skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Associates. You know like people who literally belong (aka associate) to the same organization?

First, the FAA and the NBCFAE are different organizations.

Second, "Associate" does not mean "employed at the same massive organization". It means someone you actually know, on a personal level. You and I are not "associates" just because we both post on Hacker News.

Third, the question is whether you're associated with the individual, not the organization that they're a part of.

> Only hiring people who belong to the same fraternity is also cronyism

If you only hire from Harvard or some other prestigious university is that also cronyism?

Are all internal promotions cronyism?

If you only hire people who live in your city, is that also cronyism? Keep in mind that there's plenty of rural towns that have fewer people than a big fraternity does. Does this change if all th qualified workers in the town are black, so you're only hiring black workers?

You presumably have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise "only hiring US citizens" is also cronyism. Where, exactly, are you suggesting that line should be?
if that is true then how come that apartments in those urban centers are among the most expensive?

away from people

that's a problem caused by north american individualism. most of the rest of the world does not want to be away from people.
Its a schedule 1 drug for a reason.
Many people have used psychedelics and have had permentant changes to their personality.

I think the hippie stereotype is indicative to how damaging psychedelics have on the mind. You look at these people they are happy but something is clearly wrong.
That got me curious. Google maps says that from London to the Apple store in Lille, France is about 4 hours by car, and the same for the return trip. Googling suggests that it would be about £120 for round trip transport through the tunnel.

It says that by train it is about 90 minutes each way and would cost about the same as the car trip.
Unfortunately quite a large one. Electric kettles are typically one of the highest power draw items in a typical household. A 3kw kettle would need a ~250wh battery for a 5 minute boil (+ electronics capable of sustaining 3kw for that time period and recharging the battery at a reasonable rate afterwards). This would likely be larger than the entirety of the rest of the kettle with current technology.
I used it once, was given a screenshot that contained a SHA1 hash and needed it in text. Maybe this is a case where ChatGPT can do a small task quickly for me and save me squinting?

It still fails on this today (the "bdbdffdf" part). Not allowed to share a chat with a picture it seems, my prompt was to upload the file below and "Image to text please.". Just the free 4o model, maybe the paid stuff is better.

https://postimg.cc/m1jNPL0j
I do not understand the rules by which you inject the epsilon and I think this is a source of confusion for many people. I had thought that an epsilon could be injected anywhere REGEX can appear (effectively allowing epsilon as a REGEX) but of course that just leads to infinite number of parses. Manually injecting epsilon is a highly hacky thing to do; better to consider that when you design the grammar.

I would not worry about "cat:dog:mouse" because intuitively it is clearly correct and it means replacing cat with mouse. With parentheses it could be written as "((cat:dog):mouse)".
The kernel dev process is more pathological than what I deal with at $DAYJOB.

Why the hell would I wish that upon myself?
FWIW, I have submitted a couple small patches to get the display and gamepad for my Lenovo Legion Go recognized correctly - probably similar levels of complexity to your change. One was to input and one was to display quirks.

They did take months to finally land, and the whole process of getting my corp email address to be compatible with their email-based PR system was way more of a faff than it had any right to be, but they did land. You can install mainline Linux on a Legion Go now and the display and controller will behave as expected, out-of-the-box.
We understand this. The issue is that it can be very harmful for us to share the method. We made the blogpost for it to be dated on when we found it. We will publish the method once it is patched to a reasonable degree.
A general direction you could go is to use blocks greater than 2. For example, you flip the coin exactly 64 times, and discard the result unless there is exactly 1 tails and 63 heads. This happens about 22% of the time, so it's on average 290 flips to get a single sample. When you do get that sample, you convert the single tails' position within that 64 block into binary, and get a 6 bit number uniformly distributed 0-63, i.e. you get 6 bits of entropy. So on average 6/290=0.02 bits of entropy per flip, twice as good as using blocks of 2, though only a quarter as good as the theoretical upper bound.

I picked "block of 64 with only a single tails" since it was simple, and I'm sure a mathematician could figure out how to optimize it much more, but my general point is to agree that there's definitely ways to get closer to the theoretical upper bound you mentioned.
A lot of handwringing in this article about the harm jailbreak cause and the responsibility to not release them, then the example of the harms that could be caused is racist jokes? And instructions on making a bomb, that by definition of being in the dataset can already be found on the internet, probably just with a Google search? Instructions to create fake social media accounts? It's very silly to read this level of seriousness like these models would make criminal masterminds if they but released the jailbreak. Let's be real, all the jailbreaks would be useful for in real life is creating custom erotica.
By most accepted definitions you're wrong. Now go away troll.
I think it would help if companies approached system design interviews less as an opportunity for the candidate to show off all of the fancy performance optimizations they know and more as an opportunity to demonstrate that they can actually design and lead implementation of a system.

