skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fingerprint scanner on the side, please
Apple killed TouchID when they got rid of the home button, which is a shame, as with TouchID my phone was unlocked by the time it was out of my pocket. Modern flagship Android phones are putting expensive ultrasonic biometrics under the screen. What have budget phones been doing? Just putting it in the power button. It works great; my thumb automatically goes for the power button anyways. It's cheap, efficient, and instant, using technology we've had for well over a decade now.

Decent smartphones are becoming far too expensive, please just put the biometrics in the power button.
Read a lot this year — a lot more than most years. A few highlights:

The making of the atomic bomb by Richard Rhodes was probably the best of the bunch. I read it because I see some parallels between the discovery of atomic power and the search for AGI, and wanted an insight on the ethics and decision making of the time. It didn't disappoint.

The dawn of everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow was a solid read and retelling of how civilization began and evolved.

The message by Ta-Nehisi Coates, I read in two sittings — it was that impactful. A reminder of how the oppressed becomes the oppressor again and again. "As it happens, you can See the world but never see the people in it"

Other highlights: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt; re-read Thinking in Systems by Daniella Meadows; re-read Wherever You Go There You Are by Jon Kabat Zinn; The light eaters by Zoe Schlanger; I don't want to talk about it, by Terrence Real.
Read a few years ago and agree with this assessment. A genuine work of genius, and probably in my top five books of all time.
yup. The ability to make anything interesting with the Spotify API just got flushed.

So happy I never got started on that little dream project that’s been knocking around the back of my head for a couple years…
I have a different use case in a similar situation.

My girlfriend runs an art studio that does art workshops. She uses Google workspace. She and her other teachers use Google workspace and have Google photos. They create albums of each workshop.

They want to have all the albums in one place so the social media person can easily find and use them.

Ideally there should be a way to make a Google photos account shared with the rest of the team. Unfortunately Google photos is not officially part of Workspace so it’s not treated as a b2b product.
I've always wanted a slider that gives increasingly eclectic and random selections for the radio playlists.

Psst sounds good, I'll try it, hopefully the API changes have not affected it.
The last one was a bit off.
Sci-fi was always a current-day allegory. That's why I prefer cyberpunk: rather than allegorical, it tries to be literal and concrete.

But cyberpunk is not imaginative in the way you're looking for. I can appreciate that.

What are some examples of the old-school, non-allegorical stuff? Maybe Exhalation?
Nope, but they must have covered their ass in the legal T&Cs with something along the lines of them being able to vary the prices at their discretion etc
happiness isn't something we can "demand." It’s something that comes upon us quietly, when we serve others.
Just because you live near a lucky point on earth, thinking that everyone has the same luxury is a bit absurd.

I traveled through Mongolia for a week. Every camp we stayed had a water tank, and water use was extremely constrained. Same for electricity and heat.

Your position is akin to getting power from the first distribution point near a nuclear power plant and saying that electricity is indeed infinite for everyone on the planet.

Just because you don't prepay (but pay as you go) for fresh water doesn't mean that everyone has that luxury. I have shared a couple of maps down there. Maybe you should give them a look about our planet's state.
Don't think we're close to that point yet. You can still get the same server for free from oracle free tier if you're willing to put up with god awful enterprisey control panel.

Also that linode CPU is virtualized (i.e. at least some of that cache is shared).
It's weird, I tried before posting to check if my tip was working on this article, and it did.
I implore everyone reading this to google the Sokal hoax before decide whether these guys are worthwhile.
What, did it refuse his offer of an imaginary submarine, or something?
https://chainsawsuit.krisstraub.com/20171207.shtml
Except the article states the move to Dagenham has been "dropped".
ThinkPad X1 Extreme gen 2. Bought it years ago. Very powerful laptop. Too powerful, it turns out. Burns through its battery so quickly it's basically impossible to use unplugged. At times, it has gotten so hot I burned my fingers on the keyboard. And sometimes it throttles to a truly glacial speed. The 4k OLED screen is gorgeous but eats too much power, and 4k is simply wasted on a 15" screen.

On the other hand, it did survive spilling an entire mug of tea over its keyboard without any problems.
I read maybe half. Didn't get it. Somewhere in the middle he starts to comment about all that happened? Is it part of the book?
If you don't allow the indentation based parsing to be nested within a bracket-based expression, it doesn't look too bad. At the top level you have the indentation-based parser. When that sees an open bracket, it recurses to the regular parser which doesn't care about indentation.
This is / was implemented as a custom protocol to transfer files. It doesn't work out of the box with all programs on any system after the iPod is plugged in - it needs a program (consider it a driver) to be installed on the host computer for it to work. It only works with the programs that speak the protocol - installing the program does make it available to all programs on the host. This is quite different from making the iPod behave like an external hard drive.
Murder in the Crooked House by Soji Shimada
According to some, one of the great locked room mysteries. Recommended but I am guessing it's better in the original.

