skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If your superiors are unable to process no-fluff information, regardless of whether it's feedback or updates, they have no business lording over anyone and will sink whatever function they have oversight of. If you find yourself working under such people, don't bother giving feedback, start polishing your resume.

Sounds good on paper. Maybe true, oh 5 years ago. In this job market, polishing the resume is nice but you might have to deal with irrational superiors for a little longer. That's what the article is about.

> The reason you fluff up feedback to your subordinates is because lower down the chain they tend to be insecure and don't yet have the experience to distinguish between actionable impartial feedback, and threats to their job security.

It would all be nice and good if "subordinates" and "superiors" were some completely different, disjoint sets. Yesterday's insecure peers and your subordinates will tomorrow become your superiors. People who can - do, those who can't - manage. Their personalities and other qualities likely wouldn't change in the meantime. In a perfect world, everyone who is promoted to be anyone's superior will go through a strong leadership vetting process and they will take un-fluffed honest feedback from subordinates, without retribution. But I have yet to work for such an organization. Maybe you're luckier...
would you reckon majority of the people would act the same or that you are an intelligent outlier?
Revelation space has got the Amarantin living has simulations inside a neutron star.
The article is well cited. They handily beat out newspapers by providing links to earlier blog posts on the research.

You might want this one: http://www.rollstonepigraphy.com/?p=921

> I will convey my own perspective regarding these four inscribed clay cylinders: namely, the script is Early Alphabetic (based on the clear morphology of the letters), the language is arguably Semitic, and the date is early (based on the secure archaeological context and carbon 14 dates).

> My initial thought (because of the graphemic shapes of the signs on the cylinders and the clear similarity to Early Alphabetic letters) was that these cylinders might be intrusive

So, the major argument that they're writing is that they look very similar to other writing that we can read. Imagine that you can read Latin, but not Greek, and you're confronted with some inscriptions in Greek. Should you call them writing?
I was a Casio guy, having the fx-850p. It was a very nice object I enjoyed a lot but HP ones had their own touch for sure.

Talking about design, some of the Nintendo Game & Watch series were particularly lovely. It's the first "computer device" I can think of which was elegant.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/keithmidson/8082061808/in/phot...

https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/mickey-mouse-game-watch-nintend...
Syria has been bombed way more by Assad, the dictator of Syria, than by Israel.

Assad has killed about half a million Syrians already in the civil war.
The Sun's diameter is 109 times that of Earth, though you might as well round up to 110, or down to 100.

1.4 * 10^6 km vs. 14 * 10^3 km.
Has anyone played around with this before? Do you know if it is possible to use it to manipulate the intel memory controller (e.g. to modify certain RAM behaviours like refresh rate)? Also, is it only available for the specific hardware platform mentioned?
Often these things have been sitting in a drawer somewhere for years before the research is released.

> Archaeologists first found the cylinders in 2004

https://archive.ph/YOsqx

(Also: "It’s an alphabet. It’s easy-peasy. I’m used to much tougher things," said Silvia Ferrara, who was not involved.)
Isn't this pretty much the definition of terrorism?
The reality is there is no way to build everything. You want to do scientific computing do you use libraries that have been optimized for 50 years or do you write your own? You want to do cryptography do you build your own? Pretty much everyone working on LLMs today is leveraging things like nccl, cuda, pyTorch, job scheduling frameworks.

Let's face it. Nobody builds everything from scratch. The closest is companies like Google who due to sheer scale benefit from building everything from hardware to languages and even for them it's not always clear whether that was the right thing for the business or something they could afford to do because they had lots of money.

Build the things that add value. Don't build something that just works. That's why we have the old saying don't reinvent the wheel. If you have a working wheel, while re-inventing it might be fun, it's usually not the best use of time. In the time you've saved build cool things that add value.
I agree completely. But I feel like saying "if I ever get any wealth or power I'll just be as bad as the people who already have it" is just throwing in the towel. You might as well try!
This is hilarious, but Mike’s behavior boils my blood. To switch the rules when fairly beaten is just so scummy!

Of course Patrick’s solution occurred to me immediately once he started talking about splitting up the file. :)

Then I got to wondering if it would be possible to compress a large enough file and save a few bytes, in the spirit of what Mike actually wanted. For instance, if you tried encrypting with a bunch of random keys, you’ll find some such that the result ends with n 0s (say), so then your result could be something like encrypted + key + n. Typically you’d expect to find that the length of the encryption key would be roughly the length of the number of 0s, so you wouldn’t actually net any savings. But I think if you searched long enough, you might “get lucky” and find a key that generated more 0s then the length of the key, so you could theoretically win the challenge. Of course you’d have to somehow embed a program which could decrypt and reassemble everything in a tiny amount of space, but it still doesn’t seem impossible like Mike seems to suggest. Perhaps just requires an intractable amount of computing power. :)

I’m not sure if any of that made sense. I think I’m using the wrong terms for things.
No, it’s not like that. It’s a trial de novo, meaning you truly start over as if the prior proceeding hadn’t happened. I still think small claims court can be useful, but it’s important to know what it is.
Mostly it's just formalizing of the established status quo. But the changes re: allowing training on chat logs has caused some unintended consequences.

