skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now that AI has exploded, I keep thinking about that show called Almost Human, that opened describing a time when technology advanced so fast that it was unable to be regulated.
"You're wrong, but I don't feel like teaching. Just feeling smug about my supposed superiority."

I have negative feelings towards this sort of long winded holier than thou garbage.

And it's a documented self inflicted "why does nobody want to contribute to $project?" By burned out devs.
Nuclear plants are already being forced to shut down across Europe because no one wants their expensive energy. That is old paid off plants, not insanely expensive new builds.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/energy-...

For every passing year renewable penetration deepens and we end up with situations like this:

> On 100 out of the 144 days since 8 March, California’s electricity demand was 100% supplied by renewable energy for at least part of the day. Solar, wind and hydroelectric energy technologies fully powered the state’s grid for at least a few minutes and for as long as ten hours for 100 days.

https://www.power-technology.com/news/california-achieves-10...

That is an incredibly hostile economical environment for a nuclear power plant, and the only thing the CFD accomplishes is higher power bills for the ratepayers.
Scraping the entire internet for training data without regard for copyright or attribution - specifically to use for generative AI to produce similar content for profit. How this is being allowed to happen legally is baffling.

It does suit the modus operandi of a number of American companies that start out as literally illegal/criminal operations until they get big and rich enough to pay a fine for their youthful misdeeds.

By the time some of them get huge, they're in bed with the government to dominate the market.
VPNs have a bad reputation, but I trust Mullvad (have used and paid them often), and Proton (currently paying them).
'Weekend warrior' workouts may be as effective as daily exercise, study shows
It is a good article in the end but the start is another classic bit of sanewashing of Trump.

Yes, he was clearly making a well thought out case that the FDA was too beaurocratic and there are ethical ways to roll out medical interventions faster by letting people expose themselves to risks if they are facing mortal danger.

Or he was just spouting horseshit like he did throughout the pandemic and in every other case where lives were at stake.

A timeline of quotes:
https://doggett.house.gov/media/blog-post/timeline-trumps-co...

> They are getting tired of the pandemic, aren't they? You turn on CNN, that's all they cover. 'Covid, Covid, Pandemic, Covid, Covid.' You know why? They're trying to talk everybody out of voting. People aren't buying it, CNN, you dumb bastards."
Stacked PRs is a way to surface the lifetime of the proposition as they get fixed or updated following reviews.

It has nothing to do with github.
Watch YouTube with Friends in a 3D world
This is too good not to use.

(My favourite use of Guile's Theme is by Team Teamwork: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5JuYmQ2_ns but I bet one of rms's many songs could be found to fit.)
I googled "battery cascade events", and this comment was the top result.
To be clear, that’s the definition of the memory model under concurrent execution. I’m pretty sure the single threaded version was well defined
Who is Alexis?
> You got any idea why people hate the concept of nested functions in C?

It breaks the model of c mapping to the hardware.

Functions in C are just labels you jump to. Assuming you want to capture values from the environment you're defining the function in, you have to implement some sort of function struct that is callable, and it probably won't work with any shared libraries on your system. Also it would be slightly slower, and C programmers tend to not be willing to make that tradeoff
As long as government runs slowly and industry runs fast it's inevitable.
Reuters had the exclusive yesterday but somehow it never surfaced for long here:

"OpenAI to remove non-profit control and give Sam Altman equity"

https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/o...
In any thread about companies that have some amount of hype around them, it’s difficult to tell the difference between comments coming from people with legitimate concerns about the issues at hand vs cynical people that have found their latest excuse to glom on to outrage against hype.
Thanks for the suggestion. It does avoid a nested if-statement, so agreed it's useful.
Yea. Many places in Europe have historical city scape protection. Buildings that have been built centuries ago are being rebuilt internally all the time to fit new purposes and regulations. Not to mention extreme cases like the Kowloon walled city, that was basically a gigant interconnected amalgamation of buildings that housed 35000 people. Nobody envisioned what that would become when it started as an imperial fort, that's for sure. There are many reasons why building are remodelled to fit a new purpose without the new purpose even having existed when the buildings were first conieved.

ps. And even modern buildings suffer from this, like the projects where the requirements change all the time. Like Irelands new children's hospital, that should have cost just a couple of million Euros and balooned to billions. Construction projects are somemites done exactly like software development projects with all the fallout that comes with it. Same story with the airport in Germany (BER).
Yes, fine. Again, my north star is unsafe. Rust doesn't require that all code is safe. But it allows us to mark unsafe regions. I think that would get us pretty far.

If you want to prevent stack overflows, the compiler can calculate the maximum stack space needed by any call tree. (Well, so long as the code in question isn't recursive - but again, that could be enforced at compile time.)

