skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Honestly any time I read the procedural history of this stuff I get nerd sniped by the bizarre details and I lose track of the big picture. I feel like the whole thing could be three competing Dateline NBC style six-part crime specials and I still wouldn't get tired of it.

Ross heard that one of his Silk Roads moderators was arrested, and so he hired someone to kill the mod? The assassin sent a confirmation photo of his mod, asphyxiated and covered in Campbell's Chicken and Stars Soup?? The supposed assassin was actually a corrupt DEA agent who later served federal prison time for crimes so embarrassing that they were never fully disclosed?!?!

There is some kind of thorny moral question I cannot quite wrap my brain around.

Ross did not successfully have anyone killed, but it seems that he must have thought he was successful?

Ross (it is alleged, and chat logs seem to show) ordered someone's death and paid for it and got explicit confirmation that they were dead. [actually several someones.] Did he feel like a murderer at this point? What a fascinating, real life Raskolnikov style figure.

Later, perhaps much later, he gets strong evidence that the murder was fake. Nothing has changed in the outside world after he learns this -- the victim is no more alive before or after he learns this. Does this change his identity? Is he more or less of a murderer than before?

Do the people who kill with modified Xbox controllers from a warehouse in Las Vegas do the same kind of killing that Ross thought he did?

And then there is some kind of moral thought experiment happening at a Silicon Valley Rationalist, Effective Altruism kind of scale that I can't quite wrap my head around. Do people matter as much in person as if they're just blips on a screen you'll never meet? If Ross could have sent 1 BTC to prevent fatal malaria in a dozen young kids, thousands of miles away, but he didn't, should he feel responsible in some way for their death? Is he about equally responsible for them as for the online people he is pretty sure he ordered killed from afar, but never met?

It's just a lot. The whole story is supernaturally intense; it's hard to believe it was real. It will make for great TV.

See, e.g.

- https://www.vice.com/en/article/murdered-silk-road-employee-... for the faux forum moderator killing

- https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/silk-road-drug-vendor-w... for the other faux five killings (another scam on Ross - he thought he was having extortionists killed? he kept getting confirmations?)
> Biden should have already pardoned Ross because that crazy sentence shouldn't have happened in the first place.

Biden did commute the sentence of several other non-violent cases just last week or thereabouts, and Trump has been talking about Ulbricht for quite some time so it's not a complete surprise.

I guess the whole "murder for hire" thing excluded him from the "non-violent" category. But how that got tacked on seems very odd; the judge basically said "we didn't really handle it in the court case and it wasn't a charge, but it was mentioned a few times and it seemed basically true, so I included it in the sentencing". Like, ehh, okay?

To be honest, I don't really understand much of the logic ("logic") of the US justice system....
People in power in this era do that.

The democrats are broken. They keep running women, and not getting messages out that appeal to the average voter. They lost their core reliable voters (old people, Catholics, unions) and are alienating more traditional voting blocs like African Americans and some Hispanic populations with the constant drama over trans issues. Nobody heard about anything this election cycle other than abortion and transgender issues. It’s a big tent party, but when progressives steal all the oxygen, the wheels fall off the train.

They need to run a tall white dude with good hair who talks about economic opportunity, fair play and protecting the future.

My parents live in the country. A farmer (whose father was the county Democratic Party chair) has a massive sign “Trump. I don’t like him, but we need him”. That’s the 2024 election unfortunately.
Yeah the big problem I have with my field is that there seems to be stronger incentives to be chasing benchmarks and making things look good than there is to actually solve the hard problems. There is a strong preference for "lazy evaluation" which is too dependent on assuming high levels of ethical presentation and due diligence. I find it so problematic because this focus actually makes it hard for people to publish who are tackling these problems. Because it makes the space even noisier (already incredibly noisy by the very nature of the subject) and then it becomes hard to talk about details if they're presumed solved.

I get that we gloss over details, but if there's anywhere you're allowed to be nuanced and be arguing over details should it not be in academia?

