skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are a living example of survivorship bias. One day your car will kill you or someone else, and then maybe you’ll be able to come back here and tell us how wrong you were. How, with your new experience, you can see how the car only “seemed” competent, how it was that very seeming competence that got someone killed, because you trusted it.
I’ve been doing pcb design around sensor coils for capacitive sensing. My engineering team has been playing with similar ideas around printing coils for other electro magnetic purposes. Motors are an obvious usecase. Good to see others doing similar stuff with printed circuit boards. It takes a way a lot of complexity and pcb processes have some pretty good precision these days.
FSF has published a commentary: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation

GPL licenses have allowed so-called "mere aggregation", where separate programs are distributed together. Such programs don't have to be all covered by GPL.

On the other hand, if parts are intimately tied to each other such that they are effectively a single program, GPL applies to the whole.

The FSF commentary explains that the judgment depends both on the mechanisms and the semantics of the co-operation. Technical implementation details don't make programs separate if they are intimately designed to work together: "But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program."
KDE Connect wasn't really reliable and easy to use while I did. And Syncthing pretty much eliminated the need to use KDE Connect for me. The only extra-feature of KDE Connect was sharing the buffer, and I just paste to Obsidian now instead (any text editor would do, but I don't know anything better, even though I hate it for being closed-source). Maybe slightly less ergonomic than KDE Connect in this regard, but it's negligible. And I don't need to send files, if I can just share files.

In fact, I think I never even connected the phone via USB since I started using Syncthing. Copying/moving to/from shared folder is amazingly both more ergonomic and much faster (I never learned, why moving files to Android device via USB is so insanely slow).

So I really don't know an alternative. It solved pretty much all my phone/PC sync needs. It also enables backuping the important stuff (I don't use Google for that, or course). Dropbox doesn't cut it either. I really don't imagine how would I use my phone w/o Syncthing, it's pretty much essential.
My latest project

Besides blog post, I've also put together a 14-video YouTube playlist covering each setup step: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL83G0TLSeXREwjHDZPsV_...

By the end, you’ll have a secure (DDoS proof), performant, and scalable WordPress instance on Cloud Run, backed by a Cloud SQL database and three GCS buckets for backups & media storage + Cloudflare CDN for fast content delivery!
I used to tell new engineers fresh out of school, "The hardest part of this job is thinking."
Big Ben uses a stack of pennies to keep it accurate
This is good advice but just a note - the point is to be as simple as possible. With SSL and a good password there is no hacking that I know of. If I started doing a lot of this the file would get bloated and the readability and extensibility of the code would go drastically down IMO.
I am happy with the LLMs, but I only tried them on small projects done at my free time.

As a back end developer I am not familiar with the latest trends in JavaScript and CSS, and frankly I do not want to spend my time studying these. A LLM can generate an interactive web game based on my description. I review the code, it is usually okay, sometimes I suggest an improvement. I could have done all of that -- but it would take me a week, and the LLM does it in seconds. So it is a difference between a hobby project done or not done.

I also tried a LLM at work, not to code, but to explain some complex topics that were new to me. Once it provided a great high-level description that was very useful. And once it provided a great explanation... which was a total lie, as I found out when I tried to do a hello-world example. I still think the 50% success rate is great, as long as you can quickly verify it.

Shortly, we need to know the strengths and the weaknesses, and use the LLMs accordingly. Too much trust will get you burned. But properly used, they can save a lot of time.
I don't understand how a board game is supposed to be "uncynical" in the first place.
> a method of doing upgrades between major versions that doesn't involve taking the database down.

For large instances this is a big ask, especially of a project without single person in charge. MySQL does have better replication, yet still often requires manually setting that up and cutting it over to do major version upgrades.
You raise a great point. Maybe I should be asking the AI for more career advice or new product ideas, rather than just letting it merely solve each specific coding challenge.
I'd agree with you if you live in a country where you can walk into your local library and read these for "free." For people who live where there may not even be a library, your argument makes no sense except to make the publishers richer. They typically price some of these books at "library prices" so normal people won't be able to afford them, but libraries will.
>However, I do think that a meaningful intelligence comparison between humans and dolphins, etc, would conclude that we are more intelligent, especially based on our reasoning/planning (= multi-step prediction) abilities

I'm not sure how you would make meaningful comparisons here. We can't communicate to them as they communicate and we live in almost completely different environments. Any such comparison would be extremely biased to us.

>which allows us not only to predict our environment but also to modify it to our desires in very complex ways.