That seems like something that could be checked statically. Alternatively, the kernel could dynamically allocate exactly the right amount of stack space for its own threads.
What a great con! They conned Conde Nast into turning Conde Nast's (reported) $20 million investment into billions of dollars for Conde Nast. Sam Altman is a genius, Conde Nast are such fools!
> The first 2 are literally sacrificing readability

Please point me to the objective measurement of readability that you're using.

Appeals to "readability", for instance both what the OP and yourself are doing, are always 100% subjective.
OpenStreamify – Movie Streaming Application in Spring Boot
The king has just taken my largest piece after no moves were left. I guess when you reach 2048, you can take the king and win.
OpenAI planning to become for-profit company, say reports
All 3 of the original founders have quit, this guy has sus written all over him
She was the scapegoat CEO during the First Reddit Purge.
They are indeed standard letters with diacritics added - but macrons are the only diacritical marks used for Māori. Some people do use double vowels but it's less common than using macrons.
Damn, ML/AI performance is that different? In games, 4090 -> 7900 XTX is more like -20%
The Show HN guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html say that newsletters are considered off topic.

"Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead."
A tale as told as time.
Quantum One-Shot Signatures
On the other hand, your solution requires a lot of people to agree and possibly turn away some money, whereas the AR solution (once available) can be individually applied without any decisions by others; only for the one person to decide whether to buy it or not (if they have the money).

So it's not that clear to me which one of these is complex and which simple.
Try to argue for no evacuation when the nuclear power plant is literally melting down and experiencing multiple large explosions.

This feels like post-fact reasoning attempting to in a blasé paper over reality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haUawwm7l4k
"Maybe I should fork the compiler and do it myself. Urgh. So many projects. If I could live a million lifetimes, I'd devote one to working on compilers."

-- Maybe you are living a million lifetimes in parallel right now and this one is the one devoted to working on compilers? Get to it! :-)
I don't quite understand the last paragraph. Why would Yishan the CEO manufacture crises and outed himself? Was he (at this point) an ally in Sam's con or victim?
> that's what it should do

No it is not.

> How?

I don’t know, that’s just an observation from using it, semi regularly I autofixup changes and it takes a while to do anything.
Unbackslash
I'm ignorant on this topic so please excuse me. Why did `AI` happen now? What was the secret sauce that OpenAI did that seemed to make this explode into being all of a sudden?

My general impression was that the concept of 'how it works' existed for a long time, it was only recently that video cards had enough VRAM to hold the matrix(?) within memory to do the necessary calculations.

If anybody knows, not just the person I replied to.
You want the computer to believe in God?
So, just like everywhere else, then?
> Everyone is like that when the number is potentially in the trillions

No, we're really not all like that.

I stopped caring about money at 6 digits a decade ago, and I'm not even at 7 digits now because I don't care for the accumulation of stuff — if money had been my goal, I'd have gone to Silicon Valley rather than to Berlin, and even unexciting work would have put me between 7 and 8 digits by this point.

I can imagine a world in which I had made "the right choices" with bitcoin and Apple stocks — perfect play would have had me own all of it — and then I realised this would simply have made me a Person Of Interest to national intelligence agencies, not given me anything I would find more interesting than what I do with far less.

I can imagine a future AI (in my lifetime, even) and a VN replicator, which rearranges the planet Mercury into a personal O'Neill cylinder for each and every human — such structures would exceed trillions of USD per unit if built today. Cool, I'll put a full-size model of the Enterprise D inside mine, and possibly invite friends over to play Star Fleet Battles using the main bridge viewscreen. But otherwise, what's the point? I already live somewhere nice.

> There are just people who are like that and people who think they aren’t because they’ve never been within a digit grouping of it.

Does it seem that way to you because you yourself have unbounded desire, or because the most famous business people in the world seem so?

People like me don't make the largest of waves. (Well, not unless HN karma counts…)
> A lot of "readability" depends on what you're used to and what you expect.

Yes. Typically shared sense of "readability" in a community for language X translates to "idiomatic patterns when writing X". There's no real thing as readability in a universal sense. It's a placeholder statement for "it's easier for ME to understand", double emphasis on "ME". Within a community, "readability" standards are merely channeling the idiomatic patterns within that community as for most members they'll be easier for the person to understand as it's what they're used to seeing.
The other glaring problem being that you'd have to entrust this shady company with keys to your digital kingdom so that they could perform actions on your behalf from their cloud.

When they inevitably get hacked and your money gets stolen, you won't have any recourse because you authorized them to act on your behalf.

Of course this could be solved if their models ran locally on your phone and interacted with target apps through accessibility APIs, but then they're just another app.

