skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting that they don't know exactly how they are perceiving magnetism. I suppose it could be an internal brain mechanism, but if that were to be able to operate without direct outside sensory input, there might be all kinds of other potential latent abilities in animals.

More likely, this might be the same as the mechanism which exists in birds, who can effectively see the Earth's magnetic field in their eyes, although an internal magnetic detection system present in animals would be much more interesting. See https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2019.029.... Birds essentially perceive the Earth's magnetic field through a chemical process in the receptors for red and green light in their eyes, and are believed to have special cells in their beak, brain stem, and possibly their vestibular system as well. It can be disrupted fairly easy by magnetism or different wavelengths of light.

There are obvious other strange implications of this as well, although I'm not sure how much real evidence there is to support them. For instance, there are many concerns about the effects of EMF exposure, as well as that EMF can affect plant life. There is research on magnetic and electric brain stimulation as well. At the most out-there level, there is the research into remote viewing and things like telepathy. So, to whatever extent this actually exists, there are interesting implications for the phenomenological experience of other forms of animal life.

Regardless, it is interesting to see research that is actually showing new and intriguing things regarding different forms of perception (I guess this is arguably ESP, or at least a new sense) that are not complete crank nonsense. I've always felt like my sense of direction was a sort of 6th sense; I guess it really could be.
And it’s an entirely different point to the initial one.
Atleast when I was younger I always felt like I could point towards north within 20-30 degrees at any time. I tried testing it out many times, and was right the vast majority of the time, even when trying to eliminate possible subconscious factors like sound reflections and what surface I was standing on. We do technically have the right associated nerves and structure for it, but obviously underdeveloped compared to animals who use it to live and survive, so I would totally believe it is possible to some extent, atleast among some people.

I would attribute part of it to practice, because when I was younger I spent a lot of times in the woods where you can easily get turned around following animal trails and skirting around obstacles, and finding your way back out accurately was extremely helpful.
Eventually the safest eay to be a human will be to hide from the best AI by mimicking the lesser & more quantitious AI mimicking the homo simulacra.

Example: Big AI outbids energy providers because its owners are hunting some person whose computational activity they do not like. If you consume unusually lots of energy because you are eccentric human & not having AI system guide your power use, you will stand out. The big AI might rationally buy you out from electricity because you didn't mimic how normal people's AI has them do their power expenses.
That's a puzzling statement. What makes you think money is only for taxes
Any time the government tries to do something for The People, the wealthy and their mouthpieces get a portion of the population to believe the much needed help is actually evil socialism/communism and will destroy their way of life.

America has been propagandized to by the wealthy for a century and this is the end result. The world's richest person reforming the government for profit.
Then it means the rust code does impact the C code and the rust people were lying.
> The biggest problem: developers don’t want GPUs. They don’t even want AI/ML models. They want LLMs.

Fly.io seems to attract similar developers as Cloudflare’s Workers platform. Mostly developers who want a PaaS like solution with good dev UX.

If that’s the case, this conclusion seems obvious in hindsight (hindsight is a bitch). Developers who are used to having infra managed for them so they can build applications don’t want to start building on raw infra. They want the dev velocity promise of a PaaS environment.

Cloudflare made a similar bet with GPUs I think but instead stayed consistent with the PaaS approach by building Workers AI, which gives you a lot of open LLMs and other models out of box that you can use on demand. It seems like Fly.io would be in a good position to do something similar with those GPUs.
I want to be optimistic.
No one who claims this ever posts a benchmark

Prompt eval is slow, inference for large models at high context is slow, training is limited and slow.

It's better than not having anything, but we got rid of our M1 Max 192GBs after about a year.
It is absolutely possible to have feelings and still be an idiot for acting on them in certain ways. Someone who "feels" that vaccines are a hoax and they should drink bleach instead is still an idiot despite that feeling. There is also a sort of gray area where a person may act irrationally due to intense feeling in a way that's perhaps excusable (e.g., someone's relative dies and they start smashing things in a fit of grief), but it's still a bad idea. We have to hope that more people are the latter category and will wake up and realize what a mess they've made.
Funny enough, Google is still on cgroup v1. Writeback is also very aggressive such that most of pagecache is clean.
> There's still plenty of hardware-specific APIs, you still debug assembly when something crashes, you still optimize databases for specific storage technologies and multimedia transcoders for specific CPU architectures...

You might, maybe, but an increasing proportion of developers:

- Don't have access to the assembly to debug it

- Don't even know what storage tech their database is sitting on

- Don't know or even control what CPU architecture their code is running on.

