skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That compression is excellent but its shortcomings are evident to trained ears listening via decent playback hardware.

Sounds like the kind of training that should come with compensation for life long costs.
Would it make sense to tax H-1B payroll at 200%, with the revenue used to train/hire a US citizen for the same role?
Do you have a training method for divergence?

Similar to the finger moving closer and closer to the upper nose technique, for convergence.
I find it interesting that being underage and in middle school is on the same level to you as being a woman. This comment reads like "You want us to interview WOMEN now? Why not teenagers? Or plants?!"
Facebook already was a cesspool, now they add the shit into it.
Ask HN: How to keep Chinese crawlers from taking down my site?
I run Pinboard, a bookmarking website with about 20K active users.

By design, public pages on Pinboard are supposed to be visible to anyone, whether or not they have an account on the site. However, since about August of 2024 I have found myself overwhelmed with bot traffic from crawlers, which has forced me to put all pages on the site behind a login.

In the past, it was relatively easy to stop aggressive crawling by blocking on IP range or on some feature of the user agent string. This crawling is different—it comes from thousands of distinct IP addresses that make one or two requests each, and the user agent strings spoof normal browsers. Sampling this traffic shows it comes almost entirely from Hong Kong and mainland Chinese IP addresses. It averages about 1 request/second, although there are times when it can hit 4 requests/second or more.

The way Pinboard is designed, certain public pages (especially views of user bookmarks filtered by multiple tags) are expensive to generate. In ordinary circumstances, this is not an issue, but bot traffic spread across dozens of user+tag pages can quickly overwhelm the site, especially when the bots start paginating.

My question is how to effectively block this kind of distributed crawling on a Ubuntu box without relying on a third party like Cloudflare[0]. I understand that iptables is not designed to block tens of thousands of IP addresses or ranges efficiently. What options am I left with? Hiding public pages behind a captcha? Filtering the entire China IP range using rules loaded into a frontend like nginx?

[0] This restriction is a product requirement ("no third party anything"). You may think it's silly but bear with me; my users like it.
>M-CAM 1 took this long-exposure photograph of Mercury's north pole

I'm curious how this works. The dynamic range between the sunlit parts and the dark portions must be huge at that distance from the Sun. Anyone have the technical details on the camera or post processing they use to achieve this? Is it really a long exposure or is it a series of photos at different exposures stitched together?

Edit: details at the bottom seem to imply a single photo, but that "long exposure" really isn't that long

>This image of Mercury's surface was taken by M-CAM 1 [...] using an integration time of 40 milliseconds.
Deurbanising the Web (2021)
"Disinformation, even if disconnected from any direct attempt to intimidate, also threatens judicial independence. This can take several forms. At its most basic level, distortion of the factual or legal basis for a ruling can undermine confidence in the court system"

I agree. I'd like to see something done about deliberate disinformation, within the bounds of the First Amendment. (Which has significant bounds: threats, fraud, defamation, etc.)

I think disinformation has done and will do significant harm, to many things, not just the court. Or do you mean this to apply only to your things, and not my things?
A smartphone has all the sensors: tilt, clock, camera. Even compass, though hardly needed. This should be enough to build an app to determine position at sea.
> I found it to be very easy in Python with standard stacks (mysql, flask, redis, requests, etc), because you literally just do a few imports at the top of your service and it automatically hooks itself up to track everything without any fuss.

Yes, but only if everything in your stack is supported by their auto instrumentation. Take `aiohttp` for example. The latest version is 3.11.X and ... their auto instrumentation claims to support `3.X` [0] but results vary depending on how new your `aiohttp` is versus the auto instrumentation.

It's _magical_ when it all just works, but that ends up being a pretty narrow needle to thread!

[0]: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-python-contr...
More aviation project books along those lines:

V-2 by walter dornberger - wartime engineering, rocket development

Gossamer odyssey - human powered aircraft, scrappy university project style engineering
Does that mean Americans don't want to work in American heartland and south as nurses and civil engineers?

Or does that mean American heartland and South don't want to pay competitive wages?
#{ in a few languages is a bit of a high-level operator like "start a record/object/hash table". The # is visually a bit like a handle on a coffee cup (which you are about to fill). The octothorpe (#) is also sometimes called a "hash", making it also a bit of a visual pun if it is indeed the start of a hash-table. (Think JSON object syntax in a language where you want to make sure you can't just accidentally write objects anywhere or confuse different uses of { such as starting a code block, so you put a handle on them.)

"Smushing" it together makes it even more visually distinct as a "single" operator, further adds to the visual metaphor of the "coffee cup handle", maybe obscures the "hash" visual pun a little bit, but maybe not enough to care.
Disabilities come in a diverse variety.

People with disabilities wanted to be included in society.

The goal of the Act was to provide a more equitable society for those people.

