skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The whole business plus Microsoft Safe Harbor is starting to raise the question of whether US social media (functioning as spies) should be allowed in the EU either.
> but I assume language existed way before that

Way, way, way older.

Writing is an incredibly novel development. There are still today linguistic communities without writing, although they're becoming much rarer. Writing was unknown in parts of the world until quite recently - the Aborigines of Australia didn't have it, nor did many pre-Columbian civilisations.

It's a safe bet that writing first emerged out of a need for accounting and this thus closely tied to larger agricultural civilisations. That's why we find it in places like Mesopotamia and Egypt first. Of course, those weren't alphabets yet, but logosyllabic writing (characters could stand for either meanings or syllables). The alphabet is a specifically Phoenician innovation, although similar systems (such as abugidas), which are also phonetic, have emerged elsewhere.
I agree that many software developers are pretentious and arrogant. When they see something that looks dysfunctional or inefficient from the outside — whether it's healthcare or education or construction or warfare — they default to assuming that it's because the people involved must be stupid and lazy, and enlightened engineers could do it better. The reality is that the people working in those fields are no less intelligent than software engineers. It's just that their big problems aren't amenable to technical solutions.

When working on any problem or project, assume that everyone else involved is smarter than you are until definitively proven otherwise. By not making negative assumptions you'll look smarter yourself.
So we’re back to the idea that only philosopher kings can shape and rule the ideal world? Plato would be proud!

Jests aside, I love the idea of incorporating an all encompassing AI philosophy built up from the rich history of thinking, wisdom, and texts that already exist. I’m no expert, but I don’t see how this would even be possible. Could you train some LLM exclusively on philosophical works, then prompt it to create a new perfect philosophy that it will then use to direct its “life” from then on? I can’t imagine that would work in any way. It would certainly be entertaining to see the results, however.

That said, AI companies would likely all benefit from a team of philosophers on staff. I imagine most companies would. Thinking deeply and critically has been proven to be enormously valuable to humankind, but it seems to be of dubious value to capital and those who live and die by it.

The fact that the majority of deep thinking and deep work of our time serves mainly to feed the endless growth of capital - instead of the well-being of humankind - is the great tragedy of our time.
The webapps Google makes only work well on the browser Google makes and all these students have no choice but to use Google services to complete their education? That is a very clever trick they've pulled.
I think they're referring to nationality not ethnicity.

Chinese nationals know how to deal with Party officials because necessary to get ahead in China, not because it's some racial trait.
This neglects that some people can't be vaccinated or they would still be vulnerable even after an effective vaccination. You're not just vaccinated to protect yourself, it also reduces risk for the people around you.
Why do you think they are pretending? Many of us agree with them.

I think “trying to pretend” is just one of those thought terminating cliches to pretend that you have a winning argument.
All Lisp indentation schemes are ugly
It’s a fun button/shortcut to push, but it just helps Google get better at downweighting false reports if it’s not used on the conventional definition of spam.
Yes, it does explain it.

What makes this card powerful, lies in the way it changes how NFC behaves on your device when it's set as a default transit card:

Your device stops randomizing the UID on each tap;
Your device begins responding to all NFC readers as if they were express-transit enabled, just like on Android;
Also this card does not change its serial number and UID when moving to other devices, unlike most other ones.

https://github.com/kormax/apple-device-as-access-card?tab=re...
Sorry, the goal here is not to trivialize GitHub, or suggest they suck at engineering, or even to say this is easy. I am just saying my own perspective, which is that I wish the core properties (pull requests, issues) had improved a long time ago. I have been a maintainer of a top 0.01% project, and I have seen it get in the way where other tools would have been tolerable. It hasn't always been easy to be a fan.
Does this mean they would be obligated to censor tank man content in the US at the CCP's request?
Standalone vote in the house was pretty supportive and bipartisan too https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/202486.
Yea if I see a 4 year old with an ipad in a restaurant I lose respect for the parents. Parenting is hard, and everyone fails at some point but there are certain things I have never comprised on and social media/digital crack at a young age is one of them.
Your comment would be more productive if you provided a counter example or any argument to support your claim.
I admire that the AI developers have stuck to the “we won’t let our AI kill people” values to this point, but to me it seems highly unlikely that those safeguards will stay in place for any lengthy period of time when they’ve already chosen to get in bed with the military industrial complex.
Anthropic's MCP Client Directory
It’s less the cat videos and more the constant deluge of at best half researched context-free clips about how awful western society is.
> you can absolutely ctrl+c before 100 more ms are up

Not gonna believe that without empirical evidence.
I'm sure there are many other cheap and easy ways to improve morale on deployments, but that many of those options are eschewed and/or only offered with oversight because they would otherwise risk operational security.