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell
Not as amazing as I thought it would be but memorable nonetheless.

Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent
Something nice about this book. Not for everyone. What is?
Related

Sweden seeks clarity from China about suspected sabotage of undersea cables (3 points, 55 minutes ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42268586

E.U. Vessels Surround Anchored Chinese Ship After Baltic Sea Cables Are Severed (5 points, 16 hours ago, 2 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42262913

This story previously with limited discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42256553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42263100
Those are some steeeep drops. I'm curious how they settled upon such numbers.
Seeing this reminds me of something I'm not proud of. I've done effectively no reading this year. At least not by my normal standards.

I generally read between 30-50 books a year (mix of fiction and non-fiction). But this year I knew my focus was going to be more on research, reading papers, writing code, etc. so I set my reading goal lower than normal (I usually set it to like 75, knowing that that's a bit aspirational). This year? I set it to like, 30. And I won't come close to hitting that. Right now I'm at 7 books for the year. So I don't have a big sample set to choose from. :-(

That said...

Of what I did read, a couple were pretty good:

Non-fiction:

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks- Scott J. Shapiro

Readings in Agents - Huhns, Singh (eds)

Programming Multi-Agent Systems in AgentSpeak using Jason - Bordini, Hubner, & Wooldridge

Fiction:

In Too Deep (Jack Reacher, #29) - Lee Child
These are language models, they are not designed for producing image output at all. In a way it's impressive it can even produce working SVG code as output. Even more sonthst it vaguely resembles a bird on a bike.
Attackers don't need to add their own keys. They can piggyback off of the key that you added legitimately to get DKMS working.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb is in my top three non-fiction books I have ever read.

Will I like The Dawn of Everything if I didn't like Harari's Sapiens? (I loved Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years)
In Hillsboro, OR they been building up their data centers but this hasn’t converted to dedicated servers in the US yet
It's a tautology. Replicators which do not replicate do not persist in the environment and so are selected out of the pool of replicators. So whatever genes persist in the environment are tautologically the ones that managed to replicate and persist. The people who do not have children are selecting themselves out of the pool of genes that make copies so will be replaced with ones that do make copies.

If you're talking about environmental pollution and declining fertility because of it then that's something else but even then, those who manage to survive and persist in a polluted environment will be the ones who pass on copies of their genes.
> I'd like to see something examining the effects of those behaviors on the population.

In the testimony, they explain it:

We took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset.

Allowing for misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news to flourish were like Big Tobacco’s bronchodilators, which allowed the cigarette smoke to cover more surface area of the lungs.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210318063530/https://energycom...
It just stops in the middle of the book... I hope the Missing parts follow quickly
… I mean, yeah, the language changes. People do not use exactly the same words at exactly the same frequency as they did 20 years ago. That’s how English works. Don’t like it? Go live in France.

(French changes, too, but in that case there is some active effort to stop it changing.)
Firefox Android, yep.

That makes some sense actually if iOS ignores it. Whenever I come across the behaviour I wonder why, but if it's just a copy/paste magic meta tag which goes unnoticed by most browsers then I can see how that could proliferate.
My reads this read, which I enjoyed:

- Dead Mountain by Donnie Eichar (an examination of the Dyatlov Expedition).

- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (fantasy).

- Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

- Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden.

Hopefully the other responses here give me something good to read for Christmas break. :-)
This precisely describes why Google Glass failed.
That already happened, except Reddit, Facebook, and Hacker News don't pay for the content they aggregate. People dodge paywalls in the comments, and many don't even bother to read the story. What would a paid solution offer over that?

My cool idea would be an aggregator that charges people a subscription fee to participate and read stories. $100/month and extremely heavy (paid) moderation that forces people to engage with the articles. The price point helps get rid of anyone who is unwilling to participate constructively. Revenue-sharing for commenters as well.

Make it the place where real discussions happen. People are social creatures and want to join exclusive clubs.
This has already happened. There are orgs managing hundreds to thousands of k8s clusters.
Ok, this should be fixed now, let me know if you still can't zoom!
The Deluge -- a darker take on climate change than Ministry for the Future, but also felt pretty realistic.

This is how you lose the time war -- took me a long time to start this book, and then I couldn't put it down.

Non fiction, I really enjoyed Slouching Towards Utopia. I'm a sucker for narrative history like that, and I got a few useful concepts from the book. I also really liked The Prince of Peace, a biography of Keynes.
There is no epistemological collapse. Access to accurate information has never been so fast nor so easy. To be sure, lies are spread on the internet - but people believed all sorts of bullshit before the internet. Those who want to claim there is a crisis don’t have a principled argument as to how things are worse.
>Hot rodding about fast cars.

the whole hotrod culture produced those fast cars in order to compete with the police, it then turned into in-group competition, and then formal racing.

