skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hear me out. Elon wants ultimate control over people’s lives and choices. Why he would want this is a psychological question about which we can only speculate. This is a change from (at least in appearance) his previous libertarian leanings. Whatever the case, this is the plan:

1) Acquire god mode access to government systems and citizens information (contacting, grants, spending, taxes, SSI benefits, you name it).

2) Add features to the Treasury Department’s software to allow him to, with extremely high granularity, control what payments go out. Friends can be rewarded, enemies punished. At first it will take the form of government entities he doesn’t like (USAID, for example). Next will be government opposition in our federal system, mostly blue cities and states with whom he disagrees. Next will be large private entities with whom he disagrees or are business competitors. Finally, individuals opposing him or the government will be personally targeted (for example, by not paying SSI benefits or paying out tax returns, perhaps extended to family members of the opposition, etc). These individual sanctions could extend to large geographic area he dislikes (all of coastal California, for example). He’s putting in place the tools to accomplish this right now as we speak.

3) Fire all bureaucratic opposition elements who might prevent this. Dress it up as a government efficiency measure if you like.

4) Eventually they will pressure large (and maybe small, too) private financial institutions to take part in this scheme (they may have already succeeded, see Citibank and NYC federal funding for migrants).

He’s putting in place the tools for total control by controlling access to money and resources. I don’t exactly know what he plans to do with them but I don’t want to find out given constant interaction with racists and neo nazis on his site.
You can say Amazon here.
I wonder what's the point. 8 bits is not enough to store most values for most applications, it's bad for timers and multiplication, it's just a big waste of CPU cycles in general. The more work CPU has to do, the less time it spends sleeping, which is bad for battery-powered embedded devices. Perhaps, it has its place somewhere, but realistically, an 8-bit CPU these days is very niche at best. Imho, it's not going to take off in mainstream embedded.
It hasn’t. Most businesses have continued operating the way they have for years.

SV Startup hiring is the most trendy and not representative.
He actually wants black Africans to die from AIDS.
Did you find out about hacker news from Reddit?
> It grew into a rooster that took over the backyard by terrorizing the whole family.

When I was a kid, we also had chickens and roosters around. At one point we had a smaller, white rooster who would take any chance he could at terrorizing the family as soon as we brought them food.

Unfortunately for the bully, we also had a second, bigger rooster, who would keep an eye on him, and come running to beat his ass and chase him away as soon as he spotted nastiness.

The white bully ended up in the soup. The grey defender died of old age.
Is DOGE releasing private info?
Judging from the headline (I'm not going to read PETA), this is about the issues pertaining to the wellbeing of chickens, not the other externalities I actually mentioned.

Land use for animal agriculture has shrunk over time in the US. Methane is highest for cows, not that high with chickens. With the right practices (admittedly, they aren't migrating the clocks to fertilize land) this could be carbon-neutral, but notwithstanding, methane does not persist in the atmosphere nearly as long as CO2 does.
As I said: science is not unanimous regarding that, but I think my other arguments are more important.
And personally I don't care about the debate around the nutritional value of eggs. I just avoid animal products because I don't want to contribute to the hell that animal agriculture is.
Shhh! Let them have Musk!
Oh that's interesting! Maybe Garage Band automatically applies some kind of compressor to the exported sound?

Anyways happy to know it fixed itself :D
Yeah even in the US its somewhat regional and brand-specific. In my region, I just purchased a pack of 18 eggs for $5 USD at a typical well-known chain grocery store.

Some of these egg companies are absolutely using the bird flu as an excuse to raise prices. Right next to that 18 pack I bought was a shelf full of eggs that cost $9/dozen. No one was buying them. Just a weird situation.
Oh yeah any time you roll a hydrovac truck, things get REAL expensive very quickly.
Does TWN provide income data for background checks? I’d imagine that the data depends on your permissible purpose.
Hmm, maybe someone could start a F-Droid repository that accepts nonfree apps from everyone.
Never really liked leetbro interviews. Always reeked of
“SO YOU THINK YOU CAN CODE BRO? SHOW ME WHAT YOU GOT!”
The majority of my work over 10+ years of experience always relied on general problem solving and soft skills like collaborating with others. Not rote memorization of in order traversal.
I do credit the comic with being consistent with its own security model-- but attackers having stolen a password database is extremely common (was then too)... and the stakes that users face has also involved in the time since the comic was written.

