skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I created an open-source Hardware Hacking Wiki – with tutorials for beginners
Do you know how much it costs to put someone in jail, and take care of them there? In Europe.
Indeed. Like they ever left?
Fine maybe another 100 years we’re good. But what about 200, what about 1000. Copper is not water, there is no natural process that renews it. The question is, is it as ubiquitous as silicon that we will never run out of it compared to our demands or is it not.

If it is not, then we have a serious problem if we want human civilization to thrive and continue. The only solutions I can think of are, reaching a very high recycle rate, but we know from thermodynamics that chemical reactions are not reversible, but maybe we can build enough tech that we recycle everything very well and not just dump them in landfills.

Or we develop enough tech to be able to mine the asteroids, which can give us access to some minerals at amounts that would last us another 1000+ years. But not all minerals are found at asteroids, and it’s not clear if we can actually do this very hard task.

The final solution which seems to have fallen out of vogue but I’m in favor of is limiting human population. If everyone has 1 kid, human population halves in 1 generation. If we do this for 3-4 generations, we can reach a really good sustainable population, and then have 2 kids to maintain it.

I don't understand this insane to me belief that we want to constantly grow human population. It seems to come from the belief that each human is an innovation robot, and that with more innovation robots we get more innovation. A cursory glance at humanity shows this to be obviously false. Humans need to be trained, taught, led to be able to produce something new. We have 10x more researchers now and scientific progress has still slowed compared to 1900s. Throwing more researchers into the mix will not fix it. People who run companies intuitively know this. If Google could invent AGI, by hiring 100,000 more AI engineers, they would do it in a heartbeat. Instead you find that talent density is extremely important for innovation. Small groups of exceptional talent, outperform large groups of mediocre talent always. There is a cost to cultivating talent in human beings and obviously with more humans it becomes more competitive and harder to cultivate talent in every human. There is a cost to coordinating between different humans and sifting through to find talent, that again increases the more humans are thrown into the mix.

This whole more humans are undeniably good always, is insane enough that only academics and those with no experience in the real world can convince themselves of it. There is obviously an optimal number of humans, you may disagree that it is higher or lower than the current number, but the number must exist! I suspect we are way more than optimal, ymmv.
Have you considered paying a developer to fix the bug? It might be less hassle.
Country C's regulators can sanction the companies entities in C including denying access to the market in C. (C.f. how the US got Swiss banks to comply with financial transparency laws.)

It would not matter if C == Lichtenstein, but China is currently the world's biggest semi-conductor market ...
I do ultrasound on infant brains(and other tissues) regularly with a human rated ultrasound scanning probe. It is deemed completely safe.

The properties of a veterinary scanning probe will be similar(almost certainly identical, mammalian tissue is mammalian tissue). But you can also get human rated probes for $2k so no point in getting a vet one for $3k

Cavitation applications in ultrasound uses a different range of frequencies and designs, the scanning probes are 1-25mhz
I’ve seen this with a PhD student publishing several rapid fire papers in MDPI journals. They are repeating well understood physics work done 50 years ago using off the shelf commercial simulation software. They don’t cite any papers older than a decade and claim without irony that the work is “significant” while none of their papers are cited. They will go to events where no one is an expert in the field and win prizes for showing lots of pretty pictures but nothing that isn’t already well understood.

When I, an expert in the field, tell them they need to produce something novel at their research panels I’m told I’m wrong. When I list all the work they are ripping off I’m told it’s somehow different without explanation. When I question the obvious sloppiness in their work (the simulation data showing major artefacts) they blow up at me screaming and shouting.

I’ve never experienced arrogance like this before. It’s shocking. Their supervisors tell me that they are close to firing them but then also celebrate all the publications they are getting.

The mind boggles.
> "you always have the exe" is just not even remotely a valid argument.

Why? Can you explain it to me?

I'm a Rust developer. I use my work station every day for 8 hours to write code. I also use `cargo doc` (the tool for which "I always have the exe") every day to look up API docs, and in total this saves me a ton of time every month (probably multiple hours at least, if I'm working with unfamiliar libraries), and I save even more time because I don't have to maintain separate header files (because Rust doesn't have them).

Can you explain the superior flexibility and utility of "merely opening a text file" over this approach, and how that would make me (and my colleagues at work) more productive and save me time?

