skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Easy to solve. Just use oral examinations.
Sounds like Tian Keyu stumbled on something he wasn’t supposed to see — now they’re trying to bury him alive.
If you learned Rust first but find yourself reading a lot of C then this is also a good thing to read because of the parallels it draws with the languages.
It may be done on purpose? To me this looks like a satirical piece in response to some "nooooo how dare you introduce lifetime annotations to C++"-style comments on the same author (Sean Baxter)'s C++ lifetime annotation proposal.
For everyone using Android and fearing not to be able to use Syncthing anymore: fear not. This is only affecting the Google Play Store version of Syncthing. You can get Syncthing-Fork here on F-Droid http://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncthinga...
This is mostly true, but it is also important to recognize that “hey just invent a new evaluation methodology” is a rough thing to ask people to do immediately. People are trying to figure it out in a way that works.
Are you referring to pansychism? I don't get the impression that it's very popular these days.

> There are few explicit defenders of panpsychism at the present time. The most prominent are David Griffin, Gregg Rosenberg, David Skrbina and Timothy Sprigge.

https://plato.stanford.edu/ARCHIVES/WIN2009/entries/panpsych...
For me, it would be rather long trip and generally too expensive. I would had to steal it from kids playground. Which is rather low thing to do.
> AI is here to stay; new methods should be used to assess student performance.

This is overdue - we should be using interactive technology and not boring kids to death with a whiteboards.

Bureaucracy works to protect itself and protect ease of administration. Even organising hand on practical lessons is harder
This sort of meta is not really on topic, if you think there's abuse or some other problem you can mail hn@ycombinator.com and tell/ask them.
> I remember being told at school, that we weren't allowed to use calculators in exams

I remember being told the same thing, but I happen to believe that it was a fantastic policy, with a lackluster explanation. The idea that you wouldn't have a calculator was obviously silly, even at the time, but underlying observation that relying on the calculator would rob you of the mental exercise the whole ordeal was supposed to be was accurate. The problem is that you can't explain to a room full of 12 year olds that math is actually beautiful and that the systems principles it imparts fundamentally shape how you view the world.

The same goes for essays. I hated writing essays, and I told myself all sort of weird copes about how I would never need to write an essay. The truth, that I've observed much later, is that structured thinking is exactly what the essay forced me to do. The essay was not a tool to asses my ability in a subject. It was a tool for me to learn. Writing the essay was part of the learning.

I think that's what a lot of this "kids don't need to calculate in their heads" misses. Being able to do the calculation was only ever part of the idea. Learning that you could learn how to do the calculation was at least as important.
You could use a magnetic coupling to allow a true static seal. It's reasonably common in light-to-medium duty pumps for the same reasons around leakage, but there are limits on the transferable torque.
Lacking a hefty dose of coffee and humour here :)
SAG-AFTRA are currently on strike over the issue of unauthorized voice cloning.

The AI advocates actively advertised AI as a tool for replacing creatives, including plagiarizing their work, and copying the appearance and voices of individuals. It's not really surprising that everyone in the creative industries is going to use what little power they have to avoid this doomsday scenario.
Family offices are increasingly interested in defence tech
This stuff has been going on for decades, as can be seen by the frequency with which people at the top of the institutions are found to have engaged in it. What's new is that in recent years the spread of social media (especially X/Twitter), and the creation of sites like PubPeer, has given people who always knew about it a way to get the word out to communities who will believe them. Up until now unfortunately the average person still doesn't believe any claims of academic fraud, and the institutions always sweep it under the rug, so until enough whistleblowers were able to find each other online they were just systematically screwed.

The usual proposed solution is more replication. Every HN thread on scientific fraud has people proposing this fix. Unfortunately, replication studies can't fix science and can in some situations make things worse. I wrote about why not here:

https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science...
Of course the math check out, they are correct, but in my opinion, time is not a dimension, it's the 'refresh rate' of matter.

To me, there are only 3 dimensions, that of space.

That does not mean the relativity math is useless. On the contrary, what they describe is real and we can experimentally verify it.

But that does not mean we can 'move' into time, as we 'move' into space. That's why time is not a dimension.
Product Engineering Optimisation
LLMs are overparameterized for text embedding tasks and can be easily pruned
... this website are two monospaced texts in a <pre>. It does not use paragraphs.
17,375 CVEs in the NVD Backlog, and Counting
But when that person was identified, were they personally held responsible, bollocked, and reprimanded or were they involved in preventing the issue from happening again?