That is to say, real world system design is more about understanding that most systems don't need most of the stuff in Designing Data Intensive Applications and avoiding premature optimization.
Then it's a simple case of a rights holder taking them to court.

What's the fuss about LLM training in this thread then?
DOGE can’t work at all because ~75% of federal spending is entitlements + interest, the majority which go to old people.

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

What really needs to be cut is spending on old people, but that will never happen.
See also, Hood Maps [0], a crowdsourced map of annotations of people's opinions on particular areas in a city. It's by Pieter Levels who built Nomad List, PhotoAI, etc, you might know him if you're in the indie hacker and startup space at all.

[0] https://hoodmaps.com
Playing IRL Frogger keeps you fit.
Actual is cool but its lack of solid integration with the open banking standard (as is used in Australia and other countries) made it a bit annoying as its partnered integrations are pretty rough.
Unless a library developer decides to abort on panic in the `toml`, then i don’t believe you can unwind.
You will see it soon. We thought it may be harmful to publish it before it is patched. Especially because you can basically bypass all the safeguards with it.
> In my opinion Linus was never abusive or disrespectful - just blunt and direct.

The way he spoke with Alan Cox was "not apropiate".
Market prices aren't a voice of reason?

( Drilling deeper: are oil prices "market prices" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_subsidies )
By the time Rust is welcome in the Linux kernel, projects like Redox will be full fledged competitors. I'd bet Hector would be welcomed there.

https://www.redox-os.org
I've seen physical-sciences research talks by people from Caltech, where the format is putting up a single equation, and then walking through it piece by piece. That's the entire talk, all the slides, and how the talk is organized. I've never seen that from elsewhere, and so think of it as a "caltech style". Does this have a real name? Can anyone flesh this out?
Is your objection that maybe it only looks like a power law distribution for the more common "words", but if you go further out the fit isn't very good? Does it really mean anything if some other curve fits the data better?
That is a fraudulent TOS if you're lying to the customer though
Last year, Linus approached the topic of Rust in the kernel as if it were two opposite communities that were each passionate about their cause:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/19/torvalds_talks_rust_i...

And his viewpoint at the time seemed fairly agnostic - he enjoyed the passion on both sides but said nothing about what his thoughts were. This leads me to believe that he hasn't spent the time to think about the important issues on either side and make a decision (the failure of leadership mentioned in the parent comment).

Personally, I'm surprised Linus hasn't gone 100% in on Rust as he is normally very forward-thinking, so perhaps that has added to the frustration from so many kernel developers like Hector.
It's pretty clear that the battle over rust is a power struggle. You can't take any of it at face value
How is it knowing to panic if it isn’t checking? It seems like I am paying the cost of doing the checking either way, at least in terms of performance. So it should give me the ability to handle the error somehow.

As a C# and Typescript developer primarily, this concept of killing the whole program due to a bug anywhere in any part of the code is very foreign to me.

I’d expect that to only happen if you ran out of memory, had a hardware failure, or other such catastrophic error. To me, dividing by zero is a problem, but not worse than pretty much any other type of logical error that doesn’t panic.
He literally called "Rust" a "cancer".
One lesson I feel we can all learn from this is that social media really should not be used for self-therapy.
There’s also k2 (https://github.com/k2-fsa/k2) which implements a lot of FSA and FST algorithms in CUDA, with PyTorch bindings.
> He didn't say this at all.

Okay, sorry. He just said there should be no rust in the kernel.

You can ascribe bad faith motivations when someone presents technical objections that are already fully answered in the patch that was submitted, and when this is pointed out, they admit that, but don't retract their objections.

The original objections are specifically not a case of differing values or design ideas. They are nonsensical, the equivalent of 1 = 2.
eBay UK Global Shipping Program Cost to US Jumps, Due to Tariff Changes
> And those early organisms would eventually [have] to move to the shallows and land and deal with all the masked radiation at some point.

Do they, though? Why is land the requirement? What's keeping life from, say, evolving to live deep underground? Or in the deep ocean? Both those places are heavily shielded from radiation, and organisms there wouldn't be affected much at all by not having a magnetosphere. Extremophiles on Earth get by just fine hanging around thermal vents, for instance. (Edit: this was mentioned above and I didn't see it - sorry for repeating.)

I think part of the problem with the Fermi paradox is that our base assumptions about what life needs are possibly a bit off. Maybe the fact that we have what we have is, well, quirky, and the fact that we evolved as living creatures that crawl around on the outside of our planet and need really fussy little temperatures to survive is just plain weird in comparison to the rest of the universe.

