skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed! An eventual goal of Onramp is to bootstrap in freestanding so we can boot directly into the VM without an OS. This eliminates all binaries except for the firmware of the machine. The stage0/live-bootstrap team has already accomplished this so we know it's possible. Eliminating firmware is platform-dependent and mostly outside the scope of Onramp but it's certainly something I'd like to do as a related bootstrap project.

A modern UEFI is probably a million lines of code so there's a huge firmware trust surface there. One way to eliminate this would be to bootstrap on much simpler hardware. A rosco_m68k [1] is an example, one that has requires no third party firmware at all aside from the non-programmable microcode of the processor. (A Motorola 68010 is thousands of times slower than a modern processor so the bootstrap would take days, but that's fine, I can wait!)

Of course there's still the issue of trusting that the data isn't modified getting into the machine. For example you have to trust the tools you're using to flash EEPROM chips, or if you're using an SD card reader you have to trust its firmware. You also have to trust that your chips are legit, that the Motorola 68010 isn't a modern fake that emulates it while compromising it somehow. If you had the resources you'd probably want to x-ray the whole board at a minimum to make sure the chips are real. As for trusting ROM, I have some crazy ideas on how to get data into the machine in a trustable way, but I'm not quite ready to embarrass myself by saying them out loud yet :)

[1]: https://rosco-m68k.com/
This sounds like magic, not science.
For anyone curious (and testing my recall), this should just mean: Solve a SAT problem using fnutz that are Frobbed correctly.

e.g., "Just set up a belt sequence that would solve a 3-SAT problem" to show that belt sequencing is at least as hard as 3-SAT.

(The reverse, setting up a SAT solver to solve belt sequencing only shows that SAT is at least as hard as belt sequencing, which is true for any problem that's not hard hard).
The article also mentioned the whole platform he was using was cracked by police. They might have been able to get the metadata but not want to explain that to others still using that platform.
I appreciate the notion of Grug Brained development but at the end of the day it’s just a slightly sardonic restatement of Kernighan’s Law, which is easier to get people to buy into in negotiations.

Grug brain is maybe good for 1:1 interactions or over coffee with the people you vent to or are vented to.
It's literally happening lol. When you were a kid China was making shoes and their GDP is 10% of the US. Now they're making drones / evs / high end electornics and it's 80%. This is why people's perception is so unreliable because it's impossible to notice things when they happen over a lifetime
Thanks for sharing! On iPhone, the resolution of the writing looks too low. Maybe the scale of the canvas doesn’t match the device pixel ratio.
Have you found that to be a good trade-off for large-scale projects?

Where I'm at right now with LLMs is that I find them to be very helpful for greenfield personal projects. Eliminating the blank canvas problem is huge for my productivity on side projects, and they excel at getting projects scaffolded and off the ground.

But as one of the lead engineers working on a million+ line, 10+ year-old codebase, I've yet to see any substantial benefit come from myself or anyone else using LLMs to generate code. For every story where someone found time saved, we have a near miss where flawed code almost made it in or (more commonly) someone eventually deciding it was a waste of time to try because the model just wasn't getting it.

Getting better at manual QA would help, but given the number of times where we just give up in the end I'm not sure that would be worth the trade-off over just discouraging the use of LLMs altogether.

Have you found these things to actually work on large, old codebases given the right context? Or has your success likewise been mostly on small things?
I didn't run the text generator in real time (that would defeat the point of shifting cost to the adversary, wouldn't it?). I created and cached a corpus, and then selectively made small edits (primarily URL rewriting) on the way out.
Also reminds us that line goes up is often more a perceptual FOMO than real technical milestones.
The main reason why we can't do that now is because we require models to be digitally reproducible (IMHO, but also read Geoffrey Hinton's mortal computing).

The energy cost come from error correction as much as training algorithms.
The Backstory of Backpropagation
I think there are two big reasons DSLs often underdeliver. The first is not understanding the cognitive overhead budget. If it's something where it's being used infrequently or by a lot of new people, that's a lot of overhead to be spent each time. Sometimes people think of writing DSLs for tests because they have to write a bunch, but it's really easy for this to suck. I have a test turn red and now I have to learn a DSL to deal with it? Ew.

The second is fuzzier. It's putting a DSL over something complex and hoping this will fix things. Writing SQL queries for this system takes a bunch of time and is error prone? Just put a DSL over it! Except all those details and errors are probably going to leak right through your DSL.

You want to master the domain before you put a DSL over it.
In my experience relatively few of the components on old computers and game consoles are particularly failure prone and most of them can have a future contingency plan:

- Electrolytic capacitors can be replaced relatively easily. Some people are replacing them with solid state capacitors to try to improve reliability and avoid corrosion from leaked electrolyte.