"No blame, but no mercy" is one of these adages; while you shouldn't blame individuals for something that is an organization-wide problem, you also shouldn't hold back in preventing it from happening again.
I just had the biggest "duh" moment. Thanks for bringing it up.
But can I write plugins for it? My understanding it is only implements a subset of the common plugins (and does not do any of the linting that pylint is useful for), so it avoids scanning the filesystem for plugins?
For the 'stolen valor' thing: This blog post goes deep into the question of wether we are engineers, as answered by 'crossovers', ex engineers who now work in software.

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/
The best method for assessing performance when learning is as old as the world: assess the effort, not how well the result complies with some requirements.

If the level of effort made is high, but the outcome does not comply in some way, praise is due. If the outcome complies, but the level of effort is low, there is no reason for praise (what are you praising? mere compliance?) and you must have set a wrong bar.

Not doing this fosters people with mental issues such as rejection anxiety, perfectionism, narcissism, defeatism, etc. If you got good grades at school with little actual effort and the constant praise for that formed your identity, you may be in for a bad time in adulthood.

Teacher’s job is to determine the appropriate bar, estimate the level of effort, and to help shape the effort applied in a way that it improves the skill in question and the more general meta skill of learning.

The issue of judging by the outcome is prevalent in some (or all) school systems, so we can say LLMs are mostly orthogonal to that.

However, even if that issue was addressed, in a number of skills the mere availability of ML-based generative tools makes it impossible to estimate the level of actual effort and to set the appropriate bar, and I do not see how it can be worked around. It’s yet another negative consequence of making the sacred process of producing an amalgamation of other people’s work—something we all do all the time; passing it through the lens of our consciousness is perhaps one of the core activities that make us human—to become available as a service.
In the house in general, yeah, but the first years (“shells”) had a rota of tasks, most of which involved delivering something (milk, juice, bread, papers) or taking something away (trash, crockery). Knocking up was the only one where there wasn’t something to carry.

Weekend papers was the worst. Fifty fat newspapers to deliver throughout the house, up winding servants’ stairs.
If teachers can’t tell and need AI to detect it why does it matter? If their skill and knowledge in a field can’t tell when someone is faking it are we perhaps putting too much weight on their abilities at all.
Agreed, but google hardly gives you those results. Sponsored Ads and AI generated seo crap is hardly an encylopedia.
Simple question: if true, would power consumption stay at 100% because we’d work the algorithm harder?

I had assumed the latency etc were based on what was desirable for the use case and hardware, rather than power consumption.
What about syntax highlighting? If you're only interested in viewing the file anyway, there's a decent chance that would improve your experience.

I do accept that `cat file` is not a problem, but it's interesting to discuss alternatives anyway!
Tbh I suspect part of the value is that it limits the amount of absolute junk filling the store. Requiring a unique ID for every product that costs some money is a very low bar for real products, but a high bar for AI generated slop tshirts that might not sell a single unit.

Interestingly, it doesn’t look like IKEA uses UPC barcodes at all and just has their own format and numbers. I guess since they only sell their products in their own stores, there is no need for it to be globally unique.
The obvious follow-up question would be: is there a correlation between specific nationalities and the fraction of "unknown cause" deaths?
> also we see what I call 'word of the week' where whichever 'AI' engine seems to get hung up on a particular English word which is often an unusual one and uses it at every opportunity

So do humans. Many people have pet phrases or words that they use unusually often compared to others.
> such as by using a memory safe language or hardware capabilities that prevent memory safety vulnerabilities

Heh, now I do believe that my partially-memory-corruption-based side job may be in danger. If it was just "by using a memory safe language" I do not care, but if they want to boost hardware assisted mitigations (better and ubiquitous memory tagging etc) it's going to have significant impact.
That isn’t what one learns. One learns to cheat, lie, and steal, and to exploit systems and manipulate people. You don’t survive if you play by the rules.

Public schools produce sociopaths, in general.

Still, a valuable skillset, I must say.
> I only hope that we get to decide how society responds to that change together .. rather than have it forced upon us.

That basically never happens and the outcome is the result of some sort of struggle. Usually just a peaceful one in the courts and legislatures and markets, but a struggle nonetheless.

> new methods should be used to assess student performance.

Such as? We need an answer now because students are being assessed now.

Return to the old "viva voce" exam? Still used for PhDs. But that doesn't scale at all. Perhaps we're going to have to accept that and aggressively ration higher education by the limited amount of time available for human-to-human evaluations.

Personally I think all this is unpredictable and destabilizing. If the AI advocates are right, which I don't think they are, they're going to eradicate most of the white collar jobs and academic specialties for which those people are being trained and evaluated.
With the setting off, there are no margins. How is 0 too large?
Yet the murder rate was unaffected by the gun ban.
Pretty interesting project. I have a special, yet weird, emotional attachment to these HN-based projects because they act like extensions or add-ons that could improve HN in one dimension.

While I don't feel like using this tool when I sit in front of my computer or when starting doom scrolling on my phone, I certainly would like to use it when I need to quickly check HN while being busy.

