skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually agree with you in many ways, but I think FOSS diehards miss the likely outcome of this line of thought: less FOSS will be written.

Everyone still has to pay their bills, but if FOSS-based companies can't survive, the only people writing it will be megacorps funding the likes of Kubernetes, and hobbyists doing stuff for fun.

The entire middle-tier of FOSS companies, the ones that turned to source-available licenses when AWS came for their lunch, will not exist in the future. Either they'll continue to switch off FOSS licenses when AWS comes knocking, or they'll conclude FOSS isn't a good strategy in the first place.

Anyway, I value FOSS, but I value fair compensation more. I don't believe in giving billionaire Bezos anything for free.
That just seems like it encourages bad practices. There’s nothing but upside to tracking your schema changes.
They also wouldn't use Firefox - they'd use Chrome, Edge, or (more likely) Chrome/Safari mobile. People who use Firefox are already tech people or the family of.
Physics of Language Models
US Treasury letter to the Senate regarding a major cyber breach
Sounds overly complicated. Use at-work encryption (i.e. encrypt it in the database), on top of encryption in-transit and at-rest, hosted/managed by a reputable database vendor. If that won't fly, then I agree with the (enterprise) self-hosted offering another commenter mentioned.
What makes uranium more economical, fuel production or some aspect of operation? And if it's the first one, is that just lack of scale for thorium or something else?
Thorium powerplants, nuclear fusion powerplants, solid-state batteries, quantum computing, and TSMC producing chips in the US are news that should be considered speculative until they go into production. There has been plenty of coverage, but little real-world utility or impact from these technologies so far.
My car was made in 1998. Used cars are probably the best option for the time being.

Surely hackers have figured out how to block radios in the new cars?
All modern CPUs now have it on-die, so doing a replay attack against desoldered TPMs is no longer a thing.
If prices decrease and salaries don't, doesn't that indicate economic prosperity?
Not allowing foreign entities to spy on their customers feels like the bare minimum to me.
But the thing is, ultimately, that your speech does not need a platform, let alone a specific platform, to be speech.

"I can't speak freely because Platform A won't carry it" isn't a thing when Platforms B through ZZZ exist. And if B through ZZZ have less reach, well, so be it.
I actually liked their UI out of the box, but seems like they started as LinkedIn competitor but ended up becoming a website builder.
> Do you think this is actually faster than reading the docs?

It depends on your goals, I guess. Do I really need to read the whole D3.js docs just to transform a csv into a pretty map? I'm not arguing against the docs, I genuinely think that by reading the D3.js docs I would become a better professional. But what is the ROI for this effort ?

Nowadays learning about a topic is a choice we can make, we can create things that solve real problems without the need to fully understand the solution. This wasn't feasible a couple years back. And choosing 'not to learn' too many times is a great recipe for disaster, so I understand why a lot of people are worried about giving this option to people.

Besides that the "always read the docs" theory makes an assumption that isn't always true. This assumes you know what are you looking for and where you can find it. When I was younger I was assigned to a task that required me to put a new feature in a jenga tower of custom bash scripts and I've found a bug that completely stumped me, it took me an entire week to figure out I was missing some quotes around $@ when passing arguments from one script to the next. I've spent several hours trowing random combinations of keywords to try finding something relevant to my problem. Now I know this is a bash-related problem, but at the time this wasn't clear. It might have been something in my logic, or something to do with not being an TTY, or something to do with the version of the tools I was using.... Having a LLM would have saved a week of frustration because I could just vaguely describe my problem and ask questions about my issue to point me to right direction faster.

> I never trust the response (it's commonly at best oversimplified/misleading but often wrong)

This reminds me of my middle school. When I was there technology and especially Wikipedia was just starting to get popular and almost every week some teacher would lecture us about the dangers of these new technologies and how you should never trust anything on the internet. As time passed the quality of Wikipedia content increased, but this idea of never blindly trusting something you found on the internet really stuck with me. And now LLMs are just another thing on the internet you should never blindly trust for me. Maybe that is part of the reason why I don't get too angry when the LLM tell me something that is wrong.