I'm not being sarcastic here; genuinely, please convince me that I'm wrong. I've been a C developer for over 20 years and I did it the "opening a text file" way and never want to go back, but maybe you're seeing something here that I never saw myself, in which case please enlighten me.
Yes, agreed! The first time I visited San Antonio (as a Brit who was based in Dallas for some months) happened to be at exactly that time. We didn't know anything about it, but found ourselves on the river walk in the evening, and along came the parade of boats bringing Pancho Claus & co... it was a lovely surprise and a beautiful evening.
Very good ideed! Give it try!
So, let me get this straight. Scraping data and publishing it so everyone get equal and free access to information and knowledge, arguably making the world better, is a crime. But scraping it to benefit and enrich just yourself, is A-OK??

This legal system is truly fucked.
I really like these blog updates and their record tracker but could they have phrased "solar is cheaper than alternatives so prices go up after sunset" in a more ominous way if they tried?

> prices are much lower while solar is generating, but as it ramps down prices escalate along with net load.

This is under graphs of the peak load days in which the price only spikes for a couple of hours.

Why is this not a tone of celebration? We're cheaply turning sunlight into power via quantum physics in two incredibly sunny states. Massively reducing their peak load problem over a few years of deployment and now basically solving it with some batteries.

And this is easily replicable across most of the world. We did it folks! High fives all round.
Ironic, since .rs is the TLD for the Republic of Serbia.
> Even CL people are using Discord now? People really do seem to love to converge to a single place.

Except Discord servers cannot be described as "a single place" even, as they're all isolated from each other.

Instead of spread out across multiple open IRC networks/channels, developer communities converged into silo'd, closed/proprietary Discord servers. It's a shame.
“Something better will emerge” could be a libre fork of the project without him. He is the problem.

But also technically it would be (inertia not withstanding) good if the project were replaced with something else, something better.

Django with plugins could be made to look like and work similar to Wordpress I bet.
Ollama allows me to use a single podman command, which uses the latest version of ollama, downloads a model of my choosing, and starts a local http endpoint widely supported by different clients. I can just run this one command to chat with a local model through a web interface, get code completions in VSCode, ask about the content of my local Markdown notes.

Now, I don't use AI that much, I could totally live without this. But if it weren't for the robust one-liner I probably wouldn't use local LLMs at all.
My favorite quote from one of my favorite books, Anathem by Neal Stephenson (copied from GoodReads):

"Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn't live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul's. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn't always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story."

Some people need to have their "story", otherwise they end up miserable, regretting their wasted lives.
Talking about plagiarism here is a complete red herring.

Plagiarism is essentially a form of fraud: you are taking work that someone else did and presenting it as your own. You can plagiarize work that is in the public domain, you can even plagiarize your own work that you own the copyright to. Avoiding a charge of plagiarism is easy: just explicitly quote the work and attribute to the proper author (possibly yourself). You can copy the entirety of the works of Disney, as long as you are attributing them properly, you are not guilty of plagiarism. The Pirate Bay has never been accused of plagiarism. And plagiarism is not a problem that corporations care about, except insofar as they may pay a plagiarist more money than they deserve.'

The thing that really matters is copyright infringement. Copyright infringement doesn't care about attribution - my example above with the entire works of Disney, while not plagiarism, is very much copyright infringement, and would cost dearly. Both Aaron Swartz and The Pirate Bay have been accused and prosecuted for copyright infringement, not plagiarism.
> Interesting and refreshing choice to stick to a pure textual description without the usual torrent of photos. Needs frequent looking up of terms though :-)

It's the transcript of a video (at the top), so there is little reason to bother with pictures: if you want visuals you can watch the video, or use it as a slideshow.
Very good, I like it. I usually use NitroType, and I will use yours too.
This isn't new, and academia has been rewarding behavior that wouldn't survive elsewhere for a long time.

Maybe it's time we unshackled ourselves from these 'prestigious institutions'?
Well I was describing what I actually experienced last week.
I did get my script to work after hours of faffing around, your article may have been one of the articles I read, in any event thanks for writing it.
There is no way I would describe the package installation process I experienced as automatic, since pip had no idea what requirement was missing.
Python was in an environment, a package used by an import statement required it to be downgraded so I had to downgrade it, by finding installing and setting up an older version. I then ran into other problems I described.
Once python is set up and working it seems fine.
Everything new I do in python seems way harder than it should be.

As for basic in ROM, I am not advocating BASIC, but many versions of BASIC (not in rom) have had built in support for GUIs for decades.
I spent much of the video wishing for an expansion of the pros and cons though, and why electric motors had been selected originally, and hydraulic pumps had been selected as their replacement.
Pushing out a founder is fine and all and I’m here for it to happen.
How do we “know” this?
Being able to set up things and truly understanding how they work are quite different imo.

