skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
did banning plastic straws in a few US cities fix climate change and pollution?

>The access Russia currently enjoys is the equivalent of Goebbels being allowed to anonymously publish front-page editorials in the Times

there's absolutely nothing you can do about this to prevent this.

troll farms can afford residential VPNs and can network with the US/EU via neighboring neutral countries or their overseas agents.

>while simultaneously contributing code to Bletchley Park co

there's absolutely nothing you can do about this to prevent this.

how do you know that John Johnson contributing code to some widely-used library is not Ivan Ivanson, a KGB sleeper agent? do you know John Johnson in person? does anyone else in your anonymous, informal, nebulous developer clique know any other contributor personally? are you sure that jkldjsafj, qweqweqwe and all the random anonymous guys with anime girl profile pictures who contribute code to a myriad projects are not Russian plants?

>I would like to remind you of the recent XZ utils backdoor into SSH contributed by a less than friendly nation state.

case in point to the above: no one fucking knows who did it. it could be Russia, it could be China, it could be Israel, it could be NSA/CIA.
Without people providing their prompts, it's impossible to say whether they are skilled or not, and their complaints or claims of "it worked with this prompt" without the output are also not possible to validate.

Maybe there's a clue in there as to why these experiences seem so different. I'm glad GPTs don't get frustrated.
Me as a person, or me as in a community where mostly the businesses consume 90+% of resources but my city still wants to try and limit how much water I use in the shower?

I agree with the latter, and I suppose I indirectly contribute to it as a society.
> In my opinion Kahle was wrong; the existence of one orphan works clearinghouse would have encouraged Congress to grant more libraries access instead of doing nothing

Maybe. I think that is a pretty optimistic view of congress and our political process. I would argue that having a powerful, rich company with a monopoly to lose would have made passing such a law less likely, not more.

I do think we would have been better off with a Google monopoly on unpublished unclaimed books than with the lack of access we have today.

The article says:

> You’d get in a lot of trouble, they said, but all you’d have to do, more or less, is write a single database query. You’d flip some access control bits from off to on. It might take a few minutes for the command to propagate.

If it's so easy, I'm suprised nobody has done it and accepted the consequences. It seems one of the largest single positive impacts any person could make on the world. Once it's released, it'll never go back in the box. A modern Pandora.
Talking about ancient Windows software... Windows used to have an API for automation in the 2000s (I don't know if it still does). I wrote this MS Access script that ran and moved the cursor at exactly the pixel coordinates where buttons and fields were positioned in a GUI that we wanted to extract data from, in one of my first jobs. My boss used to do this manually. After a week he had millions of records ready to query in Access. You can imagine how excited he was. Was a fun little project and pretty hilarious to see the cursor moving fast AF around the screen like it was possessed. PS: you could screw up the script run pretty easily by bumping into the mouse of that pc.
Eh, if you can correlate my account with another I’m interested in meeting them.

I use several burners across systems and rotate them semi regularly. It’s less about attribution and more about not caring about who is voicing an opinion, rather than whether their opinion holds value.

Either way, I don’t think I’ve voiced any significant opinions one way or another, with the exception of a personal vendetta against google.
Such a blatant BS rationalization... The commit literally talks about "compliance". This is nothing more than an easy alternative to navigating the obscure sanctioning regime. It's like self-censorship, people/companies do this because of the fear that their activity may fall under sanctions, even though it highly likely does not.

If your system relies on people being in "a free country with rights and ethics", then you have a bad system widely open to abuse. After all, who decides which country is "free" and which is not? White house? Should you exclude people from all "non-free" countries?
I wrote a bot / agent in Go that after installing it once in an AWS EC2 instance would starting checking and bidding on AWS spot instances and replicate itself there.

It would check the API, “buy” a spot instance and inject a startup scrip to download itself.

Totally useless. But fun.

Code is here: https://github.com/tnolet/tatanka
The Claude web UI cannot generate binary files, it's (currently) restricted to plain text.

If you want binary files you'd be better off with ChatGPT with Code Interpreter mode, which can run Python code that generates binary content.

Or ask Claude to write you Python code that generates Excel files and then copy and paste that onto your own computer and run it yourself.
Growth is good until it's not, cancer would like a word.