- Batteries likewise can be replaced easily, and you can usually fit a socket in there if there isn't already one.

- Damaged traces on PCBs (usually caused by leaky capacitors or batteries) can often be patched. It is definitely not the easiest work, but if patching a few traces is all that's needed to get something back into working order, then it's probably worth it.

- Some of the old AC-DC transformer blocks are dying or horribly inefficient anyways. Most of them are outside of the machine and can be replaced with readily available modern equivalents, so this one is extremely easy. For old computers, ATX supplies are easy to adapt to pre-ATX standards and even some different machines entirely since they provide some of the most commonly-needed voltage rails (some new supplies lack -12V but it will be listed on the PSU specs either way). There's even very small form factor ATX supplies using GaN based transformers that can fit pretty much anywhere.

- CD-ROM lasers are definitely starting to wear down, but there's quite a lot of optical drive emulators available nowadays for a variety of machines, with more showing up every year. As long as small-order PCB manufacturers remain around, it will probably remain viable to make more of these ODEs.

- Likewise, floppy disks and their drives can fail for a variety of reasons, but floppy drive emulators are at the point of reasonable maturity and can support a lot of machines, too. I'm sure there's some weird standards where emulation may be spotty (thinking of NEC) but for typical Macs, PCs and Commodore computers I imagine most of the ground is covered already.

It is true that a lot of hardware is failing and some of it is not so easily replaced, but honestly, I think if we wanted to, we could keep a good amount of the retro hardware working for possibly hundreds of years longer. The real question is if enough people will deem it worth their time and money to do so. But then again, I suppose it's not much different in that regard from vintage automobiles.

There will always be a place for emulation, probably a much larger one at that. Not only does emulation give a very nice long-term solution to keeping software libraries accessible, they offer plenty of advantages over actually using old hardware, and it's obviously a lot more accessible.

P.S.: to whoever does eventually come into possession of the machines I worked on next, I apologize for my soldering. In fairness, some of these old boards are stubborn even with a ton of flux.
You can add PWAs to the Home Screen on iOS; Share, Add to Home Screen. This is how I build apps to scratch my own itches.

Edit: Err, sorry to pile on. I see others have already mentioned this.
I'll add that one to the list. Surprisingly it doesn't closely match most of the 211 definitions I've collected already!

The closest in that collection is "A division of responsibilities between LLMs that results in some sort of flow?" - https://lite.datasette.io/?json=https://gist.github.com/simo...
> Many quant trading firms make 50%-100% annual returns. The secret is leverage

Hu lol no XD you're way over stating it. While it happens _sometimes_, 50% or 100% is insanely rare, even for the top tier hedge funds.

Most HF work at predefined annual volatility, often in the 7% to 10% range. A typical _top tier_ sharpe is in the >=2 range, we're more talking about a 10%/25% averaged annual returns.

> However, the returns after fees, to the passive outside investor underperform S&P500.

That doesn't even make sense with the figures you posted. Most HF operate under the 2:20 or 3:30 range, sometimes 0:40 for the top 5. If you take a pessimist 10% returns on 10% annual vol, against the S&P 10% averaged returns at 20% vol, you're still double the risk adjusted returns, gross. Factor in 20 to 40% performance fees and you're way above the S&P.
It's hard to switch away from mononoki, Iosevka comes really close, if I spend enough time to full customize it to my liking maybe it could become my #1 pick.
That's more or less the opposite of what was said - that he would be the victim of racism, perhaps not evident as such, but, maybe, misconceptions about his ability to perform due to his cultural background.
Defective means a product doesn’t deliver on its specifications. For example if my LED desk lamp doesn’t promise to last any time at all, it’s not defective if it fails inside a month. If you want one that lasts longer, you pay more and can have that. Same for software. But most software basically promises nothing…
It’s unclear to me why what you’re describing is specific to China and not also what Americans euphemistically refer to as “fly over states.”
The company's statement:

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/12/31/300309...
It certainly still does run on a Windows flavour,

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windowsosplatform/a...

However they have been working on something else for specific workloads,

https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2024/11/07/introducing...
It's helpful criticism as part of the conversation. What frustrates me is when people go "LLMs are burning the planet!" and leave it at that.
iPhones support PWAs on homescreen. However, there's no way to trigger the "install the PWA?" prompt. The user has to do it, which very few know about, and maybe that's what you were thinking of.
I feel "Let's just" is doing much of the work here. You can add the phrase in front of any idea and make it sound awful:

"Let's just make planes fly themselves"

"Let's just put a giant battery in a car instead of an engine"

"Let's just make electricity from wind"

"Let's just be friends"

I would love to see a list like this without such a big asterisk.
The time when people see this the clearest is during an outage. You’re in a stressful situation and it’s being made worse and longer by clever code. Do you see now why maybe clever code isn’t a good idea?

