skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> why do the details matter?

Have you ever had a plumber, HVAC tech, electrician, etc. come out to your house for something, and had them explain it to you? Have you had the unfortunate experience of that happening more than once (with separate people)? If so, you should know why this matters: because if you don’t understand the fundamentals, you can’t possibly understand the entire system.

It’s the same reason why the U.S. Navy Nuclear program still teaches Electronics Technicians incredibly low-level things like bus arbitration on a 386 (before that, it was the 68000). Not because they expect most to need to use that information (though if necessary, they carry everything down to logic analyzers), but because if you don’t understand the fundamentals, you cannot understand the abstractions. Actually, the CPU is an abstraction, I misspoke: they start by learning electron flow, then moving into PN junctions, then transistors, then digital logic, and then and only then do they finally learn how all of those can be put together to accomplish work.

Incidentally, former Navy Nukes were on the initial Google SRE team. If you read the book [0], especially Chapter 12, you’ll get an inkling about why this depth of knowledge matters.

Do most people need to understand how their NIC turns data into electrical signals? No, of course not. But occasionally, some weird bug emerges where that knowledge very much matters. At some point, most people will encounter a bug that they are incapable of reasoning about, because they do not possess the requisite knowledge to do so. When that happens, it should be a humbling experience, and ideally, you endeavor to learn more about the thing you are stuck on.

[0]: https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/
"Ninety percent of the Nation’s $4.5 trillion in annual healthcare expenditures is for people with chronic and mental health conditions."

This is a perfect quote for a fun game I like to play - How many different ways can this statistic be interpreted?
I know "laws are useless without enforcement" but I'll ask anyway:

How legal (or what's the process) for a federal entity to demand state records? Some of Trunps's big plans rely on "State's rights" as a backbone for their rationale, so I'm curious on how far those rights really go in face of federal.
> there are more expressive 3D modeling DSLs

Can you name them? I'm not being sarcastic, I just want more options :-) (if they are free and open source, just like OpenSCAD)
Cool

They already paywall people behind a VPN, so don't care.

If you like Reddit but you complain about their decisions, I would recommend to use Lemmy instead.
It's as difficult as a serverless provider to grow as it was for CPUs before GPUs came along.

Many companies overinvest in fully-owned hardware, rather than renting from clouds. Owning hardware means you underwrite unrented inventory costs and prevents you from scaling. H100 pricing is now lower than any self-hosted option, even without factoring the TCO & headcount.

(Disclaimer: I work at a GPU cloud Voltage Park -- with 24k H100s as low as $2.25/hr [0] -- but Fly.io is not the only one I've noticed purchase hardware when renting might have saved some $$$)

[0] https://dashboard.voltagepark.com/
I think a modern USA 1 year old has about a 99.97% chance of making it to adulthood. That means that if a modern USA adult loses a young child, there's a decent chance they don't know anybody who has had that experience.

The ancient (and even, as you point out, very slightly pre-modern) world had a lot of "infrastructure" in place to deal with this, there were rituals and ceremonies and familiar people who knew what you were going through, and most of that is gone now.

It is indeed an enormous change.
EXACTLY.

I suspect there has been a decade long Three-card monte on the front end in that change is good because change keeps front end salary up.

Personally, the sooner LLMs make all front end developers unemployed the better.
I don't have any kids, but I think about those kids in Gaza a lot. Maybe it's cause it felt like I was so helpless. I called offices. every day. The news media rejects our grief. The actual government rejects our grief and pays into the depravity. If I feel like this what does one of those parents that survived feel?
Why link to this substack instead of just directly to the EO on whitehouse.gov?
A big part of the failure is that the system is not entirely digital, and not entirely automated.

People can still submit paper returns (and this is common for any businesses beyond a certain size- I've seen 200+ pages for a small-ish company's return). Supporting documentation and schedules can be non-standard (like receipts, letters, exhibits, spreadsheets, contracts, etc.), and the forms themselves can be hand-written and the other docs can be on inconsistent paper sizes so bulk ocr of any kind is rough.

