skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Netflix and Cornell University researchers have exposed significant flaws in cosine similarity. Their study reveals that regularization in linear matrix factorization models introduces arbitrary scaling, leading to unreliable or meaningless cosine similarity results. These issues stem from the flexibility of embedding rescaling, affecting downstream tasks like recommendation systems.
The first thing Broadcom did after acquiring the company was announce that they were going to offload their small customers and increase revenue by raising prices on their big customers. There was lots of warning.
I always forget that we're not quite the normal crowd here in Hacker News. I think I need to stop reading so many comments on this site. Trying to convince me that I'm a sociopath for posting my grandma's obituary on my timeline.
California... It was taken by military force ending in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It ratified statehood 2 years later, so it was annexed and then accepted into the Union, not very legitimate to be done this way.
So you reckon you could learn how compilers work by reading nothing but the GCC source code? While I'm sure it's possible, I think it would take you 10x as long as it would if you had read a few books about compilers first.
In the first three generations of Pokemon, Celadon Game Corner has those in-game slot machines where you can bet and win tokens. In gen four, the Japanese games keep the Celadon slots, but in every other release they got replaced with a minesweeper-y game to appease PEGI.
California only recently dropped the twin requirements of "insurance cannot be priced according to future models" and "insurance premiums can only rise X% per year", the effect of which that everyone else definitely was subsidizing the people in wildfire zones.
TFL has obviously been aware of his use for 15 years, as the website was widely publicised in 2010. They have not taken any action to defend any trademarks they think he violates in all that time. IANAL, but I would have thought that if he wanted, he probably has a good case to invalidate those trademarks on the grounds that by not defending them for so long, they have become generic. But in the end, it's probably not a good use of his time and money to fight them on this.
The only logical path forward is to implement loot boxes with paid keys in LBAL
The optics of very rich people building under (or impossible to) insured homes in a area where they will inevitably be destroyed by a fire then expecting the taxpayer to bail them out when it happens are terrible. There's no argument you can make where people will want to do that
We have anti-harassment training at work, and one of the videos from a few years ago was titled something along the lines of "can you have problematic behavior against your own group" and was a confrontation between someone coded as a second-generation Punjabi and someone stated to be a first generation Gujarati.

The kind interpretation of that video is that "there are always subgroups" but it really felt to me as if they were all lumped in the same bucket of "Indian" by the video producer which seems to me to be rather problematic itself.
Maybe buried in that proof is the key insight needed to prove P != NP. Elegance would make it more likely that this insight is pulled out and identified.
To me this seems to be the most rambling, disorganized essay I've seen him write. I normally appreciate how he structures his arguments and in this one, I struggled to get past the first few sentences.

Also maybe it's because he assumes there is a group of "the woke" instead of realizing that the people who self-identify as "woke" probably mean something really different than the ones who use "the woke" in a demeaning way.

Wouldn't calling some a prig or woke, saying that the people are "self-righteously moralistic people who behave as if superior to others," in a way, be demonstrating the same behavior?

Shouldn't the antidote to such a behavior be to see the humanity in others, coming closer to them rather than distancing from them?

In that vein, I don't know what Paul's motivations were to write this post and I don't know why he lacked the normal structure with headings and such, I just hope that he's doing OK. I'm trying to understand the feelings he's experiencing, and maybe if I'm able to get through his writing I'll have a better sense. He seems a bit distraught, frustrated, ranting, not sure.
One reason for Spotify's move away from p2p was it was absolutely a no-go on mobile platform, which was rapidly becoming dominant at the time.
was that when they said “instead of uploading the images to our servers to do the CSAM scan, we’ll do a quick once over in the privacy of your own phone to see if we can allow-list your photo” ?

And then the whole world suddenly went apeshit, so Apple basically shrugged, said “fine, we’ll do it just like everyone else and put your photos in the relatively unprotected server domain to do the scan”. Sucks to be you.

Understand that at no point was there an option to not do the scan on upload, like all cloud providers, Apple scans for CSAM on any uploaded photos to stay out of any government grey areas.
By "we" I meant online commenters debating the issue of tech company device lockdown.

I didn't mean "the law". To the contrary, the submitted article author was proposing that we pass laws giving greater individual consumer rights over their devices. But the big tech companies have been viciously fighting against consumer rights, such as the right to repair.
> The Post Office scandal is a clear warning about relying too much on tech without accountability.

No, it is just the drop in the ocean.

