skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like you missed my point

If the DC legal team knew their TM was indefensible, they ought to have picked their battles FAR more carefully. Because sending a demand letter to a target likely to contest the TM, would be the end of the TM. Which is exactly what happened.

They could have literally kept their TM - to sue another day - if they had chosen to look the other way with superbabies.

So, my point was whether it was hubris that led to the decision to go after superbabies, or failure instituting unsexy (but necessary) internal dilligence checklists.
> What is the real world benefit we will get in return?

None. I've been using Python "in anger" for twenty years and the GIL has been a problem zero times. It seems to me that removing the GIL will only make for more difficulty in debugging.
They had a massive data breach that hit about 50% of their customers last year. There’s a good chance the data’s already being resold by brokers:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/04/23andme-confirms-hackers-s...
Oh ok, you started and made me think it wasn't acknowledging the benefits of owning, like: I want to drill in the damn walls (this is a stupid rule that was disallowed in every rent contract)
Ownership? It was the personal computing revolution, after all.
A Pi Diet
You should try Pages. The Apple office apps -Pages, Numbers, and Keynote- are often overlooked, but they can edit simple docx, xlsx, and pptx files.

For example, Pages can also serve as a basic desktop publishing software as it supports page layouts with text box flow, and Numbers has the best spreadsheet UI that I’ve used (why any other spreadsheet software doesn’t allow to handle “floating” spreadsheets as Numbers? Once you use it is so evident and natural).
That’s what bugs me about gen ai. How is it that all these resources are being used on recreating things that humans already do and not entirely focused on aging, health, and the climate?

We already have artists, we don’t have a cure for what we’ve done to the climate. It’s frustrating.
Speaking as a creative monster, I never practiced. I learned to draw by drawing, program by programming etc. Always because I was into it. Never because I was into a dream of future mastery.
I think there’s a place for “we did 99% of the work here, but we want you to be able to tweak things if you need, read the code, and compile it for new systems without us in the loop.”

In that case I see no problem with the main sponsor company not wanting just anyone to come and make money off their work. They might accept contributions if offered up, but they are not hoping to gain much from them.

That’s in stark contrast to a project like Linux where it much more heavily relies on outside people getting into the development cycle.

To your point actually, I think it can be sticky for an open source maintainer of a small project when someone comes along and tries to be a more active contributor and treat your project like the latter when you’re really intending it to be more like the former. There’s no great signal of what type of open source you’re intending to create apart from saying “I don’t really want significant contributions” in your readme.
Are there any projects out there where this is being used? I'm interested in seeing it in action.
If AMD can do it, they can as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41674382
I know; I was fortunate as a student to have a Gateway convertible(yay complicated hinge mechanism) laptop with a 4 year warranty. It was okay with notes (I did really love OneNote but portability of those notes was not good), and right before the end of the warranty period the hinge failed so they replaced it entirely. It was actually more expensive than the rm paper pro and I would relish the opportunity to have it back then. Granted, it was also a full Windows laptop too, which the paper pro is decidedly not.
Sorry, but something which is running on .pw domain doesn't give me any trust.
Rarely have I read that much blind faith in AGI happening.

Reality today seems to be anyone who's getting decent results out of ML is doing something slightly different according to the specifics of their domain. You can't take a chatbot LLM and expect it to predict the weather, architect a building, drive a car, and fold laundry.
Who are you, Matthew Stephenson?
Researchers make renewable energy breakthrough with radiant infrared heat source
The eye of the beholder... I've had hens understand how to jump on handles to open doors. Certainly, they lacked the subtlety to shut up once they started gobbling up food, but they knew how to open doors, creep in and stay silent until they reached the kitchen. Nobody trained them to do so, and they certainly had never tried jumping against doors before that happened. Not only did a hen figure out what we were up to with those door handles but suddenly, from one week to the next, each one of our 4 or 5 hens got the memo. I'd venture the guess that most humans find it more convenient to disparage whatever creature they happen to exploit.
I'm fascinated by the early PDP-11 range - and if I saw one readily available, reasonably priced, and close at hand (shipping is not trivial for those machines) then I don't know if I'm actually competent enough to handle a machine where normal configuration duties include changing the wirewrapped backplane!

