skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think comments are missing the point: one of the companies listed in article, Helion, is about to switch on a machine to demo net electricity production from fusion.

Why would that be possible? Because they don't go on yet another fancy way to boil water to run a steam engine. They do direct energy conversion.

In a fusion reaction energy is mostly released as kinetic energy of particles. Their fusion reaction is aneutronic, ie with few neutrons. That means that the energy is released as movement of charged particles. By definition this is an electric current.

This current is directly captured by induction in the coils and sent to grid.

If their 2025 experiments go well, in 2028 they will start selling electricity to Microsoft which whom they have a power purchase agreement.

Thanks to the simplicity of their machine, they aim at a cost of 10$/MWh, competitive with solar. Their 50MW generator is shipping container size and be built in a factory by the dozens.

Ok, they may fail, they could also succeed though. Worth watching.
A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design
Apple users tend to be people that don't value customization as much as users on other platforms and mostly stick with the defaults or whatever Apple solution is already provided.

That makes it so Safari has a huge advantage over Firefox which is only the default on Linux, which has a tiny Desktop/Mobile install base compared to iOS and MacOS.
Believing that a corporate friendly HR-like body with termination power, is what a community project like linux needs is a part of the current problem.

This mentality will encourage the take-over of FLOSS communities by power-grabbing psychopath types that already thrive in corporate environments.

Not sure why would anyone want that.
> It's not a direct poll though

That's putting it mildly.
"It wasn't until the post-9/11 mobile revolution and normies embracing the internet (late 2000s) that things took a hard turn for the worse"

I think this doesn't leave enough blame at more technical people embracing the same platforms as normies. After years of bulletin boards and forums where people built up small communities online, everyone migrated to behemoths that actively undercut any chance of that kind of community (examples including Facebook's restrictive interfaces and aggressive push to merge personal and online lives, Twitter's character limit, Reddit's tree-based ranked discussion structure or its obliteration of any iota of personalisation to profiles).
Even with the current BlueSky boom it's wild that so many techies tried to persevere with Twitter in the last few years (the boosting of subscribers to the top of all replies should've been instant death).

The few forums I was on back then that actually survived that mass migration are _still_ around and some of the only fun parts of the internet.

not an expert at all but maybe if ipv6 was embraced it'd result in people returning to doing a lot more grassroots stuff and just by being fun it'd massively challenge the grimness of the last 10 or so years of an increasingly restrictive online experience.
For me, everything i read and hear about the US is so weirdly confusing.

Here on HN I often read that there are a lot of problems with healthcare, poverty, minimum wages, too big cars, overweight, pollution, racism, big companies and rich people having too much power...

... and then i see the result of the election and the only argument is: this guy will fix our too high taxes.
HN is a bubble within a bubble. It’s where Kagi rules the search world and Google is all but a dessicated corpse. It’s also a place with a karma system, encouraging only the most bubbleworthy discussion and discouraging any posts from dissidents. I would put a negative weight on sentiments here when averaging them with those elsewhere.
Set up a Local AI like ChatGPT on your own machine [video]
This is the rough social media equivalent of Mensa - not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
That might be true, still to defend OpenBSD, it’s smooth sailing trying to run a desktop on OpenBSD compared to let’s say FreeBSD.

The rumor is that OpenBSD devs run it on Thinkpads while most FreeBSD devs are using MacOS as their main OS.
>Disgusting, infantilizing worldview. Fix the culture instead of chasing it.

Easier said than done. If you think it's so easy to change behavior, run an economics experiment to prove it. You'll probably even win a nobel prize. In the meantime, I'm going to support whatever actually works, rather than holding out for an ideal solution
Sorry to inform you that humans are just horny, aggressive and fear-driven chimpanzees with slightly more cognitive skills. If you thought technology was going to change that, you are mistaken.

What did you think you would obtain by giving technology to a bunch of horny, aggressive and fear-driven monkeys? Other than making monkeys more effective at making each other horny, aggressive and afraid?
> the DOJ order is also asking to ban payments between search engines and browser makers

The remedy document does not ask this.

What you cite after "> As detailed in..." does not ban any and all payments from a search engine (or only from Google) to a browser. The remedy doc is based on the antitrust case's finding that Google violated U.S. Law by abusing its monopoly through "tying", and in particular by forcing partners to lock out competitors through exclusive (default search only) deals.

This does not mean Google cannot pay for search traffic, and indeed Google has a relatively open, albeit lower-monetizing, system called Adsense for Search, which allows a toolbar to monetize -- but not a browser via queries entered into its address bar (aka Omnibus). Bing does many API deals, or did (it hiked prices last year). Brave has an API business (not yet an ads feed, just search).
> Seems mostly to care about whether tech companies back his side in American politics or the other.