'hot rodding' wouldn't exist without competition.

The first SCTA style 'hot-rods' were 'souped up' ford flatheads that were lucky to have over 80 horsepower going for top speed runs.

What i'm saying is that 'racing' was before 'fast' in the history of hot-rodding.

p.s. this also applies to the almost-entirely-disconnected very early European car scene. It was racing events and famous individuals that drove the entire culture -- this then lead to 'fast cars'. The history of the Mille Miglia comes to mind.
Tk! Some things just work. Never underestimate proven tech.
It’s like a Christmas ornament. Unnecessary in utility, and yet so fun to enjoy
Seeing as they are paying $5 a month, how do you expect buying a NUC to pay for itself in a few months? Where are you finding NUCs for $20 with free electricity?
I created an account with Hetzner earlier this year, and confirmed my Credit Card with them, but a few second later, they auto-suspended my account before I could log in.

I emailed support, and they bluntly told me to create a new account and this time use real information... Needless to say, I bought compute elsewhere.

I don't know how they're still in business.
Also Apple Music and Tidal have high bit-rate, lossless audio.

Once you've tried it there's no turning back.
I frequently hear there are more lies and they spread even faster in 2024 than 2014 and for sure faster than 1994.
I, too, imagine a person in my head, and then immediately wish that they die in a terrible accident, possibly taking innocent lives in the process, because I decided I don't like the imaginary person I just created. In my head.
Totally agree! Because of the zero-garbage and no-gc requirement we don't even use the JDK. We use Java as syntax language and write everything from scratch, even the data structures (java.util.HashMap produces garbage). So the bloated Java ecosystem does not affect us too much.
Dark Incentives: Your app doesn't love you (2022)
That was a release that came out in Summer 2000, but it has very little to do with this 1997 plan. Pretty much all of this plan was thrown out shortly after this was published. The Mac OS X Public Beta we got was a result of the later 1998 plan that brought us Carbonlib for classic Mac OS and Carbon-the-OS a.k.a. Mac OS X.
My reads this year with my personal ratings:

Greg Egan, Diaspora (7/10)

Dan Simmons, Hyperion 1-4 (9/10)

James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes (6/10)

Scott Alexander, Unsong (7/10)

Qtmn, Ra (7/10)

Qtmn, Fine Structure (6/10)

Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary (6/10)

Wildbow, Worm (8/10)
Delaware Wedge
The link to the report doesn't work for me, and everything else seems to be behind a login wall. :\
Rupert Murdock probably literally thinks the Internet is a fad and that the ad money will come back Any Day Now (TM).

They saw the Napster/Metallica saga play out 20 years ago and thought that would never happen to their form of media
I've been reading about how great Hetzner for years but i couldn't get past the sigup page where they require a credit card just to create an account.
See? What I said
OSINT - Open Source Intelligence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_intelligence
BitTorrent seedbox. If you are apart of a private torrent tracker you may download 5tb and upload 10tb of data per month to be in good standing within that tracker’s community
Well, that’s basically the history of social networks thus far, so, I mean, sure, why not?

Obviously it’d be nice if it was the first social network not to either implode (Livejournal, Tumblr, Twitter), or fade into irrelevance (Friendster, Bebo, MySpace, Digg), or just ossify into mind-numbing tedium (Facebook, LinkedIn), but, well, if it does, presumably there’ll be another one along at some point.

(I realise that you could probably argue Digg either way, here. Digg had a multi-paradigm end.)
Also,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42191394 ("Yi Peng 3 crossed both cables C-Lion 1 and BSC at times matching when they broke (bsky.app)", 756 comments)
It's a political signifier and should be recognized as such, is what I'm saying. As the New Republic described, it was a rhetorical "tic" of Obama, and is the same for other left wing types. It comes off as weird to me; not everyone uses it but a certain type over uses it a lot. So this is recognizable.
> The audience for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which was initially released on 70mm in Cinerama theatres (with their huge, curved screens) in April 1968 before going on general release on 35mm in January 1969, has always included an unusually large number of people (including many academics in Film Studies and other disciplines) who felt the need to express their feelings and thoughts about the film in writing.

Well, I'm not a letter writer. But if you want to experience the film in 70mm (alas, without the curved Cinerama screens) look for a showing by Alamo Drafthouse. They have at least one copy of the film in 70mm and will occasionally show it at a theater (I saw it in Austin). They include the intermission in the show, as 2001 was considered to be a very long film for it's time (but not nearly as punishing as the LOTR extended edition films). The "trippy dimensional travel" scene with it's music is unbelievable.