(fwiw, I'm also very supportive of having low bars to publication. If it's void of serious error and plagiarism, it is publishable imo. No one can predict what is important or impactful, so we shouldn't even play that game. Trying to decide if it is "novel" or "good enough for <Venue>" is just idiotic and breeds collusion rings and bad actors)
Given conflict in that part of the world, are wooden buildings a security risk since they can more easily be set on fire? I’ve read that mass timber has fire resistance but I can’t imagine that’s comparable to the fire resistance of concrete and steel.
Using tap water for nasal rinse puts you at risk for nasty bacterial infections, possibly affecting the brain.

Use distilled / dionised water, or boil water (and allow it to cool) for such use.

A neti pot or nasal rinse bottle are cheap at any druggist's.
> Under our system that means he should be considered innocent of it.

Nope. This doesn't mean anything, and the charges can be picked up again.

Oh wait, no. He was pardoned completely.
Because speakers of English arrived at the arbitrary decision that it is.

Whenever you're faced with the question: "why is x y?", you should ask yourself "is x y?". In this case, zero is plural... in English. But not in all languages! (I think in Arabic zero is singular.)

You can read about plural rules in different languages here[1]. For example some languages have three numbers: singular, dual, and plural. This is what Proto Indo European had and some descendants still do. Have you ever found it weird how "pants" or "glasses" are kinda plural but also kinda singular?

An interesting table to look at is here[2]. It compares all the rules in various languages for how to form cardinals. For example, English has two numbers: singular and plural and two rules to determine it: `n == 1`, `n != 1`.

My language, Romanian, also has only singular and plural, but we have three different categories: singular, plural without "of", plural with "of": `n == 1`, `n != 1 && n % 100 == 1..19`, `...the remaining cases...`. So we say "3319 horses", but "3320 of horses". It's very weird, but that's how languages work.

[1]: https://cldr.unicode.org/index/cldr-spec/plural-rules
[2]: https://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/46/supplemental/language...
This was my favorite game.
I've got 10M songs in my pocket. Now what? (2012)
Madoff got 150 years for non-violent charges (and he didn't even try to have anyone killed). Died in prison.
Signal is likely funded by the CIA and other intelligence actors:

https://yasha.substack.com/p/signal-is-a-government-op-85e

https://www.kitklarenberg.com/p/signal-facing-collapse-after...

https://www.city-journal.org/article/signals-katherine-maher...

https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/08/Signal.html

https://bigleaguepolitics.com/court-docs-show-fbi-can-interc...
10 years is plenty. No point in keeping non-violent offenders behind bars for absurd amounts of time.
What would a world with AGI look like?
Clickbait- and misleading headline. The story is about one private property developer project in a suburb of Stockholm. Not some government initiative.
I made a shell alias to translate things from French to English, does that count?

function trans
llm "Translate \"$argv\" from French to English please"
end

Llama 3.2:3b is a fine French-English dictionary IMHO.
I grew up with an Atari 2600 that was connected to a small color TV. Eventually, that same TV was used with the NES, but it wasn't until the NES that I learned that TV had a serious flaw. The bezel on the TV actually covered up part of the image so that I was unable to see the edges of some games. I learned this playing Metal Gear and was just utterly stuck. I wound up buying a magazine with hints for the game, and started comparing the screen grabs in the 'zine to what I could see. It wasn't until quite some time later that I asked someone and they told me about overscan/underscan. I took the TV to some repair place, and they opened it up and adjusted it (there was no switch to enable underscan).

The things kids today will never have to endure /s
That is talking about the 2023 Executive Order about training AI. Not the recent one about chip exports.
Someone has to question the status quo. If we just did the same things there would be a lot less progress. The author took the time to articulate their argument, and publish it. I appreciate their effort even if I may not agree with their argument.
Because zero is not singular.

If you take singular as equal to 1 and plural as the opposite of singular it‘s obvious
I’ve used Claude to ask me questions about my plans and potential features. It’s pretty good for that. Letting it make the plan itself? Nah.
For fun, I calculated how this stacks up against other humanity-scale mega projects.