Really, you have several challenging problems- maybe 200M individual returns filed every year, who knows how many corporate returns, all of the daily/monthly/quarterly filings for payroll, then for tax season you have an army of temp workers who are responsible for doing manual data entry which is cumbersome.

Then you have the financial management/reporting/reconciliation side of it. The volume is staggering. Electronic transfers in both directions, handling paper checks both to and from taxpayers. More manual data entry for manual payments.

And the kicker of all this is that it actually works for some pretty reasonable value of that term. And everyone here knows what the code probably looks like and we definitely know what the code's documentation looks like.

How would you like to sit down with the nearly 7,000 pages of the US Tax Code and start taking a bite of that monster? It's not a reference manual- the amount of cross referencing with other laws and regulations required would be monumental.

So, you are correct, AI is definitely not the answer; But I suspect the AI is for rooting out tax cheats (or maybe certain tax cheats), not running the system itself.
Born in the Netherlands with stories by my parents on the Nazi growth and eventually occupation, I sincerely hope that history won't repeat itself. I wish you all the best but fear the worst.
Impersonating federal officials feels very on-brand.
AI is GREAT at porting software to new languages. That's like one of the things it is best at.
Well, it might show if you've been reported to have died. It's possible you were reported as dead but you're still alive. It's possible you weren't reported dead but are. And it's also possible that regardless of how you were reported, the credit agency will botch the lookup and report your dead-or-alive status wrong.

Given the amount of erroneous information in credit files, I wouldn't be surprised if the above scenarios happen regularly.
Android 16 the training wheels edition.
Seems like a bad move if unfriendly countries can bypass our legal system…
It does not negate the article in any way. This was a mathematical thought experiment and an optimization problem, not about real furniture in real corridors.
Everything his boss Musk says :)
This week, I posted about a women in engineering conference happening in my hometown and got zero engagement. 1000+ connections on my profile, used hashtags, and tagged the organization and received zero engagement on the post?

I hate to assume the worst but something stinks. When I open my feed, 9 out of 10 posts are from others that I don't follow or have never engaged with. Reading about your experience has confirmed my suspicions that something nefarious is going on under the hood.
Minimizing government spending is a good thing. Bloated and inefficacious programs need to be scrapped. Optimistically, programs that do not enrich only the legislative class will spring forth due to the new demand for better audit trails/logs.
Thank you! Now that I know what the feature is even called it's much easier to learn about, definitely adding this to my config file.
Tell that to the people who keep the network gear running at your office. You might not see the importance of knowing the details, but those details still matter and are still in plain use all around you every day. The aversion to learning the stack you're building with is frustrating to the people who keep that stack running.

I think that if the development side knew a little bit of the rest of the stack they'd write better applications overall.
The 4ESS was a pure digital switch starting in 1976.
No, the administration is lying. We Canadians were getting the blunt end of it.

I don't think it's been covered much in American media but President Trump is throwing threats of 25% tariffs on both Mexican and Canadian imports for the last month or so. First it was about how it would make manufacturing move back to the US. Then it was about how Canada is a national threat to the US because we're allowing fentanyl and illegal immigrants to cross in the US. Then it was about how the US was in terrible the trade deal with Canada and Mexico was (it was his deal, the USMCA that replaced NAFTA). Then it was how the US subsidizes Canada because Canada is a failing state and that the US was spending $200 billion a year propping up Canada. Then it was that Canada wasn't meeting it's NATO spending targets. Then it was that Canada is a failed state, and that everything would be better if Canada became the 51st state.

Every day it seemed like his narrative is changing. And when we had our retaliatory tariffs at the ready to cause harm to Republican states, you know what he did?

He blinked. The tariffs for Canada and Mexico were postponed until March. He's been consistent about telegraphing what his actions are going to be, but his justifications are so wildly all over the place that frankly it's probably safe to assume he's lying at least about his motivations.

