skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The price of land will skyrocket

Is that really true?

Let's look at some data from Google, the
World Bank, etc.:

US land area: 3,532,316 square miles

US population: 334.9 million

640 acres per square mile

( 640 * 3,532,316 ) / 334,900,000 =
6.750 acres per person

Fertility rate: 1.66 births per woman
(2022) World Bank

GDP growth rate: 2.5% annual change
(2023) World Bank

So, per family of four, that would be

( 4 * 640 * 3,532,316 ) / 334,900,000
= 27 acres per family of four

"Skyrocket?" With the fertility rate of
1.66, the US population is falling so that
the acres per person is increasing.

A guess is that people are crowded into
tall buildings in dense cities to reduce
costs of communications. So, yes, in
dense cities, the cost of land per acre is
comparatively high.

But the Internet is reducing the costs of
communications meaning that people can
move to land that is less densely
populated and cheaper.

So, for the near future, tough to believe:

> The price of land will skyrocket
Well, that would be good, because when we asked him in the Q&A at FOSDEM he had no idea about colored pointers and did not mention semi-space collectors at all, and had no plan to add it.

I initially thought about using whippet, but I will stay clear and rather use MPS https://memory-pool-system.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
> Mean daily maximum in July and August in Utrecht is 23C/73F […]

Which is why heat waves/domes can be so lethal in Europe: people/infrastructure are not prepared for them.

* https://climate.copernicus.eu/heatwaves-brief-introduction

Same problem in Vancouver, Canada: it's a Marine climate, so when heat hits, folks aren't prepared for it.
Just eat the right kind of salmon:
"All species of Alaska wild salmon have very low levels of mercury."

From: https://health.alaska.gov/dph/Epi/eph/Pages/fish/default.asp...
> 1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it.

> 2. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use.

> 3. The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature.

My own editorial:

Point 1 is pretty interesting as if P != NP then this is essentially "we can't do better than random search". So, in order to find progressively better solutions as we increase the (linear) input, we need exponentially more resources to find the answer. While I believe P != NP it's interesting to see this play out in the context of learning and AI.

Point 2 is semi well-known. I'm having trouble finding it but there was an article a while back talking about algorithmic efficiencies to the DFT (or DCT?) were outpacing efficiencies that could be just attributed to Moore's law. Meaning the DFT was improving a few orders of magnitude faster than just Moore's law would imply. I assume this is essentially a Wright's law but for attention, in some sense, where more attention to problems leads to better optimizations that dovetail with Moore's law.

Point 3 seems like it's almost a corollary, at least in the short term. If intelligence is capturing the exponential search and it can be re-used to find further efficiency, as in point 2, you get super-exponential growth. I think Kurzweil mentioned something about this as well.

I haven't read the whole article but this jumped out at me:

> Our mission is to ensure that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) benefits all of humanity.

A bald faced lie. Their mission is to capture value from developing AGI. Any benefit to humanity is incidental.
You’re totally missing the point about this, the agencies being gutted, combined, are less than 8% of federal spending:

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

Even if entire agencies were bullshit, and that’s incredibly unlikely and unrealistic, it’d do absolutely nothing meaningful to our spending compared to our biggest expenses. This is a problem for a lot of people without backgrounds in economics or who are used to very, very, large numbers. A few billion dollars sounds like a lot, but it’s literally not even a tenth of a percent of our budget.

