skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey Dave,

Glad you're still doing cool things :)

Read the Docs is pretty much all open source, including the billing code (https://github.com/readthedocs/readthedocs.org/blob/main/rea...), but we are structured like a normal company, with some custom bylaws that protect the OSS codebase if ownership changes hands. We haven't found anyone else setting up a competing instance or anything, but that might also be because the product is kind of niche.

I kinda love the idea of having people in the community that use the service have some kind of ownership over the platform. It would likely lead to longer term loyalty of the userbase, which would help keep the project sustainable and avoid the enshittification cycle.

We've played around with sharing ad revenue that we generate on documentation pages split with the projects, which is partially a win/win way of sharing in the upside of success.

Anyway, I don't have a great answer here, but wanted to say hi, and give a bit of context from our place in the world.

PS: You might also talk with the folks here: https://zebrasunite.coop/ -- they are structured like a co-op and mostly come from the tech/design community.
The authoritarian goverments before the 20th century were child plays compared with the level of censorship modern governments can apply.
Wow, you ARE grumpy! As advertised
I've looked at this for years, and have my (basically defunct) attempt at it over at mutual.email - the idea was customer owned email (+etc) service.

The main idea was to make a service covering people's "workspace" needs (comms, documents, collaboration etc) which would place things like data governance under end user control, mostly on the assumption that given the choice, people would never agree to having their data mined by eg, Google.

In practice I wasn't really ready for it, but doing this kind of thing as a co-operative society with worker or member ownership is a fabulous idea and one I'd love to see come to fruition.

A lot of the pitfalls I've seen from surveying not just my own attempt but other people's is that getting your initial collaborators on board is hard, and keeping a culture that promotes change rather than stagnation is even harder. Lots of coops in the email and hosting space show this: they'll sweat hardware way past when it is economical or sensible to do so, and are generally averse to raising cash to invest in the business. Customers go to them and pay a premium because they want something "ethical", which lets them off the hook for being uncompetitive. The spiral continues, tightening until the service is so poor and prices so high that literally nobody wants it anymore. My suggestion is whatever you do, avoid that situation: investment starvation kills coops.
A lot of wildlife, like birds, bats, insects etc. are really confused by white light. There are some nordic countries which are experimenting with red street lights in outer districts which are showing great promise. (Don't have a reference atm but should be googleable)
This is not an LLM problem. It was solved years ago via OCR. Worldwide, postal services long ago deployed OCR to read handwitten addresses. And there was an entire industry of OCR-based data entry services, much of it translating the chicken scratch of doctor's handwiting on medical forms, long before LLMs were a thing.
> Keeping your password in memory like that is pretty sketchy IMO.

Every Windows version since "... for Workgroups" keeps the passwords of every logged-in user in memory as plaintext. This fact is widely exploited for privilege escalation and lateral movement in Windows environments.
In France it's reimbursed but only if you are diabetic. I'm not sure people talking about it here are diabetic.
When did we start calling markov chains 'wave function collapse'?
That was an interesting read. Thanks for sharing and congrats on getting it out there.

Two bits stood out and made me think, somewhat in disagreement:

> If “data_schema” changes a user facing type, such as the Schema type above, in a backwards incompatible manner, its authors have to release a new major version. A new major version can be a fork on the road. Libraries that depend on “data_schema”‘s new version won’t accept the old ones. Old libraries that depend on “data_schema” have to be updated and potentially forced to also release a new major version, cascading the problem. If any package along the way is unmaintained, it can stall and complicate further downstream updates.

I wouldn't call it a fork on the road. More like growing pains. This is to be expected of any dependency you have, and it's on you to keep your own code up-to-date. If the original Schema was indeed incorrect, it warrants fixing, even if it's an edge case.

And then

> In our v1 of Schema, we allowed name to only be a string(). In a statically typed language, we are effectively proving that all uses of Schema has a string() name. When we allow the name to also be nil in v2, that should not introduce bugs in our software yet because, by definition, there is no instance of Schema where the name is nil!