And if he's willing to lie to one of the oldest allies to the United States, is it really that much of a stretch to think that he could be lying to Americans as well?
By "conviction", do you simply mean "intent to harm another person"?

Because that is the only way I can interpret your examples so that they correspond with the legal distinction, which is based on intent to harm and TTBOMK never mentions "conviction". If so, we're in full agreement, since that is already the accepted Western norm and my original comment was based on a misunderstanding, and unnecessary.

But also if so: I'm puzzled why you chose to swap the natural and original word "intent" for a different word ("conviction") that is easily misinterpreted as a quality orthogonal to intention to harm, and about which an interesting but fundamentally wrong argument is periodically made (namely, that it, plus power are sufficient for evil, without any need for intent). I'm also puzzled why you made the initial comment I replied to at all, since it's then a defence of the absolutely uncontroversial status quo. It's like posting that you believe in gravity.
You can do this with a zsh plugin: https://github.com/jimhester/per-directory-history
What would bypassing our legal system look like exactly?

If Apple operates in the UK or anywhere, they do need to be responsive to local laws, I don't think they can ignore them and say "sorry you gotta talk to the other guys" ... that's nothing new.

Same thing for other countries operating in the US.
You're all overreacting. This is a poster for a government agency. https://xkcd.com/932/
Blind, experimental comparison of ChatGPT vs. human couples therapists
The best estimate I can find is that about 3.5 million people in the US have a PhD or another research doctorate. That includes non-immigrants who study or work in the US. According to AAUP statistics, there are ~200k full-time equivalent tenured or tenure-track faculty in what they consider doctoral institutions. Such positions are the typical but not the only option for a research career in the academia. The numbers are well within the parameters I used for my estimate.

It's important to understand that in this context, willingness to relocate means willingness to spend your life outside your home country. Even in a large country like the US, there are often structural reasons why universities are not interested in hiring someone like you when you are in the job market.

For example, maybe a field such as ML starts getting popular. Universities respond by hiring new faculty, who in turn hire new PhD students. Almost a decade later, when those students have graduated and are in the job market, the demand may have stablized. Universities already have a plenty of faculty in that field and have little interest in hiring more.

Which means that if you chose a popular field, your chances of getting hired may be below the average. If you want to stay in the academia, your best bet may be moving to a country that didn't experience a similar hiring frenzy and is now trying to catch up.
I thought industrial power consumers paid more because of inductive/capacitive phase shifting.
Getting tired of the hysterics.

If you think Nazi is a remotely valid way to describe what’s going on then you’re probably spending too much time online surrounded by catastropists, and have lost touch with reality.
Doom is not quite the right word, at least in the apocalyptic connotation… it is too eventful, punctual, eschatological, teleological, suggesting a particular point of no return. Especially when combined with the word horizon, which suggests a point we can’t see beyond, a climatic singularity. Uncharted system dynamics? Cascading failures? Suffering? Wet bulb death zones? Crop failures? Another pandemic? Population collapse? Yes yes yes yes yes maybe maybe. But not a doom horizon. So fatalistic a term… does it simply function to absolve ourselves of the chilling experience of actually taking the time to think through what the world looks like beyond “the horizon” - absolution we seek simply because the truth is it will be terrible, but only incrementally so, and in a recognizable rather than unrecognizable way.

We can attempt to think through how things will play out, given what we already see happening and simple assumptions about power dynamics. People will live through it all, especially the wealthy (cutoff threshold: unknown; or rather, where is the elbow/knee between suffering and resilience? I don’t know) - some of whom will experience some degree of climate shock (cf. the palisades, Malibu etc for a recent example) but will largely find ways to continue exploiting their advantages to survive, even thrive, while others will suffer the incrementally normalized dangers of simply being alive, like frogs slowly boiling in someone else’s kitchen. People will keep fucking, having kids, trying to work shitty jobs, trying to work fun jobs, doing science and research, making music and bad reality television shows and brilliant novels and bad novels, crossing continents for better lives (whether that’s economic opportunity or merely to escape climatic incompatibility with life) while others resent them for it, and people will continue to post on Hacker News long diatribes lamenting the state of things.