Mega Project Rankings (USD Inflation Adjusted)

The New Deal: $1T,

Interstate Highway System: $618B,

OpenAI Stargate: $500B,

The Apollo Project: $278B,

International Space Station: $180B,

South-North Water Transfer: $106B,

The Channel Tunnel: $31B,

Manhattan Project: $30B

Insane Stuff.
If you have a legal department and security officer, I’d get them involved immediately.
I agree: online black markets should be free trade. If drugs were legalized, even fewer issues would exist, and it would be easier to isolate the actual crime which imposes negative, third party externalities like traffiking or violence.
GOP house could hardly operate last round and … they won more seats.
Is "securing your backend" an option on the table? A simple VPN or network subnet might frustrate them and send them away, but if your product isn't secure that's a serious problem you should fix.
logic.

for words: rhymezone, roget, oed, b-rhymes, fun python dictionary things :~)
I don't know either.

Managing patches or features seems to be easier to think about: "I want feature X in this build but not Y for reasons even though Y was in the last build..."

But language (software or otherwise) doesn't really work that way.

You could imagine a novel written using a VCS where in one branch of the novel a main character lives throughout the novel dying at the end. In another branch, that character dies in chapter 1. Now try to merge the two branches automatically.

Sure, you might get a novel, but the character lives on after chapter 2 nonsensically.

That's the same issue with programming languages. "Syntax" is not the same as "Functionally Coherent".
I've seen this on SoundCloud, but that was a while ago.
Cases have made it to the Supreme Court --- recently! --- and it held up just fine. This is another message board fixation. I'm sure it's abused all over the place. It wasn't in this case.
> Executive Order 14006 of January 26, 2021 (Reforming Our Incarceration System To Eliminate the Use of Privately Operated Criminal Detention Facilities)

Joe Lonsdale[1], co-founder of Palantir and Trump backer, is an investor in private prisons[2].

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

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=Joe+Lonsdale+prisons
LLM Catcher – Python library that teams up with LLMs to decode exceptions
Who were the cop killers from Jan 6?
> I disagree

With what? English is defined by use, and we can find untold examples of "No star in the sky."
I happily admit it's more than possible to come up with examples that make inheritance shine. After all, that's what the authors of these books and articles do.

But most of them put the cart before the horse (deliberately design a "problem" that inheritance "solves") and don't seriously evaluate pros and cons or even consider alternatives.

Even then, some of the examples might be legitimate, and what you're referring to might be a case of one. (though I doubt there's no equally elegant and succinct way to do it without inheritance)

But none of that changes the fact that inheritance absolutely shouldn't be the default goto solution for modeling any domain it has become (and we are taught to understand it as)

or that it's exceedingly uncommon to come across situations like yours where you have 500+ shared cases of behavior and you only want to "override" 5

or that inheritance is overwhelmingly used NOT for such niche edge cases but as a default tool to model even the most trivial relationships, with zero justification or consideration
It's kind of crazy to see this project posted here on hackernews just now. I've been trying to compile an open source Delphi 7 project and have been having issues sourcing a dependency called OpenGLLib. Through my searches I actually bumped into the Castle Game Engine a bunch! Unfortunately it looks like the usage of opengl doesn't exactly line up.
On the one hand the number is a political thumb-suck which sounds good. It's not based in any kind of actual reality.

Yes, the data center itself will create some permanent jobs (I have no real feel for this, but guessing less than 1000).

There'll be some work for construction folk of course. But again seems like a small number.

I presume though they're counting jobs related to the existence of a data center. As in, if I make use of it do I count that as a "job"?

What if we create a new post to leverage AI generally? Kinda like the way we have a marketing post, and a chunk of the daily work there is Adwords.

Once we start gustimamating the jobs created by the existence of an AI data center, we're in full speculation mode. Any number really can be justified.

