skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Windmill company ESI Energy LLC, guilty of killing 150 bald and golden eagles in 8 USA states [1][2]

Read the case. They were guilty of basically not getting a permit. If they got a permit their incidental kills can be thousand+ per project. They are a "least concern" category.

> But the biggest fallacy in this PR stunt is that outrageous "we don't know, nothing to see here"

The fallacy is saying this is a concern while not having measurements showing it is a bigger concern than other things like illegal shooting or lead poison or rat poison or power lines or skyscraper windows. If the windmill fighters actually care about birds maybe they could fund these studies. Do they fund these bird studies or just don't want wind energy for whatever reason (like investing into fossil fuels)? If they fund those bird studies why don't we have the measurements.

Meanwhile there are no permits for killing eagles with rat poison (every death is illegal but who's counting?). Meanwhile every power line operator is given unlimited permit for incidental bald eagle kills. But yes wind turbines, the big enemy of bird lovers.
the fact that other companies succeeded doesn’t have much to do with the many that failed with terrible assumptions
AI people have been using a much broader definition of 'agent' for ages, though. One from Russel and Norvig's 90s textbook:

"Anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon that environment through actuators"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_agent#As_a_definit...
Whether*

A wether is a castrated ram.
Quite. And if it was right, those businesses deploying it and replacing humans need humans with jobs and money to pay for their products and services…
> While I'm sure it is an honest statement, this sentiment is itself concerning. Science is ideally done at a remove - you cannot let yourself want any particular outcome.

This basically never happens. I worked in academia for many years, and in psychology for some of that, and I have never met a disinterested scientist.

Like, you need to pick your topics, and the research designs within that etc, and people don't pick things that they don't care about.

This is why (particularly in social/medical/people sciences) blinding is incredibly important to produce better results.

> The self-restraint required to accept an unwanted answer is perhaps THE most important selection criteria for minting new academics,

I agree with this, but the trouble is that this is not what is currently selected for.

I once replicated (four times!) a finding seriously contrary to accepted wisdom and I basically couldn't get it published honestly. I was told to pretend that I had looked for this effect on purpose, and provide some theory around why it could be true. I think that was the point where I realised academia wasn't for me.

Now, the same thing happens in the private sector, but ironically enough, it's much less common.
Actually I would not have needed to redact the IP address. It's not the end user but Opera's proxy:

82.145.211.80 [20/Dec/2024:18:10:36 "GET /redacted HTTP/1.1" 200 75 r:- "Opera/9.80 (Series 60; Opera Mini/7.1.32444/191.361; U; de) Presto/2.12.423 Version/12.16"
OpenAI o1 scores on Chartered Finance Analyst level 1
Wow, this is a blast from the past.

Many years ago, before most phones had mobile internet, I was running a web-to-WAP reverse proxy using https://web.archive.org/web/20080209153558/www.hottproxy.org... to get mobile web access on my LG VX 5400 flip phone.

You could go into the secret admin menu, reconfigure the WAP gateway away from the carrier's captive portal to your own proxy and voila! Unlimited free access to the real web! (at 3G speeds)
> You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes.

>Notwithstanding the above, you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software related to payment to the Licensor in any copy you distribute to others.

>You may not alter, remove, or obscure any licensing, copyright, or other notices of the Licensor in the software. Any use of the Licensor’s trademarks is subject to applicable law.

To me that says that if FUTO decide to paywall the entire app, nobody is allowed to fork it to remove that.
At some point my country started borrowing lots of money and spending it on social programs, which eventually led to its bankruptcy. Some people still think that the guy in charge back then was a great leader.
It is not interesting or relevant in any way, I doubt any mobile network still supports WAP.
The Global Hunt for Putin's 'Sleeper Agents'
This is a fascinating weekend read.

Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/sleeper-agents-putin-global...
It's not clear to me how successful they were with podcasts. They certainly attracted lots of podcasters but no idea how much profit that's generated
I tried soundcloud recently and it’s filled with ads to the point of being an extremely disruptive experience.
I actually disagree entirely. The amount of forcing theories that are well ahead of the facts that occurs in academic psychology is off the charts.

We could do with a shut up and experiment movement, to be honest.

In order to build useful theories, we need lots more data, and forcing theories onto data actively holds us back from running the wide variety of experiments necessary for a real theory to emerge.
Also Mahesh Balakrishnan (Yale, Facebook/Meta, Confluent)
https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/search?q=mahesh
> And the ones who do care about reproducibility are using R anyway

I worked in a pharma company with lots of R code and this comment is bringing up some PTSD. One time we spent weeks trying to recreate an "environment" to reproduce a set of results. Try installing a specific version of a package, and all the dependencies it pulls in are the latest version, whether or not they are compatible. Nobody actually records the package versions they used.