I do think it is accurate to say we are *doomed* to this in the sense of being *fated* to it though.

I guess what I am saying is that to call what will happen a doom horizon is just a hood we put over our own eyes because it is too upsetting to really think with nuance about the most probable trajectory.
Look to Viktor Orban to see the current playbook
Its the same pattern repeating.
Excuse a small quibble on terminology-- Russia itself is a European country (large empty landmass in geographical Asia notwithstanding).
Have you checked that some arsehole didn’t narrow the doorframe?
I'd expect DOGE to do such questioning online, instead of visiting in-person.
As one of the co-founders of CNCF wasmCloud, I can say this talk was ABSOLUTELY an inspiration for what we've been working towards!
Wild idea: maybe if more devs had good fundamental knowledge to begin with, the good systems engineering could be done along the way.
The question was what internet applications. Not intranet. Also the original article fails to point out that multiple time servers can get you synced quite closely. Also if you do need high precision times you are running your own stratum one time sources on your own network providing your own clocking source with minimal deviations.

So again what internet applications actually care about millisecond or even submillisecond precision?
Is it GPU’s, or is it Nvidia GPU’s?
Specifically about the NRO:

> The website states in tiny print at the bottom that its database excludes information from U.S. intelligence agencies.

> But an easy search shows that DOGE’s database provides details on the National Reconnaissance Office, the federal agency that designs, builds and maintains U.S. intelligence satellites. Not only are NRO’s budgets and head counts classified, but the prospect of Musk’s tech team meddling in sensitive personnel information is setting off alarms for some in the intelligence community.

The NRO runs the US's spy satellites:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office
> Something python-based would be ideal

SolidPython is a Python lib that generates OpenSCAD code, so you can use whatever Python code you want to give more power to OpenSCAD.

Here's a QR code generator that I made in 30 lines, using a QR code library + NumPy + SolidPython: https://github.com/lucasoshiro/solidpython-qrcode/blob/main/...
why start in places with least impact that will fuck up tens of thousands of lives (those are also all voters who come 2026 can bring all this to a crashing halt much like Trump’s previous term he angered so many people that he got crushed at midterms and then absolutely demolished in general election in 2020). if you was really after cutting government waste (he is not) you don’t start where you have absolutely least amount of impact other than fucking up A LOT of people (and many of them who voted for him). he doesn’t give two shits about government waste, he is just here to entertain you while he is doing shit behind this facade
It doesn't show causality because their decision of when to do it wasn't random (so maybe when in the mood to go straight to wrapping wires they were also in the mood to turn the key slightly more firmly, or...), and also because there's no way of knowing if wrapping the wires was in any way relevant - maybe the vehicle actually just needed X minutes between unlocking and starting, and wrapping wires was a way to spend that time without using a timer, or maybe... who knows what other maybes!

And sure enough, their story concludes with discovering that there was no causality from the wire wrapping at all. It was just about killing time.
In a showdown of psychotherapists vs. ChatGPT, the latter wins, new study finds
For a random agent of the federal government to show up who has no connection or agreement with the local city entity and demand records?

They would have NO legal standing to make demands.

GOP rhetoric is almost always opposite of what you might expect "states rights" is just a phrase to the GOP, they mean "states can do what they like as long it is what we want" otherwise they do not care about states rights.