Well, to be fair, the movement that seems to have largely infiltrated the Republican party in the US is (openly) against democracy and prefers a concentration of power and subjugation of "others".

And it's a two-party first-past-the-post voting system so a vote for any alternative between the two ruling parties is effectively a vote for whichever party is least like them.

So it's against your own interest not to take part in the tribalism in the US.
Could you explain further? This seems pretty untrue on the surface to me; what’s the analogous structure to a corporation in a 1000 person nomad tribe?
Another tactic I like to use is a riff on the authors suggestion #3: “Is there a reason you did (or did not do) X?” This works because it’s framed as accepting the decision and being genuinely curious about the rationale. Often the answer is: no, I never really gave it any thought. Other times there turns out to be a good reason that didn’t occur to me and it turns into a learning experience for me.

Another tactic that works for me is “Can I offer a suggestion?” The answer is almost always yes but it’s a sign of respect to ask.
Can you reach out to their support chat through an order (dispute an order or something) and ask to be rerouted to the right support team?
Warms my heart, living in Norway atm.
I feel there was a time, the good time, when techies and nerds decided the direction of tech development, cause they did it out of curiosity, interested and fun for science and experiments.
But this time is long gone.
Now the direction of tech is dictated by management and marketing people which have little or no love for the tech itself as for the business model and money it can generate.
Shouldn’t that headline read “or can benefit from”. Not a shining example of good mathematical thinking. Oh the irony.
In this case, the local police department would be more appropriate, but I'd like to give Amazon the chance to make this right on their own. They sure don't make it easy.
The internet we fell in love with doesn’t exist anymore. It was replaced by the walled garden of smartphone apps.
statistically, yes. We've been falling in rankings for K-12 for decades now. Schools have been gettting less funding, especially teachers that are starting to leave for other careers like a starbucks barista due to pay.

The median is slowly falling, but the quartiles are where the extremes really highlight. On one side (which sounds like it might be you) you have colleges more competitive than ever that basically require your entire middle and high school career to revolve around minmaxing a resume before you are even an adult. On the other end you have high schoolers unable to spell that are being passed. So there's polarization on the ends where kids are smarter and dumber than ever at the same time.

Can't really speak about reputation. it all depends on your group and who you want to appeal to. There are "cool smart kids" and "uncool smart kids" for a variety of reasons. Because social skills are relative. Social skills are all about making others feel good in your presence and there's no one style that will universally do this.
Did they update dtksh with Korn's final ksh93 release?
So far as I can tell, support chat doesn't exist.
>But instant messages? Everyone expects instant responses.

My understanding is people don't expect instant responses, but that's never been made explicit. What do you base your understanding on? Do folks tell you?
I’m old enough to have been there, the internet became popular long before modern social media became a thing. Think Geocities -> MySpace —> Facebook etc.

Also modern search manipulation optimized on engagement had a particular moment when both Facebook and Twitter went from showing you a defined set of things to their selected subset of things.
Worrying about feminism when 99% of all programming languages use latin script, analytic grammar and English keywords is funny.
> it conferred an advantage on those students who were able to take advantage of it, without a matching compensation for those students who weren't.

Waiting for them to go after the entire private school system. Any day now...
If I could actually buy movies and TV shows for download I would; I buy all my music as sites like bleep.com allow you to easily buy mp3s, probably thousands of dollars over the years. I've tried buying shows a handful of times before. But I travel a lot and they're geolocked - WTF can't I watch my fully paid for episodes of Rick and Morty on youtube wherever I happen to be?

Since studios have made purchasing impossible, I don't, and I don't give them any money via streaming services either.

There is one exception I can think of: https://www.teamstarkid.com/ They've made their (awesome!) musicals available for purchase, with a true video download. So they've gotten a well-deserved $50 from me.
I would say giving users X amount of free queries (or whatever service you're doing, start out with a free tier to give people a taste of how useful it is), then have paid paid tiers for more & better access.
Great article, Scott. Chainsaws seem to be a very apropos metaphor for generative AI.
It was extremely arrogant to think that money wouldn’t change nerds.

Those nerds from 90s became autocrats and sleezbags of today.

Well yeah nerds that did not get shitloads of money like Zuckerberg or Musk or Bezps did not turn into autocrats ;) but yeah money change people.
Bamboo requires a lot of processing to make anything useful out of it. It's not as eco-friendly as the manufacturers of bamboo products, especially fabrics, like to make out.
Learn and Remember More with Information Chunking (2021)
I’m an old guy (older than you at least) who’s been working in and around tech since the 90s.

What’s happened is the utopian future turned into the dystopian present.