My job is debugging and performance profiling other people's code, but the vast majority of that is looking at query plans. If I'm really stumped, I'll look at the C++, but I've not yet once looked at assembly for it.
You have to recompile for every architecture and OS, and no security features.
True conservatism has never been tried :)

The problem with your analysis is that you don't have the power to define what conservatism is; if enough populist reactionaries wrap themselves in the mantle of conservatism (which they absolutely have) then they gain effective ownership of teh term and ruin it for everyone else. I agree with your general thesis but think the rot goes back longer than 3 decades, although it got markedly worse after Newt Gingrich became speaker, around the same time that Fox News started on cable.

As an example, consider Phyllis Schlafy's 'Eagle Forum'. Founded in 1972, its always been a reflection of its late founder's strident reactory outlook, to the point that their periodic rants about communism seem quaint and anachronistic. You could be forgiven for thinking it was relevant for political scientists studying the American right in the 20th century...except the US attorney for DC (a guy named Ed Martin Jr) is an Eagle Forum veteran, and a glance at his X timeline shows he's still all in on la Schlafly, doing official government business through his X account (eg publishing documents ther and nowhere else), and generally living down to the stereotype of a wild-eyed ideologue.

In short, I don't believe terminological exactitude isn't going to get us out of this. The famously cranky Samuel Johnson, writing disdainfully of a British Prime Minister in 1775, commented 'Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel'. His point was that any concept invested with general-purpose social value - patriotism, love of nation, belief in community, conserving the body politic - can be exploited for short-term political gain to the detriment of long-term well-being. It's a perennial problem.
I call this difference being a developer who is on call vs being a developer who is not on call
The assertion was not that these examples are common rather that currently they are more common to generic app developers than manipulating PDE's

As K-filters in data processing and interpretation, that depends thoroughly on the data domains, a good number have biases and co-signals that are more easily removed with an adaptive model of some form.

Eg: magnetic heading effect when recording nine axis nano-tesla range ground signals. The readings returned over a specific point at a specific time of day are a function of sensor speed and heading. Repeated flying over the same point (hypothetically at the same time) from North to South Vs East to West returns different data streams on each of the nine channels.

To get a "true ground reading" both the heading bias and the diurnal flux must be estimated and subtracted.

> plenty of other imputation approaches that are simpler/better/more accessible.

Do tell. What would you use in the above example?
TIL Sam Altman was the president of Y Combinator prior to co-founding OpenAI. The story of HN's spinoff around this time is interesting too.
Ask HN: Investment for Mill Computing?
Mill Computing have produced a new and different processor architecture, and are looking for investment (~$12M) so they can progress to producing silicon. Are there any HN folks with the ability to fund this company?

https://millcomputing.com/topic/yearly-ping-and-see-how-things-are-going-thread/
https://millcomputing.com/topic/any-plans-for-2024/
https://millcomputing.com/#investorlist

PS: I'm not involved with the company in any way, just interested to see more architectures succeed in some way.
Heh yeah to be clear I'm not saying the consequences won't be catastrophic. I'm saying that the gambit does have a success criteria: If we nuke half the federal government and there are no noticeable differences, then the premise that it was all waste is vindicated. A high risk gambit, to be sure.
What Internet applications need an accuracy better than ±50ms?
I also like it, in the same way I like DIN even though the author considers DIN to be better designed. I have, like the author, often seen this font when it's carved into metal, and I suppose the fact that it's on metal helps evoke that feeling of industry at its best, like a well oiled machine. I also instinctively associate it with the post-WWII period when technology seemed to be progressing faster than today and when technology was unequivocally a good thing.
This attitude is what cost your party this election.
So you can't even debug or check the LLM's output for correctness? Good luck with that.

If anything, the best use for LLMs is to produce code in very strong languages like Lean, where correctness of the code can be established. Just trusting machine code output would be irresponsible.
The unsung hero of early computing was Dennard scaling. Taking CPUS from 10MHz to 2GHz, all alongside massive per-clock efficiency improvements must have been a crazy time.

From a 50MHz 486 in 1990 to a 1.4GHz P3 in 2000 is a factor of 28 improvement in speed solely due to clock speed! Add on all the other multiplicative improvements from IPC...
Russian already lost Cold War long time ago.
Can you not use this information of it being closed for high frequency trading?

Also I have pondered, to put it very simply, why wouldn't it be profitable, since the markets fluctuate, to gamble small amounts constantly at where they most often (this is more complex but you could simply draw line as well) cross a line, such that you can always lose everything, and then sell every time it goes over that line & buy when it's below regardless of how much you would make?
Yes, should happen soon.
> time is flawed

you're absolutely correct
Why are people using HTTPS for time? That would be quite the anti-pattern. Standard NTPD port 123 UDP works fine for most people and using Chrony [1][2] one can get down to double digit microseconds or even nanoseconds offset depending on their location. If people need lower than that they should be using their own GPS receivers and local stratum-1 servers in each datacenter and then using Chrony with a short poll interval within the datacenter to the edge stratum-1 servers.