That's part of the fascination too though.
The intended audience is people who are knowledgeable about spaced repetition, and such people typically know what generalization means in the context of learning.
So why should someone use WordPress, knowing one person with enormous conflicts of interest determines which companies are allowed to host it?
Right. So definitely not 23andme.
What does this mean ? That he doesn't have to care about earning a living any more, and so he's acting like... an asshole ?
Hands up who hasn't made an offer to buy some part of Intel
> effectively zero

That feels extreme. Zero is a cold, dark, lonely number. Maybe it’s correct—i dont know. Ive worked on only a couple of projects in this space, and while the incentives certainly involved publishing, i dont feel that it equated to abandoning the SciMethod. Instead, it was the cost to pay for the ability to continue doing science.

Can you really stand by ZERO? How about a 1%. Meet me somewhere above zero, or, if you’d be so kind, make a compelling case why were truly rock bottom.
50 "exceptionally well-preserved" Viking skeletons unearthed in Denmark
Even if you could solve aging, you could never solve death. Probability and entropy will catch up with you eventually.

I think that most people over a certain age are quite aware of their own mortality, and are looking to bring meaning to the time that they have.
UK man used genealogy sites to hack execs' email accounts and make millions
As always, it depends a lot on what you're doing, and a lot of people are using Python for AI.

One of the drawbacks of multi-processing versus multi-threading is that you cannot share memory (easily, cheaply) between processes. During model training, and even during inference, this becomes a problem.

For example, imagine a high volume, low latency, synchronous computer vision inference service. If you're handling each request in a different process, then you're going to have to jump through a bunch of hoops to make this performant. For example, you'll need to use shared memory to move data around, because images are large, and sockets are slow. Another issue is that each process will need a different copy of the model in GPU memory, which is a problem in a world where GPU memory is at a premium. You could of course have a single process for the GPU processing part of your model, and then automatically batch inputs into this process, etc. etc. (and people do) but all this is just to work around the lack of proper threading support in Python.

By the way, if anyone is struggling with these challenges today, I recommend taking a peek at nvidia's Triton inference server (https://github.com/triton-inference-server/server), which handles a lot of these details for you. It supports things like zero-copy sharing of tensors between parts of your model running in different processes/threads and does auto-batching between requests as well. Especially auto-batching gave us big throughput increase with a minor latency penalty!
The masterplan to end EV "range anxiety" forever
would you atleast be compensated for those on-call shifts?
>I don't think future generations are going to be very interested in tinkering with a C64 or an Apple II, but the 6502 will live on for a very long time.

I think it will be the exact opposite.
Practice on the job is still practice, no?
I think that's a big draw to 80s computers. It was the first time most people knew someone that had a personal computer.
The politics of happiness, meaning, and psychological richness
Good point. This needs an update though now we know more about zoonotic spillover. Pigs, monkeys, bats, etc. should be off the list asap.
There is a list of reasons several agencies in US government like the FBI collects DNA from some people, but they don’t have DNA for all US citizens and I don’t expect the government to have my DNA. What nefarious purposes do you imagine the government has? Is matching suspected criminals against the crime database a nefarious purpose?

Would you care if 23AndMe sold your DNA & analysis to a private for-profit medical insurance data provider who could recommend hiking your price or denying coverage, based on your genetic markers, without having to tell the insurance company why and without having to share your DNA? This is one of the private business nefarious purposes I worry about, based on having a friend who worked in credit processing saying that they were looking for legal ways to sell purchasing habits to medical insurance companies.
Those "companies" give them money so they can promote betting. They post fraudulent stories about how they are getting paid using the platform.
haha the man probably would have been absolutely devastated to learn that his posterity has degenerated to the point of using Google while coding... or god forbid, interviewing.
Computers haven’t really changed much since the 1990s, I mean I have been running Linux since 1994. Even in the late 1970s the DEC VAX had an architecture basically similar to modern computers.

