skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The body that nominates the Commission isn't elected.

In theory the Commission is mostly made up of civil servants who answer to commissioners, who are themselves nominated by each country's own government or civil service. Each commissioner has one area of responsibility only, and they answer to the head of the Commission who is their boss. So someone in the UK votes for a politician, who votes for a party leader, who appoints some ministers, and those ministers may or may not have much of a say in whoever gets nominated to be a commissioner - one of many. But there is at least a path there, even if long and indirect and the person your vote ends up influencing doesn't do anything important to your country or needs.

In practice it doesn't actually work that way. In practice, the head of the Commission has veto power over the nominations. They aren't supposed to according to the treaties but the treaties are ignored. This means that in reality it's the head of the Commission who picks the Commissioners, because they can just reject anyone who isn't sufficiently aligned with their own agenda.

So that leaves the question of how the head of the Commission is picked. Once again there is theory and practice. In theory, it's a decision of the heads of each state that they take together to select some candidates, and the Parliament then gets to vote for their preferred candidate. In practice ... nobody knows how the head is picked. Ursula von der Leyen was recently re-appointed despite being plagued by scandals and having a long career of failing upwards. Parliament was sidelined by giving them a voting list with only one candidate on it (her). Seek out an explanation of how she got this job and you won't find one because:

1. The heads of state don't talk about how they decide as a group. Is it a vote? Some sort of horse trading? Do they take it in turns? Are they even all able to take part? Nobody knows.

2. There's no record of which country voted for who, or why.

3. The process by which someone even becomes a candidate is unclear.

4. Because no head of state has any control over who gets onto the candidate list, they never talk on the campaign trail about how they will "vote" (assuming that's how it works) for who runs the EU.

In other words, the process is entirely secret. The potential for corruption is unlimited.

So when critics say the EU Commission is a bunch of unelected bureaucrats, they are right and those who argue otherwise here on HN are wrong. People who got their jobs via a process so opaque and indirect that how it functions can't be explained, not even in principle, cannot claim to be democratically selected.
> Also, use type checking everywhere

I can't think of anything more Pythonic than that!
really agree with this and I think it's been the general experience: people wanting LLMs to be so great (or making money off them) kind of cherry picking examples that fit their narrative, which LLMs are good at because they produce amazing results some of the time like the deluxe broken clock that they are (they're right many many times a day)

at the end of the day though, it's not exactly reliable or particularly transformative when you get past the party tricks
> The bureaucracy is a tool and tools don't have a will.

As if it's not made of humans. This view is in grave error. Nobody is perfectly rational, nobody is beyond bias or subjectivty, nobody is beyond human emotions.
> why do you think Facebook won't simply sell the ad space to the highest bidder, whether it is AcmeShop or a Marketplace seller?

Depends on which placement you mean.

"Boosted listings" in Facebook Marketplace? AcmeShop can't bid on that.

In-Marketplace ads like [0]? They are similarly in-Marketplace, I don't think it's technically possible to bid on them.

In-feed Marketplace ads like [1]? They are specifically Marketplace, I have no evidence that they enter the same bidding pool, and it seems improbable.

In-feed generic auto-placed ads like [2]? Maybe, maybe not.

> Remember, Facebook doesn't even make money if you sell something locally and pay in cash.

Facebook doesn't just make money from boosted listings, they also benefit from people just using Facebook. Even if Facebook didn't make any money directly from Marketplace, it'd still be worth it for them and it'd still be anti-competitive. If they can make themselves the main marketplace, it creates a large captive audience scrolling through their ads.

> But I think it has to be shown that Facebook is actually engaging in that kind of anti-competitive behavior. We can't just assume it.

Aren't we commenting under an article about a fine for anti-competitive behaviour?

[0]: https://storage.googleapis.com/website-production/uploads/20...

[1]: https://newsfeed.org/wp-content/uploads/Marketplace_boosted_...

[2]: https://storage.googleapis.com/website-production/uploads/20...
> If they get the software from each other, how could they verify it did not have malware inserted.

Largely, they don't, just like today's sharing economy. If someone online is giving you something that you can't verify yourself (either because it's a binary or because you don't have the time/ability to understand the source), you rely on trust and reputation. Having a BSD license attached doesn't change this.

If you're cautious about installing software directly from its author or from a repository of unlicensed software, then don't do it.

My suggestion is to still release the source, so anyone can fork such a project under the same terms they had: any use is piracy.

If the author feels someone is abusing the system/trying to restrict user freedoms by distributing only a binary, and the abuser is large enough to warrant it, they can sue them, just like with GPL. But there are no possible loopholes (c.f. tivoization) because there was never a license to distribute the software under any conditions.
I have an idea how to test whether AI can be a good scientist:

Train on all published scientific knowledge and observations up to certain point, before a breakthrough occurred. Then see if your AI can generate the breakthrough on its own.