Cortisol actually reduces the effectiveness of working memory. Write your code like someone looking at it is already having a bad day, because not only are odds very good they will be, but that’s the costliest time for them to be looking at it. Probability x consequences.
and models and sounds and fonts and text and paths and configs and ...
Perhaps the distinction between "developers" and "users" is illusory.

"Developers" are themselves "users" and they, too, must trust other "developers".

I compile kernel and userland myself, sort of like "Linux from Scratch" but more personalised. I am not a "developer". I read through source code, I make decisions based on personal tastes, e.g., size, speed, language, static compilation, etc. Regardless, I still have to "trust". To be truthful, I read, write, edit and compile software not for "trust" reasons but for control reasons, as well as for educational purposes. I am not a fan of "binary packages" except as a bootstrap.

It seems that most self-proclaimed "developers" prefer binary packages. In many cases it appears the only software they compile is software they write themselves. These "developers" often muse about "trust", as in this submission, but at the same time they use other peoples' software as pre-compiled binaries. They trust someone else to read source code and alert them of problems.
At a certain point it becomes more work to prompt the LLM with each and every edge case than it is to just write the dang code.

I work out what the edge cases are by writing and rewriting the code. It's in the process of shaping it that I see where things might go wrong. If an LLM can't do that on its own it isn't of much value for anything complicated.
Until companies are held liable for security failures they could have and should have prevented, there's no incentive for anyone to do anything. As long as the cost of replacing hardware, securing software, and hiring experienced professionals to manage everything is higher than the cost of suffering a data breach companies aren't going to do anything.

I've seen the same thing at previous jobs; I had a lot to do and knew a lot of security issues that could potentially cause us problems, but management wasn't willing to give me any more resources (like hiring someone else) despite increasing my workload and responsibilities for no extra pay. Surprise, one of our game's beta testers discovered a misconfigured firewall and default password and got access to one of our backend MySQL servers. Thankfully they reported it to us right away, but... geez.
Every waste of money is not a Ponzi scheme.
All this costs money though and the eventual question is if you aren’t paying for it then who is?
> A generation ago, Israel was working towards a two-state solution.

Yes, very briefly, until Netanyahu’s faction murdered Yitzhak Rabin, and not since.

> I think even in 2017, a majority of Israelis supported a two-state solution in polls.

There is a very big difference between a majority of a population preferring something in polls and the government representing that population working toward it (cf., universal single-payer healthcare in the US ca. 2000)

> And btw, this whole notion of "the Palestinians are fighting back" is itself detached from reality

No, actual Palestinians are, in fact, fighting back.

> the Palestinians are ostensibly represented by the Palestinians Authority

“ostebsnsibly” is a marker that the speaker believes the claim following it is detached from reality; if you can't even claim that this is more than ostensibly true, how can any claim about what the PA is doing rebut a claim about Palestinians qua Palestinians are doing?

> that's their official governing body

Yes, it is the widely (but not by the US or Israel) recognized government of the State of Palestine. It doesn't particularly represent the Palestinian people because of the Hamas-PA civil war that Israel orchestrated and assisted Hamas in winning in Gaza, and Israel’s subsequent use of its power administering parts of the West Bank to prevent all-Palestine elections for a new PA government that have been agreed to between the PA and Hamas; most living Palestinians couldn't vote in the last Palestinian election, most Gazans (before the recent escalation in fighting, even moreso probably since) weren't born.

> Hamas overthrew that governing body

No, they threw them out of Gaza, where Hamas already dominated the local administrations and the representation to the PA.

> The actual government of the Palestinians is working together with Israel to stop terrorist attacks

No, Israel has also engaged in an escalation of violence in both the PA and Israeli-administered parts of the West Bank, against the wishes of the PA. The PA acknowledges that it is structurally incapable of militarily fighting Israel (the PA administered parts of the West Bank lack the geographical compactness of Hamas-administered Gaza, and are instead dozens of small cantons interespersed with similar Israeli-administered zones and even when (almost) adjacent separared by Israeli-controlled security corridors, but is still actively opposing Israeli actions with every means at their disposal, having repeatedly suspended security cooperation even though the US has used the leverage its aid gives it over the PA to demand uninterrupted security cooperation, and securing a UNGA resolution demanding Israeli exit from the entirety of the occupied territories (Gaza and the West Bank) following its success at the ICJ in having the occupation declared to be in violation of international law.
They also often don't compound so you might actually make significantly less
Funny how “orbit summary” of the Long Board Email is still vacuous
That's monopoly problem. Text retains quality, because it's more democratic, and AI can democratize visual art.
Acquired never disappoints. For folks reading this comment, there are many episodes which overlap with HN interests.
Yes or No: Can the US singlehandedly defend all those bases without the help of host country? If the answer is "Yes", then China has a long way to go to achieve that capability. If answer is "No", then the bar is much lower, and gp's point is that China can "buy" similar arrangements without too much effort. More directly, is the bottleneck on funding, personnel/matiriel, or diplomacy?