Of course ultimately the number is meaningless. It won't create that many "local jobs" - indeed most of those jobs, to the degree they exist at all, will likely be outside the US.

So you don't need to wait for a post-mortem. The number is sucked out of thin air with no basis in reality for the point of making a good political sound bite.
> if the algorithm cannot be explained in easily understandable language (as determined by a jury), then it's illegal.

You've just made

- A*
- VNMC Sampling
- Runge–Kutta
- PDE solvers
- Integrals
- Monte Carlo Integration

and so much more illegal. You've probably made all of computing illegal because good luck explaining systemd let alone kernels to a jury.
> current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure it out in the next 4 years...

Or they think the odds are high enough that the gamble makes sense. Even if they think it's a 20% chance, their competitors are investing at this scale, their only real options are keep up or drop out.
It’s not universal. Nsf is a narrow view of academia. There are other countries that pay postdocs properly (ie comfortable own place with kids) with benefits and pension.
ELI5: Passive sonar gives you the opponent's bearing only; Active sonar gives you the opponent's bearing and range; active sonar gives your bearing to your opponent(s); firing a torpedo gives away your bearing to your opponent(s). Why wouldn't you confirm a solution with active sonar before firing?
So, are you a go left or go right type of player?

Edit: Ugh, I had a weird quirk where the sound of getting hit by a log would not stop sounding. Even tried hitting another log hoping it would reset, but nope. Cmd-R was the only solve
100,000 US jobs that I bet most are h-1b workers and they go over the 80,000 limit there were over 220,000 issued in 2023
Toxic perhaps, but it didnt stop the icelanders.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hákarl
Old Reddit vibes
I wish instead of criminalizing addiction we'd fund harm reduction centers and rehabilitation services.

I would much rather the police be focused on stopping violent crime rather than these victimless crimes.

Legitimizing drugs/prostitution makes is easier to regulate and ultimately make safer. Shoving this stuff into a black/gray market is what ultimately creates violent crime.
Why Does Trump Love Tariffs?
Right now I write lots of EDM. I plug in something with lots of unquantized delay on it and just make noise. I listen back to it and hear songs in the rhythms from the delay trails. That gets me started. From there I finish up in Live adding kick, bass and whatever else comes to mind.

You could use AI generated music this way, generate some songs and sample snippets or find interesting rhythms.
Crev: Personal web of trust in other people and the code they use and review
Yes. I think many of them are. The harassment and constant criticism isn't worth it unless you really care about the people you serve in most cases.

It's pretty obvious which ones are doing it for themselves.
Hardly. Who better to invest a trillion dollars with than the guy who blew the last hundred billion dollars?
> This could have waited until after the midterms.

On the contrary, he can just bury it in the first 48 hours. This will fade into the background soon enough but that group is kept happy.
Neom: $1.5T
I was thinking of this too, oddly, also examples around books.

I vaguely feel like “no book” could also be parsed as… not one book, maybe? Like we’re saying there isn’t even one book on the subject. Maybe?

I dunno. The scenario that popped into my head was: what if you had a bookshop, where the shopkeeper would sometimes pick out books for you. If they said “I have no books for you today,” I’d imagine that they just generally didn’t find any books for you. Meanwhile if they said “I have no book for you today,” I guess I’d expect that you are waiting for a particular book, and it didn’t come in today. Somehow, there is a difference between the absence of a book and the absence of any books, even though in fact there are zero books in either case.
Hey Doug, huge fan of yours. Thank you for everything.
Perhaps too simplistic since tenure is not the only way to “make it” in academia. Many people have academic careers without making tenure. You’ve also excluded people who publish impactful work, spend time teaching, and leave before seeking tenure. It might be fair to say 84% of graduating PhDs don’t make tenure, it’s just jumping to conclusions to say they don’t make it in academia.

Also don’t forget there’s a large time lag between graduating PhDs and when they get tenure, so today’s 270k graduates might be shooting for the next decade’s 15k or 20k tenure spots. Or… who knows they might be shooting for the future 5k spots if the rumors about colleges trying to reduce their use of tenure are true.