For example, prior to 1900 quantum theory did not exist. Given what we knew then, could AI reproduce the ideas of Planck, Einstein, Bohr etc?

If not, then AI will never be useful for generating scientific theory.
> What I think it really is, is post-creation assessment, with a set of criteria by which MS ban accounts

Sounds likely.

MS said they would lift the block if I entered a code sent to my phone. I did and they did.

Quite how entering a phone code remedies a genuine violation is anyone's guess.
Long context is a scam. Claude is best but it’s still gets lost with longer context
Why bother? Jones didn't provide credible evidence for the bullshit claim that the Sandy Hook massacre was fake, so he's being paid back in his own coin. Fuck him.
There you go moralizing about acceptable patterns of sleep.

Crepuscular and nocturnal predators require tribes of humans to have some number of members who are tuned to be either awake before sunrise or awake long after sunset. Without people with genes to go bed late and wake up late we wouldn't be here having this conversation.

In modern society the former are lionized and the latter are villified as making bad choices.
My dad's left-handed and I'm right-handed, so I got to learn to tie in mirror image. That was helpful.
How would that even make sense at Amazon's scale?
A company that makes $500B in revenue is somehow beholden to some random commercial real estate company that owns a few billion in commercial real estate.
Why even bother to sandbox the browser if it can scribble all over my USB devices?
I get the same bug with Firefox and AnySoftKeyboard, so it might be Firefox's bug

:https://anysoftkeyboard.github.io/
Due to WFH, the weed laws where tech workers live, and the fast tolerance building of cannabis in the body - I estimate that 10% of all code written by west coast tech workers is done “while high” and that estimate is likely low.
How does he sing out of tune on his own darn song? If he's not out of tune, those awfully strained high notes shouldn't have been written in whatever weird key they're in.
Simply put, AGI requires more data: qualia.
If you mean Lenny, I've got bad news for you. The gentleman who created Lenny was a fairly high up person at a telco, and continues to be.
I don't understand how Less Wrong can be a small researcher community of any kind whatsoever. Either the community members are actually researchers, which means they're part of the real research communities, or they're possibly quite intelligent, well-read people who speculate about causal hypotheses related to publicly-known current day science, but don't conduct any research.
Do you think that this risk is bigger than you business being hit by the market?
> You can’t make $85 an hour playing with your computer as a gardener

But if you step up to being a farmer then you'll be playing with way more interesting computers than you'll find on a typical desk.

> (Although, apparently it’s not likely you can you do it as a dev in today’s market so)

Farming isn't in good economic shape right now either, granted.
If I could attach a software program to every replicating chunk of DNA, I'm pretty sure I could write a checksum and diagnostic and instructions to shut down if they failed. That's not a variable that does anything to feasibility.
> It also competes with other RDBMSes where a separate server process is not a requirement.

If you casually list off the top DB's either by usage or by recent hotness then almost all of them will have a server, but you'll also find they're basically all not embedded DB's with exception to RocksDB.
No one's buying your attention on your terms. They're only exchanging it for the online services you want to use. No attention, no services, better up your subscriptions budget or make do without.

(Sorry if I'm being blunt, attention economy participants can't be so they'd sugar coat it to such a degree that you might miss the point).
Show HN: Memoripy – AI Memory Layer with Short- & Long-Term Memory, Clustering
Hey HN! I built Memoripy, a memory layer for AI that adds short-term, long-term, and semantic memory capabilities to enhance LLM applications. It helps AI systems retain and prioritize past interactions, adapt over time, and respond with greater context and personalization. Memoripy uses semantic clustering to retrieve relevant memories, along with adaptive memory decay and reinforcement, so interactions stay fresh and context-aware. It’s designed for easy integration with OpenAI, Ollama, and other platforms—giving your AI applications dynamic memory management with minimal setup.

Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback!
Those are all still far more positive than negative examples, even if they each spawned small contingents of people who don't get the irony. Plus, if you know that's gonna happen anyway, then steer the dumb ironic interpretations towards something equally useful - or so ridiculous it at least educates other people.
There’s exactly one company who can crack BMW ECUs. You have to send it to them and they have a Russian method to do it. Cough, cough, somebody hacked Bosch or BMW and grabbed the firmware keys.

They moved to Finland recently for obvious reasons.

I found quite a few devices for cars like that, just install this Russian or Chinese software to enable the real thing.
Johns Hopkins Medicine toxicologist Andrew Stolbach told NPR that MADLs are set to be "very conservative" to account for people with higher risk due to their age and other medical conditions. When the chocolate is consumed in moderate amounts, the lead and cadmium levels are nothing to worry about, he says.