> In other words, all existing code remains correct, but most type systems would immediately flag them as wrong, on the possibility they may receive a nil value. There must be a better way and that’s what we study in this article.

Personally I don't think that what is proposed here is strictly better. I'd rather have to explicitly change my code to match the new shape of the Schema than to have it magically work. If I don't make changes now, I'm just punting that complexity for later and it's going to come back to bite me in some other issue that will be twice as hard to debug.
This is easily mitigated by requiring password to change boot order.
Local security authority protection changes this.
Bananas have a pH of around 4.5 for unripe bananas to 6 for ripe bananas, so are acidic.
Algorithms can and have been copied and improved. It is human nature.

For years people would wax about Spotify's algorithm never being dethroned, but the anecdotes I'm seeing lately are that YouTube Music's algorithm is now far ahead of the pack.

If the algorithm is all TikTok had, they'd lose long term. See also Snapchat and Instagram Stories.
On individual scale it is effective investment tool. When too large part of investment is passive, it distorts the price discovery. Prices move higher, because they move higher... It works until it does not.

Essentially more money gets poured in higher the fraction of total market cap is. And same if when something drops in market cap. Which in some scenarios clearly can mean not optimal distribution of value. Albeit it does looks like great "wealth" generation if you get to sell on the way up or at top.
"You have to go out. You don't have to come back"- Coast Guard unofficial motto.
Yes, I agree :)

Thank you. I try to keep it neat and tidy, despite the ads. I spent more time on the drag and drop aesthetics than anything else before I first released it. The little things really do matter, after all.
My understanding is that the Cybertruck is less likely to cause a pedestrian fatality than an F150 due to its lower hood height and better forward visibility.

But that's a pretty low bar. Crafting regulations that force the F150 back to the sensible dimensions it had last century would be an awesome side effect if it can ride on Cybertruck hate for support.
Self inflicted epidemic...
People seem to go ga-ga over this algorithm with some frequency on HN, and I think it is only because of its in-name-only connection to quantum mechanics, because I have to say that as procedural generation algorithm I find it very lacking. It works on the cases I saw for something like a 10x10 grid decently enough but for any large-scale work it just produces endless seas of structureless repetition. Even the long-in-the-tooth "just fire Perlin noise at varying levels of detail at the problem" at least produces some overarching structure even if it is itself just random because the low-frequency, high-amplitude components you use will produce some sort of higher-level variation.

Literally anything with any hierarchy in it would be better, unless you're really leaning into that SCP-esque, liminal-space creepiness. But if that isn't your explicit goal I would definitely not recommend this for large-scale usage because in most projects that creepy liminal-space-ness is probably actively fighting your artistic goals.

It wouldn't even take that much; lay down some sort of street network with some other algorithm, a bit of "zoning" to switch some tile sets between "residential" and some other zone or even just a couple different types of "residental", perlin noise it up if you've got no better ideas, then use "wave function collapse" (I really dislike the in-name-only "quantumness" of the name, can hardly call the algorithm that with a straight face) to fill in the blocks. A straightforward implementation of that would still be pretty same-y but it would at least have some sort of structure.
This took an interesting turn. A sprinkler system might have helped but it's not mentioned as part of the changes in maritime regulations following the incident.
Assuming we are comparing chips that are using the latest generation/high density memory modules, a wider bus width is required for larger memory counts, which is expensive when it comes to silicon area. Therefore, if AMD is willing to boost up memory count as a competitive advantage, they may as well also consider using that die space for more logic gates as well. It's a set of trade-offs and an optimization problem to some degree.

That said, when an incumbent has a leadership advantage, one of the obvious ways to boost profit is to slash the memory bus width, and then a competitor can come in and bring it up a bit and have a competitive offering. The industry has certainly seen this pattern many times. But as far as AMD coming in and using gigantic memory counts as a competitive advantage? You have to keep in mind the die space constraints.