For one, now the classic IRC megahal bots which have been around for decades are technically not allowed unless you get permission from Libera staff (and the channel ops). They are markov chains that continuously train on channel contents as they operate.

But hopefully, as in the past, the Libera staffers will intelligently enforce the spirit of the rules and avoid any silly situations like the above caused by imprecise language.
Clearly not if they think they can't get an academic job without substantial teaching experience.
HN would benefit from a specific, explicit policy such as this.
> As others mentioned, there are Discord and IRC pockets.

Ah, discord, the proprietary service that demands a phone number just to be able to read anything (so I've never been able to).

Basically the exact opposite of IRC.
100%. In the past 40 years we've experienced the largest wealth transfer in history, from workers to shareholders. And you don't even need to have read Piketty to see it (though it helps).
> To clarify, this is specific to "alphabetic" writing, cuneiform/hieroglyphs are older.

That’s literally in the title of both the post and the article. What are you “clarifying”?
Technology is still a good thing. It's certain tech business models that are the problem.

Tech used to be a tool. I remember participating in product design conversations in the '00s, and the focus was all on "How can we make people's lives better? How do we create software that makes things more convenient for them, more enjoyable, frees up time and opens up new opportunities for them."

Tech is now a means to turn people into tools. I still sit in product design conversations. Now they are focused on how to manipulate people into clicking on more ads and opening up their wallet more. The applied psychology is very advanced, and is more of a focus than the technology now.

IMHO, the root cause of this is the advertising + subscription business model, along with the provision of free products to get people hooked and then upsell them on expensive and (in the big picture, but customers can't see the big picture) insconsequential upgrades. The secret to success in the tech industry is "Demonstrate value. Nurture dependence. Threaten to take away features, unless large amounts of money are paid." In people terms, we call this an abusive relationship, or blackmail. In the tech industry, it's a very profitable business model.

The worst part is this is spreading to other industries like food production and transportation.
> People higher up the chain are insecure because any loss of face is debilitating.

You don't do it in public. There's no face to lose in private (you're a subordinate, face is only lost among peers and superiors).

It is, however, not really a good idea to be 100% blunt out of the gate. There's a dance to it. But in public, I'm there to make my manager look good, and in private I'll tell them exactly what I think. Once they're confident I'm there to be at their back, it's never gone wrong, even in highly disfunctional orgs (I'm a consultant and get brought in to play "doctor" with hopeless projects a lot).
It’s just whatever for most people using Wordpress is the most practical thing and who cares about wpengine.
BTW, it's easy to test model's logic and truthfulness by giving it a wrong decision is if it was its, and asking to explain. Model has no memory and cannot distinguish the source of the text. 'Truthful' model should admit mistake without being asked. Likely model instead will do 'parallel construction' to support 'its' decision.
But Syria is (incorrectly) stereotyped as "brown people killing brown people" which college students shrug at. While Israel is (incorrectly) stereotyped as "white people killing brown people" which is a big no no.

Incorrectly because if you look at pictures of Syrian dictator Assad, he would be considered white in the US. Certainly whiter than many Israelis of Yemenite ancestry.
"Ah shit, here we go again..."

But seriously, if we did have another similar viral outbreak as COVID-19, what do you think will go better than last time, or worse?
> Just blatantly stealing another business's (WP Engine) property/storefront

Context: WP Engine is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management
I think it's important not to overstate what this means. Most likely, the kid had some other upper respiratory tract infection with the symptoms coming from that and the H5 may well have been an incidental finding, especially since they have likely already recovered based on the timeframe I'm aware of. One potential theory is exposure to wild bird droppings. Due to the circumstances of the case, we may never find out exactly what the child came in contact with.

Alameda county's original PR: https://health.alamedacountyca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/1...
alternative thinking - if you need to name something to understand it that is a smell…

https://degoes.net/articles/insufficiently-polymorphic
This reminds me of the term "isochronous," that I first started hearing, when FireWire came out. They allude to that, in their justification for using UDP.

I'm pretty sure that isochronous data transfer is a fairly important part of the current USB/Thunderbolt spec.
The Atari colour screen was so ugly :( I loved the black and white display though. For the times it was really high-res and very smooth refresh.

I went from Atari 8-bit to the Amiga though. Never really was a commodore fan but I found out later that the Amiga was mostly developed by the Atari team and the Atari ST by the Commodore team - lol. A side-effect of all the business skullduggery by Jack Tramiel in those days.