“Non-tenure-track faculty account for about half of all faculty appointments in American higher education.” … “About 90 percent of all full-time lecturers and nearly 50 percent of all full-time instructors are nontenure track.” https://www.aaup.org/report/status-non-tenure-track-faculty
Lots of back door deals. Just expect more government things put in TX just like the Army built that place in Austin, when we have plenty of dead bases that could be reused
Most recently ive been bit by this with datadog. The Python version does some monkeypatching to inject trace info. The go version you need to inject the trace info explicitly. While the latter takes more setup, it was much easier to understand what was going on and to debug when we ran into issues.
He wasn't dealing them. He's not exactly culpable for the effects of his platform any more than Zuckerberg is responsible for mass hate speech coordinated by third-world dictators or Evan Spiegel for facilitating millions of nude images of children and teenagers.
Japan is probably not the example you're after as it isn't the country many of us remember from back in the day when it was rivaling the US for economic dominance. Their economy has been in recession/stagnation for about 3 decades now. Their stock market is now finally above where it was in 1989, up 1.5%. [1] Though that will probably be short lived, especially as their population is now dying off fast enough that even places like Tokyo are declining in population! It's a great recipe for affordable housing, keeping inflation manageable, and much more. Probably not an advisable path to go down though!

An example of a successful non-fiat economy would obviously be the US. Until 1971 we had various forms of backing to our currency. After 1971 we invented this abomination of a system which probably only lasted as long as it did thanks to the growth of digital technologies making infinite growth, to meet infinite debt, briefly sustainable, all be it only with rather dramatic consequences, particularly for the lower half of society.

[1] - https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/stock-market
My apologies I made a mistake. The Burdick SCOTUS case from 1915 said “carries an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it”

In 2021, an appeals court opined that: “not every acceptance of a pardon constitutes a confession of guilt.”

I thought the 2021 case was a Supreme Court case, and I was incorrect. I think in the public eye the pardon is viewed differently based on however the story is told.
In 2013, I graduated from a top 3 school in my field of engineering. I was getting paid $23 000/year as a PhD student.

I hated it every second of it too. 11 years later I still loath everything I did then.
Libertarians are not a joke. Some of the most powerful people on earth are libertarians. The people who write off libertarians are blind.

I prefer corporations because I can voluntarily choose to take my business elsewhere, or even better, create my own competitor. Why I dislike the government is that it's the ultimate monopoly, with guns, and operated mostly by power-hungry sociopaths who will use that power to destroy innocent lives.

Given the corporation or the state, I take the corporation every time.
It’s the same in German.
Not for liter because the German Liter is also its plural form.
Slovenian has four plural forms and Arabic has _six_. Here's a nice list with details and rules: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural...
My experience with very highly paid frontend developers is they like to spend hours and hours (and thousands and thousands of dollars) building out little libraries and components and frameworks that will enable other teams to be faster. Except this never eventuates because things rarely turn out to be reusable along the right axis so a new component or library or framework is developed to solve the problem.

On top of this UI developer propellor-heads love to spend time (and money) pontificating on abstract theories about functional programming and homomorphisms and endofunctors so they can render some text inside a <b> tag. It's how we wound up with utterly ridiculous pieces of code like the "hooks" API in React.
I really can't with these paper titles anymore, man.
It’s pretty well known that god wrote the universe in lisp and a ball of Perl scripts.
“My shelf contains no book” almost wants to become “my shelf contains no such book!” to my eye. Like the book is cursed or forbidden, haha.
Aaron tried to give the world free access to information for no personal gain.

Ross ran an online marketplace for drugs and other illegal materials for personal profit.

The life sentence was ridiculous, but they're not he same at all.

It's the difference between Chelsea Manning or Snowden leaking state secrets and someone who sells on state secrets to the Russians or Chinese.
But careful. Many professors lie. And many of them are nasty.

Talk to the grad students of other professors