[1] - https://chrony-project.org/examples.html

[2] - https://chrony-project.org/faq.html
Who do you use instead for hobby projects?
I would start with the fact that there is nothing consistent or complete about humans. Penrose's argument that he is a thetan because he can do math doesn't hold water.
My bet? It’s gotta be the Gitea devs! The GitHub clone wars are on.
US opponents couldn’t do this much damage if they tried….
I don’t understand how you could say something like HTTP or Cloud Functions or React aren’t abstractions that software developers take for granted.
Could actually be: https://apnews.com/article/trump-china-russia-nuclear-bbc1c7...
So don't read the feeds. My LinkedIn exists as an easy way for other folks in my field to contact me who might not have my email. Works quite well for that process. I don't read any posts.
I used to live in a 2nd story studio apartment. I had a full sized overstuffed leather couch. The front door had it's own tiny stoop up a steep flight of stairs, and the front door opened onto a tiny coat closet that made it functionally impossible to get the couch aligned and out the door when it was time to move out. After a solid half hour of getting my ass kicked into my hatband trying to configure the couch in such a way that it'd go out the front door I said to hell with it, grabbed my harness, some slings, and a climbing rope, rigged the thing on a cowtail and rappelled off the deck with it. To this day I cannot for the life of me remember how in the hell I managed to get that couch into that apartment.
your fancy scrolling animation splash screen is very laggy on my M1 MBP, incase that is interesting to you.
Eric Meyer's blog post about why it should be called 'rebeccapurple' - see https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/06/19/rebeccapurple/
I'm worried this will come across as cavalier and non-serious, but your comment reminded me a lot of ... yes, a comedy skit: Bo Burnham's White Woman's Instagram, in which he ostensibly makes fun of clichéd social media content, only to completely whip you about by briefly interrupting the cheese with the character's heartfelt post about living with her mother's death, perhaps the reason she needs the escapism of her online identity. And after it all you realize he told her entire life story in a series of comedy vignettes. I'm not ashamed to say I watched it in the right sort of mood and it moved me to tears (having lost a parent).
Housing crisis in Australia

My past few rentals are too small to practice at home without annoying the neighbours

Singing practice is really repetitive so even if you sound good it’s irritating to everyone else
Ironically, I found the opposite. Tumblr users will pay Tumblr to "blaze" posts of other users, sending the post to everyone on the platform.

I don't think there are many platforms in which users are willing to give the platform money.

If you asked me whether I'd give money to support Reddit, I'd say just let it crash and burn.
> Do you have a medical source that claimed this?

No, I just observed that everyone I know got vaccinated, then got COVID.

But if you want me to throw a PDF at you, "the impact of vaccination on community transmission of circulating variants of SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be not significantly different from the impact among unvaccinated people" & "Indeed, there is growing evidence that peak viral titres in the upper airways of the lungs and culturable virus are similar in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals" - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

Which matches pretty closely what I see in real life. Before vaccinations, everyone was going to get COVID. After vaccinations, everyone ... got COVID. No change in transmission profile.

> We don’t have a form one can sign that says you get to take risks but are put at the back of the line for healthcare access under certain circumstances.

Yes, people should be able to take responsibility for their own health rather than have the economy burned down around their ears. Maybe the CDC should have been pointing that out? Something COVID-like is going to happen in the future, it isn't that unusual an event. A respiratory pandemic is probably a 1:50, 1:20 year style event given how interconnected the world is now.
From a Japanese song Kurumi

If only time could wash everything away,
時間が何もかも洗い連れ去ってくれれば

a life would be truly easy
生きる事は実に容易い
I know how you feel. Tomorrow is my late son's ninth birthday.
I'm technical. I've gotten numerous interviews and a very good job through LinkedIn. I don't post, I don't read posts. My mere presence there with somewhat up-to-date information is valuable as an easy place to connect with people who are looking for individuals with my particular experience.
Eric Meyer's blog posts about his daughter Rebecca - see https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/category/personal/rebecca...
> I’ve been researching how online time services sync over HTTPS

HTTPS isn't usually used as far as I'm aware. Wait until you discover that your time server's TLS certificate has "expired" according to your local machine; or hasn't yet become valid (valid in the "future"). Good luck syncing after that!

Most services use some version of NTP; here's NTPv3 spec: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1305 but there are others.

> Due to network latency & asymmetry, even widely trusted time sources can drift by ±50ms or more

Yup! Some people would call that a feature to enable leap second smearing.

> most public clocks are way less accurate than we assume

I would bet you're right but I don't recall any studies to measure how bad the problem is. It sounds like you might be barking up somewhere with possibility for unique studies and information!