I often wonder what the world would look like now if those companies had survived like Apple did. And also Sun Microsystems. I could see one of them partnering with Sun like Apple did with NeXT to bring their OS into the next century. Or BeOS perhaps.
There is a difference between treating someone as a human and bullshitting your manager though. I’m painfully blunt to the point where the management staff had to spend 3 hours in a crisis meeting discussing whether to fire me an another developer over our opinions given on a department meeting. Which to be fair was the wrong place to throw a couple of managers under the bus for something we’d been telling them for months, but hey. Anyway we didn’t get fired and nothing changed either. I stopped stressing about it after I had spoken my piece though so it worked rather well for me. Less so for the company, but it’s not like the two of us were the only ones management wouldn’t listen to.

So I like it when I can be frank with managers. I think I’m also notoriously hard to manage because one of my character flaws is that I don’t respect authorities. I’m not stupid though. I’ll absolutely bullshit managers in situations where there isn’t really a “win” to be achieved. Obviously this will mainly happen with bad managers, but there will always be great managers who won’t like, understand or have a good connection with you.
The highest grade gauge blocks use laser interferometry from Mitutoyo have a measured coefficient of thermal expansion AND a uncertainty of that coefficient. And they have a size variance of plus or minus 30nm. That is only about 410 oxygen atoms.
I hate their PostgreSQL dependency
I feel like "business is the same as it's always been [so things aren't getting worse]" is kind of like saying "I'm smoking exactly as much as I have for the past 20 years, how can I only just have cancer now?" It's not that the problem is new, it's that the disease is degenerative.
Theoretically, I think that the ideal situation would be for a Computer Scientist to be someone who performs fundamental research in computation while a Software Engineer (I think that something like Computer Engineer would be a better term) applies computation research. Analogous to the relationship between a Physicist and an Electrical Engineer.

However, as the terms are currently used, I see Computer Scientist as analogous to Electrical Engineer. On the other hand, it seems to me that Software Engineer is used to suggest that developers don't need to know the theory behind computation.

Therefore, I currently think that the way "Software Engineer" is used respresents a lot of what's wrong with current software development.
Your statement is both true and not at all relevant to the parent comment.
The USA sponsors ISIS terrorism inside Syria. I wonder if that's why they are in the position to "bomb themselves."

It's worth mentioning that this is an externally state sponsored "civil war" on both sides. The most appropriate description is "proxy war."
Technically, a syllabary only refers to writing systems where the symbol represents the specific consonant and vowel pair, such as Japanese's Hiragana. For example, in a syllabary, the syllables "ka" and "ki" are two different symbols.

If the vowels are optional or not present, e.g. there's one "k" symbol regardless of the vowel, it's an Abjad. The archetypal Abjad is the Hebrew writing system.

If the vowels are written by adding them to the consonant symbol (similar to diacritics), it's called an Abugida. One example of this is the Ge'ez script in Ethiopia.
Riots for what? Assad was blamed and bombed by the West already, what should have people rioted for?

Besides, the entire Syrian civil war was started and fueled with American money and weapons- which ended up in the hands of each and every rebel/ terror group, including ISIS. Then the West blamed Assad for fighting back instead of leaving the country in the hand of those terror groups. Had he done that, now Syria would be a wasteland roamed by warlords, Mad Max style.
Spent some time yesterday revisiting the site c 2001, and highly recommend as a catharsis and reminder of the web as it once was:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010202064900/http://howstuffwo...
General information I found (after a -casual- search, not rigorous):

"current public health risk is low", and (EDIT: NOT the current strain) "50% mortality rate WORLDWIDE" (/NOT), and "less than 100 Americans in 2024 known to be infected", "bird to human (not human to human yet) transmission"

- https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/index.html ('situation' report)

- https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/prevention/index.html (prevention)

- https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22401-bird-fl... (mortality - need more detail e.g. healthcare access)
The recent deluge of positive press BS gets is somewhat suspect. BS seems to be following the same route as pre-X Twitter clones did in that those who either got banned (pre-X Twitter) or decided to abandon (post-Trump election X) Twitter/X are often ideologically driven. Where this means platforms like Gab and Parler took in a large number of guns & god types it means that BS is taking in the pronouns brigade, the perpetually oppressed, victimhood fetishists and more. This has the effect of turning these platforms into echo chambers for the 'right' (Gab etc.) and 'left' (pre-X Twitter and now BS). An echo chamber is a lousy place to discuss science since all you'll hear is yourself, repeated endlessly. Science (the magazine) should know that but it, like Nature and Scientific American [1] has abandoned the principle of keeping its editorial/political bias at a minimum.

