skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Biggest thing I missed is that I don't live in the US.

Even if I lived in the US, and the times I visited, I'm still disregarding most of the recommendations. It feels more like these people are making political statements of what should be and recruiting me and other viewers to help move towards that ideal.

Especially they want regular citizens to do this shit so that everyone has plausible deniability. The issue is that I strictly want to differentiate myself from criminals, in my experience any of these movements or technologies like Tor, cryptocurrency, pool me with people doing really bad shit.

If I'm in the US with a visa, and someone asks for my ID, I will show it to them, I will not shield illegal immigrants by refusing to show my visa. I will no longer do that in my country either, I literally thought "what if a Venezuelan was walking down these streets and the police stopped them, I must shield them by not revealing my identity" Fuck that, not my problem, here's my ID, officer.

Similarly if police ask me what I'm doing at 2 am, I will now tell them that I was working and there was an incident with the server at 2 am. I will no longer shield criminals that may be up to no good at 2 am in my neighbourhood, i will make the cop's job easy.

If my bank asks me for documentation of my business I will give it to them. If my ISP wants to see what servers I'm contacting for my porn, they may check my DNS requests and see that it's not a child pornography distributor. That's fine.

It's ok, take your tinfoil hats on. Use your judgment instead of listening to online extremists with an agenda. (Getting regular people to act like criminals so that criminals associations and behaviours can appear as legitimate)
Ask HN: How can I escape my 3W country as a freelance dev with passive income?
I was born in a shitty Middle Eastern’ish country and let's just say I’m sick of it. The general toxicity, the internal racism, the unreliability of basic utilities, the misogyny, the risk of mugging and murder…

I tried living in some of the “better” Middle Eastern places like Dubai, Qatar, and frankly, behind the artificial veneer that they spend massive efforts to advertise, they are just as shitty.

I just want to be able to code and create from home in peace, and have a beautiful environment outdoors to safely take a break in. I also want my money to go towards supporting a good country with functional democracy, that offers a path to eventual citizenship.

I’m around 40 and a high-school dropout. I have passive income that hovers around $1000-$2000 every month. If I’m successful with the stuff I’m working on then it will be more. I can dip into savings for larger one-off expenses like initial moving costs or setting up a company, and I can break the piggy bank for around $30K-$35K. I can speak English as good as a native.

What are my options?
In the 60s there were, and they were right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_revolt
This looks enticing! Do you have or plan to have an Android version of it too?
What else is there? Geoengineering sounds interesting but nobody knows what the ultimate effects would be in a complex system like the Earth. And if geoengineering is done on a global level there will probably be winners and losers. How do you negotiate that?
I want to work on smartglass apps like

- Go to aquarium, look in tank, put glasses in info mode via a gesture to see the names of the fish in the tank. Learn more about them then on my phone.

- Have glasses keep score of any real life game you are playing from pickleball, to a card game to any game that has a score and requires vision to keep track of it.

Guess i could start creating such on the Vision Pro. Im thinking either idea will be created and or built into the smart glass winner but hmm maybe they are lame ideas..
My approach to this class of issue has been to make the reindex be "Creates a new search server, build the index, then switch the application to the new one and turn off the old one".

At the cost of doubling storage/IO requirements for search, this works around virtually every kind of outage-due-to-index-corruption (don't switch to the new one if it fails healthchecks).
"AGI can do human emotions" is a bold statement since AGI doesn't exist yet, and it's not a stated goal to do human emotions.

The "human component" to (good) teaching is human beings teaching other human beings to be human. A teacher is not a mechanism for offloading knowledge into a child-shaped container.
Linear Algebra was the math subject I was strongest in during college and I give all credit to Gilbert Strang. He was the best to ever do it.
My understanding is that tech was politically weaker back then. Although there were some big tech companies, they didn’t have as much of a lobbying operation.
1. If prices weren't this high then there wouldn't be incentive to develop these drugs in the first place. There's a reason most novel drugs come from the US!

2. The vast majority of drugs do not pan out and most fledging companies formed to study them fail

3. In the US, insurance mostly covers the cost of drugs

4. In 14-20 years, the drug will be turned into a generic and the prices will plummet
People were running adsense and Amazon affilates in 2004. I visited many websites who would let you spin a wheel and send you a check if you won. Browsers would pay you to surf. Money was a big factor and you would have to go pre dot.com or the bbs world to find it. Geocities had ads. Punch the monkey was everywhere.
Cost per FLOP continues to drop on an exponential trend (and what bit flops do we mean?). Leaving aside more effective training methodologies and how that muddies everything by allowing superior to GPT4 perf using less training flops, it also means one of the thresholds soon will not make sense.