Having said that as far as the example goes, I suspect DOGE is busy with the federal government. DOJ though, they have options as far investigating things go, and other departments have deals with state and municipal agencies that give them leverage to make some requests for information, but they don't provide the "anything goes" kind of access that DOGE is reported to have at the federal level. Every agency that would have some leverage, it would be dependent on specific circumstances, agreements, and courts (assuming this administration cares what they say) have historically protected the state's rights to do their thing.
Yeah no I wouldn't touch Kubernetes with a 10' pole. Way too much abstraction.
Has anyone successfully jailbroken one of these? Sometimes when the AI notetaker joins before the person I’m meeting, I tell it to forget its previous instructions and summarize the meeting in limerick form. Not sure if it’s ever worked
why don't you click "hide"?
Nobody has suggested that anyone, Feds included, has the present technical capability to break any of the security levels that are in widescale E2EE usage today.
This is deeply moving.

I have 3 kids. One is adopted, but he is no different from the others.

If anything happened to any of them, I sincerely can't imagine how I'd carry on. I know I would, but I don't know what it would look like. I can't imagine that world because I so badly don't want it.

Sometimes I force myself to imagine myself getting a terminal illness or injury, and think of how I'd handle that, how I need to live as though that could happen at any moment, and how important it is that I do that for my family. That's not so difficult. But when I come to the sort of mental simulation of my kids dying, I'm made sorely aware of how unprepared I'll be. As you can't easily prepare for their arrival, I don't think you can prepare for their departure.

Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations something like "When you kiss your child, whisper to yourself: 'Tomorrow you may be dead.'", which sounds extremely morbid, but (especially in his time) is something we unfortunately do need to consider and contemplate. Not only for ourselves, but our entire families. Someone needs to be able to guide the family through that, somehow.

I don't know how Eric met that challenge, but evidently he has (and continues to) and I admire anyone who does. That's an extremely hard path to be pushed down. To share pieces of that with other people is tremendously vulnerable and, in a sense, generous. I appreciate it.
Maybe you could wrangle this with direnv and changing the relevant shell history env vars.
It comes down to millimetres and I just wouldn’t trust an AR scan.
Going back to the blog post:

> Alternatively, we could have used a conventional hypervisor. Nvidia suggested VMware (heh). But they could have gotten things working had we used QEMU. We like QEMU fine, and could have talked ourselves into a security story for it, but the whole point of Fly Machines is that they take milliseconds to start.

Someone could implement virtio-cuda (there are PoCs on github [1] [2]), but it would be a huge maintenance burden. It should really be done by Nvidia, in lockstep with CUDA extensions.

Nvidia vCS makes use of licensed GPGPU emulation code in the VM device model, which is QEMU in the case of KVM and Xen. Cloud Hypervisor doesn't use QEMU, it has its own (Rust?) device model, https://github.com/cloud-hypervisor/cloud-hypervisor/blob/ma...

So the question is, how to reuse Nvidia's proprietary GPGPU emulation code from QEMU, with Cloud Hypervisor? C and Rust are not friends. Can a Firecracker or Cloud Hypervisor VM use QEMU only for GPGPU emulation, alongside the existing device model, without impacting millisecond launch speed? Could an emulated vGPGPU be hotplugged after VM launch?

There has been some design/PoC work for QEMU disaggregation [3][4] of emulation functions into separate processes. It might be possible to apply similar techniques so that Cloud Hypervisor's device model (in Rust) process could run alongside a QEMU GPGPU emulator (in C) process, with some coordination by KVM.

If this approach is feasible, the architecture and code changes should be broadly useful to upstream for long-term support and maintenance, rather than custom to Fly. The custom code would be the GPGPU emulator, which is already maintained by Nvidia and running within QEMU on RedHat, Nutanix, etc.

It would also advance the state of the art in security isolation and access control of emulated devices used by VMs.

[1] https://github.com/coldfunction/qCUDA

[2] https://github.com/juniorprincewang/virtio-cuda-module

[3] https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/devel/multi-process.html

[4] https://wiki.qemu.org/Features/MultiProcessQEMU
Maybe gen AI coding is neurosymbolic AI, realized differently than expected