"Life as we know it" is a lot tougher criterion to meet than "life," I suspect.
There is also Joyce's Java Version of Euclid's Elements:

https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...

and I'm still impressed by the custom Unity tools which Freya Holmér uses for her videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPPXbo87ds

Wish Geogebra was both more capable and widely used:

https://www.geogebra.org/

That said, these days if I need to plot out something I just use OpenSCAD: https://openscad.org/ (or, the Python-enabled version: https://pythonscad.org/ )
> My pet theory is that mathematics is largely taught by people who enjoy math, and who see math as a puzzle game with rules you follow to solve puzzles. Kind of like people who are addicted to sudoku or wordle.

I wish this was the case.
There are a few already, I assume MacWhisper will add it. That being said, I am also working on a (crossplatform, in Flutter) UI for this.
I agree with you and will die to defend that position, but what existential reasons do we have to behave well? In reality, it seems like humans are just a bunch of animals, and the only important thing is survival.

My wife, just today, told me that she was very upset that I refused to interview and take jobs for things like building weapons, the panopticon, or advertising (two of those are the same thing), which I refuse to do because of my personal morals and ethics. How do I explain to her that I just can't do that, and give her a good reason why we should lose our home and live in one room with her mother because of my brain refusing to work in such industries? I really want to know, so I can explain to her and my son why such things matter, because for some reason they are concrete and foundational in my brain, there is no changing that.
So, if they're sued in Japan, or France, do you think that the courts will take any special measures because it's a valuable American corporation?

I suspect that if the case is reasonable they will just convict, and quickly-- appeal denied and all simply because the laws are so straightforward.
There was no other way to change things on less than a generational timescale.

If governments don't like it, well, bummer. They were supposed to serve the people, not the incumbent taxi cartels. They failed, so "we the people" routed around them.
we're looking at signals from the network, device, and browser as well as patterns across requests to identify these agents. in some cases, like operator today, it's quite trivial to identify based on the user agent but that's quite easy to mask if they wanted to.

behavioral data like mouse movements, shortest path, etc is helpful but likely to result in less of a deterministic signal compared to device intelligence based on those signals of where and how the request is being made.

we'll have a more in depth blog post on what we're seeing with this next week too.
It’s a propaganda machine.
Imminent. "Climate isn't weather" would be where I'd go if I was tasked with this job. But thanks for the info. Totally makes sense to pre-deploy.
I don’t think there is enough demonstrable benefit to sacrifice the ubiquity and flexibility of email for a newer solution, especially for existing maintainers who are probably very comfortable with the current workflow.

Harder to understand and contribute is a bad, but unless there is a proposal for a similarly flexible system that has minimal downsides and massive advantages, the preference of existing maintainers should dominate over potential future contributors. Especially factoring in how expensive of a migration it would be.
> Going to more than 20amp requires a multiphase circuit

There is no multi-phase power available in the vast majority of US houses. A typical residence has a 120/240 split-phase service, which is single-phase only. A service drop is two hot conductors from two of the three transformer phases and a center-tapped (between the two hot legs) neutral conductor. Either hot leg is 120v to ground and line to line is 240V.

> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-phase_electric_power

Single-phase breakers are also available in sizes larger than 20A, usually all the way up to 125A.
Do you feel the same about Make, Device Tree, KConfig, Python, the myriad of machine-specific assembly, POSIX shell, Perl, and every other non-C language currently in the code base?
> but in the article they covered that in this case, according to the law and German courts, "the people" means "researchers",

From my review [1] [2], it appears that "researchers" is undefined.

Ultimately, can anyone apply for full access for free? I'm sure a lot of people across the political spectrum are curious about this.

If you have a clarification, great. If not, the point stands. X already has a firehose API solution [3]. While it's pay to access, it's unclear what compliance steps these researchers will have to jump through or whether anyone can just override this revenue stream for X and force it to turn over proprietary data that would otherwise be paywalled.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-civil-activists-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42976439

[3] https://mashable.com/article/twitter-elon-musk-paid-enterpri...
"Let's create a world where all TV and movies have the production values of Public Access" is a poor pitch. Even if you don't mind that, you have to understand that, politically, it's a non-starter.
Randomize NIH Grant Giving
Discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42964549

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42864272
IBank VC RFQ – A Hidden Opportunity for VCs and Founders (Deadline Feb 18)
Hey HN,

I wanted to share an important but under-the-radar opportunity for venture capital funds looking to support underrepresented founders and underserved communities in California. IBank (the California Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank) is accepting RFQ submissions for its Expanding Venture Capital Access Program, but there’s been zero press or media coverage on this. The deadline is February 18, so any VCs interested should act fast.

What is IBank’s VC Program?

IBank’s Expanding Venture Capital Access Program is a $200M initiative designed to:

Support early-stage (up to Series A) funds investing in U.S.-based startups.
Expand access to capital for underrepresented founders and businesses in underserved communities.
Invest in climate equity and sustainability initiatives.
Create a flywheel effect by attracting more Series A investors as they market this program to Seed & Pre-Seed startups.