I agree with the idea that a lot of productive app developers would not be able to set up a new project ex novo but often it is not about particularly true understanding but rather knowing the correct set of magic rules and incantations to make many tools work well together
Mainly X, Reddit, and Discord for specific groups.
There is much more to PL research than "type theory". Look for instance at POPL 2024 program [1].

Also Rust has been influenced by type theory. Rust first compiler was written in OCaml and the influence of OCaml/Haskell (and many other languages [2]) is pretty clear.

Goal of PL research isn't to design programming languages but academic research has a lot of influence on programming languages.

[1] https://popl24.sigplan.org/program/program-POPL-2024/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34704772)

Edit: regarding https://x.com/deedydas/status/1846366712616403366?mx=2 these are just the formal specs of a type checker. Nothing magic or very complicated there, it's just a notation. Anyone who can understand and implement a type checker should be able to understand this notation as well.
Is that typically shorter days or fewer days?
For Finland in 2021 one figure is 225€ a day, or 82500€ a year.
I tend to play this at work when I need some downtime.
If you want other suggestions, give Typing of the Dead a go.
@xanderlewis I don't think anyone's comments are meant for you specifically, nor to discourage you or anyone particularly.

If anything, take it all with a "grain of salt" and reflect on whether or not anyone you meet might resemble these comments. Hopefully, not your future self.

Good luck in your career.
Gemini https://geminiprotocol.net/
You honestly sound immature.
Difficult to tell the economic / geographic context from a short article like this, but they mention the possibility of relocating the project. If possible that's a win / win, no? Sounds like it may just be the case that the dark sky aspect of this wasn't taken into consideration.
As a junior PM should have a mentor from within the company. Should this be your first step to find a mentor?
> In principle it could know that something is more commonly cited based on its training data

Could it? Without explicit training for that, how would it be expected to know it has to be able to count occurrences of something?
One big issue is that industry jobs in some areas increasingly expect academic excellence in the shape of "publishing in top 3 conferences" for example.
Show HN: Werk, a simple build tool and command runner
I made this for my personal workflow, but I'd love to get feedback from the community.
> LLMs are able to often _preciesely_ recreate

Is there actual proof of this? Especially the "often" part?
> Copyright allows you to sell artificial scarcity.

Not always. That’s more the domain of patents, honestly.

> AI does not replicate your work directly.

This is false, at least in certain cases. And even if it were always true, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t infringe copyright.

> At least you're acknowledging that training rights are a proposed expansion of current IP laws!

Yes, they are, emphasis on the “proposed,” meaning that I believe that training AI on copyrighted material without permission can be a violation of current copyright law. I don’t actually know if that’s how it should be, honestly. But as of right now I think entities like the New York Times have a good legal case against OpenAI.
Hey Walter, importC is great but on Mac it doesn't work right now because Apple seems to have added the type Float16 to math.h (probably due to this: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swift/float16) and DMD breaks on that.

Could you have a look at fixing that?
Push the boundaries but not actually move them.
No, if you scrape and create a open-weight model, that is OK too. The difference is if you re-publish the original dataset, or just the weights trained from it.

Please stop mis-interpreting posts to match doomer narratives. It's not healthy for this forum.
> should of charged

what?
I'm not saying you're wrong but...

Elon Musk skipped his PhD program and did many more things than spending time in school would have allowed him to do. Of course, most people aren't Elon (probably a good thing).

Other than preparing you for a career in academia or some highly regulated environment where education is erected as a barrier to entry, it's hard for me to think of "many more things" that are open to a phd holder than to someone who is not.
> When I, an expert in the field, tell them they need to produce something novel at their research panels I’m told I’m wrong. When I list all the work they are ripping off I’m told it’s somehow different without explanation. When I question the obvious sloppiness in their work (the simulation data showing major artefacts) they blow up at me screaming and shouting.

At risk of relying totally on assumptions, that wouldn't be a surprising reaction for someone facing first serious criticism after an entire life of probably being unconditionally lauded for their smarts (or the projection of it). When parents push children towards something relentlessly without providing any constructive feedback on account of living their dreams through their children and/or the fear of discouraging the child, any criticism can feel like someone is trying to destroy your life goals.

> Their supervisors tell me that they are close to firing them but then also celebrate all the publications they are getting.