What else could you be into? Computers pre the IBM 360 sucked. Personally I have some nostalgia for the 1970s PDP-11 and PDP-10 but not enough to really put a lot of time into setting up emulators. (The PDP-11 has the awkward bit that it has a 16-bit user address space, running RSTS/E you basically get a BASIC environment (or something like a CP/M environment) which is just slightly better than what you get with a 16-bit micro. I’d used installations where 20 people could enjoy that at once but for an individual hobbyist you might as well use or emulate a micro… But those GiGi terminals beat the pants off the Apple ][ and such)

Mass producing 8-bit micro hardware has tough economics today (can’t beat RasPi) but it is possible to make a computer of that era with mainly or entirely discrete components. (Even a 6502 or display controller!). Forget about making an IBM PC clone or an Amiga. (An FPGA can get there if you have enough $$)

If I wasn’t already overloaded with side projects I’d like to deeply explore the 24-bit world of the eZ80, like the old 360 and a place where micros never really developed a comfortable ecosystem. You could have more memory than the IBM PC that is easier to code for; you could run Linux with X Windows and Win 95 in 16GB of memory back in the day so such a system could kick ass. The AgonLight 2 has a programmable display controller based on the ESP32 and it should be very possible to make a more capable sprite-based graphics system than most contemporary game consoles, maybe even as good as the coin-op systems that supported games like Street Fighter
Some woman’s cat was hiding in her basement. She automatically assumed her Haitian neighbors stole her cat and made some comment about it, which landed on Facebook, which got morphed into “immigrants eating pets” story, JD Vance picked it up, Trump mentioned it in a national debate watched by 65 million people. All of this happened in a few days. This resulted in violence in Springfield.

If you can place a rumor or lie in front of the right person/people to amplify, it will be amplified. It will spread like wildfire, and by the time it is fact checked, it will have done at least some damage.
> Yet another example why "HIPAA compliant" means nothing.

"HIPAA compliant" doesn't mean nothing. It means a whole lot. It's just not relevant here, because - as mentioned at the beginning of the article - 23 and Me is not regulated under HIPAA.
Taiwan does this, too.

I think NYC should consider daily collection. They have a huge curbside trash problem, and I suspect that there is so much trash accumulation by the time the truck comes by that a lot of labor is used putting the bags in the truck. Collecting 7x as often seems like it would not require anywhere near 7x the cost or labor, and the city would be a lot more pleasant with more frequent collection.
Sorry. I meant obscure relative to the large space of combinatorial optimization problems not just chip design.

Most design houses don’t write their own macro placers but customize commercial flows for their designs.

The problem with macro placement as an RL technology demonstrator is that to evaluate quality you need to go through large parts of the design flow which involves using other commercial tools. This makes it incredibly hard to evaluate superiority since all those steps and tools add noise.

Easier problems would have been to use RL to minimize the number of gates in a logic circuit or just focus on placement with half perimeter wirelength (I think this is what you mean with your grad student example). Essentially solving point problems in the design flow and evaluating quality improvements locally.

They evaluated quality globally and only globally and that destroys credibility in this business due to the noise involved unless you have lots of examples, can show statistical significance, and (unfortunately for the authors) also local improvements.

That’s what the follow on studies did and that’s why the community has lost faith in this particular algorithm.
I believe the main reason for the focus on these earlier decades is due to the openness of both the hardware and software during this time. Manual published by computer manufacturers contained detailed schematics of all the circuits, assembly code listings of the BIOS and system programs. As a hobbyist I can build my own SBC based off these schematics and probe physical pins on the chips in order to debug the board. As things became smaller and more integrated, chips started including more functionality and closed-source firmware and actually integrating them into your own designs became increasingly difficult.
He could be prosecuted under current fraud laws, but this hardly ever happens.