Every part of their business is either not practical or downright insane if you think about it for more than a minute.
"Pleasing to corporate sponsors" isn't what comes to mind when I think about great programming languages.
You might want to add a disclaimer that you work at Automattic.
i posted a blog (server's now offline though) on a technical topic and it sat on the frontpage of hacker news for about half a day, totaling about 100 points on HN; within a week i noticed a surge of messages from recruiters. most were, of course, useless bulk mailers but i did end up following through with one promising lead and made a good step up for my career. in my case i wouldn't say it opened new doors, per se, just made some doorways bigger.
Agreed. The statement that "they more or less gave up" is simply wrong. In addition to what JoshTriplett said, they landed const initialization of Mutex, RwLock, and Condvar in 1.63. That sounds like a complete success to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_Ohanian
Depriving any party of any portion of their free will & their right to voluntarily consent is still a con, even if it's for (ostensibly) their own benefit.

There's a reason that informed consent is required for medical procedures, even lifesaving ones.

Informed consent is the process in which a health care provider educates a patient about the risks, benefits, and alternatives of a given procedure or intervention. The patient must be competent to make a voluntary decision about whether to undergo the procedure or intervention. Informed consent is both an ethical and legal obligation of medical practitioners in the US and originates from the patient's right to direct what happens to their body.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK430827/

I know that it's a stretch to apply medical ethics to business deals but I believe the principle of informed consent is still a moral requirement. An example of how this is the intent in many legal systems is the concept of a "meeting of the minds" being a mandatory part any legally valid contract. "Meeting of the minds" is similar to the idea of informed consent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meeting_of_the_minds
If you actually read my posts you would see that I acknowledge and analyze the difficulty with using Pin and propose a solution which makes it much easier to deal with. My understanding is that the Rust project is now pursuing a solution along the lines of what I suggested in these posts.
Flexing the Windows RRAS BGP Implementation
I hope some journalist popularizes "clopen" as a neologism to describe organizations that claim to be open and transparent but in practice are closed and opaque.

Or "clopen-source software", projects that claim to be open-source but vital pieces are proprietary.
Is your position that, since people said the same thing about kids reading books, then there is nothing we can give kids that will have a negative outcome on their development? A book can only be read, which requires cognitive effort. iPads can be watched and listened to, which requires no cognitive effort. It's obvious which one kids will choose to do.
I believe the term in research literature for this is "Dynamic Video Synopsis". Check this CVPR 2006 paper for instance: https://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~peleg/papers/cvpr06-synopsis.pdf
I agree, though it's hard not to be negative. My first thought after "oh cool" was "how long until this thing languishes and gets discontinued?" The recent history of AR devices doesn't exactly do Meta a service.
Microsoft already effectively owns OpenAI. Their investments in OpenAI have granted them a 49% stake in the company, the right to sell any pre-AGI OpenAI products to Microsoft's customers, and access to all pre-AGI product research. Microsoft's $10 billion investment in early 2023 (after ChatGPT's launch massively increased OpenAI's operating expenses) was mainly in Azure compute credits rather than cash and delivered in tranches (as of November 2023 they'd only gotten a fraction of that money). It also gives Microsoft 75% of OpenAI's profits until they make their $10 billion back. All of these deals have effectively made OpenAI into Microsoft's generative AI R&D lab. More information: https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/
Generally, these cloak-and-dagger companies just vanish especially industry where is fierce competition because cloak-and-dagger stuff takes just too much energy from the north start. I would not be surprised if 2025 GPT-5 still is not out and OpenAI just drops the whole model + number concept and just starts calling it to gpt.
To hazard a silly question...

Why can't gpt pick up
a non-fundamental "understanding" of letters and spelling from the data?

I mean... I do think "see letters" either when speaking/hearing, but I do know how to pull up those letters when necessary.
Very cool! Definitely has growth potential...

Since you asked for feedback, maybe a user portal, with a document library would be the tips from the top of my head. Maybe with something to track learning over time. Though this would surely increase hosting costs.
Looks like far away is more reasonable.
Oh yes, to be fair those are bad - they're the ones where they've removed the physical keyboard if I remember correctly.

Elizabeth Line - the move to LCD screens was probably a move to make it feel more modern, no doubt at great cost. I never really have an issue with them though, maybe boiling a frog thing :)
As the Google memo (https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...) pointed out, a lot of OSS stuff/improvements are being built on top of Meta's work which somewhat benefits them as well.

But still, Kudos to Zuck/Meta for doing it anyway.
What you're describing would still need a bootstrap ROM, and would be rather challenging since it's not obvious how you'd handle unplanned power loss.