> I'm using LLMs as a fuzzy database

That is a really good way of putting it. And I agree this is a great use-case for LMMs. But I think we still have a lot to learn about how to effectively use LLMs. I just hope people don't get too caught up in all the marketing surrounding this AI hype cycle we are living right now.
Author here: all the code to reproduce this is actually all on the huggingface space here [1]

https://huggingface.co/spaces/jerpint/advent24-llm/tree/main
Thanks. Are you summarizing the thread or is that based on evidence and research? I don't see the explanatory power of those theories.

> Oral transmission via an apprentice system

Oral transmission has probably existed everywhere (apprenticeship is a matter of definition, but I get the idea), but very few have achieved anything like the Incas.

> Quipus as a form of proto-writing

Quipus are just numbers, as far as I know. They are great, but don't explain how the enormous amount of other necessary information is transmitted and updated across such a vast geography.

With due respect, what we need is actual research based on actual evidence, not Internet comments (I'm not offering any theories myself!).
As a counterpoint I'm a heavy firefox user and haven't had crash in many months, and even that was because I was testing some experimental webgpu thing which I had to manually enable. It has its fair share of odd bugs but what kind of big piece of software nowadays hasn't? It's honestly no less cromulent than Chrome.
> Unfortunately there is no practical way to verify it either.

discuss an exceedingly clear assassination plot against the President exclusively over signal with yourself between a phone that's traceable back to you, and a burner that isn't. if the secret service pays you a visit, and that's the only way they could have come by it, then you have you answer.
Matz is the creator and maintainer of Ruby, yes. mruby is a subset to my knowledge, and I don't think it's 100% parity with Ruby MRI (CRuby), which is basically what the lang spec is built around to my knowledge.
The EU is a supranational union of independent states, with voluntary membership. The USA is a country which possesses (as of now) 5 colonies. If you don‘t see the difference between joining a political union of independent states and territorial acquisition by a host state, then I don’t know what to say. Joining the European Union is akin to Greenland making a free trade agreement with the USA which includes free movement of people, etc. That is not what USA is talking about here. They are talking about acquiring the territory of Greenland by buying it, i.e. colonizing it.

I think you are being naive if you think the USA is only talking about a bilateral agreement with Greenland which Greenland is free to enter or leave at anytime. The USA has in recent history purchased (or more commonly borrowed) territories with total disregards to the people that live there. They have on numerous occasions broken local laws (or more commonly gotten another colonial power to break their laws) to undermine the sovereignty of other countries. The most recent example is the military bases they keep in Iraq, despite Iraq telling them to leave (military bases the USA got by illegally invading and illegally occupying Iraq). I think it is a mistake to not take the USA at their words when they say they wont to annex new territory, and I think it is a good idea to assume their intentions are just as bad as they sound.
That something can simultaneously be impossible and sensible is peculiar. It almost suggests that the technique has merely not yet been figured out.

Secrets fail unsafe. Maybe an alternative doesn't.
Well, we’re almost in 2025. I found it preposterously offensive that D&D was trying to tell us that a 25 Kg, 1.10 meter gnome, couldn’t be as good as a fighter as a 150 Kg, 2.20 meter Orc.

I’m glad they fixed that obvious shortcoming of the game. I’m sure too buy the new edition materials now.
The knotted strings are the quipus that some comments are talking about. They were for accounting, not words.
> There are no RNA-based lifeforms.