If they cared about reducing the budget, and finding inefficiencies they would nationalize the healthcare system since we as a nation pay nearly double that of any other country and have worse outcomes. It’s empirical they do not care about efficiency, based on their targets, they care about power. USAID was investigating NeuralLink that’s why it was targeted. Thats it.
Macron’s focus should be on making sure that France’s existing AI successes like Mistral, Owkin, and Bioptimus have the right business environment for scaling and internationalizing, closing big initiatives with big corps/institutions rather than launching yet another public-sector initiative. These startups already demonstrate France’s AI potential, but they need strategic support to compete globally. Instead of reinventing the wheel with new government programs, why not double down on making these companies world leaders?
This. Stuff like stitched leather was obviously indulgent without a lot of function, but skeumorphic buttons at least carried a standard complement of affordances that too much flat design ignores.
The messaging of men needing to be punished is definitely how it was felt and that produces the sort of society we’re living in right now. I still don’t believe that’s the actual intent but it can still be perceived that way and it’s important to consider.
NYPA is the state owned electric utility in NY. So yes, it is a triumph of socialism. A state owned entity supporting a local one.
Probably not. But from a skim-over, I'd say the article is a Scam Awareness PSA, disguised as Apple-boosting.
You say there's security clearance which was a prerequisite for the predecessors but was bypassed by the DOGE team. Understood.
Ask HN: How do I learn more about LLM-assisted transpilation (e.g. Python->C)?
I’ve been experimenting with Flet (a Python framework for Flutter) to quickly prototype cross-OS apps, mostly to easily get to iOS. It turns out Flet/Flutter is not great on iOS, and a number of packages don't work on iOS (PyTorch, Sentence-Transformer along with more usual ones).

I got frusterated and had Aider+Claude just rebuild my app in Swift (+ some server calls for sentence-transformer) and it worked surprisingly quickly (and almost well)!

This got me thinking ... maybe the future is building in janky expressive Python (or high level language of your choice) and using LLM enabled transpilers + profilers + unit tests to convert the bits that need performance or platform compatibility into C, CUDA, Kotlin, or Swift as needed?

I'd love to learn more about where the world is going here. I found a few papers (e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.03003) and I'd love to learn more about what compiler folks think, what kinds of benchmarks exist and what directions people are going in. I can only assume that PyTorch -> performant fused CUDA kernels is a thing that any number of folks are looking into.
> Lowest temperature so far this winter has been -21°F and my Haier Arctic heat pumps kept going […]

Crikey:

> For zones with exceptionally harsh winters, the Arctic mini split AC with heat pump ensures you stay warm even when temps get down to -31 degrees F.

* https://www.haierappliances.com/ductless/arctic-next-gen-ser...

-35˚C.
Maybe the layoff is not the biggest stink, but the fact they used to work for Facebook? Or post-truth is also the era of post-ethics?
Short answer: remapping single keys like Control is trivial with Kanata or without. I have no problems with this.

It is likely that AHK has some features not in Kanata, so you would have to explain what you do.
> exactly the sort of problem that doesn't happen with a Github issue/PR

What? PRs or issues being forgotten happens all the time, especially for large projects.
This is a sidestep imo. People _can_ be held accountable, though they will not always be. Machines add a layer of complexity - money is lost or a life is lost because AI made the call, who bears the burden? Machines _can't_ be held accountable.
I assume you mean built-in sharding across multiple nodes/instances/servers? No, there's no built-in support for that in MySQL, at least when using a general-purpose storage engine like InnoDB. (There are alternative engines like MySQL Cluster / NDB, as well as Spider in MariaDB, but these are not widely used and have some major shortcomings.)

Or if you just mean partitioning across the same node ("partitioned tables"), then yes, MySQL has had that feature for over 16 years.

That all said, I agree 100% with your overall point: scaling any relational database is challenging, and I don't see any evidence that Postgres is harder than others. In my direct experience, nearly every item in the original post has some analog in MySQL that can become problematic at scale. So I'm not sure what Postgres-specific concerns GP is referring to.
Yep. You can see it on the map in the Museo Nacional de Antropología. El periférico ("the ring highway") and other major roads follow the old causeways. I have been there many times in my life, maybe 30 or 40.
The authors have a specific definition of bullshit that they contrast with lying. In their definition, lying involves intent to deceive; bullshitting involves not caring if you’re deceiving.