I'm not sure what to make of the argument that the military is unable to find any alternative to consumer smartphones without even RMM implemented as a means of providing for troop morale, therefore the government should regulate social media for the entirety of society as a means to ensure the security of military maneuvers. This just sounds nuts to me.
People come up with new things all the time. It happens in this very moment, all around the world. I don't see how this is astonishing.
> neo-Nazis (aren't any actual nazis left)

Neo-Nazis are a subset of Nazis though, no?
Yes I'm aware this trope is applied to every communist country that's ever existed. I've never been in a conversation where it added anything.

It's like saying the Pope isn't Christian. It's really a hidden statement about gatekeeping.
No paywall

https://tribunecontentagency.com/article/philosophy-eats-ai/
Should the ACLU defend the rights of someone to blow up nuclear bombs in their backyard?

That’s a clear curtailment of their civil liberties. And assuming they’re in a rural area may not harm anyone else either.

This is an obviously extreme example but the point still stands. Any civil liberties organization cannot focus absolutely narrowly on that question in every situation but has to apply a broader approach.
Of course you can. Nothing stops the same group of people from congregating on Discord, Rumble, or even in real life.
Unknown, but I'd hazard a guess that old cave art that depicts animals and sizes probably had sounds associated with them too. Humans like to tell stories, so probably cave art had oral history of some kind, and pictures probably became progressively more precise to handle progressively more complex stories, maybe about seasons, places, counting to keep track of things, etc.
It doesn't mean the same though, 2.6k implies somewhere between 2550 and 2650 years ago and 2600 an exact number of years.
Thanks for the extension. By the way it only started working after I switched the X display language to English.
I don't know that I'd consider YouTube to be social media, though there are similarities.
All of humanity will die eventually, and all of its accomplishments will be buried, so why do anything?
Dang. Comments seem to be accumulating on this thread faster than they can be moderated. I'm not trying to call anyone names, but there seem to be A LOT of different political opinions and more than a few conspiracy theories. But who knows... maybe the conspiracy theorists are right... Just wanted to say thanks to the community for not being as flamey as one might expect for a comments section on the internet.
>"Their preference to shut down instead of receiving tens of billions of dollars would be a clear violation of a company’s fiduciary duty to shareholders"

I am shedding tears for those poor shareholders.
I can remember using UNIX spell with the '-b' option, because I am British. There were only two language options, and now I want to know what the decision making was behind that, how the code catered for that and where the respective dictionaries came from. Did Australians and New Zealanders use British spelling or American?

UNIX spell was the 'ZX81 1K chess' of spelling, and, on home computers, we did not have a lot of spell checking going on until MS Word for Windows 3.1. Before then, in offices, secretaries did the typing with WordPerfect. They were human spell checkers for their respective managers and teams.

Meanwhile, at home, with our dot matrix printers and flickery screens, we were winging it with paper dictionaries for all of those early years of computing. I can't remember spell checking as being that important back then as everyone could spell. I was in a school of a thousand and there was only one kid that claimed to be dyslexic, a plausible excuse for not being able to spell. Maybe the 1980s was literacy's golden age with there being a clear start date for the decline in our spelling ability, that being the day UNIX spell was written.

I like to play Scrabble. Although a very different problem to spell checking, the process shares some steps with UNIX spell. Common word prefixes and suffixes are identified and bolted together in the rack or on the board with other components. Then a Scrabble dictionary is a bit like UNIX spell as it is just a big dictionary of words with no meanings provided. All that matters is whether a given word is in the book or not. It also has a few special look up tables such as the 102 two letter words.
There are many card types (notably the Japanese transit cards using the Suica system) that will change their UID when moved between iOS devices.
So Mercurial had something like this back in ancient times, but git devs decided to make a worse implementation.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651007

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42673628
I tried Feedly after Google Reader shut down but eventually settled on Feedbin - that might be worth a look.
The information (history/discoveries) can be distributed throughout the world and not dependent on one place anymore.
Past that, we'll have to leave the planet.
They would defend the Nazi right to free speech.

You seem to be confused between principally defending everyone having the same rights vs defending everything anyone can do.

The ACLU defends Nazi’s rights because they believe Nazis should have the same rights as everyone else irrespective of who they are.

That doesn’t mean they defend every possible action that can be considered a civil liberty.
COINTELPRO [1] (and [2])

IRS Targeting [3] (misuse of technology to unfairly target political opponents)

Stellar Wind [4] (related to XKEYSCORE)

DCSNet [5]

ECHELON [6]

Project Shamrock [7] (an oldie but telling of the culture of intelligence agencies and collusion with private business)

Hepting v. AT&T [8] (hilarious because the outcome was that the government just changed the rules to give retroactive immunity to data providers)

> And not about some agency collecting data, or targeting a foreign national with suspected ties to terrorist, all which are within the bounds of the law.