It would absolutely be derided as "woke DEI nonsense" if proposed today.
Good luck to the author. Having a tractor around just to move things (mulch, etc.) is very useful.

You can generate a significant amount of output in a relatively small space. Two years ago (last year was weird) we netted ~7 gallons of blueberries, 60+ lbs of tomatoes, 25-ish lbs of okra, 20+ lbs of bell pepper, 45+ lbs squash and 10-ish lbs of corn (a storm destroyed 2/3 of it before any popped up). We did all of this on approximately 1/5 of an acre, with plenty of room between rows. It was all for personal consumption - froze and canned everything. We plan to do more this year with some expansion. However we do till, but make heavy use of mulch for weed control. Pest control is handled with neem oil and biological controls (marigolds and yarrow).
The article is thin on specifics.

Some problems specify well. A database is an example. A spec for a database can be written in terms of exhaustive search, running the query against everything. Now show that an efficient database yields the same output.
Nine times out of ten, I've got more valuable problems to solve than a theoretical future change of our vendor/stack for telemetry. I'll gladly borrow from my future self's time if it means I can focus on something more important right now.
This is a better joke too.
You're conflating two steps:

1. hypothesizing — coming up with a novel insight at runtime, that uncovers new parts of the state space the model doesn't currently reach

2. syllogizing — using an insight you've derived at runtime, to reach the new parts of the state space

LLMs can do 1, but not 2.

(Try it for yourself: get an LLM to prove a trivial novel mathematical theorem [or just describe the theorem to it yourself]; and then ask it to use the theorem to solve a problem. It won't be able to do it. It "understands" the theorem as data; but it doesn't have weights shaped like an emulator that can execute the theorem-modelled-as-data against the context. And, as far as I understand them, current Transformer-ish models cannot "learn" such an emulator as a feature. You need a slightly different architecture for that.)

And actually, humans can't really do 2 either!

That is: humans can't immediately make use of entirely-novel insights that weren't "trained in", but only just came to them, any more than LLMs can!

Instead, for humans, the process we go through is either:

• come up with the insight; sleep on it (i.e. do incremental training, converting the data into new weights); use the insight

• build up 99% of the weights required for the insight "in the background" over days/months/years without realizing it; make the final single connection to "unlock" the insight; immediately use the insight

LLMs don't get to do either of these things. LLMs don't do "memory consolidation"; there is no gradual online/semi-online conversion of "experiences" into weights, i.e. reifying the "code stored as data" into becoming "code" that can be executed as part of the model.

With (current) LLMs, there's only the entirely-offline training/fine-tuning/RLHF — at much greater expense and requiring much greater hardware resources than inference does — to produce a new iteration of the model. That's why we're (currently) stuck in a paradigm of throwing prompts at ever-larger GPT base models — rather than just having an arbitrary stateful base-model that you "install" onto a device like you'd install an RDBMS, and then have it "learn on the job" from there.
Hwwasm: Experiment in Hardware Intrinsics for WebAssembly
> reasonably flat

comparing to wheel size. one can use bigger light wheels. that would make landing on short runways possible. besides, wheeling is much easier than walking. two wheels balancing and rolling around is not a problem today. but.. without legs it's just an common airplane, nothing to talk about. the best of both? put small motorized wheels instead of flat platforms for feet.
These programs seem problematic.

'A former Facebook global diversity strategist stole more than $4 million from the social media giant “to fund a lavish lifestyle” in California and Georgia, federal prosecutors said.'

Interestingly, similar fraud occurred at her next job.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/13/former-facebook-diversity-le...
Proton worldwide outage caused by Kubernetes migration
It's part of making a product that works for a diverse group of people. The same way the XBox controller was made smaller for female and children hands. And how including darker skinned people in facial recognition systems is now standard practice.
> DEI would be hiring a blind person, over a more qualified non-blind person.

No, it wouldn't.

DEI might be things like expending resources for outreach to and soliciiting applications from the blind community because there were almost no blind applicants, when blind people could reasonably do the work even if, on average, blind people would be at a disadvantage compared to the sighted given the job responsibilities.
I find the opposite to be true, that best and most productive developers tend to be more language agnostic than average, although I'm not saying they don't have their preferences.

Specifically, I find language evangelists particularly likely to be closer to .5x than 5x. And that's before you even account for their tendency to push for rewriting stuff that already works, because "<insert language du jour here> is the future, it's going to be great and bug free," often instead of solving the highest impact problems.
/r/CreaturesGames/ - Discussion about the Creatures artificial life simulation games. I haven't seen anything particularly cringey on it.
The Making of Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Its not about one people but a project, Manhattan Project. One of my most favorite book.
Dubai company DAMAC will invest at least $20B in U.S. data centers
I have really bad vision too (my prescription is left: -8.00, right: -7.50). Tried this out, and yeah, really works! And realized, you need the best resolution screen possible, because you can see every detail.
Not sure how much I'll use this is the future, but good to know it's always an option!
Problem in Africa is that the Chinese will sail in with their alternatives at the first sign of trouble. Right now, we can’t have games like that in Africa. We’re in an almost daily grind trying to counter Chinese influence as it is. The last thing we need is Elon sailing in torpedoing our efforts.