Lesson 2, The Nature of Bullshit: “BULLSHIT involves language or other forms of communication intended to appear authoritative or persuasive without regard to its actual truth or logical consistency.”
Recently, I paid for OpenAI for Deep Research. I asked it about a topic I'm actively working on and researching: reactivity and effect systems. Deep Research ended up using my blog as a part of its research.

At first, I wasn't sure what to make of it. But reading the source, my blog post reminded me of some ideas I had consciously forgotten. The Deep Research report gathered some of those idea and repurposed it in an interesting way. So writing a blog is now a way to resurface ideas you might have forgotten yourself back to you, a kind of "memories" or "timehop" feature.
You should leave the flags, for the same reasons as last time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42933391
They elected a right-wing government, but it's pretty run of the mill, not the kind of crazy we're seeing in US and many places in Europe lately.
Right the intention to share knowledge.
There was no evidence found of fraud during the 2020 election despite being contested and audited. This is evidence that is being discovered now, because the election was not contested by the losing candidate in 2024 and was not audited.
Yes!

First, thank you for the link about CoT misrepresentation. I've written a fair bit about this on Bluesky etc but I don't think much if any of that made it into the course yet. We should add this to lesson 6, "They're Not Doing That!"

Your point about humanities courses is just right and encapsulates what we are trying to do. If someone takes the course and engages in the dialectical process and decides we are much too skeptical, great! If they decide we aren't skeptical enough, also great. As we say in the instructor guide:

"We view this as a course in the humanities, because it is a course about what it means to be human in a world where LLMs are becoming ubiquitous, and it is a course about how to live and thrive in such a world. This is not a how-to course for using generative AI. It's a when-to course, and perhaps more importantly a why-not-to course.

"We think that the way to teach these lessons is through a dialectical approach.

"Students have a first-hand appreciation for the power of AI chatbots; they use them daily.

"Students also carry a lot of anxiety. Many students feel conflicted about using AI in their schoolwork. Their teachers have probably scolded them about doing so, or prohibited it entirely. Some students have an intuition that these machines don't have the integrity of human writers.

"Our aim is to provide a framework in which students can explore the benefits and the harms of ChatGPT and other LLM assistants. We want to help them grapple with the contradictions inherent in this new technology, and allow them to forge their own understanding of what it means to be a student, a thinker, and a scholar in a generative AI world."
Last time I asked AI something, it started its response with "Yes, it's certainly possible to x with y." and closed its response with "in conclusion, unfortunately, it's not possible to x with y". In the same session, it told me one must press shift to get the number 1. I'm simultaneously amazed at its ability to generate what it can and disappointed at how it falls short so routinely. It'll get there eventually I'm sure, but I'm pretty dubious when people say they get a lot of value out of it.
To be clear, the security clearances you’re talking about, that look at “skeletons in their closet” or family members or whatever is not applied to MOST federal positions. This is only for a subset that are more sensitive. The type of activity people involved in DOGE are taking on does not require security clearances, just a background check. Also keep in mind, the people involved in DOGE are working alongside senior people, alongside people from agencies, and not just off on their own the way the media has been painting. Treasury secretary Bessent discussed this recently in public.
And one of the disadvantages is that you can't solve problems by just spending more. It's a real trade-off, and too often is simplified to one option being obviously better.
Syncthing, Dropbox, etc.
Atuin.sh solved all my problems with history: history by project : check, history by session :check, global history: check.
And if you want you can share history between computers.
I just have to enter 2-4 letters and I can found complex command to rerun or to reuse as example.
He's going after every single agency. Surely you're aware he's tarting health card and the Military already right? Do you know why the started with USAID?

Let's see where we are in 6 - 12 months, then if he hasn't touched anyone else I'll accept your point of him not targeting anything of value.
Ocean temperatures are rising much faster than scientists expected
You just ruled out 99% of humans from having reasoning capabilities.