Well over a decade ago - I think it was R600 - AMD did take this approach, and it was fairly disastrous because the logic performance of the chip wasn't good enough while the die was too big and hot and yields were too low. They didn't strike the right balance and sacrificed too much for a 512-bit memory bus.

AMD has also tried to sidestep some of these limitations with HBM back when it was new technology, but that didn't work out for them either. They actually would have been better off just increasing bus width and continuing to use the most optimized and cost efficient commodity memory chips in that case.

Data center and such may have a bit more freedom for innovation but the consumer space is definitely stuck on the paradigm of GPU plus nearby mem chips, and going outside of that fence is a huge latency hit.
Was BIOS fully updated as well?

Do new devices still suffer from the issue?
A medium sized potato has that amount, I doubt it’d be the coconut milk to blame. Also, coconut water != coconut milk
> Very few of them are longer than 12 characters and even fewer don't have numbers and special characters at easily guessable positions

Why yes because adding a $%^* at any point in your password easily increased the entropy and didn't make it significantly harder to remember...

Realistically randomly generate your password and if you are the forgetful type write the bloody thing down. In 2025 you should be inputting it at most once every now and then and for disc encryption effectively never...

A long password in a locked drawer or safe is much more secure than Summer2025!5
I think with experience they know how each medicine is usually written? It's often easier to listen/read when you already know what it is about.
The ban is nothing more than an attempt to abridge speech and deny the youth voice in politics. TikTok increasingly has become refuge from censorship occurring on other platforms (see the recent issues). The lawmakers indicated that is the reason for the ban.

If United States was honestly concerned about data protection and privacy, it would devise a federal privacy law that models GDPR. They are trying to pass a federal law now, but it is seriously flawed and they are trying to preempt more user-centric privacy laws of the states.

Finally, such partisan, targeted and unprincipled bans reenforce that EU's approach on issues such as data transfers abroad (see Schrems 1 and Schrems 2) is perfectly valid. EU has a principled regulation, which gets evaluated by free and democratic courts. The outcomes are what they are. Not partisan and discriminatory, as they are here.
The VW PHEV’s will run the combustion engine regularly, mainly to avoid the fuel going stale. I assume the Toyota does the same.
Amazon deal for AI startup's technology draws whistleblower complaint
http://archive.today/a5FLn
A disease is a disease regardless..

Telling people to eat less or move more doesn't work and hasn't worked.
Most introductions to RSS assume that people want to know about RSS.. and so instead here’s a more people-centric explainer: https://journal.jatan.space/why-use-rss/
Yep, it's an area denial weapon.

You basically cannot do anything worthwhile in this space without violating someone's patents. It's beneficial patent and corporate lawyers, but it's detrimental to innovation. As an engineer you are asked to not look up existing techniques or designs as this will taint you legally.
The "wave function collapse" part comes from the original algorithm which inferred the constraints from a sample image : https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse

Still a misnomer in my opinion, but I noticed that this part of the algorithm was missing from all the articles that followed (mine included). People are basically implementing sudoku solvers :)
I wanted to like the 2024+ Prius, I really did. I was in the market for a new car anyway, so I went and test drove one (not that I could have got one right away, at the time). Takeaways...

- it drives really nice with plenty of power

- the "gearshift" (not that it is one, but that part of the UI) is nonintuitive

- the interior looks smaller than it is, due to massive A-pillars and little to no rearward visibility

- it looks much better than past Priuses, but the rear door handles single-handedly put back the "dork factor"

None of that would have mattered that much, but the dealbreaker: Trunk space. I mean, space to load stuff when there are already 4 people in the car so you can't just fold down the back seat. That trunk floor is high. Folded it up and what's underneath? A styrofoam spacer matrix! WTF? Why not a spare tire instead (you don't get one)? I can imagine an ugly hack, tearing all that out, just to get a bit more trunk space but really? My only guess is that the Prius Prime's extra battery goes here, and they don't want to have it have less trunk space than the regular Prius.