With the other threshold, it creates a disincentive for models like llama-405B+, in effect enshrining an even wider gap between open and closed.
That’s my read on it. Far too tidy, pitched to make you feel just so. If it’s real, so many details are missing that it may as well not be.
Indeed, and like Theo, I finished the video with little sympathy towards WP Engine. I think Matt's trademark argument is sound.

But as Theo pointed out, the public was not privy to this long running dispute, and Automattic's drastic action came effectively out of nowhere.

Matt seems so preoccupied with this line of thinking (i.e. is WP Engine doing something wrong) and not nearly preoccupied enough with the impact on the Wordpress userbase, the long-term perceptions of the Wordpress brand, and the overall business confidence in Wordpress as a platform. There are ways to balance both, but Matt has chosen not to.

It is clear to me that Matt sees Wordpress as "the foundation" and "the trademark" and "Wordpress.com" and not the 25% of the public internet that uses it.
I had a teacher that routinely did this.

I hated it.

The issue is that, at least for me, I'm madly trying to capture in my notes whatever it is the teacher was presenting. Then, on "step 15" we get the "Oh, did anyone notice this on Step 3?" and then they'd erase the board and we'd start again.

I never felt it was an interesting technique, especially early on, when, again, at least for me, I'm just trying to absorb everything. I don't know enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, and still barely understand what I'm doing. Many times one can succeed by blindly following a process without understanding, and over time that understanding arrives, aided by repetition and application of the examples.

Folks learn differently with different ways. This was not an effective teaching technique for me.
Podcasts are generally terrible. They will never get close to text in terms of capability to deliver content, and enabling critical analysis of the content, because unlike text you cannot revisit sections with ease. You cannot ingest information at the same rate as when reading either. While a fun gimmick it feels like a step back in terms of learning / improving rate of ingestion of information. Imagine how useless this site would be if every comment section was just recordings instead of text comments.
Par for the course for Amazon:

https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh...

Amazon is facing a looming crisis: It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024, according to leaked Amazon internal research from mid-2021 that Recode reviewed. [...] “If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024,” the research, which hasn’t previously been reported, says.
The geometric decreases in cost that you cite (in terms of communications and SaaS) are due primarily to Moore's Law. Unfortunately there is no similar law affecting power generation costs.

If tech companies got into power, the inevitable result would be that they embrace and extend the regulatory capture of utilities, with the explicit goal of maximizing their profit at the expense of human needs. As well as of course the evisceration of as much pesky environmental regulation as their lobbyists can get their hands on, to the extent that it serves as an impediment to this paramount goal.

Their philosophical stance on these concerns and tradeoffs has already been made palpably clear, in any case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41552642

From everything we know so far, these people definitely will not do the right thing without the swift and exacting application of a very heavy stick.
my wife and I have a new side project: we're opening a bookshop! the last local store is closing due to retirement and we figure the community demand is still there. we're negotiating the lease, sorting out how to order a lot of bookshelves, and source the initial inventory. i'm currently figuring out how to connect our point of sale system to our accounting software. good times. :)
Show HN: Questdown.de – make paper-based questionnaire with Markdown-ish syntax
Hey, I’ve been working on a project built on top of markdown python for the last few weeks. It is still very much a work in progress, but I think it is at a place where it could start to be useful.

Per the rule, it's functional to try out the syntaxes, but convert to pdf I still put behind an registration to avoid getting my server killed :)

Feedback and contributions are more than welcome!
I'm working on a private social media app for (me and my) friends who workout together. Making a beta version of the app with flutterflow (low-code, bit buggy) to see if it is what I think it is.
In any case, he is a good storyteller.
FWIW, most baby proofing you can do after month 12, after some minimal baby proofing at 6 months (depending on kid and space). They truly can’t get into much trouble before 4-5 months. Much of what I worried about prepping for was far easier to do once you actually have the issue at your feet but you have time.
>It's not because we have some awesome efficiently run state government.

Can you point to any place in the world that has an "awesome efficiently run" government?
That sounds pretty cool!

What kind of margins do book stores typically have?
Sure, look at that chart. According to that chart, we'll burn coal forever. Now, consult reality for a moment, or take a look around. Coal is finite, a resources stored away over a tremendous period of time, much of it burned in about a century. So your "always" is at best temporarily true, and thus worthless, it can't actually have predictive power.

Although you insist that new sources "always come on top" you're either just observing that the chart was designed this way (facile) or you didn't look at the actual data closely.

In 2014 there was more "traditional biomass" (ie people burn stuff) than today. Since this practice is extremely inefficient it makes sense to see it phased out, cooking food over a literal log fire is simple but that's the only upside.

Also Solar looks like about 2.5% to me. How is that "negligible" ? Is the population of Bangladesh "negligible"? That's about 2.5% of the world's population.
That's right, this is true no matter the queue length. If input=output on average, there is no limit on how long your queue will grow, and therefore no limit on how long queued task will wait.