Some quick feedback:

1. First, regarding the UI/UX:

- The title and subtitle don't tell much about the app.
- In the audio track, while you can see the progress of the playing audio, it doesn't show the total time nor the current time.
- It would be useful to highlight the audio track into segments, each one representing a story.
- It would make sense to mention how many stories are being summarized (seems to be 5 right now).

2. For a better use case, I believe it would make more sense to have this tool as a mobile app or a PWA to easily access it even from your car's infotainment system while driving.

3. Tightly linked to (2), having this tool as a mobile app and making it available as a widget, with a Play button, would reduce the number taps needed to play the broadcast.

I hope this serves as a constructive critic.
Lightmatter Raises $400M Series D
I'm surprised at the number of comments that give up and say that "AI" is here to stay.

I'm also surprised that academics rely on snake oil software to deal with the issue.

Instead, academics should unite and push for outlawing "AI" or make it difficult to get like cigarettes. Sometimes politicians still listen to academics.

It is probably not going to happen though since the level of political apathy among academics is unprecedented. Everyone is just following orders.
Sand is not an infinite resource. It's crucial for both protection (if you remove all the sand from the beach, there will be nothing to cushion the waves and currents and etc. and it will result in more erosion, which can be deadly for any constructions nearby) and construction.

As such, it's completely normal that you can't just take sand or stones from many beaches. The very famous Étretat town in France with its accompanying beach and rocks, have a very strict "don't take souvenirs from the beach because you'd be actively destroying it" policy.
> Note that running software on Linux doesn't mean you are linking to Linux.

Technically, you do link to linux-vdso.so (or variants depending on architecture), which is part of the kernel image. There doesn't seem to be an explicit GPL exception for the sources of this library [0] but the general syscall exception [1] may or may not apply.

[0] e.g. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/x86/entry...

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/LICENSES/excep...
[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41874178
Is that relevant to something? The logical model is identical for every source control system. Deltas are a form of compression for storage in every source control system.
Server-maker Wiwynn expands $61M lawsuit against X
I noticed this part: "generally, the directive sees vendors liable as long as they have control over their product after a sale."

That condition makes sense, at least at first.
Ahem, try this: <file cat
[dupe]

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41889027
> Let’s say they are exceptionally honest, and won’t take money. How about threats to their lives or families?

The more I think about it, the better I understand TrueCrypt's sudden demise.
> Legal reasoning from made‐up examples is generally a bad idea

What? That's the only way to do legal reasoning, and as an obvious consequence it's how both lawyers and judges do it.
My browser (Firefox Mobile) somehow does turn it into scroll bars per paragraph.

https://paste.c-net.org/CartsTroops

(Cool that it works btw)
Very well put. I would actually suggest to not use calculators in high school anymore. They add very little value and if it is still the same as when I was in high school, it was a lot of remembering weird key combinations on a TI calculator. Simply make the arithmetic simple enough that a calculator isn't needed.
I just googled ‘do I need a license to drive a power boat in UK’

I got AI answer saying ‘no’, but actually you do.

If I use a calculator it will be correct. If I open encyclopaedia it will mostly be correct, because someone with a brain did at least 5 minutes of thining.

We are not talking about some minor detail, AI makes colossal errors with great confidence and conviction.
Show HN: Nextread.ai – AI-powered book recommendations with a twist
Did you have a counter-example in the nearer family?
> That truly sounds like a skill issue. This no-true-Scotsman angle is silly. I said documentation and tests, I don't know how you got "doctests" out of that. I said "documentation", and "tests". I didn't say "the simplest form of documentation", that is another straw man on your behalf.

What are you on about? Doctest is the simplest form of documentation and test. I.e. you don't have to write an in-depth test, you just need to understand what the function does. I expect even juniors can write a doctest that passes the compiler check. Not a good, not a passing one doctest, a COMPILING one. It's rate of writing a passing one was even worse.

> Wow, the arrogance. There is absolutely nothing to justify this assumption.

Ok, then. Prove what exactly hard problems did you give it?

I gave my examples, I noticed it fails at complex tasks like YAML parser in an unknown language.

I noticed when confronted with anything harder than writing pure boilerplate, it fails. E.g. it would fail 10% of the time.

> Unfortunately, this discourse has made it clear that you do need considerable practice

You can practice with a stochastic parrot all you want, it won't make it an Einstein. Programming is all about converting requirements to math, and LLMs aren't good at it. Do I need to link stuff like doing basic calculation and counting 'r' in the word 'strawberries'.

The best you can do is half the error rate, but that follows a power law. You need to double the energy to half the error rate. So unless you intend to boil the surface of the Earth to get it to be decent at programming, I don't think it's going to change anytime soon.