There is apparently a 4k transfer now, but I don't know if they started with a 70mm print or the later 35mm print.
PeerTube comes to mind.
After missing the AI boom – badly – Samsung shuffles the C-Suite
Hm, the one I enjoyed the most this year was Susanna Clarke's Piranesi – engrossing, awesome and beautiful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law

> Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. — Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?
> 1890k =-0;.9l, km8nubh6ydes3w2q1

What is the meaning of your comment?
Australia passes world-first law banning under-16s from social media
By freezing bank transfers/disallowing any Australian companies (read: advertisers) from doing business with them? Depending on treaties, possibly by seizing assets in the company's home country?
Honestly if you are providing computer resources, that's pretty standard now and one of the only lines of defence against abuse
AGI and robotics will have the worst supply situation. They depend on expensive GPUs and complicated machinery from across the world.
Boring article. How does it go from blaming computers in general and then just picking on Twitter and Reddit - as if these two websites are representative of everything a computer is used for.
You cannot jam signals the aircraft has already received from an earlier point on the flight. Inertial navigation + cell towers hundreds of miles away could be useful, essentially requiring a state actor to really render such a system useless.
I think that's the key thing. Social media bombards us with stimuli based on an algorithm optimizing for what will grab our attention best. It doesn't matter if it has value, or even if it can hold our attention, because there's always some new novelty in the pipeline.

Long-form writing ask us to choose a subject and then focus deeply and deliberately on it. It's more demanding and more rewarding.
So far, they seem to be correct answers.

I assume it's more a part of explicitly programmed set of responses than it is a standard inference. But you're right that I should be cautious.

ChatGPT, for example, says it can retrieve URL contents (for RAG). When it does an inference it then shows a message indicating the retrieval is happening. In my very limited testing it has responded appropriately. Eg it can talk about what's on HN front page right now.

Similarly Claude.ai says it can't do such retrieval - except through API use? - and doesn't appear to do so either.
Asking language models to draw things by outputting SVG is a deliberately absurd task.

Given how unreasonable that is I thought this model did very well, especially compared to others that I've tried: https://github.com/simonw/pelican-bicycle?tab=readme-ov-file...
You really think women, on average, would be willing to sacrifice 6+ years at the minimum to have 3 children? It’s easy for us, men, to say that. But all my girl friends around my age group (late 20s-early 40s) are generally happy with 0-2 children. Genuinely nothing is stopping them other than “why do I need to make that sacrifice?” question. I will never blame them either, because I would do exactly the same in their place. It is the most logical thing to do. It’s either we make women’s lives objectively worse, or figure out a way where we can live without everyone going for 3+.
And then still people are saying: these are just heuristic next token predictors incapable of reasoning.
That's a particularly, but unfortunately good example of how awful they are as a company. The sooner they get pushed out of business the better.
There’s a devious ambiguity in this type of conflict. Is it an act of war? Sabotage? Accident? Negligence?
Also, I suspect there was something else going on there, because there are lots of bigots on Bluesky. The “Very British Bigotry” blocklist (for fancy modern/Rowling—style transphobes), say, has literally thousands of people, completely unbanned, on it; Bluesky is really fairly small-l liberal about post content. One thing that they’re somewhat strict on is profile content, and I would speculate that those performatively getting banned are doing so on the strength of putting shit in their profile.
> opened in nitrogen in a class 10,000 clean room

Since these samples were collected in a vacuum, doesn't it make sense to keep them in a vacuum, at least for science that requires the smallest possible amount of contamination?
easy, impose an exit tax. capital doesn't need to be free when it's trying to evade justice.

you pay tax on unrealised gains the same way the rest of us do when facing an unexpected bill that we can't afford - you sell your stuff.
I would do it as a second income, it only becomes subsistence if the need arises.
Tuxera: An Etymology
This is an interesting linguistic rabbithole about my former employer's name, for no particular reason.
Oh gosh you are right. I turned off the adblocker to check it out. I often kind of forget the adblock-less world is out there.
For sure.

It's basically an observation on expectations wrt regional language differences. HAND.
£2bn actually doesn't sound that enormous for this sort of organisation. Especially since...

> Initially the Corporation had planned to move both markets as well as New Spitalfields in Leyton to a £1bn purpose-built site in Dagenham, however this was dropped earlier this month over cost concerns as the council had already spent £308m purchasing and remediating the site in Dagenham.

They were going to spend half their entire endowment on this! And, regardless of whether you have the money to spare, £1bn is an absolutely colossal amount to spend on a market (even a large and very historic one). It just makes no financial sense at all.
Works, thanks
For the US in particular, water issues come down overwhelmingly to unfettered agricultural use, often with crops like alfalfa that are both mostly water by weight and are shipped out of the country to other places. Domestic use is only a fraction of the total.