When “bounds of the law” can be extended to be any U.S. citizen (and I can just fill in “suspected terrorist ties” in the “why” column [9]), then there aren’t really any bounds. The entire point is that these data collection programs and databases shouldn’t even exist.

> I want to hear an example where a US citizen, fully innocent, who was targeted for no reason what so ever for someone for personal gain.

I can’t (unless you’d count the admission of error in the surveillance of Carter Page [10]) because they created a shadow court (FISC or “FISA Court” in the 70s) to push through surveillance warrants on their own terms [see 9]. There’s zero requirement to publicly report any surveillance (or its outcome) authorized under a FISA-granted warrant.

This further highlights the problem: American citizens are supposed to just blindly trust entities that not only have unlimited access to our information if they want it, but also have a court with judges that will push through surveillance warrants (see stats on the number of approved warrants vs. those rejected or requiring amendment)?

And that document I linked? You’re right, I skimmed it. My point with sharing that was that a system that shouldn’t even exist still does and is still being used under the rule of the FISA court, not the greater U.S. Justice System.

The report itself is covered in redactions. It’s clearly a (arguably weak) case of plausible deniability (my own speculation—you can call me an idiot but I think that’s the more intelligent position, here). I’m all for patriotism and protecting the country, but not under the pretense that all Americans be made into de-facto criminals and unwillingly submit (without recourse) to limitless surveillance because they hypothetically, possibly, maybe could potentially have ties to “terrorists.”

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_Wind

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Collection_System_Netw...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_SHAMROCK

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT%26T

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...

[10] https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/23/politics/fisa-carter-page-war...
There's No Wave Function? [video]
For those skimmimg the problem is mktime() returns local time, and they want it in UTC. So you need to subtract the timezone used, but the timezone varies by date you feed mktime() and there is no easy way to determime it.

If you are happy for the time to perhaps be wrong around the hours timezone changes, this is an easy hack:

import time
def time_mktime_utc(_tuple):
result = time.mktime(_tuple[:-1] + (0,))
return result * 2 - time.mktime(time.gmtime(result))

If you are just using it for display this is usually fine as time zone changes are usually timed to happen when nobody is looking.
They seem to be going in quite hard on banning people in both Discord and reddit talking about it, too.

Not a good look.
The law has a provision permitting the President to grant 90 day exceptions. Trump has indicated he'll sign one tomorrow. This isn't going around the law, it's just the law as written. We can debate whether the law was good or bad, but this is an outcome the law directly supports.
The law gives him some power to grant a 90-day reprieve, iff he makes some 'certifications' to congress w.r.t. progress toward compliance.
But is it also dumb?
I wish you luck.

I used to have a time tracking app that has been out of service for a little over three years now.
My read says the law itself is a presidential power, doesn't have to be pushed unless the President wants it
This is Trump playing chess. ByteDance, Greenland, The Gulf of Mexico, Panama Canal- All this, and he's not even President yet. It's all part of a bigger picture and a bigger plan with sizable levers. Some love this, others find it terrifying.
I'm sure I remember seeing an image of the 'official' wheel at the time, but I think it was in a less mainstream magazine - probably home computing weekly.

I did own the mastertronic rebadge of it a couple of years later, and it was dire, really dire.

Oh, and a fun fact, 'Mastertronic' still exists, of a sort... Flight Simulator and Train Simulator vendor 'Just Flight'/'Just Trains' purchased the Mastertronic brand about 20-some years ago, and purchases from them still show up as Mastertronic in financial records.
New videos and “new videos from someone that’s never been seen before” or “who I’ve never seen before” are very different things.
Ask HN: What is a desktop automation task you would pay for?
What is something you or someone at your company has to do repetitively on a desktop?

For example, it may involve some minor variations, could be kind of 'messy' and involves clicking through various programs, checking outputs, deciding from there, etc.

Example: during an internship I remember running regression tests, which meant running some scripts, re-running them if they hanged for too long (don't ask), checking output log files for a few specific lines, and then emailing the results to my supervisor. Having to babysit the software run and do the manual stuff at the end was a pain and seemed like a waste of time but was unfortunately necessary.

Would be interested to hear other specific examples, as me and a few buddies are working on some desktop agent programs to try and tackle some tasks like this.
You're not "acting" stupid if you're not as smart as you think... you are.
I must protest, my good sir, I reckon that the Monthy Pythons have a perfect grasp of the English language!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zIV4poUZAQo
If anything, Europe is more protectionist about data security, so European nations should have a bigger concern about the claims of ByteDance siphoning user data.
Whoever they sell to becomes an immediate competitor though no? They’d get the software, US users and algo.
you can search twitter safely, hands free with audio only.
This seems like really quite bad design.