The R community are only now realising that reproducible environments are a good thing, and not everybody simply wants the latest version of a package. Packrat was a disaster, renv is slightly better.
The largest and leading commercial fusion energy company
I turned off GitHub Copilot yesterday
We wouldn't, that's their point.
Do Apple and Google stop you from opening a web browser and navigating to any web site?

Because that was the trillion-dollar vision for mobile operator owned WAP portals around 1999. They would completely control access to online services on mobile devices. That was how they planned to get a cut on everything you view on a phone.
Arc: Putting Fusion Energy on the Grid
RISC-V has existed for over a decade and in that time no one has got close to building a competitive non microcontroller level CPU with it.

How long is this supposed to take?

How long until it is accepted that RISC-V looks like a semiconductor nerd snipe of epic proportion designed to divert energy away from anything that might actually work? If it was not designed for this it is definitely what it has achieved.
A lot of the arguments I’m seeing ignore the factor that China sees ARM as a potential threat to it’s economic security and is leaning hard into risc-v. it’s silly to ignore the largest manufacturing base for computing devices when talking about the future of computing devices.

I would bet on china making risc-v the default solution for entry level and cost sensitive commodity devices within the next couple of years. It’s already happening in the embedded space.

The row with Qualcomm only validates the rationale for fast iterating companies to lean into riscv if they want to meaningfully own any of their processor IP.

The fact that the best ARM cores aren’t actually designed by ARM, but arm claims them as its IP is really enough to understand that migrating to riscv is eventually going to be on the table as a way to maximize shareholder value.
Show HN: Fill, sign, edit PDFs and much more
Hi HN,
I built a new and modern PDF Editor. I had been using some online PDF Editors since years and over the period of time I found that most of them were either slow and outdated or bloated with un-necessary features. Another pain point was all of the PDF editors mentioned "Free" but right after you do edits and want to export anything, they ask you to pay. I decided to fix my own itch and built PDF Editify.

Using PDF Editify, users can fill, sign, edit, redact, annotate PDFs and much more. The free version allows users to export 3 PDFs with unlimited edits per week. We are constantly working on new features, some of which are:

- Digital Signatures (currently we only support Electronic Signatures)
- PDF Templates Catalog
- OCR PDFs

This is my first product and we have good feedback from our users. I would love any questions, comments or feedback from the HN community and any ideas for marketing would be appreciated since I (being a tech guy) really find marketing boring.
Very cool! I'm curious when it says "did you know that accessing a random element in an array takes linear time", why that's the case, with bash?
My personal first hint was when ARM, the plaintiff in a contract case, demanded a jury trial.

When your contracts are airtight, you usually want a bench trial. Then the defendant demands a jury.
in flies and mice
Surprisingly, there's also no "higher power" to get your money back from scams using traditional banking rails as well. I have family members who have lost thousands from bank transfers to legally registered companies that establish legitimacy through having a business bank account. It usually takes forever to shut them down, even after hundreds of thousands of reports from people like me who recognize what they are early on.

Many haven't actually lost money in significant ways through bank transfers, but when it does happen, the disillusionment of institutional security really falls away. Additionally, governments are slow and ineffective, so when these companies do get caught with class action lawsuits, they usually don't have anything to return.
> Does the contract say anywhere that Spotify would never provide their own generated music to users of their platform?

> If the contract between artists and platform provides no such limitations, I fail to see how anyone is being defrauded of anything.

Then why does Spotify refuse to talk about it? It's clearly outside of the spirit of the deal they are striking with artists generally.

Ultimately, they will get away with it because of just the same quasi-justification you're offering: Oh we're not screwing any of them individually, we are screwing them all at once.

Congratulations I guess, your argument is on the winning
side!

But certainly Congress, the UK parliament, EU parliament, Swedish parliament etc. should be looking at this through the lens of regulation and competition law. And for once I hope the record labels -- big and small, because so many of them are small -- sue.
Per capita EU is a far bigger polluter than non developed countries.
100% agree. I did a research on workflows, durable execution engines in context of Agents and RAGs. Put some links in a comment to the article below
Accidentally exponential behavior in Apache Spark (2021)
Spotify's Plot Against Musicians
It also has to be able to come and argue in the comments.
Okay but what are the tests like? At least like a general idea.
> Doesn't the fact that it can only accomplish tasks with benchmarks

That's not a fact
Why should journalist badge provide some kind of protection shield? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Gonz%C3%A1lez_Yag%C3%BCe
In my experience with different kinds of batteries, from the cheapest to the more expensive ones, the AirTag holds between 3 and 9 months until it starts warning about battery, so what you’ve read does not line up with my experience.
Even at 100x cost decrease this will still cost $10,000 to beat a benchmark. It won't scale when you have that amount of compute requirements and power.