The beautiful thing about reasoning models is that there is no need to overcomplicate it with all the things you've mentioned, you can literally read the model's reasoning and decide for yourself if it's bullshit or not.
On the other hand, we may all experience privacy at levels uncomfortable for a lot of people, which MIGHT trigger some desire to actually make things more privacy conscious.
Surrealist Compliment Generator
What are you talking about? Insane YoY rev growth. Still on a hockey stick growth curve. Lower PE than Apple. Best FCF in the biz. Well positioned to take over VR if it becomes a thing. WhatsApp is ripe for monetization.

Talk to any staff+ eng at Meta in Ads and they will tell you there's a lot of low hanging fruit left. Sure the music will stop eventually (it always does) but there's no evidence that's soon.

People need to separate their hatred of Meta/Zuck from an objective analysis of the company. Meta has been and continues to be an amazing stock to own.
Data scientists are generally better than financial auditors at handling large quantities of data.
If the time comes to discuss operating systems, I always suggest an exercise of downloading a Windows 11 Home ISO and installing it into a virtual machine, look at how much of it is installing an OS versus upselling into services using every dark pattern in the book. (With such hits as "the No button is hidden under a link-button called Learn More and only appears if you choose an advanced installation")

Once you're using it for >month, it's easy to see the BS as just an occasional inconvenience because saying yes is so much easier.
I agree that recall seems to play an important role in solving these problems. Similar to how the ARC-AGI problems seem to depend on visual perception of shapes and colors. When I come up with the correct answers to such puzzles, I feel subjectively that the answers flashed into my mind, not that I reasoned my way to them.
See https://learn.adacore.com/courses/intro-to-ada/chapters/obje...
> I'm sorry but what are these guys working on that's taking precedence over this?

Their day-jobs at other various Musk enterprises.
> Can you provide vetted sources that accurately communciate actual benefits as a result of this effory for anyone other than Elon Musk and Donald Trump as individuals?

Can you provide such sources that communicate the benefits of this effort for only Elon Musk and Donald Trump? I have seen a lot of speculation on the matter, with much of it plausible, but nothing concrete and nothing that really stands up to intense scrutiny.

At this point we're all working on a near-total information vacuum. To claim you know anything with certainty is presumptive, at best. To claim, with anything short of first-hand knowledge, that you both know exactly what is happening and exactly why it is happening is unbelievable.

Or at least it should be, but as discussion around this topic indicates, it's actually quite believable. Which is really a shame.
Well if you want change, convince the other side to vote for your candidates. This is what won. The people made their bed.
> discoverability (55) There were lots of comments about this, which all came down to the same basic complaint – it’s hard to discover useful tools or features! This comment kind of summed it all up:

> How difficult it is to learn independently. Most of what I know is an assorted collection of stuff I’ve been told by random people over the years.

This is all too true, the discoverability aspect is one of the reasons why we exist (0), and there is lots to improve here for discovering terminal tools, how to install and use them.

Also thanks for running this survey Julia.

Also, let us know on what we can improve on the site if you find Terminal Trove useful for you.

(0) https://terminaltrove.com/
I expect that pilots are allowed to have opinions about systems in the plane as being user unfriendly, like MCAS of 737 Max fame. I expect violinists to be allowed to complain when their bow is rosined wrong. Sure, we should expect users to at least read parts of the manual, but when billions of dollars have been spent so I can ask the computer to write me an ffmpeg invocation, haven't you got to ask to yourself that there's a chance we're making this unnecessary hard on ourselves for no reason?
How do you know who has a clearance? Is there a database they check? Or is it word of mouth from their boss?
Boeing Will Update 737 MAX to Keep Smoke from Entering Cockpit
Orders can be given that are unconstitutional or unlawful. Congress appropriates and designates funds, it is illegal for the executive to impound funds Congress appropriate. Unfortunately the GOP is happy to hand over their power in Congress and walk right into a dictatorship.
Any confusion here is on Elon.