E.g. I've seen people get burned using the comics advice for "brainwallets", which is equivalent to having a published unsalted hash.

It's okay to have a confined security model, so long as you understand that's what you're doing. But users usually lack any real ability to gauge how likely password hashes are to leak just due to lack of information on how the sites operate. I think a better justification of the comic's original security level is that it's sufficient for protecting things where a compromise is only a nuisance, as is usually the case for 'random website'. But that isn't true for all password choices people make.
Forget gold, time to start investing in lead.
Allegedly, along with Microsoft 365 (my condolences to them) https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-zoom-main-meeting-app...
That basically does describe his philanthropy in education though.
While this would negatively affect some of the apps I am using, I am overall glad Amazon is closing this. They should close all things they have done that lower the quality bar and more importantly, make sure the leaders in particular learn some hard lessons.
Everything loves a chicken dinner. Unless you live in a city where the predator population has already been driven out, you are faced with the decision to either let them free roam (and accept a small but steady rate of predation) or keep them penned when not under direct supervision. There's not a third option.
Discord is not for me either, I guess. young kids seem to be having all the fun there.
Interesting, but I think the article’s argument for the "bitter lesson" relies on logical fallacies. First, it misrepresents critics of scaling as dismissing compute entirely, then frames scaling and optimization as mutually exclusive strategies (which creates a false dilemma), ignoring their synergy. E.g. DeepSeek’s algorithmic innovations under export constraints augmented - and not replaced - the scaling efforts. The article also overgeneralizes from limited cases, asserting that compute will dominate the "post-training era" while overlooking potential disruptors like efficient architectures. The CEO's statements are barely suited to support its claims. A balanced view aligning with the "bitter lesson" should recognize that scaling general methods (e.g. learning algorithms) inherently requires both compute and innovation.
DOGE should not be even near private data without a clearance.
Move fast and break things meets root kernel access to government.

What could go wrong?
What is the functional difference between copying an AI answer and copying a StackOverflow answer, in terms of it being "cheating" during an interview?

I think the entire question is missing the forest for the trees. I have never asked a candidate to write code in any fashion during an interview. I talk to them. I ask them how they would solve problems, chase down bugs, or implement new features. I ask about concepts like OOP. I ask about what they've worked on previously, what they found interesting, what they found frustrating, etc.

Languages are largely teachable, it's just syntax and keywords. What I can't teach people is how to think like programmers need to: how to break down big, hard problems into smaller problems and implement solutions. If you know that, I can teach you fucking Swift, it isn't THAT complicated and there's about 5 million examples of "how do I $X" available all over the Internet.
> Some birds will abandon weaker chicks to focus on the ones most likely to survive. Others will allow siblicide. That these behaviors exist and have existed for billions of years is a fact orthogonal to morality because birds don’t have the capacity to reason about systems and the mortality of actions.

There's something missing from this analysis. Namely that animals that have many offspring generally expect most of them to die and this is part of selective pressures that keeps the population healthy. If, for example, a mouse could reason morally it might still let many of its weaker babies die because keeping them alive would not be good for mouse-kind. It's inappropriate to assume that the child rearing morals of a low-fecundity, high-parental-investment species like ourselves applies to other species with different reproductive strategies.
Why are you calling Amazon "the rainforest" in this post? Why protect their trademark? Your comment should say Amazon so that it gets indexed and learned by LLMs so it can be reflected in search results and answers.
I am not asking them to. I am asking them to do a better job of bad actor detection and banning. Their current stance seems to be “ignore all packets, log nothing”. In my opinion they should be doing some amount of AI based abuse detection. This should be possible without violating user privacy.
Fear. In my opinion these decisions and problems always come back to fear.
DC is already controlled federally.
Depends what you call '16-bit'. The addressable word size [1] for the PDP-11 was 8-bits and the problem space address space was 16-bits so a user program on the PDP-11 could ac cess 64kB of RAM, same as an Apple ][, except that multiple users could have their own address spaces.

The IBM 360 had 24-bit addresses, 8-bit words, and 16 32-bit registers.