GPT-3 may massively reduced in cost, but it's requirements were not anyway extreme compared to this.
> It’s slightly depressing that there are probably more fake Google support staff than real ones.

I've never thought of it that way but you're right! Dealing with support at most tech companies is a horrible experience and is usually something I research before using a product where a failure in service provision could lead to catastrophic results.
When I was lonely, I used to hate weekends
I've been wanting for a while to share my experience of loneliness and how I overcame it 7 years ago during my PhD in the hopes that people who find themselves stuck in a similar situation find solace and encouragement.

In summary, the following 3 factors helped me overcome loneliness:

1. Support from my family.
2. Commitment from my romantic partner.
3. Becoming unstuck from my career obstacles.

Having friends around was fun in the moment and arguably gave me some of the most amazing memories in my lifetime. However, in the moments of despair, friends without commitment weren’t able to provide me with the refuge and support that I needed to trudge through the trenches and make it to the finish line.

They say “no man is an island.” We form mini continents with people we are committed to. Non-committal relationships, on the other hand, are like cruise ships—docking at the island briefly, then sailing away whenever they please. But, man, aren’t those ships fun to have around—they can turn a mere island into a paradise.
Perfect information is a requirement for a centrally planned economy. In the spontaneous order of a free economy, no one is responsible for everything – each person acts based on the part of the economy and their wants and needs that they are aware of, and people aren't stuck relying on some top-down, centralized power to impose one-size-fits-all solutions.
What is the benefit of compiling formally correct code to Rust? It seems that all the possible benefits are already there (if not more)
…and macOS. Sandboxed Mac apps get their own little home directory in `~/Library/Containers/`. To access anything else, they need to ask through system APIs.
That doesn't do the same thing at all. It doesn't create numbered citations, backlinks, or a bibliography.
> the fact that you even can use more compute to get more intelligence is a breakthrough.

I'm not so sure—what they're doing by just throwing more tokens at it is similar to "solving" the traveling salesman problem by just throwing tons of compute into a breadth first search. Sure, you can get better and better answers the more compute you throw at it (with diminishing returns), but is that really that surprising to anyone who's been following tree of thought models?

All it really seems to tell us is that the type of model that OpenAI has available is capable of solving many of the types of problems that ARC-AGI-PUB has set up given enough compute time. It says nothing about "intelligence" as the concept exists in most people's heads—it just means that a certain very artificial (and intentionally easy for humans) class of problem that wasn't computable is now computable if you're willing to pay an enormous sum to do it. A breakthrough of sorts, sure, but not a surprising one given what we've seen already.
I’m very much for legalizing and regulating (almost) all drugs, but watch out with the confirmation bias of “everyone in my social circle who used recreationally turned out fine.”

I can’t find it right now but I read a great comment on legalization that pointed out that a kid experimenting with weed and cocaine in college is doing so for a radically different reason than a kid doing it escape the daily misery of his ghetto neighborhood.

This is also why you’ll often see staunch opposition to legalization in the lower socio-economic classes, with them having seen people close to them destroyed by drug use.

And yes, legalization and regulation would of course also allow harm reduction. But it is good to be able to take the opposition’s perspective :)
> These being the only ones whose populations are worth having empathy with.…It seems you'll need to find another way to promote the "Israel's suffering is unique" narrative.

HN norms are to assume the best interpretation of your collocutor. This isn’t doing that.
Rudolphs Sleigh on a North Pole PCB
The Magnetic North Pole Has Officially Changed Position: ScienceAlert
A naïve translation would produce rust code which is almost entirely unsafe (using raw pointers instead of references everywhere). Translating to references is difficult, since C code isn't written with the restrictions of the Rust alias model / borrow-checker in mind.
Found via https://hackaday.com/2024/12/20/its-official-the-north-pole-...
State central planning requires perfect information, because those in power are responsible for the entire economy. With economic freedom, each individual acts to meet their wants and needs and provide for others based on what they know, avoiding solutions based on inadequate knowledge being imposed on everyone from the top down. Because no one will ever have perfect information – people and the economy are constantly changing. The only approach that really works is freedom – letting people do as they choose with their own lives, bodies, and resources, so long as it does not involve initiating force or fraud against others.
You misunderstood what I was trying to say. I closely know people that do this work with the specific personal goal of protecting bird populations. They are confident they are able to do so, and I have faith in their level of competence based on knowing them well, and also being a scientific researcher in a different but related field. I expect this to carry zero weight as an argument, I’m just explaining where I am coming from.

I am curious enough that I will ask these details and follow up if I can…
That logic doesn't work for me, because many words have multiple meanings. "Agency" can also be a noun that means an organization that you hire - like a design agency. Or it can mean the CIA.

