning" is discarded.

So if one were to improve an LLM along those lines, I believe it would be something like: 1) LLM is asked a question. 2) LLM comes up with an initial response. 3) LLM retrieves the related "learning" history behind that answer and related portions of the corpus. 4) LLM compares the initial answer with the richer set of information, looking for conflicts between the initial answer and the broader set, or "learning" choices that may be false. 6) LLM generates a better answer and gives it. 7) LLM incorporates this new "learning".

And that strikes me as a pretty reasonable long-term approach, if not one that fits within the constraints of the current gold rush.
>> My Greek teacher hated the word “television.” He considered it an abomination that combined the Greek prefix telos (far off) with a Latin base, videre (to see).

Note "telos" which means 'goal' or 'end', but "tele-" which indeed implies distance. Words like Telegraph and Telephone that use "tele-" are modern inventions but ancient words with a "tele-" prefix are "τηλεβόας" ("televoas", a loudspeaker") and "Tηλέμαχος" (Telemachus, lit. "he who fights from a distance", metaphorically an archer or javelin-thrower; the son of Odysseus).

Edit: many more here->

https://www.greek-language.gr/digitalResources/ancient_greek...
It's because the experience you get is completely random and heavily weighted towards the fatal. If you show up with something life threatening they're actually pretty good.

But your experience of non-life threatening can be anything from good, to indifference/boredom to aggressive dismissal. This also applies to things that could be markers of something fatal, analogy would be they do little when smoke is coming out from under the door but do jump into action when the flames are coming out from under the door. Most of the interactions start on off the foot that you're assumed to be a timewaster too.

Keep begging my parents to just go private because I don't like trusting their lives to the random chance they have a good doctor when I can instead have one incentivized by their continued existence.
How is this positive news?
how do you do that and have to make a living?
More nuclear is a good thing. FAANG nuclear is even better, because they will be be ready and equipped to push back the insane NIMBY crowd(s) and also don't need to be worried about getting reelected.
So how would this work? Does this mean Microsoft will build a directly connected data center nearby?

Or is Microsoft just buying power from the plant's owner on the energy market?
OpenAI stated [1] that one of the breakthroughs needed for o1's train of thought to work was reinforcement learning to teach it to recover from faulty reasoning.

> Through reinforcement learning, o1 learns to hone its chain of thought and refine the strategies it uses. It learns to recognize and correct its mistakes. It learns to break down tricky steps into simpler ones. It learns to try a different approach when the current one isn’t working.

That's incredibly similar to this paper, which is discusses the difficulty in finding a training method that guides the model to learn a self-correcting technique (in which subsequent attempts learn from and improve on previous attempts), instead of just "collapsing" into a mode of trying to get the answer right with the very first try.

[1]: https://openai.com/index/learning-to-reason-with-llms/
To make a possibly imperfect analogy, Trickle is like a Jupyter notebook designed specifically for LLMs, but without the need to write any code.
Of course, but all emails you could read have been sent at one point or another. Unless you only care about local email delivery, you're going to have to get involved with PKI.

And if your threat model is bad enough that PKI isn't good enough for IMAP, why aren't you using a VPN in the first place? Or even an airgapped network? Or PGP?
Now that it's out, it's no longer a cheating device.
A lack of infrastructure development combined with a population being artificially increased by high levels of immigration, which is applying downward pressure on wages while pushing property costs (the source of most of the UK's problems) ever higher.

A population increase of around 1% per year may not seem huge until you consider what 1% of the UK road network or 1% of the NHS actually looks like, and what it'd take to build infrastructure and expand services at that rate year upon year.

The reality of building infrastructure in the UK is HS2 - a 20+ year project to build a little over 100 miles of high speed railway (with future northern phases predictably cancelled), at a cost over over half a billion quid per mile - it'll likely put any government off attempting any significant infrastructure construction ever again.
> I wonder if this is a regional or generational thing?