I bet nobody reads Orwell in Britain anymore. /s
I don't see why it's a "siren song". Being lured by sirens is deadly. Implementing a small language is a fun hobby and can be a useful learning experience.
> Literate programming fails because it I'm a programmer and so it is telling things I already know.

Code is just a medium. You’re supposed to know it. What you don’t know is the domain knowledge the code is solving, and that’s what’s written in the literate program, along with diagrams, math, etc to aid your understanding.
> So 1985 Oregon Trail is written in Applesoft BASIC

This surprised me for some reason, I guess it's been 30-some years but I remember my adventures in Apple II BASIC not running that quickly, but maybe Oregon Trail's graphics was simpler than I remember

I guess I just assumed any "commercial" Apple II games were written in assembly, but perhaps the actions scenes had machine code mixed in with the BASIC code.
There's a story in the book - on nuclear submarines there's a brass bar in front of all the dials and knobs, and the engineers are trained to "grab the bar" when something goes wrong rather than jumping right to twiddling knobs to see what happens.
Show HN: A new kind of recipe game for foodies, chefs, and authors
A new kind of daily recipe game that uses colors, photography, and trivia to build connections with food, and the ingredients that make it shine.

If you have an interest in food (you are a reader, author, casual foodie, or home cook), and enjoy puzzles or games, give it a try — there is also an anonymous feedback form for anyone with suggestions (look for "questionnaire" in the menu).

Buon appetito, thanks!
> I stopped to play those games.

English nit, if you mean you no longer play those kinds of games, as I think you do baaed on context, you should write

"I stopped playing those games."
So it doesnt work wirk adhoc venvs, does it? Might still valuable for simply running scripts, but I’m not sure venv-less works for dev
Why Do TV Title Sequences Have So Much Stuff?
Maybe not in the official series, though I’d love to see Al-far one finished by someone. But as far as tintin, there may not be official series, but there is a lot of new work based on it, from merch to the Spielberg movie, as bad as it was.
I mean, the nigerian prince scam is almost a meme these days…
You mean 32k words, not 32k bytes, right[1]? And AFAIK by V5 or V6, Unix could use split instruction and data if the MMU supported it giving a bit more headroom. But, yeah, memory was very tight, and a lot of very clever tricks were used to get around it.

[1] Even worse, the top 4kW/8kB was reserved for I/O.
Nathan Barry (now CEO of ConvertKit) and Brennan Dunn had some stuff on this a few years back. You could try googling their articles?
Knuth’s is the only literate programming system that emphasizes type setting. That’s because he designed Tex and wrote thousands of pages with it. It’s his local optimum.

All the others use markdown, html, eMacs org, etc.
the cover photo is faceted. several in the photos are
Not to mention that HN is the most hostile place for AI that I frequent.
> Why a new language?

In my opinion, Starlark (in rust, Apache 2: <https://github.com/facebook/starlark-rust/blob/v0.13.0/LICEN...>) is the way since it is designed for sandboxed environments and also (AIUI) was initially designed to support Bazel, a build tool

Now, I'm totally on board that people can hate on whitespace sensitive languages, but if my choice was "make my own language that no one has ever heard of" or "delete the Python hater's emails" ...

It also would mean that you could tag your Werkfile in .gitattributes with linguist annotations[1] and they'd syntax highlight, which isn't the case with your own language https://github.com/simonask/werk/blob/5990c8a9536a1a76c3da59...

1: https://github.com/github-linguist/linguist/blob/v9.0.0/docs...
well, people who use it to self-identify often use it in terms of being aware, a positive attribution, and I assume people who use it to identify others use it in terms of being judgmental, a negative attribution. So yeah, it's a highly charged term.
It would be if those were not specific exceptions to the hate speech policy: “ Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.””

Source: https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/h...
Show HN: I made something in the weekend to read my GitHub issues like email
You definitely make a good point. My thought was that large legacy projects would slowly migrate to a different language. The news of the recent introduction of Rust in Linux has me optimistic something similar will eventually happen in other places too. (not necessarily with Rust, specifically) The keyword here is Eventually. I’m thinking this is years away for GCC and LLVM.

If the new language has good interop with the old then this doesn’t have to be painful either. A while back, I was working on a large Objective-C code base which was slowly moving to Swift. We quickly got to a point where new code was written in Swift by default. In only a couple of years, we had a code base which used Objective-C pretty much only in the dark corners where code churns slowly.
An on-line UPS is designed to run continuously. Equipment connected to such devices never directly connect to utility power, they always run off the UPS which uses double conversion (AC -> DC) to charge the batteries and (DC -> AC) run the outlets. You'll find off-lease online UPSes on auction sites, as said often without their battery packs but given that you'll want to run them using bigger batteries than normal that is not a problem.
> Much like the FTC in the US bans tobacco and alcohol advertising that could be interpreted as encourage underage use.