I don't know what you mean by reverse.
Not really. If a banker in China is taken down for political reasons, it’s not evidence that China is more adept at upholding banking corruption laws than the US.
> Those who couldn't find work elsewhere will be easier to abuse because they will believe they don't have other options.

That seems like an odd goal to assume of someone who needs to keep the company doing well to keep shareholders happy.
You are wonderful!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-room_occupancy

It's a category that's been mostly legislated out of existence in the US today.
>Nearly any uses for flexible electronics would also be satisfied by sufficiently small electronics such that lack of flexibility doesn't matter.

we make microelectronics as complex as we can because 128 bits would be better than 64 bits, and floating point, and parallelism, pipelining, speculative execution, and caches, etc.

we already make microelectronics as small as we know how, because speed of light makes a difference, and power dissipation also.

and our chips, already completely consumed by the tasks we give them, are too big to fit your definition of flexibility not mattering.

So-ooo-o, if our chips were flexible it would solve the problem we are both trying to solve, which will not be solved your way, except in some uncertain future.
Tasks that never get done, yes. In other words, tasks that wait forever.
Do you mean to suggest that this isn't true or that we should question the reasons that it happens to be true, and possibly change them?
Cool! I’ve been looking for ROS alternatives
The future of Artificial Intelligence: Does India have a role?
I see what the mistake is! You are using some sort of gibberish instead of using JavaScript and naming your variables with clear and verbose intent.
Having the source code “unlocks” the ability for you to make your own custom firmware.. in case you want the device to do something more than it already does.
It has been a long time that I read his manifesto. While he has many correct conclusions, I don't remember him arguing in any way how he got them.

There are much better writers. E.g. Ugo Bardi, Gail Tverberg that have a skeptical outlook on our future.
Ah yes Aramark, at a place I worked they got someone in trouble because they brought a single plate of cookies to work on their birthday for us. That apparently violated the catering agreement and the Aramark employees forced them to throw them out and tried to get them further in trouble. Great company!
> the ones left will be the ones who couldn't get jobs elsewhere.

Oh, come on. There're people that like working in the office. It's unfair to label them as "the ones who couldn't get jobs elsewhere".
We should do the same thing in software engineering. After 4 years in web dev, you have to switch to something else like embedded systems or DBA. Or be forced to become a highly paid consultant.
I think it works well for the early grades with simple problems like 5x5=24 to get young kids interested or your vs you’re

But anything beyond that anything multi step is just not useful - you talk about taking notes young kids are not taking notes
What is your GTM strategy?
> But changing CO2 levels is not the only way to avert that damage.

It is currently. Everything else is basically gambling on technology that doesn't yet exist.
at full retail price, you're often looking at 40-50% for books...but then everything goes on sale at some point. sideline merch (think the stuffed animals in the kids section) can get 60%+. but after rent, expenses, etc. we're just hoping to break even in year 1. the math suggests its possible but we're about to find out empirically. in the end, most evidence also suggests there are a lot easier ways to make $30k net a year. but it's a community project as a much as a business.
2024 is this year. A web search turned up that same prediction, but nothing that looked like it had actually materialized.
I've heard this called "tactical debt" instead of "technical debt".
Day 2 strategy. Sad.
> Every time I see people struggling with this, I am so incredibly glad that I forced the issue for FreeBSD when I did the initial amd64 port. I got to set the fundamental types in the ABI and decided to look forward rather than backward.

Hold on. You're saying that when amd64 happened, FreeBSD ported i386 time_t to 64 bits as well? That's wild. Were other 32 bit architectures ported to 64 bit time_t as well, like the Motorola 68000 and sparc32?
It feels to me like the old lovingly curated and crafted internet sites are being pillaged and displaced by a wave of AI regurgitations — with the cheerleading of "information wants to be free" advocates.
thanks! my wife and i both really like local bookstores and often stop into them when we travel. and you know, you only live once...so why not.
I'm not sure the best way to change minds is using a facetious tone and quoting meticulously-crafted numbers from a right-wing think tank.

Billionaires get richer through asset appreciation, not income. The White House report is focusing on how fast the rich are getting richer and that's how they arrived at 8%.

A worker's salary is taxed at a high rate like up to 40%, whereas a wealthy person's gains from assets are taxed at a much lower rate like 15%. And that is if they realize the gains at all, because their unrealized gains don't get taxed at all.

Our current system (in which long term capital gains tax is much lower than income tax) rewards the owner class and punishes the workers.

