skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article is annoyingly written. Basically the author takes this little story from Weizenbaum's published accounts of "Eliza"—

> My secretary watched me work on this program over a long period of time. One day she asked to be permitted to talk with the system. Of course, she knew she was talking to a machine. Yet, after I watched her type in a few sentences she turned to me and said: ‘Would you mind leaving the room, please?’

—and wonders whether this story is true, and if so, what was Weizenbaum's secretary's name. It's not immediately clear to me that we should assume there was a secretary at all; Weizenbaum might have anonymized not only the participant's name but also her profession (and maybe her sex).

The author says she made an effort to find out who was Weizenbaum's secretary circa 1966, but was (completely?) unsuccessful:

> I work my way through Weizenbaum’s yellowed papers. Surely, among the transcripts, code print outs, letters and notebooks there will be evidence? There are some clues, reference to a secretary in letters to and from Weizenbaum. But no name.

> I broaden my hunt to administrative records. I look in department papers and the collections of Weizenbaum’s workplace, Project MAC – the hallowed centre of computing innovation at MIT. No luck. I contact the HR office and MIT’s alumni group. I stretch the patience of the ever-generous archivists. As my last day arrives, I still hear only silence.

The Weizenbaum archives are partially online. On page 149 of this 150-page collection labeled "SLIP, 1963 - 1967" ( https://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/201706 ), it's indicated that on November 5, 1963, someone with the initials "jep" was taking dictation from JW.

Now, a single set of initials isn't remotely "identification" of JW's secretary (let alone identifying the participant from Weizenbaum's story, year unknown). But I feel like as a reward for reading all that, at least the author could have mentioned that she'd found those initials, and worked that into the tale she wanted to spin. As it is, it feels like she cared strictly more about spinning the tale than about finding the identity of the secretary. And if she doesn't care, why should the reader?
HTML is a text-based medium. But that doesn't make it a human language. Some human languages are not text-based. And some text is not a human language.

ANSI C was designed to be written by humans using a plain text editor. That doesn't make it a human language.
OK, but if you own the machine, you can just pick the outcome you want, or draw it from the distributions at random. We (observers inside the machine) cannot know the future of course.
The article refers to one company as being "more stagnant" than another. It also mentions how people can behave "more like workers than like entrepreneurs." It refers to a firm's "growth."

What are the assumptions underlying the article? What does it mean for a firm to be "stagnant"? How do "entrepreneurs" behave? What is "growth"?

My guess is that the model unspoken is how startups work in, say, the US. An entrepreneur is a person focused primarily on securing more funding/customers/exposure for the company. A stagnant company is one whose revenue/profit/funding/headcount is not steadily increasing. Growth, the opposite of stagnation, is one combination of measures that an investor might use to guess whether an investment in the company will yield favorable returns.

Is that what is missing from poor countries?

To play the devil's advocate, I think that those things are more likely to occur in an environment flush with money, where there are many founders who will take a gamble, where there are many rich people who will fund the gambles, and where a corrupt state entity cannot easily be used to steal any good that comes from it.
I worked in biotech / pharma for a little over a decade, a big chunk of PhD’s are doing work that doesn’t require a PhD…as in open to someone with a MS or PhD.

And then mamy jobs “require” a PhD, but I’ve seen what they do and it’s semi-mindless and very repetitive.
Trees can also be useful here but they have some of the same branching problems that hashes do and lists do not.
EEG markers in autistic and non-autistic people [pdf]
Probably more that it's easier to figure out wealth from public stocks compared to private businesses and real estate.
The funny thing is that in normal doses, pure nicotine isn't even particularly harmful. (I am not recommending that children use nicotine.)
> If it is illegal, setting an upper limit is not the moral solution.

Any particular reason you believe that?
Every tenured professor is expected to have at very least one PhD student. A PhD takes on average less than 8 years and a tenure more than 20.

Though I think a more reasonable replacement rate is 10+ PhD graduates per professor. I do not think this problematic somehow, unlike what overproduction implies.
what does artificial mean here
Its certainly interesting, though the language its couched in wouldn't be found in any philosophical discussion on time. This is all to say that it deals with concepts that have been discussed in philosophy for a long time, and these insights wouldn't be considered "new" to someone from say mid-19th century Prussia. Certainly the "progressive unfolding of the truth," in qualitatively different steps which Wolfram adopts here as his concept of time is no different from Hegel's concept of time and the movement of history. I would recommend, for anyone interested in this sort of thing, to just read the "Preface" to his Phenomenology of Spirit.[0]

[0]https://files.libcom.org/files/Georg%20Wilhelm%20Friedrich%2...
> Boeing basically just a guaranteed monopoly

This.