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/17/1143239430/dark-chocolate-lea...
> Is it though?

Marketers seem to think so, or they wouldn't waste their time calling.
OK, thanks for trying - will try a bit of searching myself.
Often it's a boss proving they're in charge by setting the times.

It's also a handy way to keep raises small. Oh you are being a human and we don't give raises to people who are human. Meets expectations, 2% raise.
when you take energy into account its like anti engineering. What if we used a mountain of effort to achieve a worse result?
I would argue maybe people also are not thinking but simply processing. It is known that most of what we do and feel goes automatically (subconsciously).

But even more, maybe consciousness is an invention of our 'explaining self', maybe everything is automatic. I'm convinced this discussion is and will stay philosophical and will never get any conclusion.
My choir director does this with new rehearsal pieces on purpose. We go through them once at the beginning and then let them "percolate" while we practice some other songs. Then we go back to them in "stabilization" before the end of the same rehearsal and they suddenly feel familiar, so we can pay better attention to things like dynamics. It's wild.
The Onion didn't put up the money to make the purchase. They tried some dodgy legal maneuver where they pledge to pay later, and that the money Alex has to pay in damages are going to fund that payment.

The Onion also did not make the highest bid in the auction.

The whole thing is sketchy AF.
i imagine we aren't at your cohort yet but email team@usetrmnl.com and we'll get yours out today, regardless. tiny thank you for the shout here!
This reminds me of the time when searching for “c string” would probably result in “The C Programming Language” at number 1.
lol you think immigration is a real concern? remember the convoy, or the W Bush era?

half of US farms, meat packing, restaurants, construction, etc. rely on undocumented labor. the GOP owned the house and Senate for years, and could have crushed it well before now.

they don't because a lot of big business want these illegals, and the same folks backing the new administration -- aka tech bros like Musk and Thiel -- are totally down with H1Bs
Podman has a docker frontend. On Fedora, it is packaged as podman-docker, I believe. I recently went through the pain of getting testcontainers working on Fedora 41 with Podman. After enabling the Podman socket and setting an environment variables, I was off to the races!
> The author can either explain it or doesn't understand it.

I've never been challenged to explain any of the code my CV points to. I could have made it all up. If they randomly asked about something I have not looked at in a long a while, it could actually look like I don't know it! There is so much of it that I would have to study the code as a full time activity to be able to fluently spout off about any random sample of it.

I think I'm going to rearrange my resume to move the free software stuff farther down and maybe shorten it. It could come across as a negative.

Some hiring people genuinely don't understand why someone would put in a 40 hour week and then do some more on evenings and weekends. Well, I don't know how many. In my career I heard something along those lines from around two. Not everyone will tell you.

> You left college or high-school and walked straight into a job then learned to code there, or what?

It doesn't describe me, but does almost everyone I've ever known in the field (other than distant strangers met through online free-software-related channels, who are an obviously biased sample).
At-Will Employment
Is that because you can’t judge the quality of the output?
LOL conservatives
Slacker (Hacker News Bot)
https://slack.com/marketplace/A03QV0U65HN-slacker-hacker-new...
There are subtle differences between the two and not exactly the same.
You're assuming that would be one person and one organization, the way it is now.

I think that's the most likely outcome, but it isn't a safe bet by any means.

In any case I hope it's a good long time before we have to find out, since I wish Linus long life and good health.
I suspect the coming administration would find a way to do the same thing even if it was in Germany or France. I suspect if the extreme right parties there ever win, they will find a way to achieve this too.

Best to be aware of this, not deceive ourselves that public servants are untouchable. Some people might get the idea that voting for a very bad politician would just send a message and not have much real effect, as the civil servants are the same and will do the same job and cannot be removed. They can. Even in Germany.
it can't, you have to pick which device it can use.
I think you're thinking of Hashcash? Not invented by Satoshi, and not pay-to-send exactly. It's proof-of-work for email.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
Nope, it's not 100% required, there are exceptions for certain job categories like nursing and there's also the extraordinary ability exception.

(Not trying to be pedantic but US immigration law is full of random loopholes and people who qualify for them, or might be able to qualify with a bit of work, often aren't aware.)
When you profile your code and find that all you gotta do is change a few if statements for a 2x perf boost, that will be a happy day.
That's the rub, the landlord chooses the broker, but has nothing to do with paying the broker's fee.

The fees are about to not be that high, this rule change just passed this week.

The landlords are about to care about broker fees now that they are the ones getting ripped off. I suspect that the entire landlord broker industry is about to cease to exist overnight. It will look a lot like rentals in most other American cities where no such job exists, and finding a tenant is all handled by whoever manages the property.
Thank you for the hint about the business phone registered in a call redirect service.
Great question. Im very confident in my answer, even though it’s in the minority here: we’re not even close to exhausting the potential.