> You have demonstrated throughout this discussion that you aren't capable of assessing machine intelligence.

Pure ad hominem. You've demonstrated nothing outside your ""Trust me bro, it's not a bubble"" and ""You're wrong"". I'm using double double quotes so you don't assume I'm quoting you.

> You didn't even bother clarifying which LLM you used.

For YAML parser, I used Chat GPT-4o at my friend's place. For the rest of the tasks I used JetBrains AI assistant, which is a mix of Chat GPT-4, GPT-4o and GPT-3.
Airports / Filetypes
> Pretty cool, although I'm not sure who had the bright idea to allow Javascript in SVG...

Is the decision making process public and transparent? Can we find out what committee made the decision, and when? Who the members were and their individual votes?
There are optical amplifiers that use erbium-doped fibers (EDFA = erbium-doped fiber amplifier), which are based on the LASER principle, i.e. amplification by stimulated emission.

Their energy source is not electrical, but also optical, i.e. light produced by a laser with a different frequency from the frequencies used for data transmission and which is also sent through optical fibers.

In current speech, laser is used mostly to mean optical oscillators, which generate light, but actually the laser is only the optical amplifier and it must be inserted in an optical resonator in order to make a generator of light. In the amplifiers for optical fibers, only the laser part is inserted in the fibers, without an optical resonator (i.e. without mirrors), so it does not generate light, but it amplifies the light passing through it.

The erbium-doped lasers function exactly like any other solid-state lasers, which typically use crystals of sapphire or of YAG or glasses doped with ions of chromium (ruby lasers) or of neodymium or of titanium, but erbium is chosen instead of the more common dopants because it amplifies light in the frequency band used for optical fibers.

So the cables with optical fibers do not need any electrical connection for providing amplification in intermediate points when the distance between the ends of the cable is too great.
Any at all? I don't think Americans realize how much of a US-only problem it is, and how some of the non-US mass shootings are explicitly inspired by US media and discourse.
For extremely simple scripts maybe. I get around 70 ms difference in startup time.

$ time python3 -c "print('Hello world')"
Hello world

real 0m0.017s

$ time node -e "console.log('Hello world')"
Hello world

real 0m0.084s
This isn't what I had in mind, but now that you've suggested it I would absolutely listen to this. In fact, I'm convinced having read it that this is where we're going good or bad (I can see a lot of YouTube gurus suggesting this as the new get-rich-quick scheme for "creators"). A high quality version of this would absolutely work though if that can be achieved.

I was thinking more in terms of the way you can get morning news briefs on a nest hub. The AI summarising the top posts on HN would have value to me as something to listen to in the morning not because I expect a really interesting debate, but mostly just to get a quick update on what the buzz is on HN on a given day so I can decide if I want to pick up the thread from any of those topics when my day starts at the desk.
But then you’d be holding a DB connection for the entire duration of your task (which may include HTTP calls, etc). You might even do asynchronous work in parallel, which doesn’t quite work with txn locks. So the session based locks seem a bit better imo.
Related:

The useful use of cat

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41894933
Show HN: Dynamic IPv4/6 records for Cloudflare
Easily update Cloudflare records for your dynamic IP or homelab, now supporting IPv6 (A and AAAA), with the ubiquity of Bash
Sounds like automobiles are -- have been, until now -- an even more long-lasting example. The basic recipe has been the same for over a century: Four wheels, two to five doors, steering wheel and other controls at one of the front seats, internal combustion engine.

Only now is one of those components, the engine, being changed out. And looking at that from this perspective, it's apparently not as humongous a change as many are now claiming: For one thing, it's just one of the four (or more?) parts of the basic recipe; for another, it's not all that new -- electric motors are in wide use elsewhere, and were one of the alternatives in rather wide use in cars, too, before the industry settled on the current recipe ~a hundred years ago.

Anyway, the "beholden to them alone" bit doesn't seem to apply to the automotive industry, since pretty much all manufacturers are in on the switch-to-electrics idea. Which begs the question: Would there really be so much of a customer lock-in in the aeronautic space either? Just like the idea of driving cars by electric motors is unpatentable, what could Boeing (or anyone else) come up with in the basic design of an aeroplane that isn't too general an idea to be protectable, or (most probably) hasn't been tried before?
Thank you. I tried the emoji URL but Fennec on Android doesn't accept it and just runs a web search.
This is just the beginning. Read the DSA (Digital Services Act), where private companies will be able to take down any content or comment.
More than once a week not quite once a day.

Rather than trying to diminish something that's completely preventable and abhorrent maybe we could discuss ways to actually prevent it. Because this isn't a problem anywhere else so clearly it's preventable.

If AI can be part of a solution here this is a reasonable place to discuss it.