It would be great if Boeing was dissolved and shareholders wiped out. The company is sold off to a new company that can attempt to rebuild it again with the very hard learned lesson that quality and engineering matter and that MBAs ruin everything and make you bankrupt if you give them too much power.
I see that as a good thing, given that we're on the receiving end of when companies can drop any employee on a dime with no explanation.

If it's that critical, give the older workers their pension early and let them enjoy their life. And the younger workers should he retrained to work with the automation. But we know that's never what happens when work gets more efficient. So it's not just about "advancement" for the ports. The fact that those things were never even on the table speaks for itself.

----

Alternatively, congress can always repeal the law and break whatever contracts they have. Surely their own dysfunction wouldn't bite them in the butt when it's in the government interest, right?
> All of the experience from every robot can be combined into a single agent

I'm not so sure. It's not obvious that experience combines linearly, so you'll have to somehow figure out how to make the combination work in such a way that it doesn't mess up the receiver too badly--you still want some individuality among the robot fleet right?
> Musk lost a month of Brazilian revenue and gained nothing.

Oh, he lost more than that.

Twitter is big because of the network effect, and the network just got smaller.
> For the transformation of money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must find the free worker available on the commodity-market; and this worker must be free in the double sense that as a free individual he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that, on the other hand, he has no other commodity for sale, i.e. he is rid of them, he is free of all the objects needed for the realization of his labour power.

> Why this free worker confronts him in the sphere of circulation is a question which does not interest the owner of money, for he finds the labour-market in existence as a particular branch of the commodity-market. And for the present it interests us just as little. We confine ourselves to the fact theoretically, as he does practically. One thing, however, is clear: nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history, It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.
Summarizing it to say it was Fayez Sarofim was useful to me.
Dreamhost.
How many users have ever sought to relink a statically linked closed source app with an updated version of an LGPL library? I’m sure somebody has done it somewhere. But I think it is so very rare, to the point that for the vast vast majority of people (even people with the necessary technical skills to do it), it is a theoretical right rather than a practically relevant one.

In fact, I think this would technically comply with the LGPL: package with the software an offer to supply this “link kit” on request, but don’t bother actually creating it until such time as a request is received. Significant chance nobody ever requests it, and hence you never have to do the work of creating it. And in the unlikely event someone does eventually ask for it, you could always collect the object files manually rather than some automated process as I suggested.
What kind of bizarro-world are you living in where these things happen?

I just take my car to the [both "unauthorized" and "uncertified"] shop when that is necessary. My mechanic looks at it and either generates an estimate while I wait or he calls me later -- depending on how busy they are.

I then either agree to have him do the work, or I don't.

If I do, then: He gets it done, and then I pay the bill, and then I drive my car home.

It's a very straight-forward kind of transaction.
As a twin I've always been extra cautious about this kind of stuff. I don't think I have a right to give people my twin's biometric data. I even refrain from posting images of myself publicly---there are at most two pictures of me from the past five years floating around the internet. It astounds me how reckless others are with their relatives' private information.
> There are many complexities, but one popular technique is to put assets into trusts that allow the returns to accrue for heirs without taxation. Nike founder Phil Knight, for example, put his company’s stock in a series of trusts to benefit his children. The trusts pay him a modest return, but the rest of the gains avoid incurring estate tax, including Nike shares that were worth $6.1 billion in 2021, Bloomberg reported.

…

> Behn’s clients typically want to maximize the money they leave for their children or establish a philanthropic legacy; some seek to do both.

I’m sure that the numbers on these schemes work out favorably on paper, but if you lived through WW2 I wonder if you might be willing to pay a premium to give your immediate heirs maximum flexibility, knowing that the future is unpredictable.
It does improve it, by several orders of magnitude. If your point is strong enough to make without exaggerating, then use of hyperbole can only stand to distract from the point.
There's "digital physics" which goes back to the late 60s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics.

The connection between heat/entropy and time is well explored. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_as_an_arrow_of_time
First: no, that reasoning doesn't generalize nearly well enough. Unicode has many quotation marks, and " is just one of them. “ and ” are perfectly acceptable to use to wrap double-quoted text and you can't say they "should" use ordinary " and a proper font, because a font doesn't know which one is the beginning and which is the end of the quoted text. (Hence why those characters even exist).

Second: no, Unicode definitely considers other characters to be apostrophes:

>>> unicodedata.name(chr(700)) # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modifier_letter_apostrophe
'MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE'
>>> unicodedata.name(chr(1370)) # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_(Unicode_block)
'ARMENIAN APOSTROPHE'
>>> unicodedata.name(chr(2036)) # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%27Ko_script
'NKO HIGH TONE APOSTROPHE'
>>> unicodedata.name(chr(2037))
'NKO LOW TONE APOSTROPHE'
>>> unicodedata.name(chr(65287)) # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfwidth_and_fullwidth_forms
'FULLWIDTH APOSTROPHE'
>>> unicodedata.name(chr(917543)) # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags_(Unicode_block)
'TAG APOSTROPHE'

There's even a "double apostrophe" which is definitely not any kind of quotation mark, semantically (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modifier_letter_double_apostro...) .