Imagine that our current capabilities are like the Model-T. There remains many improvements to be made upon this passenger transportation product, with RAG being a great common theme among them. People will use chatbots with much more permissive interfaces instead of clicking through menus.

But all of that’s just the start, the short term, the maturation of this consumer product; the really scary/exciting part comes when the technology reaches saturation, and opens up new possibilities for itself. In the Model-T metaphor, this is analogous to how highways have (arguably) transformed America beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, changing the course of various historical events (eg WWII industrialization, 60s & 70s white flight, early 2000s housing crisis) so much it’s hard to imagine what the country would look like without them. Now, automobiles are not simply passenger transportation, but the bedrock of our commerce, our military, and probably more — through ubiquity alone they unlocked new forms of themselves.

For those doubting my utopian/apocalyptic rhetoric, I implore you to ask yourself one simple question: why are so many experts so worried about AGI? They’ve been leaving in droves from OpenAI, and that’s ultimately what the governance kerfluffle there was. Hinton, a Turing award winner, gave up $$$ to doom-say full time. Why?

My hint is that if your answer involves less then a 1000 specialized LLMs per unified system, then you’re not thinking big enough.
CNN, and countless other outlets, thought there could be teeth there at the beginning. They reported as it went along, and as we found out via Mueller's investigation, there wasn't much to the claims at all, save for a couple of minor tidbits. As it happens, CNN, and countless other outlets, have since reported on the fact that most of it turned out to not be true.

That's about standard for how most media organizations handle shit, right-wing outlets included.
I really did like this interview quite a bit and helped me deal with the shame of being a bit unfocused, Gwern shows that it all connects in the end.
> As someone who purports to care so much about facts, how can you open with this statement?

You just answered it, lol. Because I care about facts.

> people are voting against this sort of cognitive dissonance disguised as arrogance, not for Trump.

Right, the arrogance of pointing out things that are blatantly untrue. If you're trying to paint your side as anything but bumbling idiots, you're not doing a very good job.

The really fun thing about Trump supporters this go around is that they pretty much shoot themselves in the foot whenever they can.

Virtually every Trump supporter I know considers him a liar. The leftists I know don't - they actually have more respect for him. But Trump supporters will defend him constantly with "he doesn't mean that" or "he meant it as a joke" or whatever.

Your defense is that the person you support is not evil, but just a liar? In fact, they vote for him under the assumption that he won't be able to execute most of his plans, and they'll fall through. Their faith in him is paradoxically based on complete non-belief. It's very interesting to me.

Musk is in a similar position. His defenders proclaim his innocence by requiting his crimes on the grounds of abject stupidity. That doesn't do much to convince me.
I think you can use the VSCode Docker extension if you enable the Podman socket.
From Stripe: Adding payments to your LLM agentic workflows
Or maybe it pushed everyone to innovate faster than they otherwise would’ve? I’m very interested to hear your reasoning for the other case though, and I am not strongly committed to the opposite view, or either view for that matter.
For over two decades, a systemwide security flaw has been hiding in macOS
"The creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation and safety to life and property"[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering
How to render it. Ten ideas to solve Computer Graphics problems
I have this weird issue where about a third of people I meet for the first time swear they know me from somewhere, and it's somewhere specific that I know I've never been. My dad and brother have the same issue, and we strongly resemble each other, so I think I just have a congenitally familiar face.

I have no idea if feelings would automatically transfer to me from people with amnesia, but they certainly do for people without it, even though I don't remind them of anyone they know well enough to name.
You can buy hard copies again if you subscribe. They used to give it away free in the 1990s because the world wasn't as hyper-capitalistic and it was practical to publish a free paper and put metal boxes on the street to distribute it while making a modest profit with advertising.
Might be better to have a hubs and authority score. It could be “being a good producer” and “being a good judge” are different things. Problem is you can clone somebody’s hub score by stealing their judgements.
I agree that `len(seq) == 0` is more readable. I don't mind the recommended truth test of the sequence itself, but I have no idea who would use their "wrong" option with the length as a truth value. Or maybe POSIX exit codes (0 is success) have made me shy about using integers as truth values.
Right. It's a simple ratio of genetic variation to phenotypical variation. How does evidence of heritability support HBD claims, which are based on genetic determinism, a notion orthogonal to heritability?
Is your steelman intentionally just removing "we definitely have our own internal meme population"? Because that part is true for every community I have ever encountered, including such groups as "me and a friend". I don't see how removing it makes the statement stronger or more plausible
I should have been more clear - I am talking about IT/Dev/… jobs, not other professions.
That would be news to me, as both are pointing to the exact same GitHub repository[0]. Can you name the differences?

[0]: https://github.com/docker/compose