I wrote a blog post on how to make this easier, including a new criminal statute specifically tailored for scientific fraud. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41672599
> eventually

I'll take millions of years instead of 75 thanks

> looking to bring meaning to the time that they have

Everybody says something like this in response to this kind of question about death/aging - or they go all religious on me talking about Jesus etc.

I'm like "what is 2 + 2" and half or more of the people go "I like cake"
man that's so frickin' beautiful
How much would you pay for this feature?

Is typing your requirements that much easier than going through traditional search filters at Digikey?
What gets me is that even if you don't code much, if you're using a spreadsheet with formulas, in that moment you are writing code, and doing so in an awful, awful language. Sure, "SUM" is easy, but the moment you have any kind of conditional logic it gets pretty hairy. Maybe there's something about traditional spreadsheet languages that makes them easier than, say, numpy for non-coders, but I don't see it.
Right, I've seen this occasionally. I don't really mind since it's usually because there is some unexpected audio that you might miss if you're watching on mute.
I'll bet everything I have they haven't destroyed the sample.

Honest and sincere question: why would you even use their service in the first place?
I don’t think you should expect exponential growth towards greater correctness past good enough for any given domain of knowledge it is able to mirror. It is reliant on human generated material, and so rate limited by the number of humans able to generate the quality increase you need - which decreases in availability as you expect higher quality. I also don’t believe greater correctness for any given thing is an open ended question that allows for experientially exponential improvements.

Though maybe you are just using exponential figuratively in place of meaning rapid and significant development and investment.
Marine dust identifies 1.5M year Oldest Ice near South America
TldrApp: Offline-capable PWA for tldr-pages. Runs in browser. Zero API latency
Referenced article: https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/20/1437/2024/
I'm not a big fan. I think the advantages of rolling your own fully custom auth outweigh the simplicity of a plug-and-play framework like this.

Sure, there might be some use-cases and I can see why people might opt for it, but not me...
For the adventurous, a new beta was released earlier this month:

https://warmplace.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7005
Mentor AI Agents Within Your Codebase to Automate Your Dev Workflows
You can try WPS Office....
What is a specific plausible scenario of something that could be done with “my DNA” that I should be concerned about here?
Yes, and no. So I am the author of https://hostmeinca.com/

It did help me get an internship in Hawaii in 2019 for which I am eternally grateful. The website was #1 on YC HN and opened many doors. You can read the entire story here: https://medium.com/startup-frontier/7-686-miles-from-slovaki...

On the other hand, my personal website, https://www.marekdlugos.com/ doesn't have much traffic. It all boils down to standing out from the crowd and having something to offer.

In 2025, I'd like to start blogging. I believe other people could benefit from some of my experiences.
> This is _not_ true, as cryptocurrency has already demonstrated.

His whole argument against AI is basically the anti-tech stance: "Well crypto failed that means AI will too" It's coming from a place of disdain for technology. That's your typical Hacker News commenter. This site is like Fox News in 2008 - some of the dumbest people alive
Agreed. There!s uproar over coding interviews, which makes no sense to me. We give easy peasy code reviews to smoke check claimed skills. 4 of 5 candidates do absolutely terribly on very easy stuff, relative to their claimed skillset. No, our bar isn’t high—fraud (resume fraud) is sadly very real.
At best Musk suffers from adolescent delusions. At worst the Mars plan amounts to a stock pump and a way to stay in the headlines. The main takeaway from the media coverage of the imaginary Mars colony: the press seems too gullible and too ignorant to ask questions.

If we could send millions of kilograms into orbit and then to Mars we could deflect an incoming asteroid.

If we could “terraform” Mars — a planet with no magnetosphere and therefore incapable of holding on to an atmosphere — we could fix the damage done to Earth.