For that matter, there's a "Greek question mark" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark#Greek_question_m...) which is semantically equivalent to ? for Greek text, but rendered identically to ; in most fonts. And there are some CJK ideographs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_characters) which represent completely fake characters not used in any writing (including in any other East Asian language), which were included in an old Japanese character standard by mistake and then copied into Unicode.

"Unicode only has one" is the start of a lot of false claims. It is very much "designed by committee".
It would be great if you provide a link for that.
Agree that IQ is a bad test for intelligence, speaking as someone with a very high IQ. I am interested to know your thoughts about the test for AI that I came up with (check my most recent post). Let me know what you think!
Fireside Chat with DHH, Matz and Tobias Lütke – Rails World 2024 [video]
Are those two facts supposed to be related? I doubt the same uncharged war criminals were still running things 40 years later.
snac2: Mastodon API ActivityPub instance in portable C
Anyone can make a voluntary contribution to the United States Treasury: https://fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html
You can make just about anything a slippery slope if you wanted to - “they’re putting limits on guns, what’s next, kitchen knives?”

Morally you should probably be spending more time figuring out how to get everyone their first car instead of worrying about your legal rights in owning your second.
Apple TV+'s market share vs. other streaming platforms in the US
"We encourage young people to go into the sciences and then treat them like shit when they do.

--heard from a scientist on a podcast once
>Twitter/X was standing up for free speech by fighting back on this censorship, which does not seem constitutional per Brazil’s own laws. But I guess at some point their profits were more important than principles.

X cannot credibly maintain a pretense of standing up for free speech principles when the so-called "free speech absolutist" at the helm of X is curiously quiet about the world's largest censorship machine.
Do you... not buy into that premise that my comment makes sense in context? I thought it was pretty clear.

The issue I take with your new scenario is that you're not the one swinging the club. You've been working on your stance, grip, and follow-through, but none of that is relevant because the clubs Tiger uses are 400 feet long and in space.
My experience is not just against insurgents. I fought uniformed Iraqi military, and some black pajamas guys later. I was there in 2003.

The conflict in Kosovo was nothing like the ROE in Iraq, and if you’re on the ground calling for fire you damn sure would know the difference between arty and us.
Why Design Is Hard
INT-FlashAttention: Enabling Flash Attention for INT8 Quantization
They're probably applying more of an Übermensch mentality than a self-centered one.
True. I suppose you could remove the antenna or sabotage it in some manner
> The EU will have fun with this when it catches up.

I don't think you know how the EU works.
>I haven't seen a PS/2 port on any brand-new (non-industrial) computer, even rackmount servers, since 2009

They're in lots of B550 chipset (AM4 socket) motherboards. Here's some examples:

https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/gp/B089Y9PFH1 (ASUS Prime B550M-A)
https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/gp/B0CXNK17WT (MSI B550M PRO-VDH)
https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/dp/B089W26FCB (AsRock B550M-HDV)
https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/dp/B08MXSQS49 (AsRock B550M Phantom Gaming 4)

Granted, these are a generation old and not the latest AM5 socket stuff, but still AM4 chips are fairly popular; these motherboards probably all came out around 2019.

>e-waste is a problem, yes; but PS/2 ports are really, really, not a meaningful cause of any problems in this area.

It all adds up. Millions upon millions of never-used PS/2 across all these systems for the many years these motherboards have been manufactured is a big pile of PS/2 connectors, all gone to waste.
> Rather than an FAQ section, I wonder if websites will integrate a “LLM question” section instead.

FYI the point of FAQ sections is to "prime" your brain about certain ideas; they're not always questions that they're frequently asked. A blank canvas chat interface won't have the same effect.

> There’s too much slop on website homepages

Some of these homepages have been iterated by many teams of very smart people, and they're sloppy because they convert. That's it. It's not to convey meaning, like a Wikipedia article, but get someone to click "sign up" or "buy."

It's important to distinguish "conveying meaning" with "conveying feeling"

> hacked together with Tailwind + Cursor + shadcn

most YC and other generic (but pretty) landing pages are usually webflow
Not to defend any particular case but I think it is easy to see that there must have been a time when the volunteers had no idea what they were in for, and that after they were in too deep they might have feared for their lives. Many of them probably had no idea what atrocities were going on in the name of their country. So, I think you need to judge people on a case-by-case basis when it comes to alleged war crimes. The same goes for people who join political parties in countries where it is a virtual prerequisite to any kind of professional work. Not only may they be unaware of the bad deeds of the party, but they may have concluded that they could do nothing about the party's actions anyway.
This $7B is enough to fund the US Federal government for about 8 hours
I would be totally fine if Unix programs never detached themselves from their invoking terminal/process and that restart was handled by an external system. Honestly, that seems much more consistent with the unix philosophy than having a billion different services all with their own daemonization code.