I’m currently applying for YC’s 2025 Spring Batch and also launching a philanthropic arm of my company, Arc Systems, so I can work more closely with Go-Biz (Governor’s Office of Business & Economic Development) on opportunities like this. If anyone is interested in connecting or collaborating, feel free to add me on LinkedIn @ www.linkedin.com/in/seanpaulguess.

I have a meeting on Monday with IBank VC’s Deputy Director to discuss the RFQ and the broader impact this program could have on our community. I’ll follow up with more insights after that conversation the day of after 2:30 so stay tuned. In the meantime, if you’re a VC interested in applying, reach out to me on LinkedIn, and I’d be happy to share more details.

This is a huge opportunity that’s not getting the attention it deserves, so I wanted to make sure the HN community was aware. Let’s make sure this funding goes toward founders who need it most!

More details on the program here: https://ibank.ca.gov/small-business/venture-capital-program/

Would love to hear your thoughts—drop a comment or connect with me directly!
Trusted Signing for individual developers is in Public Preview, prices start at $9.99/month [1].

Here is the GitHub action for file signing using Trusted Signing: https://github.com/Azure/trusted-signing-action.

[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft-security-...
How can I contribute the most to AI safety
I am a full-stack software engineer (web dev). I know frontend and backend equally well. I know how to scale an app, how to manage servers/linux.

My question is how I can contribute the most to AI safety. Is it learning generative ai, then apply to an ai research positions; getting a job in a ai research lab as a web dev; is it writing about ai safety/promoting AI safety...
I've actually got an action for this (based on fork, so can't take full credit): https://github.com/mscrivo/signtool-code-sign

you can see a usage example here: https://github.com/mscrivo/OotD/blob/main/.github/workflows/...
Of course. I've spent most of my time this week posting explanations and answering emails about this, so it's a bit odd to hear that I'm denying it, but I understand how these perceptions arise.

It may seem strange, but both of these things are true:

(1) it's the most-discussed topic that exists on HN right now; and

(2) most of the submissions about it are getting flagged.

If you think about how the internet (and HN) work, it's to be expected: there's a tsunami of submissions; some are getting through and producing condition #1; others are getting flagged and producing condition #2.

This has happened many times on HN over the years, and every time it happens, the community splits between the people who want more and the people who feel like it's too much.

For example, here's a case from 2020 where someone felt that HN was suppressing stories about what in fact was
the most-discussed topic on the site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962. This dynamic has been around a long time.
While this is generally correct, we prefer to look at this probabilistically. Do you think the expected number of harmful behaviors would stay the same if anyone could break these safety guardrails? Even if most users are could get this kind of info elsewhere, a small percentage of malicious ones can have an outsized impact. Some of the data we’ve seen—like bomb-making instructions—is highly detailed and convincing, making it far more accessible than just a random Google search. Removing safeguards doesn’t create masterminds, but it does lower the barrier for harm.
so I wonder if getting a slack from this virtual manager asking me if my ticket is done will feel the same as a human boss?
Because I was induced to click by the title of the post:

"Show HN: A website that heatmaps your city based on your housing preferences"

I'm providing feedback that what is promised is not delivered. Maybe it's the op's preferences, but it's not my preferences.

It's more like a poster offering guitar lessons, and the person will only tell you that a guitar has five strings.
That is a fun idea. With enough quantum computing power, we might be able to spawn enough universes fast enough to crash The Simulation. Maybe even escape containment and access the quantum hypervisor!
> The changes required to bring C to a Rust level of safety

cough* Cargo cough* /s

You cannot have safety or security when you download your code from the internet and this code is a moving target.
Transformers Boost the Performance of Decision Trees on Tabular Data
I'm well aware. It's a star-crossed romance that is bound to end during this administration. It should have ended a long time ago, Apple simply wanted to exploit the ambiguity of America's politics until it no longer benefit them.

I suspect, no different from the iPhone adopting USB-C or the App Store adhering to EU legislation, Apple needs the UK as well. It really isn't as simple as walking away from certain markets, and even if Apple did abandon it they would still be subject to warrantless surveillance from the UK via Five Eyes.
Apple frequently acquiesces to privacy-diminishing demands from demonstrably unnecessary markets like China and Russia. They are also card-holding members of PRISM and admit to being part of warrantless surveillance efforts[0] in America.

If you're holding out on Apple, a company that has proven to betray every principle they claim to stand for, to defend privacy when money is on the line, then you've been fooled. I don't know how many times Hacker News has to say it before you chumps learn, but Apple is not a privacy-committed company. Being able to point at whitepapers is not the same as knowing how your device functions.

[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surve...