We modify our environment mostly through technology. Intelligence is a big part of technology sure but it's not the only part of it and without the other parts (hands with opposable thumbs, fire etc), technology as we know it wouldn't exist and our ability to modify the environment would seem crippled to any outside observer regardless of how intelligent we may be.

It's not enough to think that the earth revolves around the sun, we need to build the telescopes (with hands and materials melted down and forged with fire) to confirm it.

It's not enough to dream and devise of flight, we need the fire to create the materials that we dug with our hands and the hands to build them.

It's not enough to think that Oral communication is insufficient for transmitting information through generations. What else will you do without opposable thumbs or an equivalent ?

Fire is so important for so many reasons but one of the biggest is that it was an easy source of large amounts of energy that allowed us to bootstrap technology. Where's that easy source of energy underwater ?

Without all the other aspects necessary for technology, we are relegated to hunter/gatherer levels of influencing the environment at best. Even then, we still crafted tools that creatures without opposable thumbs would never be able to craft.
Having worked both as a developer and as a technical communicator (for software), I'm thinking that low friction for developers is paramount, and that therefore the way to get developers to put some effort into it is to have documents both (a) written in Markdown (or adoc or rST or typst) and (b) co-located with code under version control. Change the code, change the docs, no screwing around, BUT a quick & simple brain dump can suffice because of [see next paragraph].

To whit: I have yet to hear of a documentation system that provides fully bidirectional updates between such documents-as-code and edits made further downstream along the documentation production pipeline. That is to say, when a TC person or a reviewer makes edits to content, these changes should propagate back to the docs-as-code material.

Then everyone benefits, including senior devs whose scarce time is optimised by having TC people expand and polish their hasty scribblings, and junior devs who have well-maintained documentation at-hand in-place.

My 0.02€, YMMV. Maybe too niche.
Indeed. I thought to say the same but you’ve phrased the problem with most in academia very nicely.
> unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep.

T E C H N O L O G I C

…

T E C H N O L O G I C
> What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs.

Despite being an LLM skeptic of sorts, I don’t think that necessarily follows. The LLM matrix multiplication machinery may well be implementing an equivalent of the human non-language cognitive processing as a side effect of the training. Meaning, what is separated in the human brain may be mixed together in an LLM.
There was a suspicion that a chestnut got hacked. Enough for HN.
TV ads to target households on individual streets
12 years of blogging – what I've learned
The legal side is a big issue, true. The simplest and best workaround that I'm aware of is how the Arweave network handles it. They leave it up to the individual what parts of the data they want to host, but they're financially incentivized to take on rare data that others aren't hosting, because the rarer it is the more they get rewarded. Since it's decentralized and globally distributed, if something is risky to host in one jurisdiction, people in another can take that job and vice versa. The data also can not be altered after it's uploaded, and that's verifiable through hashes and sampling. Main downside in its current form is that decentralized storage isn't as fast as having central servers. And the experience can vary of course, depending on the host you connect to.

As for technical attacks, I'm not an expert but I'd assume it's more difficult for bad actors to bring down decentralized networks. Has the BitTorrent network ever gone offline because it was hacked for example? That seems like it would be extremely hard to do, not even the movie industry managed to take them down.
>I like the idea that people are upset because they are dumb and categorically misunderstand the word “public”

because that IS the reason. You can even see it here in the comments that a lot of people misunderstand that blocking never prevented the blocked person from seeing your posts.
12 years ago, I started blogging on alwa.info, and since then, I’ve expanded to Medium, Substack, and other platforms.
When did snark replace thoughtful commentary?
Perhaps the difference for you is that "bin" is already an English word with an official pronunciation.

Personally, I also use short-i for "lib," because I tend to pronounce shortenings of text as if they were words themselves.
"There will be a large number of non-participating vehicles on the road for at least another 50 years."

I think so too, but I also think, if we would really want to, all it would take is a GPS device with internet connection, like a smart phone, to make a normal car into a realtime connected one.

But I also think we need to work out some social and institutional issues first.

Currently I would not like my position to be avaiable in real time to some obscure agency.
The free tiers of https://linear.app/ and https://www.notion.so/ are pretty good.

Combined with plugging your linear account into the VCS of your choice (probably github/gitlab/bitbucket).

The free tier of https://www.figma.com/ is good for mockups and design.
How did you come by this information and do you have any sources / further reading on this?
The design of good storage layers in databases is deeply architectural. As a consequence, it is essentially a "forever" design decision. Fundamentally changing the storage architecture will alter the set of tradeoffs being made such that it will break the assumptions of existing user applications, which is generally considered a Very Bad Thing. The existing architecture, with all its quirks and behaviors, is part of the public API (see also: Hyrum's Law).