This belief is mainly because after many years of debugging services, the very first thing I do is run the service outside of the daemon manager, with debugging enabled, so I can strace the process from its beginning.
So you have pretty much the exact opposite position of the original article then (which does not suggest The Odyssey itself is a problem).
Sure, but why? Asahi Linux is the furthest along to my knowledge.
Given evolution's "modularity/abstraction/engineering principles be damned" approach to problem solving, I'd wager the shape of the bottleneck and every other little detail is actually important.

Put another way, evolution writes the worst side-effecting spaghetti code you've ever seen that somehow, (seemingly) miraculously does exactly the right thing, robustly, more efficiently than you can possibly imagine doing it.
It is indeed a recognized exception in Brazil. Also, our constitutions grants absolute freedom to communicate facts, while free expression is limited that way.

What is messed up here is how those things happened. It's not even clear if it's about hate speech, because the the censoring orders are themselves secret.

But then, the way Twitter handled things was messed up too.
Another small tidbit of lost computer history: The first person who lost a game to a computer was an unnamed Los Alamos laboratory assistant who lost a game of simplified chess against a computer program in 1956 [1]. The assistant's name seems to be lost to time.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_chess#Los_Alamos_tr...
Yeah nah, for me it's exactly that: plain html/js/css files. For simple things, I copy/paste.. not a big deal.

If it's getting more complicated, I'll abort and upgrade to rails to use layouts etc.

The middle ground of static site generators are a trap in my personal opinion.

If I need to add a feature, I've found it's easier for me to implement it directly rather than try mess around configuring a static site generator with plugins etc.
> The word is “post”.

Most posts on reddit aren't called posts. They're called comments. And nobody called posts on Twitter "posts" either. They were tweets.

If you go around talking about a website's posts, and the people who use the website call them something else, you're going to sound uninformed.
Elon Musk or another person pre-paying some of their future estate tax, don't buy the other angle.
No problem, it was an interesting history to read
It's because Unicode don't allow for language switching.

It takes up to eight bytes per character in Unicode if you want to support both Chinese and Japanese in a single font using IVS(and I don't think there's any font that actually supports this).

AFAICS(As far as I can search), Simplified(PRC) and Traditional(Taiwan) Chinese encoding are respectively called GB2312 and Big5, and they're both two byte encodings with good practical coverage. Same applies for Japanese Shift_JIS. If e.g. :flag_cc: were allowed to be used as start-of-language marker, one could theoretically cut that back down to two bytes per character without losing much and actually improving language supports.
Matt is frantically trying to justify his behaviour to dhh:

https://x.com/photomatt/status/1843802126281257347
https://x.com/photomatt/status/1843803465719620012
https://x.com/photomatt/status/1843804108932944122

Matt seems to have missed that dhh called out his use of the WordPress trademark as the strategy to "get Al Capone" which Matt has admitted to multiple times.

What's the truth, Matt?

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/4/24262232/matt-mullenweg-w...

"“The analogy I made is they got Al Capone for taxes,” Mullenweg says. “So, if a company was making half a billion dollars from WordPress and contributing back about $100,000 a year, yes, I would be trying to get them to contribute more.” WP Engine competes directly with the hosting services offered by Automattic and WordPress.com, and Mullenweg argues one of the reasons for its success is the use of “WordPress” across its site. “That’s why we’re using that legal avenue to really, yeah, pressure them. That’s true: we are pressuring them.”"

Is this about the trademark or not?
I have heard (on HN) of... 100 MBit ethernet with the transmit wires cut. Probably in the context of in-flight infotainment: plane data to infotainment yes, infotainment anything to plane control anything no. If it's stupid but it works...
I'm curious how you can find rails incredible while simultaneously hating ruby? Rails takes a lot of its inspiration from the language itself (internals relying heavily on metaprogramming, lots of exploitation of ruby's quirks all over the place). Like, what do you like about rails and what do you hate about ruby and how do those two things not overlap?
I do not view pension funds as a more legitimate use of the market. The market as a whole is completely zero sum in my view.

And of course the CME group has a positive view of speculators, because they profit from speculative activity.
There is a pool of people who definitely died. That's not in dispute.

What is questionable, as you point out, is the application of different tricks and shades of "can't prove, must be nuclear" to claim all deaths in the pool as a direct result of nuclear.

As others have pointed out there are similar yearly figures for tenuous "coal deaths" as there are here for seven years of post disaster "evacuation deaths".