The only thing that seems capable of growing forever is the amount of space in the universe. Line go up increasingly fast always forever is a bullshit fever dream that needs to be culled with prejudice.
Isn’t this basically how stable diffusion works?
I find it all equally meaningless.
Some care but most don't or cannot care as talking code quality means to managers that you could be doing more, faster and cheaper that is relevant to the bottom line. In large corps, everything is slow and expensive as it is, so 'wasting time' on things that are hard/impossible to measure is not something that is a great sell.
I checked; you are right.
Um, as a former CA business owner, there isn't a significant cost to start or support a business - aside from the annoying $800/min LLC "tax". The real problem is the fact that most people starting small businesses that want to hire people end up with people that do not want to work, are flakey, etc. We had a "successful" (paid for itself) plant business in far north eastern CA in a traditionally Summer/vacation area (open year round - paid well above median wage for the area). My wife and I also had other lives. Reliability was a huge thing. Sure people want to work - on their own terms. We couldn't get consistent help and said "we are done". This was 2021-2023.

That's a way bigger issue than some state booga booga conspiracy bullshit.
HathiTrust is a fine example of a repository which is in theory useful but in practice all but useless.

Participation is limited to tertiary academic institutions, and possibly only four-year (rather than two-year) ones. This excludes local (city/county) libraries, as well as primary/secondary (grammar / middle / high school in the US) libraries.

Even public-domain records cannot be downloaded in whole, but rather can be saved one page at a time as PDFs. I'm pretty sure that those interested in more useful archival will and/or have created automated tools to do so, but HathiTrust remains the most notable point-of-access for such works, and the additional generation of conversion and republication further degrades the quality of original-publication formats. (It's less a problem for regenerated works from OCR'd or manually-converted documents, but those of course lose all the characteristics of original publication.)

And of course, many materials still under copyright are not accessible to the general public at all, no matter how obscure. I'd run into a case of this some months back trying to get a date attribution of an Alan Watts lecture which had been posted to HN:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41231047> (thread).

And my request still stands. Anyone with an academic affiliation who can check <https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000678503> and see how it relates to this post (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41230841>) would have my gratitude.
Exactly. And that's how the west / america would approach it. Throw money at it until u get what u want
Gotta love the confidence to casually think every physicist for the past 100 years is an idiot.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics. You can usually prove whatever outcome you desire by choosing your starting and ending dates carefully.

While I don't doubt that CA has major economic problems, they chose their time range as Jan 2022 - June 2024. The huge tech layoffs began in ~mid 2022, largely as a result of huge over-hiring during the previous 2 years. So while CA indeed had abysmal job growth numbers over that period, I'd be very interested to know what, say, the past 5 or 6 years looked like in total, including both the pandemic boom and subsequent bust.
Era of Cyberpunk is arriving! Interesting times indeed.
>Are we going to be angry that billionaires exist

I'll take this one. Honestly, environmental impact is a lower priority reason for it.
The problem is deeper than that. Software has completely eroded property rights. I believe someone has coined the term "techno feudalism". Corporations own the software and us serfs merely lease it.
Discussion (55 points, 27 days ago, 10 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41647649
Molmo is the model, discussion (55 points, 27 days ago, 10 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41647649
Don't worry they'll hire migrants after a while when people forget this story.
>How the Unchecked Power of Companies Is Destabilizing Governance

It's an old joke. The joke is it's working as designed for the companies.
Yanis Varoufakis.
What are you saying? These are vital positions. I'm not sure what it matters to the discussion if they are 'career' or not?
One of the few things I actually want the government doing. We have weapons to give to foreign countries though.
In the same way Tinder "lets you find dates", I suppose so.
Cool. Which country owns the Linux kernel?

Not that I disagree with the move 100%, but I don't think it's that clear cut.
Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
This is a good point. Aside from the 3 specific incidents where they claim exactly that on page 13 of the document, the first amendment doesn’t get brought up. If you choose to skip reading those bits it is as if it isn’t mentioned at all.
Also known as anti-tracking insurance.
>Corporations own the software and us serfs merely lease it.

We were way more worried about that before GNU/Linux became a thing.
Only for basic objects.

The minute you add relationships your approach becomes unusable.

There is a reason ORMs have persisted for over 30 years.
You're describing the paparazzi. Yes - it's legal.
You just need to decide your own personal hardiness zone, and compare it to the map.

Just like plants thrive in certain zones, you need to consider what you need in order to thrive.

https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/
It's just an unfortunate title by her editor, the article is interesting. Silicon Valley is about building new companies, not large incumbents manipulating the world.
> And of course, the other real issue, especially in the U.S., is the capability of the power grids. In the Netherlands, which is an advanced economy, as in the U.S. and the U.K., we’ve already seen reports that the grids are functioning at near-emergency levels: code red. The grids are stretched to their limits. They break down and outages are more frequent. And yet there are many data centers in the pipeline that were agreed to years ago. When they come online in two or three years, we may face a wave of disaster.

I keep a document called "Timed Predictions," so I can check back on bold predictions such as these.