Generational is a good bet:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41537994
> live from legacy sectors

Finance is a legacy sector now?

> energy starved

Importing energy while ramping up your own production with wind and tidal, and importantly, nuclear, is not "starved". Is there a lack of energy in the UK? Blackouts like the ones in Texas?
Wait, how does the pro improve remote play? I may have missed something.
That's when you become a contractor and work with recruiters or go into consulting.
No,this is the AI math tutor
This is a cool project, reminds me very much of IRC Poker from back in the early days on the internet.
I'm aware of the conditions, and there's no impediment.
This has now already been fixed: https://github.com/element-hq/matrix-react-sdk/pull/62.
Sometimes I'll read a biography of a famous British person and the first chapter is dedicated to the full family lineage of them. You won't even hear the subject's name until chapter 2 because it was more important to discuss what his grandfather did in India in 1895. I think biographies of Americans tend to start at the childhood of the subject and will mention their family life and parents when relevant
How is Substack blog authority here?
Nice! I've worked with a few similar real world payoff languages. This paper discusses one of them:
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/haskell-barclays/
Microsoft's TypeSpec reminds us why OpenAPI exists in the first place
Seems you didn't read the story.
This graphic[1] show how insane the European electricity market regulation has been for both France and the UK: going from electricity prices on par with the US to 2-3 times the price in less than a decade !

[1]: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/7SNeG/full.png
Ironically, a lot of the US medical professional problem mirrors housing -- supply limited by fiat, to the advantage of existing suppliers.

https://www.medicaleconomics.com/view/match-day-2023-a-remin...
I always wondered who would pay $1000 for a device you have to babysit, just so that you can become an unpaid beta tester and data drone for SV millionaires. I guess all you have to do is tell people they're a part of a revolution?
FOSDEM is upon us, and finding the right room to follow the chat is going to be much harder with Element X. Ditto for LPC which just ended. It's OK, Element for Android is still here, but I hope you'll have a solution for small servers with a controlled number of room — but that would still need browsing on mobile.
In the Acknowledgements, Neal thanks the Blue Origin team for the time he spent with them in the 2000s. Maybe he didn't want to hurt their feelings.
Microsoft wants Three Mile Island to fuel its AI power needs
Show HN: My Static Website
I imagine it must be something like small Pacific island to small town in the Canadian far north or something...
Elon Musk and Tesla Shape America's Future. But Problems Run Deeper Than Tweets
Because you were only talking about martyrdom and suicide bombing which is a choice of weapon, there is not a single word relating to choice of target in your comment. One could maybe see some implicit hint at the choice of target as suicide bombings are most effective and mostly used for a specific kind of targets and they are often pretty indiscriminate attacks. But as you can target more or less the same targets with non-suicide bombings as with suicide bombings and you were specifically talking about suicide bombings and not bombings in general, this is not something that you should expect people to take away from your comment.

By the way, I am not sure you understood necessity in the way I wanted it understood. I wanted to say what if they target civilians because they do not have the means to effectively target the military, i.e. if it is necessary to target civilians in order to have any impact at all. And you can target civilians in various ways, so martyrdom and suicide bombings are not necessary. It is, I would assume, however true that martyrdom and certain religious views about an afterlife make suicide bombings a much more viable weapon than otherwise.
CakePHP 5.1.0 Released
Could you say what car ?
You pay a thousand bones for a device you have to babysit. What's confusing about that?
Hmmm. 50 years old and out of action for half a decade. That’s going to require a lot of work to persuade the NRC it’s safe to operate.

Given how difficult it’s proven to build new nuclear around the world, what are the odds of this recommissioning being on time and budget?
> Unfortunately these supply-side policies causing stagnation are representative of what our ageing population actually wants.

This is basically it. The pensioners don't want change. They might theoretically want some nebulous "improvement", but only if it doesn't cost anything, doesn't involve building anything, or even a change of use, doesn't make any noise, doesn't increase traffic, and doesn't involve any immigration.