China is building up a lot of soft power with infrastructure projects all over the world - most of them are aimed at improving trade - ports, rail lines and the like. In the next decade or 2, they can reasonably make requests to place a few PLA/PLAA personnel and equipment on bases in strategic places, bases they may have been built using Chinese money.
I think this almost always refer to Renaissance, except that they aren't really a hedge fund the same way (say) millennium are
> often don't care to focus on UX.

Or they do, but it's not the average Windows user's UX they focus on.
Or a certain streamer AI
I went to a University of California school which had 3 calculus tracks - one for life/social sciences students (eg biology, econ), one for physical sciences (chemistry, physics, math, ...), and an honors track.

High school went up through what we call Algebra II. Calculus is an Advanced Placement (AP) course that most students don't take.

I took physical sciences calc + multivariate calc (1 year including summer), an intro to proofs and set theory course, and then finally a rigorous construction of reals was taught in our upper division real analysis course. So somewhere in my second year as a math major. Though I had already researched the constructions myself out of curiosity.

Apart from the material being extraneous for anyone outside the major, I think they were in a sense trying to be more rigorous by first requiring set theory which included constructions of the integer and rational number systems.
Pretty much everything. From his name, to his mother name and birthplace, photos of him as a teen, etc.

Especially for young people the decent thing to do is to not name them in this kind of reporting.

Now not only he, but also is his mother, have to live with this article being the first result when you google either of their names. What did his mother do to deserve this? Should something he (possibly) did as a teen haunt him for the rest of his life, even assuming he is found guilty and served his sentence? It's absolutely disgusting and despicable.

> Are they things a major newspaper would include?

Yes. If they're the Daily Mail, which is the bottom of the barrel. There's a special place in hell for some of those journalists.
I haven't run across any single key sites.

PayPal's handling of multiple passkeys is kind of annoying. I didn't see any way to change the default labels it gives them, which appear to be simply the OS and browser names. So both of my passkeys are labeled "macOS Chrome".

Clicking on them tells when they were created but the resolution is only to the day.

If somehow my private key for one of the them leaked and I wanted to delete the public key I wouldn't know which to delete.

Some sites label the passkeys "1Password" and something like "Apple iCloud" which works a lot better.

I too first experimented with passkeys about a year ago, and then largely ignored them until this discussion prompted me to have another go.

A year ago I found them almost unusable. I had trouble getting browsers to recognize a passkey was available for a site, and I had trouble getting browsers on my Mac to use passkeys from the Apple keychain on my Mac. They would often put up a QR code for me to scan on my phone to use the passkey from the phone--and that was also not very reliable.

Now I'm hitting almost no problems.

There are still some settings annoyance with some sites. At PayPal for instance it asks for my TOTP code even when logging in with a passkey. There is no option to turn off TOTP for passkeys but leave it on for passwords.
To get the most out of them you have to provide context. Treat these models like some kind of eager beaver junior engineer who wants to jump in and write code without asking questions. Force it to ask questions (eg: “do not write code yet, please restate my requirements to make sure we are in alignment. Are there any extra bits of context or information that would help? I will tell you when to write code”)

If your model / chat app has the ability to always inject some kind of pre-prompt make sure to add something like “please do not jump to writing code. If this was a coding interview and you jumped to writing code without asking questions and clarifying requirements you’d fail”.

At the top of all your source files include a comment with the file name and path. If you have a project on one of these services add an artifact that is the directory tree (“tree —-gitignore” is my goto). This helps “unaided” chats get a sense of what documents they are looking at.

And also, it’s a professional bullshitter so don’t trust it with large scale code changes that rely on some language / library feature you don’t have personal experience with. It can send you down a path where the entire assumption that something was possible turns out to be false.

Does it seek like a lot of work? Yes. Am I actually more productive with the tool than without? Probably. But it sure as shit isn’t “free” in terms of time spent providing context. I think the more I use these models, the more I get a sense of what it is good at and what is going to be a waste of time.

Long story short, prompting is everything. These things aren’t mind readers (and worse they forget everything in each new session)
Discussion about the scam (233 points, 10 days ago, 78 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42483500