There are viruses that have entirely RNA-based lifecycle (even using RNA-dependent RNA polymerase). Our very favorite COVID virus is one of them.
Threema leaks no such metadata
When legitimate users viewed that forum post, their browsers would, in the course of loading the image, attempt to HTTP GET /phpmyadmin/whatever.png, with that being the URL in the actual request in the header.
Love that! Amir and crew are very responsive on Discord as well, which makes a DX difference.
I guess, but that leaves almost every question unanswered. What was their vision? Why did they have the vision and not others? Lots of people have visions; how were they able to apply theirs and so successfully? What was their system? etc.
"Here's a court order, you must serve this tainted APK we built to the user at this email"

VS

"You must backdoor the operating system used on billions of devices. Nobody can know about it but we somehow made it a law that you must obey."

Come on, that's not the same amount of efforts at all.
Metadata, yes. Of course, the protocols, and thus all the inconveniences of the Signal app people constantly complain about, are designed to minimize that metadata. But: yes. Contents of messages, though? No.
Not everyone had finances for magazines, not everyone lives in a densely populated area where you can get access to information, including libraries.

Many HN readers frequently forget they lived in the perfect storm to allow their skills to grow.
Morning

- wake up 6-7 for dog toilet time
- make decaf coffee
- drink coffee, and use laptop to:
- do some programming, or
- read some hackernews threads about something that interests me currently
- get ready for day
- walk dog

Notice:

- at no point in time is my phone nearby, nor do I use it
- I use a brick phone
- I only read hackernews on my laptop, old threads, I've blocked all social
media and news sites (incl Reddit - blocked)
More specifically, look up "WPBT" - this is something MS did in cooperation (collusion?) with the OEMs.
https://breakingthe3ma.app/

You want to use this, by all means.
Here's something for the next time you want to "expose" a phony: before linking me to your investigative source, ask for exact date-stamps when I made changes to the robots.txt and what I did, as well as when I blocked IPs. I could have told you those exactly, because all those changes are tracked in a git repo. If you asked me first, I could have answered you with the precise dates, and you would have realized that your whole theory makes absolutely no sense. Of course, that entire approach is mood now, because I'm not an idiot and I know when commoncrawl crawls, so I could easily adjust my response to their crawling dates, and you would of course claim I did.

So I'll just wear my "certified-phony-by-orangesite-user" badge with pride.

Take care, anonymous internet user.
to be fair, 25k rows seems like a few more rows than I'd use a spreadsheet for
Cool project, love the bit about aliens
It is for those who spend on anything to increase their self worth? do not see how otherwise it can be useful. And these color palettes is actually pretty awful.
Definitely interesting. I think if I was going to put in the effort of switching, it would probably be to more of a labor of love pain in the ass situation like Obsidian where I can be more in control.

My use case would easily fit into the Fibery free plan. Amusingly, their own comparison page argues that Notion is a better fit for me:

“Where Fibery works better?

Processes and work management for medium and large teams. Complex processes like product management, feedback management, user research, software development tracking.

Where Notion works better?

Personal life organizer. Small/medium company wiki. Work management for teams with simple processes.”

https://fibery.io/fibery-vs-x
For the number 23, I wonder there must at least 2 schools :

( … there are many …

One can think that there is really a number 23! It was discovered and somehow we human has accessed to it. I am not sure.

Or one can think about it. This is the mapping of empty set to 0, set of empty set to 1, set of empty set of empty set to 2 …
…)

one can think of 23-ish item is a set with all 23 elements whose combination of any 2 elements does not reduce. You need a thousand page to prove 1 + 1 = 2, with the reason that the first 1 is not the same as the second 1 to avoid this operation collapse back to 1. Our counting always assume different object, but to be rigorous there is nothing in the first 1 is explicitly said in that equation is not the same as the second one, as pointed out by a previous Hn refer to latest article .

…

Or my beloved : there is no 23. Only 0 and an operation +1 exist. You can say 23 as the result of a marker after 23 +1 operation on 0. It is 0 +1 -> 1 … 1 +1 -> 0 +1 +1 -> 2, Qed. If you have 23 stones/… with you, you do a counting by doing a mapping to this 0 obj +1 ops in your head-compute somehow.