We need to be cognizant of the fact that we’re no longer the only game in town, and act accordingly when using power. Soft or hard.
Yeah the biggest trouble really is on the dashboarding side of things, not the sending side, and is why there are popular SaaS products like datadog. If you're amenable to saas, datadog is probably the best way. Otherwise, look into SigNoz for a one-stop solution with minimal effort even if there are some rough edges still.
That claim is being questioned by sources quoted in this article.
I've been to London a couple of times over the past few years, and haven't seen anything "hydrogen" there. Maybe they just aren't marked. In China they're very easy find, and they're rather obviously hydrogen - usually green in color and say "H2" on the side. Cursory search also suggests that it's not just Beijing and Shanghai that have them.
> He said he felt younger Japanese people tended to be more interested in Japan’s domestic media.

It might be just regression to mean that after curious and open global oriented generation more likely comes one that's more isolationist and more easily satiated with domestic slop.
It led to dictatorship and itself was a super bloody dictatorships. The regime it replaced was failing, corrupt etc. But the revolution was not "make us free and happy" kind of event. It was "and now we are going to go through really really bad times" kind of event.
No, because NOT NULL/UNKNOWN is still NULL/UNKNOWN.

I realized earlier I was using the term NULL, but going forwards let's use the ANSI SQL concept where the null state of a Boolean is called UNKNOWN. You'll have to forgive me for using the term NULL this far, but in my defense the concept of NULL column-values and UNKNOWN boolean expression results are pretty intertwingled.

SELECT * FROM foo WHERE NOT (1 = NULL)

resolves to

SELECT * FROM foo WHERE UNKNOWN

which is the same value that

SELECT * FROM foo WHERE 1 = NULL

resolves to.

So the WHERE clause is treating UNKNOWN/NULL as equivalent to false. The rest of the Boolean algebra is not.

SQL likes to have it both ways. Sometimes UNKNOWN/NULL is equivalent to false sometimes it's not.

It does this because UNKNOWN/NULL Booleans are incredibly inconvenient and tedious and sometimes they'd rather not think about them.

I'd like to do that as well, but this hoary old language won't give me the same permission it gives itself.
Your biases applied to the comment may read that way. The comment itself doesn't say that at all. It is interesting that we are seeing the discrimination right here on HN too. I thought we were better than that?
i can report the same traces to jager if i want open source or i switch out the provider and it can go to aws x-ray (paid). without any code or config changes. pretty useful. yes, a tad clumsy to set up the first time.
and I know plenty who won't because while you CAN, if anything goes wrong, you are going home. They prefer to play it safe with known quantity then roll the dice, have a paperwork SNAFU and end up on the plane home.
And if so, then that's fine. But for others it isn't. And my guess is the latter is more common.
Again, that's not how it works, or should work. But even if it did, it could be called a 'mistake'. But it's not 'racist'.

You're fundamentally misunderstanding the word. And it's sad because people
(perhaps you) will go around and say that the word 'racist' is overused and has lost it's meaning.

And yet, you (and co) are the ones mistakenly using it here.

EDIT:
(it appears I've been blocked from replying here so to the below ...

@seryoiupfurds:
"Well, better than your first attempt. But the thrust of your comment is still that 'diversity hiring' is the norm. My experience says it's not - and certainly not in the way we apply DEI.")
I suspect there are a number of factors that eliminate people from these steps like objectivity, persistence, and other virtues.

The biggest single discriminator that the Y Combinator people talk about, which I agree with, is doing the right things first without regard for scale. Most developers will immediately jump to some framework so that they can prop up some web app in the shortest time and immediately go into promotions and then struggle with scale when they need to scale.

I had this big app that tried to solve for full decentralization of universal file system access from a browser. I wrote my own end-to-end test automation tool and focused all my energy on software execution performance. These things allowed me to prove out new ideas and identify regression in about 8 seconds on a single machine or about 2 minutes on 5 machines talking to each other. Most people won't invest in that. I could perform a massive refactor across dozens for files and hundreds of lines without regression in about 2 hours. At work, at that job at that time, I spending more than 2 weeks for tiny refactors that were littered with regressions and having to clean up other people's messes.