He was responding to a tweet that featured a screenshot from the IRS website about Direct File. The tweet said "18F, the far left government wide computer office that was recently taken over by allies of @elonmusk, is also the same agency that built Elizabeth Warren's "Direct File" tax program. Direct File puts the government in charge of preparing people's tax returns for them". To which Musk responded "That group has been deleted".

If you google "Elon musk free file" you'll see dozens of articles with headlines like "Elon Musk creates confusion about IRS' Direct File".

It's unclear to me what the impact of "deleting" the group that built that product is. It's unclear whether Elon wants to delete that product and not just the team that built it, and given that they are suddenly shutting down whole agencies without regard for the fallout, it's unclear whether he will get rid of it.

It's a hell of a way to run a government.
Seagate's fraudulent drives scandal deepens as clues point at Chinese Chia farms
The comparison to street photography is very apt. My blogs are usually a snapshot of how I feel at a given moment in time. Even if they're just technical posts, they often reflect my understanding when I wrote them.

It's also fun to go back a year later to see how stupid/naive/ignorant I was 'back then'.

EDIT: since we're linking blogs - https://twomorecents.org :D
detailed video here: https://youtu.be/swlVkYVSlIE
I had suggested the virtual instructions to the RISC-V developers to eliminate branchy cmov assembly, as I am not happy with it either. It is surprising to realize that x86 cores are not making more use of macro-ops fusion, contrary to my expectation, but I guess it makes sense now that I think about it. Their designers have plenty of other knobs for tuning performance and the better their branch predictor becomes, the less this actually matters outside of the cases where developers go out of their way to use cmov.

A plugin would handle cases where the implicit idiom is emitted without needing the developer to explicitly try to force this. As far as I know, most people don’t ever touch conditional moves on the CPU and the few that do (myself included), only bother with it for extremely hot code paths, which leaves some dangling fruit on the table, particularly when the compiler is emitting the implicit version by coincidence. The safety of the transformation as a last pass in the compiler backend is not an issue since the output would be no more buggy than it previously was (as both branches are already calculated). Trying to handle all cases (the non-low dangling fruit) is where you have to worry about incorrect transformations.
> skipping over security clearances

This is not accurate. Most jobs in the federal government, including at the treasury, do not require security clearances. You’re confusing background checks, which are very basic, with the different types of security clearances, which aren’t required for something like a financial audit.
Trust me my representatives are complicit in this coup.
+1. ND and Thorne I trust blindly.
The frustrating thing is that the code for mouse move/selection already exists, but it's a total rathole to get it working, and I don't have the whatever to be a whatever maintainer across everywhere.
To avoid mixing up zeroes with the empty set or phi, simply put a dot inside of them instead of crossing them. Many fonts do that.
Nobody said that it's okay. But there are degrees of evil, and there's clearly one here. The guys who come, drop bombs on you, and leave again are bad, but the guys who come and drop bombs on you and then stay and imprison you and erase your entire culture by force are obviously worse.
If it is any consolation, I don't think there's anything more you can do as a moderator to solve the problem, as it will require the underlying human nature to change. In this context, the problem is with what is called 'peasant mentality'[^1], specifically defending a bureaucracy that is being dismantled by DOGE.

[^1]: https://x.com/sridca/status/1846935493100888262
Could you elaborate on this? I’m genuinely curious about how one would do that.
> non-profit immigration

Very vague. Wonder what they were really doing?

I worked for a USAID funded company once. On the surface they were doing satellite imagery analysis for agriculture. Want to know what they were really doing? Identifying prime agricultural land in Kenya to help the Kenyan government seize it from poor farmers.
I would prefer a "common core Linux" where most backports of stable distributions happen. Instead of each distribution fixing the same bugs in (slightly) different versions.
What a waste of resources.
Background checks have always been done on political appointees. They aren't a requirement for getting the position but historically they've been done prior to appointment so that leadership knows if they are a security risk.

And for appointees that require congressional confirmation the checks have been giving to congress prior to hearings for the same reason.

They weren't required but they very much have been done for political appointees in every admin in recent history except this one.