We are (by choice) a one-car family and we have two kids. When we travel we need a certain amount of trunk space, and the Prius doesn't have it. Aside from that, the Prime would have been lovely - enough battery to do your around-town driving entirely electrically! I never even thought of the "no heat" angle.
AFAIK this uses even slower memory.
Hey Eric! I think of you whenever I open Python documentation and see some of my old work!

That's good to know that at least I'm not crazy for also open sourcing the billing code. I feel less worried.
Is this an idea or have you built it?
LLMs improve significantly on state of the art OCR. LLMs can do contextual analysis. If I were transcribing these by hand, I would probably feed them through OCR + an LLM, then ask an LLM to compare my transcription to its transcription and comment on any discrepancies. I wouldn't be surprised if I offered minimal improvement over just having the LLM do it though.
Yeah ok, but it might take me a few tries because I don't know what you're using. I hope that's agreeable?

What does your OCR say that these say? The first one isn't too hard for a human (assuming appropriate language skill). The second one is a bit more difficult.

https://imgur.com/a/CDU6Lgs
Ah hah, terrible naming strikes again.

I’m guessing that means you now have to change your password in two places if you ever change it? Not great, but then again people probably never change their passwords.
I suppose the point is that it's not the voiceless glottal fricative?

To my ears [ħ] sounds closer to [x] and [χ] than to [h] (even though the place of articulation is closer to [h]), but I'm sure it's different for people who (natively) speak a language with all three.
You really believe their value could drop by 90% because of this? 90%!!!
Which is why recently Microsoft has been pushing very hard to replace the account login password with a TPM managed PIN. This way the (Microsoft) account password is rarely needed and never stored in memory.
Not really a problem anymore, it's all been digitized at least for the most part.
No shrubs and lots of concrete: This is what a fire-resistant house looks like
I predict this will be the future for many industries.

Shifting to worker cooperatives and innovation on the business ownership side.

Imagine Amazon as a coop?
In the bad old days I had a server at blue host in Dallas. Went to the dc once and there extension cords accross the racks suspended about 1ft off the ground that I had to step over to get to my server. Hey at least it was cheap :)
Since people started using marketing tactics to promote themselves. WFC is a $100 name for a $1 concept. Other entries in the tech hall of shame are mersenne twister and dependency injection
check out civic 11 gen, they are almost indistinguishable from regular ice cars when sitting inside
What exactly is paper-like about this? It sounds like it is still transmissive (they talk about brightness rather than contrast), which is just the same as any other screen no? E-ink is paper-like because it's reflective.
I agree that cursive handwriting has become useless.

As a child, even many years before having access to personal computers or any other kind of typewriting, I have switched my handwriting from cursive to using the kind of sans-serif typefaces used in technical drawing and since then I have never written again cursively, with the exception of my signature, where required on official documents.

Nevertheless, I believe that some kind of calligraphy is necessary for developing fine motor skills in children, unless it is replaced with some other activity that requires a similar precision in the movements of the fingers and of the hand.
I've lived in sweden for a while, I have family ties. People there care, compared to US. I've seen people pick up some random trash on an otherwise spotless sidewalk. I've seen people point out to somebody misbehaving that they are out of line. I've seen city council adjusting sth on a sidewalk within a week after some people living there pointed out a minor issue. People care.

Not everywhere, bot everybody. But enough for me to notice.
I concur, it is a pain. The US absolutely needs to improve! The point I was making is that the idea of free, unrestrained, unlimited healthcare in Europe is a myth.
Can you feed these to ChatGPT and tell me what it says they say?

https://imgur.com/a/CDU6Lgs

It gets them wrong for me, but maybe it will get them right for you. Maybe you're better at prompting or have access to a better model or something.
Yes, I believe that in a court case, when someone says "what about Scenario X" and then you write an opinion that fails to preclude Scenario X, you are writing an opinion that can be criticized for allowing Scenario X.