Worse, is that most people recognize when they are not performing well, especially if it is anywhere from 10-100x less well. The normal go to place is either sympathy or an echo chamber. High performers don't do that. They aren't trying to impress people with their awesomeness or seeking sympathy when it falls apart. They just build what they need at great expense because its something they can have that others won't have.
Thanks for the suggestions :) I'll look into how I can tune those down a little. They are however needed to understand the "platform picture" I am trying to get through in some discussions
Low earth orbit is the best orbit because space junk accumulation is impossible there
Elon literally didn't turn it on because of the US government rules. How is a person / company doing what the government wants undermining government policy?
Application Insights, Data Dog, New Relic, etc…

APM products in general.
One thing I find frustrating with Django is there's not really a place to put business logic. Ask 3 Django people and you'll get 3 different answers, and often different answers from the same person! That's not a good architecture IMO. It should be obvious where stuff goes. Some say it's not Django's concern, Django is just a web framework, but Django doesn't sit nicely at the edge of an architecture where it belongs at all.

Is Rails better in this respect?
> I have no idea what Apple's MacBasic was like

This was already apparent.

Microsoft BASIC for Mac was a lowest common denominator sort of product.

It did the sorts of things BASIC could do on any platform fairly well (since most platforms ran a Microsoft BASIC variant), but it did an incredibly poor job of allowing a user to write programs that worked as if they were designed for a Mac.
> Read the memo from Meta in full:

That did not seem at all controversial to me. It seems quite sensible, but it alludes to some silly practices that are now being retired. For example "This effort focused on sourcing from diverse-owned businesses" is, in my opinion at least, a very very silly thing to do.

I am much, much, more interested in high quality, affordable, stable products when I buy things. Not the skin colour of who owns the business. To filter things based on the owner's identity (in the American sense of the word) may disadvantage my business by making my own products (build from their components) worse. It would not be a sensible thing to do.
This was exactly my experience in a Big Tech company. I will say, a lasting (IMO good) effect we had was that hiring managers continued to consider diversity of candidates as a factor, but there was no gate in extending offers. Some hiring managers took this further and actually enforced diverse slate style hiring because they believed in it and others didn't care. It also meant that if a req was taking a long time to get filled, diverse slate just stopped being a factor.
I just went from Pixel to Motorola and this has worked surprisingly well. Even for apps that I install manually.

That said, if I don't use the old phone to pull "the data" Google will not transfer more important things (Wi-Fis), settings etc.
If you add minus signs to of popular sites you get better results. However you then end up with a search of something like:

-google -twitter -reddit -amazon -youtube some search
The ignorance on this site is a sight to behold at times. A further risk to the aircraft and crew is not to be taken lightly...
Correct. Most non-Starlink constellations LEO are going up around 800 - 1200 km altitudes. Those orbits have century to millenium level deorbit times and pose significant Kessler risk.
> By all appearances, it just seems like an absolute no brainer....I really dont get it

I understand the policy around hydrogen (Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocated $8 billion to hydrogen production) as a technological pivot for the United States which leads the world in oil and gas extraction and logistics tech. The US has a lot of gas handling experience.

Optimistically, green hydrogen will diversify the energy supply, bringing "energy resilience", a key policy buzzphrase. Batteries and pumped hydro are undeniably superior in round trip efficiency, but hydrogen does have some desirable properties such as relative ease of overland transport, very long term storage, and being a chemical precursor for some industrial processes.

Pessimistically, green hydrogen is a way for oil and gas companies to siphon many taxpayer dollars while doing superficial work similar to the compliance EVs of the 90s and 00s.

I'm optimistic mainly because my PhD in electrical engineering is being funded partly with the green hydrogen taxpayer dollars. Shout-out to my fellow taxpayers and my advisor's grant writing skills! I'm working on power electronics which are fundamental in renewable energy and by extension green hydrogen electrolysis.
> But if you accept a slightly higher abstraction, WebAssembly is portable, typed, and structured.

Does WebAssembly support AOT compilation to native binaries? I thought it was just a VM.
For what it's worth Sure in Jersey (channel islands) was fantastic. 80ish bucks for symetrical unlimited gigabit
Yes and the fun part is a lot of people see this "eager yet resistant" as a damnification of diversity initiatives instead of the calcification of current systemic problems.
interoperability between vendors, so your business isn't stuck with a vendor who can raise prices because their SDKs are deeply embedded in your codebase, so open source libraries / products have a common point to hook into without needing to integrate with each vendor.
I was not able to find anything, can you help with locating what you're talking about?
Broadly appealing subs like that should be the last subs you cite if your goal is to provide evidince that Reddit isn't lowest common denominator trash.

Even in fairly niche subs I find that "surface level" content quality dominates and nuanced takes are frequently unpopular which is basically a recipe for anyone who knows anything to leave. I find the best subs are satire subs because having to know enough about something to be able to satirize it weeds out all the people who create and perpetuate surface level content. I assume there are some super niche subs that are similar.
But then what would I use on my IBM 5150?
Is there much space for opposing views on a forum answering science questions? Presumably the purpose is to answer from established science.