In practice, the only way to change the fundamental architecture of a database is to write a new one, with everything that entails.
Sounds much better than $20 Gotek /s
That is literally the entire point. The whole investigation is moot because both the hardware and software are out of date, and no longer used for any current Model Ys off the production line.
Looks very Azure-centric. Both installation guides (https://drasi.io/how-to-guides/install-sample-applications/b... and https://drasi.io/how-to-guides/install-sample-applications/c...) require Azure to work.

And then there's this:

> Installing Drasi in an EKS cluster can be significantly more complex than a standard installation on other platforms. Instead of downloading a CLI binary using the provided installation scripts, this approach requires modifying the source code of the Drasi CLI and building a local version of the CLI.

Is this an actual requirement or just the current easy path?
I couldn't agree more. Given how much frigging hoops I had to jump through to get my Obsidian over syncthing setup to sync with my company iPhone - I nearly gave up.

I grew up when computers didn't babysit me and tried to act like the good old GDR, knowing every thing better than their citicens.

Nowadays, I feel more and more hindered by computers, not enabled. Computers used to be a production device (I could create things with them).

Phones are not a computer - phones are a just "consume like we want you to" device.

The problem is, I want my phone to be a creation device. A device that allows me to create content, text, to do lists, shopping lists, ideas and store them. And(!) sync them using the tools I decide to use. And not force me to use tools I friggin hate, because they just don't get the job done.
Well for one thing I didn't write that.
No, inflation is only because of an increase in the money supply, which is increased by lending in modern economies. Rulers will make false definitions and false measurements in order to try to hide this. Just as Roman emperors would debase the metal in their currency and demand that people treated the money as pure. But the truth is still the truth, no matter the lies.
Do you pronounce the vowel in /var as in "bar" or as in "bare"?

Also, for those who try to pronounce everything rather than spell them out, where does it end?

I now have a newly discovered, morbid interest in how such folks say path elements like "selinux", "httpd", and "pgsql"...
Don’t know anything about YC’s business model or the direction they want to grow.

But the community is very thoughtful & already here. I think a HN SM App, whether part of their present business plan or not would have some mass appeal.

Just probably isn’t something they necessarily want to do
When machines could see you
Sure. The varying "composition" of that energy is what forms the spectrum - it's a single scalar. You're adding one more dimension of dim/bright, making the entire description be two scalars.

Look up the definition of "spectrum", and contrast with "gamut".
I made a small C program that would use GMP to generate a prime number from a bmp image. I was inspired by a Youtube video but I can’t remember what it was anymore.

https://github.com/Fethbita/BMP_to_Prime
dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41893994
Nowadays it seems rather easy to have a computer that talks as if it were conscious. Do you think it really does perceive itself the same way we do? I woke up a human today, but someone else woke up an algorithm?

If not, what’s missing?
Wow, as someone who feels like I'm decently familiar with the ins and outs of Postgres, I thought this was a great article and I learned a ton.

It seems like one of the biggest fundamental flaws is that Postgres chose the O2N approach for tracking row versions instead of N2O. While switching to N2O wouldn't solve all problems (e.g. the article also talks about how Postgres stores full row copies and not just diffs), from an "80/20 rule" perspective, it seems like it would get rid of most of the downsides with the current implementation. For example, I'd assume that the vast majority of the time that transactions want the latest row version, so using the N2O ordering means you could probably do away with storing each row version in an index, as you'd only need to traverse the linked list of you needed an older version, which should be much less common.
Most Twitter users aren't americans.
"Aesthetic" gets even stickier! In the UK I tend to more commonly hear it pronounced as "es-thetic".

The Great Vowel Shift indeed makes written English much more confusing than it perhaps should be. English is already a messy hodge-podge of a language, then our writing system started to get standardised (or standardized, if you're American!) right as pronunciation started to change, leading to the written version of words suddenly no longer being anything like the pronunciation.
My understanding is that the dataflow user was talking about a notification which the server is supposed to receive from the OS in the case of a broken client connection. This notification is usually received, but cannot be guaranteed in a distributed environment.
I made no such assumption this will always happen though? That's why the comment was so much longer than just "isn't TCP RST enough?"... I listed a ton of ways to deal with this that didn't involve letting the program continue happily on its path.
No. Not in my world. Because I actually want to be able to backup my phone - not only demarcated parts of it.