If we could keep people alive for the journey and then long-term on Mars, fit enough to reproduce, we could fix a lot of medical/health problems here.

We don’t have human colonies in the ocean, a much less hostile environment than Mars. We don’t have colonies on the moon either. We struggle to maintain the planet we evolved on in a livable state.

Starship so far has not achieved low-earth orbit, carrying any cargo, much less humans, refueling in orbit, etc. We do have some new debris fields making this planet a little less habitable.

If we want to talk seriously about saving our species we might start with identifying sociopaths and not mistaking their lies and self-serving schemes for anything to do with the common good.
I didn't downvote that comment when you commented, but I did it now.

I don't come to HN to read the auto-generated output of a system. If I wanted that I could generate the result myself. I come to HN because I'm interested in what people in the community have to say.

Showing up to a thread and saying "this is what an LLM generated" does not "gratify my intellectual curiosity" (per the FAQ) and, in my opinion, is not a practice to be encouraged.
Yeah that's true, agreed.
Earth to capture a 'second moon' this weekend, NASA says
Carrier Pigeon Faster Than Broadband Internet (2009)
There is a 30-year lag in collectibles; people in their 50s tend to buy what they coveted in their late teenage years. From what I understand, this trend is also present in the car market.
It is strange people don't understand this.

The only thing that changes in time is the medium.

100 years ago, young people wanted to be painters.

50 years ago, young people wanted to form a rock band.

2024, young people want to be tiktok stars.

Some are more delusional than others about it but that never changes either.
How this happens given the near reverence provided to “peer review” is another question.
Tried building something with Cursor + Chatgpt in 30mins not bad for the initial exploration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3mkXPdTVlI and the demo link: https://mtachallenge.streamlit.app/
The most ambitious people I've ever known were all Google employees and most of them enjoyed marijuana after work.
A relative id mine sent her DNA to 23andMe or something like it. I was angry then, and I still haven't forgiven her.
Applying Flexible Paxos to Raft
You are kind of begging the question - Do all members of your community take mandatory ethics classes?
No, most people pretended to read Animal Farm and 1984 in middle school and haven’t thought about them since. They didn’t understand them at the time, and they don’t see the similar manipulations going on in today’s society.
Drawabox
Splitting efforts aren't good .
PyPy is decade effort of making JIT Python and they had big success. But it doesn't get the praise by the python community - and they are only doing NIH solutions again and again. (First attemped by Google and they failed - unladen python , now this experiment results dosen't sound good).

Why ignore millions of dollars spent in a decade effort of fulltime PHD researchers' work and doing their own thing?

Yeah NIH is helluva drug.
I do not know for the latest models, but at least in M1 the CPU was limited to a fraction of the total memory throughput, IIRC to about 100 GB/s.
Correct. If 23&M sells their services in the EU (and you bought the service while in the EU) then GDPR would apply

But if you just walk into a pharmacy in the US and send your sample from there GDPR has nothing to do with it
Why is it your business what your family members do with their bodies?
Well I once had an analytics/statistics tool that regularly chewed through a couple GBs of CSV files. After enough features had been added it took almost 5 minutes per run which got really annoying.

It took me less than an hour to add multiprocessing to analyze each file in its own process and merge the results together at the end. The runtime dropped to a couple seconds on my 24 thread machine.

It really was much easier than expected. Rewriting it in C++ would have probably taken a week.
When I went to college in the late '00s I was able to find several other Linux users. The counter culture to the Windows/Mac duopoly was alive and well. In some ways we won by being accepted as mainstream for certain niches. Between WSL, Steamdeck and Docker Linux has seen more adoption than I was expecting.
I don't know that much about literacy rates and social competition in ancient Greece, but I suspect it may have been in Plato's personal interests that others remain illiterate.
Basis of stitched-together protein complexes that recycle proteins in cells