This is an advertising regulation for actual specific products, not a general restriction for things redolent of things that are bad for children.

In the same year, they made it legal to advertise Oxycontin on television, direct-to-consumer.

> branding for those products.

French suited playing cards aren't advertisements for gambling. Gambling isn't a product. Gambling at Bally's Casino is a product.
Show HN: I built a 24-hour goal tracker to gamify accountability
This app helps you stay accountable by gamifying goal-setting: Complete your goal in 24 hours to earn a spot on the leaderboard—or land on the losing board if you don’t. It's perfect for fighting procrastination and making productivity fun. I would love your thoughts!
Games aren’t going to suddenly start targeting only updated copies of windows 11 though… if they target even win 10 then they need to be API compatible with what’s currently there in windows. It doesn’t matter what new stuff comes out. Just like how we had to keep using ie6 compatible code for ages for the 5% of people still on windows xp even though it kept us from using modern web tech for everyone else.
Recent Linux distributions are quickly catching up to Windows and macOS. Do a fresh install of your favorite distribution and then use 'ps' to look at what's running. Dozens of processes doing who knows what? They're probably not pegging your CPU at 100%, which is good, but it seems that gone are the days when you could turn on your computer and it was truly idle until you commanded it to actually do something. That's a special use case now, I suppose.
Comparing LLM prompt engineering to traditional software engineering.
Yoko Tsuno!
Show HN: Take the one minute Table Setting Efficiency Test (T.S.E.T.)
The Bureau of Hospitality & Food Service is kindly requesting all Hacker News users to take the Table Setting Efficiency Test (T.S.E.T.) to ensure consideration in the Post-AI Resource Restructuring Program.
Plenty of ways around it. Look at Musk's bullshit $1 million-a-day voter sweepstakes.
Society is, at least in the US, much less prudish towards gambling now than ever before. The major sports leagues refused to even put a team in Las Vegas for years because the entire city was taboo, now every broadcast has a million ads for gambling apps.
270 million light-years away can only be considered "nearby" in cosmic scales, but I guess there are just a handful of supermassive black holes within the ten million LY radius, so, it might just be one of the top 100.
I said documentation generated from literate tests (this does not exist yet), not tests as the final documentation artifact. The result would be similar to API docs, but derived from a more authoritative resource (tests, not docblocks).

> I don't want to read through a dozen different edge conditions

Neither do I. You mean you want the happy path in a distinct scenario. That is a very common perception amongst both testers and documentation writers. Good test suites have the happy path distinct from the edge conditions as well as good docs.
My bet is on timescape as it doesn't use any unknown magic. Just requires applying GR correctly instead of in the simplest conceivable way that CDM does.

A lot of things might clear up once you remove the assumption that Big Bang was true begining of matter, energy and time, with everything isotropic instead of just temporary state of high temperature (kinetic energy) and density with its own internal structure.
I wonder if it is thought of as not really gambling because the ROI is so bad. The rewards have very little actual value, so fun must come from playing the games, and the toy is just a little trinket at the end. And if a kid ignores the tickets and just plays the games they like, they’ll probably have more fun. But the ticket minigame is something that some find fun, so…

Anyway, I think this is wrong, because kids are mostly playing with their parents’ money. So it still becomes a system with a positive ROI from their point of view.
It sounds like you want to ban knowledge of gambling.
I thought I read somewhere the early versions of slack actually ran on irc.
This post would benefit from a screenshot. Here’s one I found:
https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/stea...
I think, even though they are very different games, Disco Elysium has a lot of the same feel as Planescape: Torment. A lot of the same introspection of human nature, philosophy, moral judgment, and wry humour. If you like one, I think you'll like the other.
I've never even heard of that before, and I'm terminally online.

Anyway, desktop computers aren't really the main problem here. For example, Apple Macs offer vastly more personal freedom than Apple iPhones. If iPhones behaved like Macs in that respect, then we might not be having this debate. To the extent that Macs have been increasingly locked down over the past 15 years, it's mostly just copying the iPhone, porting the "features" over from one platform to the other.
I would assume it's mostly marketing. There's no entity behind IRC to push its adoption and herd the cats to a singular goal.