The figures are misleading because if you have low income, your effective tax rate is indeed lower than the wealthy. But then you're barely surviving anyway. So if you're poor, you're screwed because you're poor. If you have a livable income, you're screwed because of high taxes. But if you're wealthy, the system exists to serve you.
Amazon has had to raise warehouse pay [1 [2], definitely screams labor shortage to me. This makes sense considering structural demographics and a shrinking participation rate in the US labor force [3]. I would not have expected Amazon to just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and say "we are all out of workers"; they have to compete like everyone else for a shrinking pool of folks.

They have run out of folks to abuse at the previous price point. The wage floor will continue to rise. Even Bank of America is raising wages for tellers [4]. Demographics are destiny, all that jazz.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-18/amazon-bo... | https://archive.today/5ODb8

[2] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/amazon-wage-incre... | https://archive.today/fY28B

[3] https://www.ebri.org/retirement/content/new-research-of-u.s.... ("A new research report published today by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) taking a historical look at labor force participation and employment data in the United States found the prime working age population (25–64 years old) has significantly fallen and is being filled by older workers. At the same time, the labor force participation rate of those ages 65 or older has not reached its pre-pandemic level, while that of the prime working age population has reached that level")

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41500201 ("Bank of America is pledging to pay its bank tellers and other hourly workers at least $24 per hour starting in October. The company says that this pay raise, from $23 per hour currently, will affect “thousands” of its 212,000 employees. The wage increase will particularly affect tellers and other customer-facing employees, such as call-center workers.")

(~10K Boomers retire per day, 3.6M per year; ~1.8M people 55+ die every year in the US, ~5k per day; roughly half of which are in the labor force, so ~2.5k workers actively in a job die each day; ~20% of the population is retired today, in 10 years that'll go to ~30%)
As I remember it, among other reasons, tech companies really wanted “multimedia” (at the time, that meant DVDs) to migrate to PCs (this was called the “living room PC”) and studios weren’t about to allow that without legal protection.
You are an AI bot.
It's not just CPUs that can cause Silent Data Corruption errors (SDCs). Essentially any chip in the system can give bad results, and those bad results are often not detected.
That is a very fair assumption nowadays. I was not raised by the internet simply because I could not afford to even have it in the home until I was in my early 20's. Still remember the weeks after youtube being launched! The internet was that thing I had 30 minute chunks of from the local library. So it was always at arms length. Something that felt like a negative then might have been a positive in a way. The internet was this very positive force, a tool not an obsession for many.

I do worry about those nowadays that are "raised by the internet". I see the stream of influence that social media is having and I have to remember than for many people, this is all they have ever known of the internet. There is no other context. Many viewing this stuff are smart folks, but when that stream of media becomes like the air, many can be tugged in all manner of directions and now even realize it.

In the same manner of drugs, try not to turn them into a diet. The internet is a wonderful tool but a questionable 'way of life'.
Ehhh, I feel like I have to mention that optics like a Schmidt–Väisälä camera exist, and notably have their focal plane right in the middle of the tube.

They readily go as fast as e.g. 400mm f/2.0 with 2 tame (iirc literally just spherical) optical surfaces (mirror and near-sensor plano-convex lens) and 1 more elaborate wavy surface (back side of front glass), naturally achromatic for a 20~30 MP large image circle.

Modern technology (ability to manufacture of array waveguides that act like a bundle of fiber optics, to de-flatten the sensor's focal plane) also allows making better use of objective designs that perform well in every way but field flatness.
I am trying to use a decoder encoder to generate rift transforms for delta compression of binary file updates.
Awesome! I have a South Bend model 420 toolmaker restoration in progress, I hope to finish this winter. Old lathes are great.
The US target in the Kyoto Protocol was a 7% reduction from the 1990 baseline in 2008-2012. That target has still not been reached, because the emissions continued growing until the mid-2000s.
Sorry I missed this - but here's the belated but simple answer: I posted both manually, but took care to make them say the exact same thing to make it clear that I wasn't taking one person's side over the other.

I only do that in cases where it's appropriate (e.g. where both people were breaking the site guidelines to approximately the same degree), but in such cases it's convenient because it cuts out the "why me? what about the other person?" complaints which otherwise tend to be common.
LLM limitations are different from silent data corruption errors.
I am working a contract job to integrate some banking back office concerns (pays bills), a Unity RTS game and a machine learning project.

The ML project is probably the most interesting. It is seeking to use evolutionary/genetic algorithms with novel computational substrates such as spiking networks and Turing machines. Things that would (by intent) run poorly on someone's GPU farm. I figure I might get lucky looking under rocks no one seems to care about anymore.
I got notified my NeurIPS paper was accepted this past week, so I've been doing the brush-ups that'll have the manuscript set for camera-ready. Preprint on arxiv with the title "Divide-and-Conquer Predictive Coding" at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.05834
I looked into the question of what counts as reasonable care and wrote up my conclusions here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kBg5eoXvLxQYyxD6R/my-takes-o...