I'm adding an entry for this. In a few years, I'll evaluate whether we experience "a wave of disaster" due to overtaxed energy grids in 2026-2027.
Right!? We should send someone to write serious and thoughtful pieces about “How the unchecked power of governments is destabilizing companies”
I don't think you can use tanks, missiles, shells, and drones to clean trails
Tried that and didn’t work for me. I do hope it works for others.

Sometimes we do need custom tools even for the most basic needs. Mine is built to track not only that I did it but it allows me to comment on it. I can then go back and read through different entries. It’s super useful.

One of the use cases is tracking medications. I then share the notes with my GP (they appreciate things being timestamped).

Btw, love your website!

I use it for multiple things like writing. I will just create an entry to track it and then just write away. I also track when I work on my projects. One button click and it records the time when I start working on my car for example. Then I can track how much I spend on it and calculate how much a given repair or modification might take to complete.

Yes, I love tracking things …
Can anyone explain the mission of USFS? Why does the US maintain a bunch of wilderness when it’s buried in debt. Why not use federal assets to generate income instead of burdening taxpayers with taxes & debt payments?
I don't know, I feel like it has to be some sort of near field identity proof. E.g. as long as you are wearing a piece of equipment to a physical computer near you can run all those automations for you, or similar. I haven't fully thought what the best solution could be or whether someone is already working on it, but I feel like there has to be something like that, which would allow you better UX in terms of access, but security at the same time.

So maybe like an automated ubikey that you can opt in to a nearby computer to have all the access. Especially if working from home, you can set it at a state where if you are in 15m radius of your laptop it is able to sign all access.

Because right now, considering amount of tools and everything I use and with single sign on, VPN, Okta, etc, and how slow they seem to be, it's extremely frustrating process constantly logging in to everywhere, and it's almost like it makes me procrastinate my work, because I can't be bothered. Everything about those weird little things is absolutely terrible experience, including things like cookie banners as well.

And it is ridiculous, because I'm working from home, but frustratingly high amount of time is spent on this bs.

A bluetooth wearable or similar to prove that I'm nearby essentially, to me that seems like it could alleviate a lot of safety concerns, while providing amazing dev/ux.
Only the United States has raised weaponization of network effects to essentially the pinnacle of warfare. Which in essence, geopolitics is.
The commenter who says that ChatGPT is his "girlfriend" seems to have a fairly open-eyed view of the potential pitfalls, but I find it difficult to understand how he can have such a positive emotional reaction to the "sweet" things it says while being aware there is no emotion or comprehension behind it, just statistically-likely output that will be forgotten when it falls out of the context window. The reason why I like people saying nice things to me is not that I want to hear that specific combination of words, but that the words represent another human understanding and caring about my desires and needs. It feels like watching a bird attempting to mate with a mirror.
Better migrants than no one?
Concretely, Go has eg context.Context, net.Conn, http.Handler and of course io.Writer/Reader/Closer. All 3p libs will use the standard types. This means you can compose many 3p building blocks together, without any prior knowledge or coordination on their end.

When you have an insufficient stdlib, you often get compatibility issues, where things don’t compose. So you get these kind of pseudo-std mega frameworks like Tokio instead. It was a while ago I was deep in JS but I remember similar things there.
At least, you really shouldn’t
This is a drop in the bucket compared to military spending; apparently no one cares?
I mostly read comments :) I care very much that someone more attentive than me point out if a comment is machine generated.
Size and scope matters. Large network operators that have a de facto monopoly on Internet access in many places should absolutely not be able to do what they want, but this is a function of their market power, not something inherent to any network operator.
Internet ruined that idea. As well as a few high profile stalking cases. It's sad, but I'm sure it wasn't a surprise to various Sci-fi authors at the time.

Good thing people don't live on a plane, and ports (private or public) aren't just places you get to walk up to with a gun. That's all the information we get.
Some libraries are government-funded. Many are not.

That ranges from the personal book collection numbering from one to many thousands in private hands, private institutional libraries (the Mechanics Institute in San Francisco is one that comes to mind, many private universities and grammar schools have their own, as do numerous corporations, some of which are catalogued by Worldcat).

Preservation of Western culture, notably the Greek and Roman canons, as well as much literature and knowledge of the Jewish, Byzantine, and Islamic worlds, occurred through religious institutions. Though in some regards those were the governments of the time. Indian, Chinese, and other further East Asian collections were preserved through multiple means.

Book digitisation at US academic institutions (the University of Michigan being a major contributor to both Google Books and HathiTrust) has had its own exctremely combative relationship with commercial publishers, as has the US Library of Congress, which issues US copyright in the first place.