I'm not saying it's not a valid definition of the term, I'm pushing back on the idea that it's THE single correct definition of the term.
Collatz’s Ant
Embedded is far larger than pcs and dosn't needthat phones too are larger an already you recompile as needed.
Convergent Encryption
There's no honor system when there's billions of dollars at stake x) I'm highly highly skeptical of these benchmarks because of intentional cheating and accidental contamination.
In my article I only say that it is currently slow and that there are various initiatives to make it fast and I am hopeful for the future.
Angels and Demons: The science behind Dan Brown's novel (2009) [video]
I see you toned down the "defrauded" rhetoric to a much more ambiguous "yeah, it was against the spirit of the deal".

I am always in favor of proper regulation. If the EU sees this as abusive and detrimental to competition, they should definitely put restrictions on platforms offering their own content. I wonder if this would extend to, say, supermarkets offering products under their own brands. It is important that regulations don't harm the consumers.

As for record labels suing... Well, they will have this problem which is proving that any fraud took place. Unless the numbers were rigged (and no users actually streamed the slop, and it was actually fraud), I fail to see how they would win anything. What would be the allegation? That users are listening to bad music?
The downvotes should tell you, this is a decided "hype" result. Don't poo poo it, that's not allowed on AI slop posts on HN.
I’ve never had Alexa control a device via a TV show’ audio but playing back a video of me testing my home automation (“Alex, do X”) triggered my lights.

I’d love a no-wake-word world where something locally was always chewing on what you said but I’m not sure how well it would work in practice.

I think it would only take 1-2 instances of it hearing “Hey, who turned off the lights?” in a show turning off my lights for real (and scaring the crap out of me). Doctor Who isn’t particularly scary but if I was watching Silence in the Library and that line turned off my lights I’d be spoked and it would take me a hot minute to realize what happened.
I agree there is a disconnect in pure logic, but I think it is observable that science is often conducted with a goal in mind (and is not then logically pure as a pursuit).

When the goal is the preservation of a species through the understanding of survival pressures caused by human activity, I think that understanding of the limitations of the state of the art does in fact translate into progress towards actionable understanding of the “ground truth”. This becomes manifest once you factor in the motivations of the researchers, who will use that knowledge to press further study, make new hypothesis, and couch the conclusions of their studies with this knowledge in mind.

Every advancement in understanding is built upon the knowledge of the shortcomings of previous investigations.
It seems to me quite a lot of it is down to having a net co2 zero goal but not anything like market tax for co2 so if reducing emissions by 100kg can be done by spending £100 on insulation or £1000 on domestic solar then solar it is because it sounds sexier to politicians.
People whose work will never be slurped up can't see the problem.
Thanks! It was a lot of fun to put together, and the site has expanded in scope considerably since I wrote those articles. Whenever I get a few moments, it's one of my favourite projects to work on, there's just something very "zen" about going back to Sinclair BASIC and all the limitations which enforce some creative hacks. I was particularly pleased with the user preferences system[1] and articles code which mimics some of the early disk/tape magazines I remember from my early teens.

So many of us of a certain age started with those early 8-bit computers, I guess "booting" straight into a BASIC prompt encouraged that exploration and experimenting which is a little harder to get at these days.

I never played the original Starstrike, but Starstrike II is still one of my favourites - impressive to see a 3D engine running on an 8-bit micro with 48Kb of memory and makes you wonder what we're spending all those cycles on now!

[1]=https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?p=11776...
> Most of those drugs had a component that actually pushed kids heavily towards socialization and forming peer groups. Now looking back to the results of that drug consumption I would say that most of the individuals engaging on them were able to regulate and continue to what it seems to be a very normal adult life.

Counterargument: a "very normal adult life" in our generations treats alcohol as basically mandatory for having a good time with a group. As someone who doesn't drink, I'm perfectly happy to go to parties and hang out and socialize, but as the night wears on it becomes less and less stimulating as the alcohol kicks in. People get less interesting on drugs, but they perceive themselves to be having more fun. It's a crutch.

Now, maybe having a social crutch like alcohol is better than having a drug which encourages disappearing from the physical social world entirely, but our generation's answer was hardly healthy.
What about sugar addiction? Read recently an article in the news that that's what is becoming a problem, actually, much more than alcohol or cigarettes. Anecdotally, I see kids around drinking all kinds of sweetened beverages. My friend who cleans at a college picks every day full baskets of empty bottles. And in my school, some parents giving kids chocolates for a snack or kids buying themselves a pack of sweets from their pocket money.
LLM office space is pretty expensive. Chillers, backup generators, raised floors, communications gear, …. They even demand multiple offices for redundancy, not to mention the new ask of a nuclear power plant to keep the lights on.
And you can use whatever software you want
Sounds like your cousin is able to think for himself. The amount of bullshit I hear from quality-college educated individuals, who simply repeat outdated knowledge that is in their college curriculum, is no less disappointing.