The technology created by Silicon Valley has profoundly harmed people and society in really visible ways.

That’s not all it’s done, it’s absolutely undeniable that it’s also been a driver of some extremely positive things.

But many people feel increasingly unable to live in this economy, take care of their children, find meaning, and achieve a state of balanced mental health. Many of these people place blame for at least some of this, correctly in my view, on the corrosive effects of the technology sector on the financial and labor markets as well as our personal day to day lives.
>Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable. But once tech became a powerhouse of investment, it became taken over by investors, financiers, and the kind of geeks who would play ball with them.

I don't think that was the case. Go and read the stories of the founders of companies like Apple, Atari, Adobe and others from that era and you will find they all took investments to get started.
Except all those people performatively declaring their refusal to comment on forums and write blog posts, they're not actually making their money this way. LLMs take away nothing from them, except maybe inflated sense of uniqueness.

I can understand why all kinds of artists, who make money from their creative work, have an issue with generative models. But I feel this is unavoidable - graphics and writing and video creation will follow the same path music already did decades above. For a long time now, bands and singers don't make their living through their songs and recordings. They make it through live performances and branded merch, and related things. Music is too cheap to meter, but human connection isn't, which is why musicians make money by being entertainers. This is the fate that awaits other creative arts too.
so they were caught due to the citations to non-existing books. it seems fine and unconnected to all of the controversial news stories of using AI detection, which has a high rate of false positives
I never understood why it's all collected under the term piracy. Do we just classify illegally acquiring as piracy?
Watching people square this mentality with training LLM's on art has been fascinating, and really highlights that people are by and large just in it for themselves.
Americans have been convinced to vote against their own best interests by decades of lobbying and propaganda.

As just one example, they deeply believe Socialism is evil, never mind the very vast majority of their daily services are dependant on it.
You are kidding yourself if you think we have a free market in SWE employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
> Can you mention a recent time they were polled and make this incredibly clear?

2018 in America, "57 percent of Americans are willing to pay a $1 monthly fee; 23 percent are willing to pay a monthly fee of $40" [1]. 2018 in France, "carbon taxes on petrol and diesel" prompt les gilets jaunes [2]. 2024 in America, "more than half of Americans are unwilling to pay any amount of money to combat climate change" [3].

And then there is the global success of climate-skeptic or outright denialist citing the cost of Paris Agreement compliance.

[1] https://apnorc.org/projects/is-the-public-willing-to-pay-to-...

[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/31/opinions/macron-warning-c...

[3] https://epic.uchicago.edu/insights/2024-poll-americans-views...
What’s the story around the Unlagged mod was that a mod you remember? It was mentioned in the blog post curious if it was popular and if it eventually got iD's attention to implement something similar officially?
One of the unpleasant side effects of the Second Amendment is that it has put firearms within easy reach of... well, just about everybody. Despite tighter controls over gun purchases, the gun used in the Sandy Hook shooting, for instance, was legally purchased, and not through some gun-show loophole. It belonged to the shooter's mother. She never suffered from any mental-health issues and, except for autism and anxiety, neither did he, nor did he have a criminal record.

He just... snapped, and there were guns within reach, so he used them. Were the guns not so easy to acquire and use, he might not have committed so many murders (or any at all), simply because they would have been too much work and risk. This, by the way, is why I'm in favor of repealing the Second and enacting comprehensive gun bans and mandatory licensing and registration of firearms -- you know, like civilized countries do.

Now as to how this relates to the monkey torture videos. Yes, there might have been people who sought this material out in the past, but the internet put it within easy reach. The videos were shot in Indonesia and made available to Western clients through brokers in the UK (two of whose arrest was described in the article I read). Before the internet, this kind of international coordination in order to satisfy someone's sick deranged urge would have been prohibitively expensive and difficult. Only very wealthy, dedicated perverts would have been able to even contemplate arranging it. And maybe some of those would have been dissuaded because the slow, risky communications put them at greater risk of getting caught. Maybe monkey-torture fetish was such a niche interest before the internet that it would have been difficult to find other monkey-torture fetishists, and hence put together a large enough market to justify producing these videos in the first place. But with the internet, it's easier than ever to find like-minded monkey-torture fetishists, form discussion groups and the like, and associate with each other in sufficient density that there's a market large enough to justify going into business producing and selling monkey-torture videos into that market.
>a better approach is to be optimistic about one's own potential to contribute to the betterment of humanity, no matter the field. Also the understanding that there are and always will be bad actors should not dissuade one from being part of creating solutions, as one sees it. Being jaded and cynical will not help in the long run.

Easy to say this, but these two aspects contradict each other. You become jaded and cynical precisely because your potential to better humanity is locked down in beauracracy that has the opposite interest. One can only fight back so much against the tidal wave that was setup decades before you were born.