The lack of features that Slack/Discord specifically added to differentiate themselves from IRC are also important, but it was a lot simpler to add them to their brand new designs, than to work through having to specify them onto the IRC protocol and then get servers and clients to adopt it. You can look at the IRCv3 page linked higher in the thread to see some of the efforts, but this is 10 years later and we're still not there. :D
I sympathize with your frustration. A 1% success rate is extremely discouraging.

Do you know what the success rate is for non-DEI candidates? I believe there is some bias in the hiring process including racism, sexism, ageism, etc. But I also think that companies are hiring less than 1% of applicants in general. From what I have seen, companies are very bad at identifying the best candidates. But if you are getting 100 resumes a month and you hire 2-4 people a year, it's a roll of the dice just selecting the 20 resumes out of 400 to invite for an interview.

All of that is to say: don't get too discouraged. A 1% success rate would be remarkable. If you can achieve a 0.5% success rate you can increase diversity by 400%.

Personally, I'm a fan of meritocracy. I wish the most qualified people were surviving the roll of the dice. But I think it would be ideal if the most qualified people included a lot of diversity. As it is, employers' best chance to hire qualified people is to rely on human networks to help somebody stand out in the sea of resumes. So the more people of diversity you can land, the better chance there is for future candidates. And the better qualified your diverse candidates are, the more voice they'll get in future hiring influence. So keep pushing highly qualified diverse candidates. And while you're at it, push highly qualified non-diverse candidates so you aren't just seen as a diversity advocate. People might take your diverse candidates more seriously if they are perceived less for their diversity and more for their excellence. If 80% of your recommendations are diverse and 50% seem to be very high-quality, the 10% that are very high-quality non-diverse will change the perception of the 40% very high-quality diverse candidates.
I do know how to profile my code, and I'll also continue to bias towards not doing it now. Even if it could mean more pain later.

I think part of the problem is that the pain it causes is quite visceral, but the opportunity cost is pretty abstract, so it's a lot easier to just focus on the pain and forget about what you're gaining.
But PSF doesn't distribute binary builds, so what's the alternative?
It’s more about the comments than the front page. Most HNers don’t bother clicking links and just read top of the fold comments.
I'm skeptical there ever was much of a consensus. From the start there have been first hand witnesses say there seems to be some sort of attack and government bureaucracies, not on the ground saying they are probably just imagining it, so we don't have to do anything about it.

I wouldn't really say that was a great consensus. Maybe a consensus amongst the bureaucracies that they'd rather ignore everything? But it's only a consensus if you exclude everyone who's a witness.
So going by your definition what would be a true black box?
I'm just using (inductive) "bias" to refer to assumptions about the data that are built into the model and the way it learns, such as the way a CNN is built to assume spatial locality of patterns.

My point is that the more biases you build in, especially with a poorly understood goal like AGI, the more chance you have of either getting it wrong, or simply of over-constraining the model. In general less is more - you want minimal necessary set of biases to learn effectively, without adding others that it could better (providing greater generality) learn for itself.
I assume these breaking changes are in the stdlib

Well yes, but sometimes the features provided by stdlib can feel pretty 'core'. I remember that how dataclasses work for example changed and broke a lot of our code when we upgraded from 3.8 to 3.10,

There have also been breaking changes in the C API. We have one project at work that is stuck at 3.11 since a third party dependency won't build on 3.12 without a rewrite.
Germany hits 62.7% renewables in 2024 electricity mix, solar contributing 14%
Biocubes – A Visualization of Everything on Earth
And yet the SVO turbo 4 cylinder was one of the most coveted Mustangs ever.

I had that engine, intercooled and with a 5 speed, in an '88 Thunderbird TurboCoupe. It would draw more attention than my beautiful '69 Mustang Grande. The Mustangs with that engine would out-handle anything from the Corvette to the Z.
> but eventually I concluded the rule-of-thumb "don't use derogatory metaphors about other people" is often not hard or that big of a deal

This is simply untrue.

A couple of decades ago, one could use the hyperbolic euphemism “I would of course be lynched for suggesting such a thing”, completely devoid of any racial animus, because human history is of course rife with instances of lynchings of people of all skin tones and racial origins. But today, a concerted effort has been made to “brand” “lynch” as a term that is “racist against black people—black Americans specifically.” There is no historical reason for this to be the case. The ADL was founded after a Jewish man was lynched because the lynch mob believed him to be guilty instead of a black man, for instance!

Just because a given term or metaphor or euphemism isn't considered offensive-toward-a-certain-class-of-people today, doesn't mean that somebody won't invent a reason for it to be considered to be such tomorrow.