Gorsuch saying "I am not considering Scenario X" does not actually mean his opinion precludes it. His opinion, as written, allows it.
Is this time different and will AI replace up to 80% of existing jobs
Right, which is why "Justice XYZ agrees" does not (by itself) say anything at all about the moral or political valence of the decision.
Just making sure I understand.

You have sold your business but are still responsible for IT support.

You are responsible for IT support but don't already have a defined access path.

The new buyer knows what a root password is and how to gain access to a Linux machine and reset it, but does not know what an SSH key is, or how to check for a full disk.

Despite clearly being a (very specific kind of) novice the new owner is suspicious of the person responsible for his IT giving him instructions he doesn't understand?
Nonsense. Theft by definition requires the original owner to lose something. Me not buying something is not theft.
NSA and CIA do NOT want this info to be public. Surprised OP hasn't gotten a call yet to shut it down...
Great post. Highly recommended. Thank you for sharing it on HN.

My take: Many "Web3" applications naively rely on conventional "Web2" infrastructure, so they are exposed to conventional attack vectors.

The OP is just the latest example of this.

Here's an earlier example showing how easy it is to mess up a Web3 app if it naively relies on Web2 infrastructure:

https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

The author of that earlier example is none other than Moxie Marlinspike, creator of Signal.
> Like if this is a crowdsourcing project...

I'm confused by what you're asking. Are you asking me to like (upvote) your comment if this is a crowdsourcing project? Don't we already know it is a crowdsourcing project?
Dusa Programming Language (Finite-Choice Logic Programming)
Research Paper
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.19040
Other competitors in this space:

- Daylight Computer (mentioned in the article) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40456834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40754445

- Onyx Boox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27513521

- Kobo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40015429

- Amazon Kindle Scribe (also mentioned) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33009715

FWIW, I still haven't managed to fully replace my Newton MessagePad with a single device --- the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ comes close, but I don't like to read books on it, and it's a bit small, so makes sketching fussy.

The Kindle Scribe is great, for reading books, but no immediacy in handwriting recognition/shape conversion, so I only use it for note-taking and sketching, but not for writing first drafts or editing texts.

The Wacom One 13 (gen one screen) attached to my MacBook is a nice fallback, and makes it convenient when I'm both taking notes or referring to a text (on my Scribe) and drawing/annotating/working on a project on my Mac.

The Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 is awesome, but a bit large and cumbersome when folded into tablet mode --- really wish Samsung had made a replacement for my Galaxy Book 12 (the perfect thing would be a dual-screen 12" device w/ Wacom EMR, competing against the Lenovo Yogabook 9i (which I'd buy if it had Wacom EMR)).

A dual-fold 3-panel device where the outside panel was e-ink would be perfect.
The new Prius looks good, but I love my old Prius’s spacious hatchback. With the backseat down we can stick 3 giant dogs back there. I don’t know if there’s a hybrid with similar internal space.
My First Impressions of Web3 (2022)
Yeah, I went to Neovim a couple of years ago, and haven’t looked back. There are enough plugins to make it equivalent in useful features, IMO.
A lot more. More than the majority of people are able to.
The feature/bug only makes sense from the perspective that someone is telling Microsoft to leave it in.
Making hydrogen is extremely energy-expensive and, as result, money-expensive if it is not by-product of crude oil processing. It is why hydrogen cars & Ko is not viable really if we stop to process crude oil (in additional to the problems with storage and transportation).

Hydrogen is greenwashing by big oil companies, only they could provide "cheap" hydrogen, and not some water cracking with electricity from renewable sources.
> in some cases

some != all

therefore, it is not a real-name only network.

I'm not asking for Facebook to become a confirmed real-name only network. I am not asking for anyone to be compelled to supply a confirmed real-name only network.

I am saying: I wish that one existed and caught on with consumers.