> Some engineers are experimenting with ways to push accuracy below 10ms

Get rid of HTTP and you can get accuracy below 1ms. HTTP takes up a lot of compute compared to NTP.
Possibly because it's actually just "good enough" for most use cases?

And if you truly require better accuracy, using a GPS units for high acuracy PTP is a thing.
Nvidia deliberately makes this hard.

Opportunity for Intel and AMD.
Autopsy: No foul play in OpenAI whistleblower's suicide
Anyone wanting accurate time is using their own time source (eg GPS) and switches that support distributing it over PTP
> because things just work

If that were true, you might be right.

What happens in reality is that things are promised to work and (at best) fulfill that promise so long as no developers or deployers or underlying systems or users deviate from a narrow golden path, but fail in befuddling ways when any of those constraints introduce a deviation.

And so what we see, year over year, is continued enshittening, with everything continuously pushing the boundaries of unreliability and inefficiency, and fewer and fewer people qualified to actually dig into the details to understand how these systems work, how to diagnose their issues, how to repair them, or how to explain their costs.

> If the cost of an easily managed solution is low enough, why do the details matter?

Because the patience that users have for degraded quality, and the luxury that budgets have for inefficiency, will eventually be exhausted and we'll have collectively led ourselves into a dark forest nobody has the tools or knowledge to navigate out of anymore.

Leveraging abstractions and assembling things from components are good things that enable rapid exploration and growth, but they come with latent costs that eventually need to be revisited. If enough attention isn't paid too understanding, maintaining, refining, and innovating on the lowest levels, the contraptions built through high-level abstraction and assempbly will eventually either collapse upon themselves or be flanked by competitors who struck a better balance and built on more refined and informed foundations.

As a software engineer who wants a long and satisfying career, you should be seeking to understand your systems to as much depth as you can, making informed, contextual choices about what abstractions you leverage, exactly what they abstract over, and what vulnerabilities and limitations are absorbed into your projects by using them. Just making naive use of the things you found a tutorial for, or that are trending, or that make things look easy today, is a poison to your career.
Slightly pedantic nit:

I know you're pointing out what "taxes" get you, but most people look at the tax brackets for income taxes and correlate that with the level of government services they receive.

It's important to note that income taxes do not fund Social Security and Medicare. These are funded through FICA taxes, paid 7.65% from the individual and the employer match of another 7.65%. That's why if you are self-employed (or do 1099 work on the side), you pay self employment taxes, which is both halves to the tune of 15.3%.

So people actually pay their income tax (less the standard or itemized deductions) on the stairstep up to the top bracket IN ADDITION to FICA.

Not passing judgment on whether it's an equitable deal for everyone involved, but we do get taxed pretty heavily. Especially when you throw state income taxes (for those states that have them) and property taxes into the mix.
Maybe fundamentally is an extremely load bearing word here, but just in the hardware itself we see far more abstraction than we saw in the 60s. The difference between what we called microcode in an 8086 and what is running in any processor you buy in 2025 is an abyss. It almost seems like hardware emulation. I could argue that the layers of memory caching that modern hardware have are themselves another layer vs the days when we sent instructions to change which memory banks to read. The fact that some addresses are very cheap and others are not, and the complexity is handled in hardware is very different than stashing data in extra registers we didn't need this loop. The virtualization any OS does for us is much deeper than even a big mainframe that was really running a dozen things at once. It only doesn't look like additional layers if you look from a mile away.

The majority of software today is written without knowing even which architecture the processor is going to be, how much of the processor we are going to have, whether anything will ever fit in memory... hell, we can write code that doesn't know not just the virtual machine it's going to run in, but even the family of virtual machine. I have written code that had no idea if it was running in a JVM, LLVM or a browser!

So when I compare my code from the 80s to what I wrote this morning, the distance from the hardware doesn't seem even remotely similar. I bet someone is writing hardware specific bits somewhere, and that maybe someone's debugging assembly might actually resemble what the hardware runs, maybe. But the vast majority of code is completely detached from anything.
The abstraction manifest more on the language level. No memory management, simplified synchronization primitives, no need of compilation.

Not sure virtual machine are fundamentally different. In the end if you have 3 virtual or 3 physical machine the most important difference is how fast you can change their configuration. They will still have all the other concepts (network, storage, etc.). The automation that comes with VM-s is better than it was for physical (probably), but then automation for everything got better (not only for machines).
First— NTP does not use HTTPS. It uses UDP as a transport since on-time delivery matters more than missed deliveries.

Second— inaccurate time really is only a “problem” if it is not accurate enough. For the purposes of TLS, the current typical time error seems to be well within the tolerance of most communications.

There are plenty of people talking about time synchronization if you know where to look. If you really need something more accurate than NTP, use a PCI card that gathers time from GPS or using a time signal radio broadcast (eg, NIST’s).