Avoid slurs, it's an HN guideline: <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>.
That error mode (and it is one) doesn't seem so bad, relatively speaking. Personally I find puzzles interesting and while the value is deeply questionable (I mean, how often do you implement binary search or a novel hashing algo at your job?) I actually rather enjoy jumping through those hoops. Far, far worse is just getting ignored entirely. When rejections start looking good, simply because there is some evidence that they actually saw your application, you know things are bad.
> likeliest group of people to own an EV […] These people do not live in “disadvantaged communities.”

Isn't that the whole point? Early EV adopters are already creating a demand in richer areas, and that can be fulfilled by commercial suppliers.
It's the poor areas that have a chicken-egg problem. EVs have to get cheaper, but that requires a mass-market demand for non-luxury vehicles. But people won't consider buying an EV if the infrastructure is not there, and no business will invest in chargers where there are no EV owners.
This is in the article.
But you do use websites with their trackers, over time they've collected enough data to have a shadow profile of you. It's not accurate to the meter but they probably know the block you live in, some searches you have done in the past weeks, what news you read, what your taste in food, clothes, etc. are.

Unless you live in some jurisdiction like the EU and diligently refused to accept cookies on every website.
Anyone else noticed the election has trashed your ad budgets? Doing CPC and CPM when suddenly hundreds of millions are being dumped across the board kinda sucks.
Jesus Christ.

So my take, it's a llittle bit of emotional or mental illness (for lack of a better word) and a little bit of human nature.

The human nature part, it's like porn. Or doordash. Or doomscrolling. Animals would like to preserve energy, primally, and so if we can get the things we crave (or fool our endocrine system into thinking we got them) without effort, we do it. As a result, we get addicted to these easy ways to get what we need.

The mental side... It's no secret that some people are more prone to certain addictions and addiction in general than others. This person seems to be exhibiting that, but also, an intense, unrelenting loneliness that is not normal. We all feel a little alone all the time, because we can't connect with others as fundamentally as we can with ourselves, but we don't all feel intense loneliness even when we forge connections with others. I think this person has a harder time with that than most of us due to some underlying issue.
Query results are actual, if transitory, relations.

And db updates are either relations or tuples (and a tuple is a relation with cardinality of 1, so...)
I can choose to not engage with Facebook/Meta at all, or not install their apps on my phone.
I would love to hear more of these from your doc
The budget for this has very little bearing on the debt. See where the money actually goes here: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
As much as we need infrastructure to move us all the way to IPv6 (no more CGNAT please!), I'm not sure I want more captive portals in the world. I'd much rather an addition to the WiFi standard to support interactive login, though I suppose that would be hard pressed to come by now.
In a political system shaped by lobbyists, those without lobbyists go without.
I develop in Go every day and it's by far the worst language I've ever used.

Having to explicitly handle every type of error immediately without any support for deferring, encapsulating, chaining, manipulating, transforming etc is antiquated and tiresome.

Rust has Option and Result types and all of the niceties along with it.
There's a difference between mapping database tables to objects and just copying query results into structs.
That's not the whole point of the training. It's just (very loosely) a measure of loss used during pre-training. There are many post-training and alignment stages in a typical model that are designed to reward high-quality responses.

Technically, yes, it's impossible to guarantee that it won't just regurgitate source material (which is mostly around the tails of the data distribution), but the whole point of training is to build generalized intelligence.
Great idea, please consider publishing it. I've often wanted to do something similar, and in reverse (that is, now that the outcome has happened, check predictions). Not to get too far afield but online discourse really undervalues success. It's almost as if people speak not because they are correct, but because people like hearing them speak.
Could be the best thing that's ever happened for RISC-V!
> you'd be better off with ChatGPT with Code Interpreter mode

Yes, this is what I am saying. Why go to the trouble to build something as capable as Claude and then hamstring it from being as useful as ChatGPT? I have no doubt that Claude could be more useful if the Anthropic team would let it shine.
It's the same reason we like candy, the same reason people will eat pastries instead of real food. That vacuous thing doesn't feel vacuous while youre doing it, and can be addicting.
For the record, some of us have tools which comprehensively solve all of your concerns (even #1). Generating 100% reliable self-analyzing deterministic code is already possible and will become mainstream within the next two months. When you see how it’s done, you’re going to smack yourself in the forehead. Programmers in particular seem extremely vulnerable to dismissing technology that they are not intimately familiar with.
i am sorry but i do not understand.

if a car advertises that towing is a feature, and that the truck should be dependable in its features (which is literally Ford branding), and then towing only worked.. one time (barring extenuating circumstances) -- it most definitely is a product which failed to deliver.

a lemon, so to speak.
I guess I didn't read 'spend Elons money as if I was Elon'; I read it as; spend his money as someone who doesn't have it themselves.
You could certainly use military drones to map out trails and mark sections for cleaning. Beating milspec drones into plowdrones, etc.
https://archive.ph/FcXRW
https://archive.is/FcXRW