Probably trying to protect themselves from being in the crosshairs of one of many things that can blow your career apart.
Is it true that non-gguf models are basically all Q4-equivalent? I'm always not sure which one to download to get the "default score".
I'm noticing that the reporting on this, including the ESO press release, is vague on exactly what this "industrial megaproject" happens to be. Ordinarily, there is no hesitation to disclose this, unless it's a military matter. Or a sacred cow.

A sacred cow, indeed. It's a green energy operation powered by both wind and solar to generate hydrogen, electricity and ammonia. Here[1] is the AES Andes press release about this project, if you care to read the opposing spin on this matter:

"AES Chile submitted an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) to Chilean permitting authorities for a proposed industrial-scale green hydrogen project called Inna. The project, which is in early-stage development, could include a variety of solutions, including green hydrogen for export or domestic consumption, aligned with Chile’s National Green Hydrogen Strategy."

[1] https://www.aesandes.com/en/press-release/aes-andes-submits-...

Land use. It's not just a fossil fuel shill talking point.
991166
Open letter to Mark Zuckerberg – Congratulations on your remarks
>> I think OP's thesis is that this is a larger cultural issue of capitalism increasingly squeezing every once of joy out of people's lives, and demanding more labour from fewer people under dehumanizing conditions.

Let's have a look at China, or the former communist countries (soviet union etc). All people in those communist regimes are slaved, being under surveillance and often suppressed (except the regime, of course), with the government being the suppressor (as opposed to greedy companies). History is full of evidence, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R504_Kolyma_Highway

Thinking capitalism is the culprit is naive. Power will find its way. Legal regulations of working hours, holidays, health insurance as well as unions work very well for most modern western countries. In many countries there's a constant fight between unions and companies. That is a good way to balance power. No need to bring back cruel communist regimes.
This is something I really like about Common Lisp, but after ~30 years of progress, I am a bit disappointed with improvements in the field of interactive development.

The process you describe is possible in JavaScript and many other languages as well. Updating a JAR is trivial, but doing it in a running system is uncomfortable.

The first thing to start with is versioning at the function, class, package, or module level. Combine that with versioning of data, and you've got my interest :)
Most of these people have never been in a PhD program, so take their words with a grain of salt.

If you have a good advisor, your passionate about your project, and you got some good funding, you'll have a wonderful time of exploring interesting ideas and becoming a competent researcher. Good luck!
An obviously totally arbitrary barrier. Why not 4 or even 5?

Someone who only published in 2 top conferences is obviously not worth anyone's time. But 3, now we're talking.
Common Lisp is a great choice for many purposes. (And, if you're doing a startup, a fringe language like CL is a good way to find and attract some of the best hackers, and avoid all the Leetcode grunts.)

Just comments on the Scheme/Racket parts...

> I looked at Scheme, but that community seemed to still be fractured over the r6rs/r7rs mess.

Things were fractured before R6RS, with very little portable ecosystem code, and then R6RS didn't solve that, but AFAIK, people got back up on that horse, started over, and have been embracing R7RS.

> Also, there wasn't a big enough ecosystem to suit my liking.

There's a reasonably-sized ecosystem, but three things:

1. Unless things have changed recently, much of the good stuff is still in the package system for a particular implementation (like Racket, "https://pkgs.racket-lang.org/", or Chicken, "http://eggs.call-cc.org/5/").

2. It's nothing the size of Python or JavaScript.

3. Don't believe any claims of "batteries included"; you often have to roll your own basic packages for real-world work. (But this can actually be a blessing, even for startups that have to move fast, depending on what you have to do, and how capable you're willing to rise to be.)

> I'd already tried Racket in school and didn't like it. The runtime was a bit slow and bloated for my tastes.

Although CS professors are some the greatest friends of Scheme (having designed and made much of it), CS professors can also be the worst enemies for real world use of Scheme.

Before Racket, most people who had heard of Scheme knew it only from school, in problem set homework for the dense SICP course, or from whatever pet intro CS textbook their professor wrote. That's a good way to never want to try Scheme again. (And it got worse as many CS departments became optimized Leetcode->FAANG hiring funnels.) Then people never saw Scheme used, nor even described by, real-world programmers, for real-world things.

So Racket (PLT Scheme) comes along, and half of the handful of people thinking of Scheme as a language for real things gravitate to Racket, because they are doing some real-world things. And overall it's one of the best programming languages out there.

But still, although the Racket CS professors include some great programmers, Racket is determined by CS professors, who do PL and CSE research, and write and teach textbooks. So, Racket's use in intro CS classes seems to perpetuate the tradition of CS professors ensuring that students will never again want to touch Scheme after they get a passing grade for the class.
LOL. Hey!