If you really want to avoid booting, the registers also need to be non-volatile, and all of the peripherals have to be built this way, too, e.g. the GPU.
You’re talking about something completely different. The fact that the contactless system doesn’t support railcards doesn’t change the fact that it’s much better at performing the core task of computing people’s movements through TfLs systems, and charging the correct amount.

Oyster system is fundamentally limited by its use of stored values on the physical cards, making it hard for the system to correctly issues retroactive refunds. TfL does its best to automate this, if you regularly use the same station, buts it’s an imperfect system.

TfL have long acknowledged the issue with railcards, and not supporting them on contactless is hardly “by design”. It’s substantially harder to support railcards, and perform correct enforcement of them, with contactless cards. There’s no way of meaningfully marking a contactless card as being paired with a railcard, which would allow ticket inspectors to actually know that when performing enforcement. It would be come trivial for people to defraud TfL using railcards, if there was no mechanism for allowing spot checks on people travelling.

To make the argument that not supporting railcards is “by design”, you also need to explain why TfL accept railcards on the Oyster system. TfL are under no obligation whatsoever to support national railcards. So if the lack of support for railcards on contactless was a revenue maximisation choice, why don’t they just get rid of the railcard discount entirely?
The fact that this has just disappeared from the front page for me, just like the previous post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651548), somehow leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.
I continue to be surprised by the talk of general artifical intelligence when it comes to LLMs. At their core, they are text predictors, and they're often pretty good at that. But anything beyond that, they are decidely unimpressive.

I use Copilot on a daily basis, which uses GPT 4 in the backend. It's wrong so often that I only really use it for boilerplate autocomplete, which I still have to review. I've had colleagues brag about ChatGPT in terms of code it produces, but when I ask how long it took in terms of prompting, I'll get an answer of around a day, and that was even using fragments of my code to prompt it. But then I explain that it would take me probably less than an hour from scratch to do what it took them and ChatGPT a full day to do.

So I just don't understand the hype. I'm using Copilot and ChatGPT 4. What is everyone else using that gives them this idea that AGI is just around the corner? AI isn't even here. It's just advanced autocomplete. I can't understand where the disconnect is.
Usually there's a penalty on top of the cost of the hotel.

You really have to be selective, and read the fine print, though. Often they try to make you pay fees for the free room, and the fees almost equal the cost of the room. Read everything, and be sure you can say no to people before you even think about doing this.
And use which first class libs? IO related libs are almost all based on Tokio. I mean I'm happy that at least there's some consent regarding the runtime. But you can't undo the decisions for going async (instead of green threads) that easily.
> You are right in principle that FLOSS apps can and do have telemetry/surveillance included

Note that I was just replying to your "Firefox is non-free" statement, not to this. I do agree that the tracking story is way better when using free software in general (but that indeed, it's not a guarantee, especially when using official installers from sloppy software editors).

----

Code that is under a free software license that downloads (and runs) non-free software is still free software.

This can be seen as an anti-feature, F-droid would call this one "Non-Free Addon" [1], but this is a separate matter.

For a distro to be approved by the FSF, it needs to only include free software, and also match additional, more restrictive criteria such as, indeed, not promoting non-free software. But this doesn't qualify some specific software, it qualifies a distribution.

In addition to DRM, Firefox also has other issues, including these:

- it allows non-free addons on its extension repository, and even recommends (promotes) some of them (also Non-Free Addons)

- it includes features that depends on non-free services, like pocket (Non-Free Network Services [2])

I don't like them, but that doesn't make Firefox proprietary. Worst case, it isn't suitable as is for a FSF-approved distro. Which, again, goes beyond the quality of being free software.

The fsf.org blog post you link to (which I'm also familiar with) shares concerns (which I mostly share, indeed), but doesn't state that it makes Firefox non-free software. There's one point that I would debate from this link:

> We agree with Cory Doctorow that there is no meaningful distinction between 'installing DRM' and 'installing code that installs DRM.'

The distinction is meaningful, because embedding the DRM code in Firefox itself would make Firefox non free. However I agree that it makes Firefox promote horrible software without even warning the user, which is not great at all.

tl;dr: The concepts of FSF-approved distro and free software should not be mixed up. They are both useful but separate concepts. I could even see someone being full pro free software but thinking that FSF-approved distro goes too far.

[1] https://f-droid.org/docs/Anti-Features/#NonFreeAdd

[2] https://f-droid.org/docs/Anti-Features/#NonFreeNet
Most of my other comments I was speaking in first person, in others I did not initially realize it wasn't as clear in some of them.

I also updated my bio here to reflect the product I am working for belongs to Automattic. Previously, it only mentioned the product which not everyone has to know belongs to Automattic.