I want to be able to get all data from my phone - regardless of what it is and what app put it there.

If I decide to only sync specific folders. So be it. But I want to be able to sync "/"
Haven't done the math but maybe they aren't so disconnected. If I can trade off an elevated heart rate of 170 for an hour every day or two in exchange for dropping my resting heartbeat from 70 to 50, I should end up with more years to use those finite heartbeats. As with most things in life it's about balance. Extremes and absolutes in most everything tend to result in poor outcomes. You don't want to be sitting 24/7 or running 24/7.
Shortkey a Smart Keyword Launcher
It's a long time since I read the book, but it strikes me as a bizarre misreading. The article quotes the guy who discovered the game as saying:

> In Sirens of Titan, there’s this army of Mars which is really a joke. No one in the army, [not] even the officers, are really in charge of what’s going on. They’re all mind controlled. Nobody has any real free will. They’re just set up as a pawn to be sacrificed, to make Earth come together, kind of Watchmen-style.

The effort of the officers in the book is meaningless, but it turns out the effort of all humanity for all of history is completely meaningless, because humanity is being manipulated by aliens to achieve a trivial purpose.
Yes, it's a good point. Though they could take that money and reward people for hosting the data as well, couldn't they? They don't have to be in charge of hosting.
Solving the Dining Philosophers problem using systemd

It gave me the chance to play with some old unix concepts in an nspawn container.

https://github.com/brightbox/systemd-dining

As well as incorporating the Philosopher’s Song and some profound statements into the journal.
You seem to be arguing that it was possible to implement auctions without blockchain, and that such an implementation would be even better. I provided my example in response to josephg, who did not include "using blockchain is the best way to build such a product" in the list of constraints in his question. Therefore, I have not optimized my example for that.

So I'd rather stop argument here.
Microsoft asking us to buy new Windows 11 PCs is wasteful
Not a big fan of the dielectric fluid these motors have to be filled with.
I like having this kind of animation on my homepage, too.

Currently I just have an animated GIF background, but I've had some animated ASCII art in the past.

I'm currently working on animating a fractal drawn with HTML Canvas.

Your houses and pencil style are very cute, I feel inspired to make something similar.

I'd like if clicking in the same place would grow whatever's there.
"Honestly it seems like it ought to be federal law by now that municipalities need to notify a designated centralized service of all road/lane/sign/etc. changes in a standardized format, that all digital mapping providers can ingest from"

Why not just anyone and make that data openly avaiable?
It's an open-source program, it shouldn't be held to the same standards as a closed-source program that just shuttles all of your data to someone else's computer.

The risk here isn't misuse of the data, it's that some exploit is found in the code, and the additional protection of limiting its filesystem access is marginal (but nice to have).
Why would it not given the legal framework put in place?
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-military-office...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/06/pro-russia-ukr...
How did you get iPhone Syncthing + Obsidian working? I was under the impression that it was basically impossible to share Möbius Sync's directory with Obsidian.
Coordinating roadwork is challenging in most places, I think. Over here, it's apparently cheaper to open up a road multiple times in a year, rather than coordinating all the different parties that need underground access in the foreseeable future.
> 3-10 juniors can make a massive expensive mess of a crud app that costs $x0k a month in amazon spend and barely works, while someone who knows what they're doing could cobble it together on a lamp stack running under their desk for basically nothing.

Yes! Absolutely. It will be faster and more reliable and an order of magnitude (or more) cheaper.

Alas, I'm slowly (grudginly and very slowly) coming to terms accepting that absolutely nobody cares. Companies are happy to pay AWS 100K/mo for that ball of gum that becomes unresponsive four times a day, rather than pay for one expert to build a good system.
Documentation near code is a good idea, but unfortunately it covers only part of the problem.

There is a big portion of documentation that should be available to "other persons", such as architects or project managers, who may not want to visit the codebase.

Another challenge is that for these people, diagrams are typically more useful than text. This still requires some manual effort which is difficult to achieve with Markdown.
Does anyone know who is targeting the Internet Archive, and why? I get the impression the attacks are too sophisticated for it to just be vandal punks.
http://blogicaster.blogspot.com/2011/10/lovecrafts-lactantiu...
Software Engineer Titles Have Almost Lost All Their Meaning
The Climate Crisis as Spiritual Crisis
I agree with you about the trust issues and feel similarly, but also feel like the younger generations who grow up with these technologies might be less skeptical about adopting them.

I've been kind of amazed how much younger people take some newer technologies for granted, the ability of humans to adapt to changes is marvelous.