…
Women’s rights, gay and trans rights and human rights were hard fought for. Defending them is progress.
You start with interfacing with well-known, well-documented hardware devices (say anything from Adafruit or Sparkfun), then move to interfacing with rare devices with badly translated manuals and broken example code (many cheap sensors), and then to reverse engineering.

It helps if you use non-trivial hardware: while plugging STEMMA/Qwiic cables make for simple and reliable hardware, having a nest of wires on protoboard will teach you to how to trace connections and use multimeter/oscilloscope.

Also for reverse engineering, some devices are much easier than others. For example serial ports on various embedded linux devices are probably simplest - you might not be able to do anything useful, but boot logs are often very easy to discover, you don't even need oscillosope/logic analyzer.

The next step is simple one-way links, like most infrared remote controls or cheap radio transmitters (in OOK mode) - easy to capture, and fun (if tedious) to decode. There is a danger that device you pick will turn out unexpectedly complex, so don't be discouraged if you have to give up on one device and pick a different one.
Well, yeah, and open answers.microsoft.com and it's hundreds of support messages daily from the Windows community. Where else are people going to for Linux problems other than the Linux problem support sites?
The best solution is to put everyone in a little cage and point and keep a permanent record of everything they do. This doesn't mean it's a desirable solution.
I agree with Liquibase for source control of schema.

But you don’t see how much harder this is for developers with feature flags in stored procedures, etc over standard git? There is tooling around feature flags for code

I think we are in violent agreement though, for OLAP and analytics, I wouldn’t care as much. Because of the way that Redshift works (columnar store) and how it compiles and optimizes queries across a cluster, I wouldn’t care about stored procedures.
That seems more like a case of "authoritarianism is bad" than "finance people are good".
I think the bar for paying such a visit would be infinitely high (they would find a way to defend in a more clandestine manner) to keep the ruse going.
Glide is cool ... I wish there were FOSS versions of Glide to spin up nice, neat and simple mobile apps.

There are now quite a few reliable FOSS version of no-code tools (but the mobile space seems to be missing alternatives). Few nice no-code FOSS that I love using are listed at https://blog.n0c0de.com/articles/1635ef6f-f616-8023-b336-ff3...
Yeah, reducing it to a story about sound misses the development of the character. Why did he do it, how did he do it? What does it say about him that he chose to and that he could?
This is the typical model economists use to reason about utility. It has a good track record for explaining real world phenomenons.

Your model of "things are very complicated and you can never really know" is very common, but note that it doesn't even attempt to explain anything. This leaves adherents free to assume their gut feel as fact.
I think Linux is not ready for desktop the way Windows is. That's for sure. But I have been daily driving it for 10+ years and recently casual gaming as well. And I can tell you that it can handle a lot of things these days. Especially for general casual users and certain specific niches.

If people are still asking "Which distro should I use?",
I wrote a Linux distro recommendation framework article for beginners based on my experience.

The idea is that if you don't like my recommendations, I hope you can find a distro that meets your needs with the knownledge in the article. Something that I wished I had when I started with Linux.

https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/01/2024/a-linux-distro-r...
One thing I've realized after using a really fast model is that the time it takes the model to generate a suggestion is proportional to the size of suggestion I'm willing to accept. And in my experience the quality of suggestions decreases when the suggestion size increases.

If the model takes a couple seconds to generate a suggestion I get inclined to accept several lines of code. But if the suggestion takes just 300ms to generate I don't feel the "need" to accept the suggested code.

I'm not really sure why that happens, maybe that's just the sunk cost fallacy happening right in my editor? If I wait 5 seconds for a suggestion and don't use the suggestion did I effectively just wasted 5 seconds of my life for no good reason?
(1) Donbas - though Russia was not initially attempting to annex this area. The negotiations scrapped by the West would have left these regions as something like special administrative regions under Ukraine, akin to what Russia had already been trying to relatively peacefully achieve for a decade with the Minsk accords.

(2) Coal + industrialization + peasants seeking a better life.