The people demand stagnation.
I give them the benefit of the doubt. They are of the opinion its hard to get anything built because of regulations at the planning stage.

Difficult to see anybody but piggy sticks trying to get away with building with highly flammable materials.
AI might be the thing that ends badly this time. Better than using fossil fuels for it though.
yea could be my specific hospital. I've heard from indian colleagues that if you sprain your ankle you can see someone immediately but if you get cancer and need to specialist then you are competing with thousands of ppl to see that doctor.
It’s even worse. If you have money and are against deploying AGI once we get there you still want to be the first to achieve it, because it’s the only reasonable chance of stopping others… assuming you can even align it.
How are nimby crowds insane? Accidents may happen. And did happen in the past in that same place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
Use extended (commented) RegExps in JavaScript
Moerenuma Park: A Giant, Gorgeous 'Living Sculpture' in Hokkaido
Did the article not address these questions for you?
If I were going to use these in my product, I would only do it the other way around. If there's no explicit license, I'm not touching someone else's trademark.
> Thanks to their long-flight endurance, they are suited for long-term missions.

How long can your drone stay in the air?
I agree, but the economy as a whole seems to have swung to the completely opposite side. Every product is either turning into disposable one-time-use items, or into a subscription. Even "luxury" items aren't providing quality anymore.

I'm not calling for t-shirts that are guaranteed to last 20 years, but it would be nice if clothing didn't fall apart after a wash or two just because they saved 5% on material cost.
I'm a little disappointed this IEEE article doesn't give any technical details. As an EE, I'd like to know what they are using for the antenna wire conductor. The quote from the article says it's a transparent conductor, which I've never heard of.

“I don’t think the idea for using transparent conductive materials as an antenna existed before"
Microsoft launches a Windows streaming app for iPhones, Macs and Android devices
Yeah, 'move fast and break things' is certainly the best ideology for running nuclear plant.
Having recently visited the US, the infrastructure there (at least in the parts of California I visited) is noticeably worse than in Europe (including the UK). So I don't think it can just be about infrastructure.
Was anyone else horrified because they thought the powerplant was going to be run by a Microsoft AI? (TFA is about Microsoft purchasing nuclear power to run their AI)
I believe this is the video that the article summarizes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM_8UOPFpqE
Yeah, due to thw Fly America Act, I (usually) have to book through a US carrier even if it's a code share for work travel and run into this problem often...
It does: https://github.com/adryd325/oneko.js/blob/main/oneko.js

const isReducedMotion =
window.matchMedia(`(prefers-reduced-motion: reduce)`) === true ||
window.matchMedia(`(prefers-reduced-motion: reduce)`).matches === true;

if (isReducedMotion) return;

Simple but effective. More websites should include this check. Well done, adryd325!
Ctrl-f "class" -> "world-class". Checks out.

One thing I will never forget from my short time living in London is how un-insulated the homes there were. Single or thin double-glazed windows, full-brick homes without a hint of thermal insulation. Sure there were exceptions but not many. At the time in Central Europe the movement to heavily insulated, nearly-passive homes was already in full swing. Many central European countries were much poorer than the UK, not even mentioning London, and energy prices were lower, so, naively I thought, everyone with an old house in the UK should be busy insulating it. It would pay off in a few years. Why didn't they?

And I think one of the reasons is that the governments, indeed the ruling class as a whole, just didn't care that the commoners are paying over their heads for energy and are freezing in moldy houses, because the class divide is just so big. It would be interesting to live in an alternate universe where Karl Marx would live in a different country - perhaps his theory would place a smaller emphasis on social class.
If only safety was a matter of system design and operational practices, not geographic location.
Presumably they’ve signed an agreement to buy the power (delivered through the grid) from the plant operator at a contracted price. The plant operator can then get finance for the work required to actually deliver on the contract.