I'd even go so far to say that the ones who do rise to the challenge need to be jaded, and channel that into overcoming the wave. Being cynical means understanding a need to deeply understand every little action, no matter how simple and otherwise "objectively good" it is in the short run.

It's how you use that cynicism that matters, not the state of being cynical.
How is it clear? Their foreign currency reserves decreased just by 15% since December 2021 and their total reserves actually increased. Yes, some of that huge pile of money was frozen, but it’s nowhere close to “giving up” trying. So no, you are wrong, they did not give up, they simply did not have intention to keep ruble strong. The central bank intervenes to prevent high volatility, but that’s it, since 2015 they focus only on inflation.
> power positive sustained (and contained) reaction. Fusion power doesn’t exist and can’t do a damned thing until that wall is reached

Did we read the same article? Helion's entire design strategy is to sidestep sustaining fusion plasmas. It's unclear if it will work. But it's theoretically sound. Your wall is a chain-link fence.
Your theory is that the nerds are the good guys in this story?
"Musk can't highlight specific examples of the federal government pissing our tax money down the drain because of how other people who see it might react."

You ever heard of a Heckler's Veto?
> I might suggest focusing on finding out those statistics directly and getting a sense of what current student experiences are like.

And outside of liberal arts colleges, where are you going to get those statistics?

The places that openly boast these things tend to be very expensive, and hard to get admission into.

Certainly, if you have a shortlist already, you can email the department and ask for those stats directly. Most people don't have that shortlist, though.

> For class size, you can have dozens of small classes nobody takes, and have giant lectures for the core intro classes everyone takes. Then the average class size of the classes offered is quite small, but the average class size of the classes you take is quite large.

And that's why you look at the percentage of classes with under 20 students. It's certainly easy to find universities with as good a faculty/student ratio as what I posted, but with only 20% of the classes having less than 20 students.

Incidentally, if they have dozens of small classes, it's a good sign. A lot of departments will cancel a class if it has less than, say, 8 students.
> You expect to not be responsible for what happens to the software you put into production?

First: IT seems to be rather the exception - most professions have no on-call. Eg. even if my car mechanic screws up a service job, they'll have me bring the car back into the garage during their normal working hours, regardless of how and where stranded I am in the middle of the night.

A second comment: I'll be responsible for anything I have created in my own way. The reality of software development is that we implement functional requirements we've been given with which we disagree, we implement non-functional requirements which don't achieve the goal, we are made to use frameworks and tools we're not familiar with, on a short timeline, a low budget and inadequate infrastructure and we're supposed to take responsibility for code our co-workers wrote.
If the US was gonna absolve itself of it’s past sins for all countries they’d double or triple the national debt a few times, just trying to rectify what they did to Vietnam & the middle east would be near impossible, then you also have Cuba and probably a bunch more countries I’m forgetting cause this is just off the top of my head.

Not that you’re not making a great point but sadly as you said, it’s never happening
It’s a hard social problem in many contexts, even if it is not a hard technical problem.
https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
tired would not be inaccurate
Turning down a job because your potential employer values arbitrary control of their employees over the actual value they created and being frustrated at the silliness of it is so normal. If this is "pain in the ass" behavior I can't imagine how milquetoast and ChatGPT professionalism your company Slack must be.
Because the point is you can’t make the same money working from home elsewhere. So you have to make a tradeoff
> which gets lots of neutrino bombardment and ends up glowing scrap metal

One, neutron. Two, doesn't glow. Three, aneutronic fusion is real.
GenAI content isn’t afforded copyright protection so that feels like a coincidental good tradeoff

I’ve made money from genAI content but i don’t care if someone copied it, it’s a risk I took, they don’t have the network and community I do which is the value.
I also think Rust has picked the right default, but I wouldn't mind having an opt in to the other pair of trade-offs. There are traits like `ToSql` that would be mostly harmless. Serde has tricks for customizing `Serialize` on foreign types, and this could be smoother with language support. Not every trait is equivalent to Hash.
I think a window manager project without a single screenshot should be illegal
As the black hole getting larger, it is more difficult to notice this difference (of crossing the event horizon or “observe the geometry around you”.) and as we are talking about the whole visible universe being inside a black hole, we are in this extreme large scale.

Also, I’m not sure why you’re arguing about the radial coordinate being time-like. You can only measure in your own local reference frame. You wouldn’t necessarily be able to transform between your own local reference frame to the blackhole’s if you don’t know you’re in one.

The universe as a black hole is actually a very old idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_cosmology

I’m not saying we are in one, but I’m saying it is not as obviously false as you might be arguing.
Actually this is good advice for giving feedback to anyone.