(3) Actually quite a lot happened, but I assume you're referencing the fact that a small number of Russian forces were deployed to Crimea. A practical issue when territory "peacefully" changes hands is deterring the former "owners" from simply coming in and trying to kill everybody to immediately reclaim it. The important issue is whether those forces drove coercion or otherwise manipulated the outcome of the referendum in a way outside the will of the people. This is what the West tried to prove, but they instead ended up proving the exact opposite! Incidentally, a comparable referendum held in Donbas was likely outside the will of the people, and consequently - Russia did not recognize it.
> towards what are almost undeniably the very common experiences of many linux users.

While I empathize with these novice Linux users (who may not be self-aware they are as novice as they are), I do so to consider what a distro that avoids all of their problems would look like.

And, a big part of that is a huge colorful chart about what hardware is supportable and is not supportable during the install, along with the user typing out something like:

"I understand this hardware is not supportable and this is the fault of the vendor of the hardware. I understand that if I want a supported system I can buy one at https://ProductionLinuxInc ; furthermore, I understand and agree that by typing this acknowledgement and clicking "Accept" that I am legally bound to this agreement and legal penalties apply if I bitch about this operating system and my bitching either by its contents or what my bitching alludes to are factually wrong".
I've done this before and just did it again to see if my tastes have changed, and to no personal surprise, I landed on JetBrains Mono again
Linux on the desktop sucks ass, for the stupid people. Smart people running Linux on the desktop are having a fantastic time with zero problems.
Tried it when it was a LinkedIn competitor.

There's one thing that I notice with these sorts of startups that take on larger social network apps.

If you're not in the US and you try it, chances are you'll find very few users from your own region.

For some platforms that's fine, you can find plenty of others to interact with online where location isn't that big an issue (eg BlueSky). But for something like a professional network it's different. You're very likely building your career network based on who you actually know, which is often starting from your area or country. That makes something like Polywork pretty pointless early on.
interesting so it didn't work for you unfortunately. Give me 2 minutes I'll try it and screenshot the result in both browsers.

edit: you're right it requires the user to be logged in to crawl websites. Somehow in my test while writing it I was logged in. My bad.

So while it's handy, it's not perfect.
Is there anything like an open source Magic emulator for optimization or ML purposes?
very computationally expensive

The same goes for all the other higher-order probability models, which are used in what is currently the best known compression algorithm:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAQ

LLMs are just another way to do the probability modeling.
At least it's more useful than their limited edition themes.
It is sensible that people would want the impossible. It isn't sensible to try to mandate it.

Government keeps trying to mandate it in various ways. With predictably bad results.
> The garbage is a result of me using Linux

I think we're all in agreement with this part.
https://www.copenhagenatomics.com/
Did the commenter say that it was being edited concurrently? Because that's the only circumstance in which it would really be acceptable for it to break like that.
I reluctantly concede that BYD makes a good car. I’ve ridden in half a dozen of them in the last two weeks. Smooth, comfortable, the ergonomics are good and clean. The driver assist visuals are clean. (Pulling out of a restaurant last night the driver could see the projected path of the vehicle and widened his turn to prevent scraping the rear right quarter panel). My one complaint is that there appears to be an internal rgb disco mode.
Oh and they appear to start at $21k. (Don’t quote me on that, my conversation math might have been wrong)

If the projected total cost of ownership holds, these cars (and those of the other 4 big Chinese electric car companies) will own the global market over the next decade (minus places that implement protectionist tariffs like the 100% tariffs in the US)
The swindled their 90% share down to <9%, but Google can point to Firefox and try and claim they aren’t a monopoly.
Is your complaint here that the paper is not discussing a literal coconut?
Note this requires attacker to control target process, which means this bypass does not add any new security vulnerabilities nor it gives the process any permissions it did not have before. All this does is it makes attacker's life easier - after successful RCE, instead of manually placing code in memory and jumping to it, they can ship the code as ELF file and execute it.
Regular white background and black text would be better.