EDIT: 1) is the result of my misreading of the article, the "previous value" never existed in git.

1) Pushing a change that silently break by reinterpreting a previous configuration value (1=true) as a different value (1=0.100ms confirmation delay) should pretty much always be avoided. Obviously you'd want to clear old values if they existed (maybe this did happen? it's unclear to me), but you also probably want to rename the configuration label..

2) Having `help.autocorrect`'s configuration argument be a time, measured in a non-standard (for most users) unit, is just plainly bad. Give me a boolean to enable, and a decimal to control the confirmation time.
Unsubscribing or blackholing works well. When I started unsubscribing, the first couple weeks were a burden, but that was so long ago. In work email, I use filters and rules and then prioritize the important/focus filter. This is easy because there are fewer senders to manage at work.
> AWS seems to charge 1 cent per Gigabyte transferred for egress fees.

I am seeing 5-9x that?
Carbon Dioxide Levels Rose by a Record Amount Last Year
"Sucking up" implies there’s a meaningful choice—that firms or individuals can realistically be expected to show courage now. But voters chose this, knowingly. Blaming firms for bowing to public will misdiagnoses the issue and wastes emotional energy fighting a false battle.

Whats the realistic alternative? Standing up to Trump? The president who has explicitly said he will retaliate against firms and individuals who oppose him.

The same president who was re-elected even though everyone knew this was coming?

If this bothers you, and you want to address it, focus on identifying the real root cause and work toward changing that.

And if you genuinely believe firms would act differently, make the case. But let’s be honest—how many rational people would stand up to someone who:

- Faces no accountability,
- Has the Supreme Court and legislature backing him,
- Is in power for a second term,
- Commands an incredibly effective political machine (Fox-GOP),
- has die-hard voters behind him?
As per US law....
But there are American users making and viewing content on that platform.

The physical equivalent would be if China was hosting a TED-talk-like conference where anyone can come and hold a presentation, and after certain kinds of talks became popular congress would tell them that they are no longer allowed to let Americans in, neither to hold presentations nor to listen to them.

Technically that doesn't violate the constitution, but it's not difficult to argue that it does violate the spirit of the constitution
A paper out of Rutger's:

> For pop-culture hashtags, the ratio between platforms is consistently range-bound:

> Conversely, the ratios we found for topics sensitive to the Chinese Government were completely out-of-bounds.

> The data below illustrates that across topics directly sensitive to the Chinese Government, relevant hashtags are dramatically underrepresented on TikTok vs. Instagram.

> Given the unanimity of anomalies, we expanded our research to topics relevant to the Chinese Government’s geopolitical interests: 1) Ukraine-Russia War; 2) Kashmir Secessionism; 3) Israel-Hamas War. There too, we found relevant hashtags are dramatically underrepresented on TikTok vs. Instagram.

* https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing...

* Via: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/tiktok-is-just-the-beginning
> You’re free to criticize the government however you see fit, but you’re not guaranteed the right to a microphone and stage that isn’t yours.

So if I wanted to hold a speech how corrupt the government is and then the government passed a law that a PA supplier isn't allowed to sell me a Microphone or speakers, that wouldn't infringe my first amendment right because I don't have a right to a microphone or a stage? (Im not American so I don't have any first amendment rights anyways but for arguments sake.)
What's the philosophy department at the local steel fabricator contributing exactly?
Because they read random crap on X they thought sounded smart and are now simply regurgitating it with no further thought or consideration.

And “free speech absolutism (for me, not for you or anyone else)” is the current right-wing cause celebre.
I mean sure, once AI can write perfect code, infer specifications from vague and conflicting instructions and has full access to all siloed information developers will no longer be needed. And once we've perfected fusion energy all our energy issues will be solved.

But at that point AI writing code will be the least impressive thing it can do.
I believe the patent was highlighting an additional issue and providing a pretty clear follow up question.

Not equating the two questions.
"for the love of $deity lets not discuss it here" - good idea, and why not take your own advice.
All your examples miss the part about the company being a foreign government's psy-ops vehicle.
Certainly. I get that, I'm just saying you are remarkably patient to be willing to actually explain this to other people. Maybe you're not familiar with the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Personally I'm inclined to be more blunt and impatient. Whataboutism is intellectually lazy in the best case, in the worst case it means the interlocuter is manipulative or just actually operating at the emotional level of a 5 year old. Good people just don't like bad behaviour.. they won't wait around to find out which team committed the bad behaviour, and they won't refuse to fix 1 evil until another 2nd evil is addressed first, etc. Also relevant here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Poisoned_Arrow
China isn't your dog. What if you invited your neighbour over, and they pooped on your floor, repeatedly. And then they said you're not allowed into their house.