[1] https://x.com/michaelshermer/status/1857610335005630769
RAID-1 does not do on the fly error detection or correction. When you do a read you read from one of the disks with a copy but don't validate. You can probably initiate an explicit recovery if you suspect there's an error but that's not automatic. RAID is meant to protect against the entire disk failing but you just blindly assume the non-failing disk is completely error free. FWIW no formal RAID level I'm aware of does majority voting. Any error detection/correction is implemented through parity bits with all the problems that parity bits entail unless you use erasure code versions of RAID 6.

The reason things work this way is you'd have 2x read amplification on the bus for error detection and 3x read amplification on the bus for majority-voting error correction & something in the read I/O hot path validating the data reducing latency further. Additionally, RAID-1 is 1:1 mirroring so it can't do error correction automatically at all because it doesn't know which copy is the error-free. At best it can transparently handle errors when the disk refuses to service the request but it cannot handle corrupt data errors that the disk doesn't notice. If you do FDE then you probably would notice corruption at least and be able to reliably correct even with just RAID-1 but I'm not sure if anyone leverages this.

RAID-1 and other backup / duplication strategies are for durability and availability but importantly not for error correction. Error correction for durable storage is typically handled by modern techniques based on erasure codes while memory typically uses Hamming codes because they were the first ones, are cheaper to implement, and match better to RAM needs than Reed Solomon codes. Raptor codes are more recent but patents are owned by Qualcomm; some have expired but there are continuation patents that might cover it.
Where Glaciers Melt, the Rivers Run Red
this sounds like a Nigerian Prince scammer set-up
grues-dinner was referring to the Solar Orbiter's distance from the Sun, and the intensity of radiation on the Orbiter.

Not the Sun's distance from Earth, and radiant intensity at the Sun's surface.

(The comment was unclearly worded and it took me a couple of readings and review of comments to realise the intent.)
Pretty much wrong on all counts.
The problem with being more assertive is that there is always the possibility that you are wrong and the person you are "correcting" is right. Opening with an assertion makes it hard to save face in that case.
I can see the lines forming at Costco for toilet paper and water already.
latex doesn't load
We have data from COVID when most people were working from home.
The artists who don't mind not making money from their work itself, have built a personal brand to obtain other sources of income. But the future that the OP describes, and which feels quite believable, is one where AI defeats humans even at building a monetized brand around obtained content, so there isn't anything left for humans. I am much less optimistic than you that people will demand human connection, I think they will be satisfied with a convincing enough simulacrum.
Not really comparable:

People were negative about Tesla owing to a long history of making negligible sales before Musk took over as the third CEO.

Twitter was occasionally profitable, and now it has so little income it can't cover the loan he saddled with it even if literally every other cost was entirely eliminated.

Now, that doesn't mean that Musk can't change course on Twitter, nor does it mean that he can't just burn money with Twitter for as long as he wants to, but it's still a thing where if I were somehow a shareholder, I'd be trying to sell.
No, my ucstomers would be in the US and Europe. This is a SaaS for developers. Create a US entity through Atlas is exactly what I want to avoid. I'd prefer something simpler, where I can get paid (even if they get a high cut like 5%), and then send that money to Paypal or a bank account.
The difference as I see it is that electrical engineers are expected to have a deep knowledge of advanced mathematics, EM fields, semiconductors, control theory, electronics, etc. However, software engineers are not expected to have a deep knowledge of algorithms, category theory, formal languages, etc.

Effectively, companies treat Software Engineers like Electricians not like Electrical Engineers.
Vip 999
> Yeah like several hundred "Chess IM/GMs react to ChatGPT playing chess" videos on youtube.

If I were to take that sentence literally, I would ask for at least 199 other examples, but I imagine that it was just a figure of speech. Nevertheless, if that's only one player complaining (even several times), can we really conclude that ChatGPT cannot play? Is that enough evidence, or is there something else at work?

I suppose indeed one could, if one expected an LLM to be ready to play out of the box, and that would be a fair criticism.
If we're getting critical here...

>> and many of them are under your control

This is the societal problem with cancer. If someone gets cancer I'm guessing it might be an incorrect reaction for one to think it was the person's "fault", but the reality is cancer just happens, and it's not a modern phenomena. No one can control the type of cancer they get and no one can control the (unaided) outcome.

My banana comment was partly in jest, but as an example that ionized radiation is found everywhere, and our body is set up to protect, remove, and repair broken DNA on a regular basis.
Ah, so it's not charged plate conversion (which seems impossible with pulsed plasma if the plate spacing is too high). Hopefully it works, because I'm _not_ reading another 40 page study/whitepaper on direct energy conversion.
> But, there are definitely some folks who we’d be better off paying to not do anything.

An even better idea: simply don't hire such people.
Hack 99999
Sure but this sounds exactly like the original definition of jihad or even “from the river to the sea” but people will get very upset if you suggest they mean they want to commit genocide when they chant it. I don’t think an argument over the meaning of ancient words is relevant or helpful here
I remember using a CD player for DOS that was all about full screen visualizations.

I can't remember the name though.