A lot of renewable energy projects were financed through similar agreements, called PPAs.
I'm not framing them in terms of an out group at all. It's the exact opposite- they are the most "in" of in-groups. In the UK, government policy for the last 15 years has been hugely influenced by this specific thinktank and two or three similar ones. It's an extraordinarily small group. If Britain is in decline due to lack of infrastructure investment it's in no small part because of the policy positions that they have advocated and implemented during that time.

I care a great deal about the actual points in the article. It's just important to understand this is not in any sense a neutral analysis.
Show HN is not for a simple web site.
If using a ton of energy has to happen then I'd prefer it be generated from nuclear, but I don't see the need to supply LLM data centers with a ton of energy as a positive.
Yeah though not all flights are daily
It is a big story if one can make it part of the anti-trust actions. Google having a monopoly which it leaves laying around as a weapon to be picked up by the next most corrupted big player to damage real businesses. The impact on the market is measurable (with naked eye), is distorting the market (which anti-trust is dealing with) and is an instance of escalating (making it actionable) domain reputation abuse. Google failing to police such blatant abuse might also open them to class action lawsuits.
Ya I kind of answered what you are getting at in my longer response. Basically it's a question of fulfillment.

I can feel how much more fulfilled I'd be if I got to make the personal contributions in my heart. I wanted to write languages and frameworks, even design hardware like multicore CPUs, that would have made tech work easier so I could accomplish more and maybe win the internet lottery in the process.

But instead, I just endlessly ran the treadmill to make rent, in the end only standing in place as if I had done nothing. That's what the very essence of the suffering of life is: we insert a coin from the astral plane to incarnate in this life and run the rat race, eventually losing it all to end up right back where we started. Do it enough and we might ascend to the next level, but even then, we eventually volunteer to start over as the fool.

So nothing against C++. In many ways, it's still the most capable bare-metal language. The catch is that the developer has to do everything by hand. It's like comparing a protected memory process to one that can take out the whole OS at any time. I know from personal experience, having programmed my first computer (a Mac Plus) with C++ in the early 90s and having to reboot up to 30 times per day.

Today my time is stretched so thin that in an 8 hour day, I usually get less than 1 hour of actual work done, and probably more like 20 minutes if I'm being honest. It's all logistics now. Travel, orchestrating containers, meeting with team members, researching workarounds for unfortunate snafus in whatever framework, navigating large codebases, maintaining the body and living area, etc.

If I was using C# or C++ instead of PHP and the shell, I simply wouldn't be able to get any real work done in any reasonable amount of time. And PHP is a lackluster language, a far cry from what I would design, but it's the only imperative language with copy-on-write arrays like functional languages, so runs circles around them and avoids countless conceptual pitfalls. It's like MS Excel, simultaneously the best and worst software that I've ever used.

I really want to learn Haskell and Scala to extend my functional programming knowledge, but so far have only made it to Lisp and Clojure. I think I need a course to overcome some of my misunderstandings around decomposition, currying, functors, monads, impurity, etc. The utility of MATLAB jumped out to me immediately (operations happen on arrays, not primitives, similarly to shaders), but I haven't found a use for lambdas as much.

I'm happy that you've fared well and are able to do what interests you. I'm struggling with discipline, motivation and giving myself the space to play as a people-pleaser. I've had a scarcity mindset and been in survival mode for so many decades that I don't know how to put myself first. I just procrastinate and project my frustrations onto the web..
That's not true. In France you pay both taxe foncière (on any and all property you own) and taxe d'habitation (unless you're renting it for the whole year) on second(and more) homes you own. With some exceptions like newbuilds, newly renovated for better insulation, in very rural places, etc.

https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F59/per...

https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F42
Adjacent plug for a free Chrome Extension: FlyOnTime embeds flight delay probability straight into Google Flights. Very useful when you're evaluating a number of flights from the same origin and destination but at different times.

Helps you really know what you're paying for.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/flyontime/mjhocoppe...
When I explain to anyone about privacy and some service/products answer usually is 'yeah but it is more convenient so...'