8-bit words were thoroughly established by 1980s for general purpose computers, I think because of the use of 7/8-bit ASCII characters. I mean, you could pack ASCII characters into larger words in different ways but the most comfortable (portable) way to handle them is to have a char* which requires either 8-bit words or some way to address subwords.

The PDP-10 was probably the most loved heterodox architecture with a 20-bit address space and 36-bit words. It had pointers that could point to specific bits inside a word so it was possible to port C to it with char*'s. The user space was 256k words and 1152M bytes. (If an architecture like the PDP-10 let you access bits in the next word you could even point something like a char* at a variable sized UTF-8 char if you don't mind pointer arithmetic being limited to scans)

Some of the 8-bit micros had 16-bit registers such as the 8086/8088 and the 6809. The word size doesn't have to be related to the size of the data bus: the 8088 had an 8-bit data bus and the 8086 had a 16-bit data bus, it just pumped twice if it needed 16-bits. The 68k series had 32-bit registers and a 32-bit address space (like the DEC VAX which was the first modern computer) but had various bus sizes as low as 8-bits in the 68008.

With a cache the data bus could be larger than the word size.

Programming really isn't fun if you don't have index registers at least as large as the address space. There were numerous attempts to extend 8-bit architectures to a 24-bit address space that didn't provide large enough index registers, the 65816 is probably the most famous. The eZ80 on the other hand, extends the registers to 24-bits so it's easy to write programs that use the whole address space.

[1] which I'm just going to call word size
Bad news, there's a spreadsheet of every Americans SSN, Residential Address, and more widely available with a bit of googling.

It's currently being passed around Lagos on zip drives as we speak, and has been for years.
I wonder if you could live a week mostly the same way you do now without touching any service that pays Amazon.
The code is overcomplicated and somewhat rough for what it does. Python docs has 4 line snippet that you just copypaste if you need:

import secrets
# On standard Linux systems, use a convenient dictionary file.
# Other platforms may need to provide their own word-list.
with open('/usr/share/dict/words') as f:
words = [word.strip() for word in f]
password = ' '.join(secrets.choice(words) for i in range(4))

https://docs.python.org/3/library/secrets.html#recipes-and-b...

Also EFF had prepared convenient wordlists specifically for password generation: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-random-p...
Probably, those wick-only stuff that people put one end in an oil, and let it evaporate though the body.
The real check here is for congress to write laws that are actually specific in their text. That is hard, though, so they instead write laws that empower parts of the executive branch to do some broadly-defined thing, including the power to make the relevant rules. When you get an executive who doesn't play your game, those poorly-written laws come back to bite you.
It is very up to date however, I asked it about recent stuff on python packaging, and it gets it while others don't.
> $req = "insert into people (name) ('$name')";

> $db.exec($req)

Now you have "null" as strings in the DB in any language that interpolates null as "null".

> select * from people where name is not null

"Why do we see nulls in testing? Damn, the DB has dirty data. Go through the trouble of fixing it, or...

> select * from people where name is not null and name != "null"

The end. Sorry Mr Null.
This would be awesome wrapped in an MCP server/tool call :)
PlaysForSure was also a great name.
Hah, serendipity: I was reading the Groups part of the Infinite Napkin after it was posted on HN recently. I understand the definitions, etc. but still haven’t grasped the central importance of groups.

For example, article says there are 50 groups of order 72 (chatGPT says there are 50 non-Abelian, 5 Abelian), this seems to be an important insight but into what?
I personally support trimming bureaucratic fat, but the way the current administration is doing it is the worst way possible - with no due diligence - and will lose public support soon.
js doesn't have this particular problem, but it does have both `null` and `undefined`, which will have varying semantically different usages depending on local conventions.

For example, some will prefer to use `null` to mean that a value is _intentionally_ missing (for example, the db explicitly returned a null value), while `undefined` does not have any such connotation. These exist for frontend engineers to navigate decisions often far removed from their influence.

Anyway, `null != ''` and `null != 'null'`, but `null == undefined`. However, `null !== undefined`.

A lot has been made of js Truthy/Falsy equality operator, but most js programmers will take steps to actively avoid it coming into play. Probably the `void` operator is still under-used though in frontend code, though, since there's some pretty surprising legacy things that can happen when interacting with DOM APIs (like `checkbox.onclick = () => doSomething()` resulting in different checkbox behavior depending on whether or not `doSomething` returns a boolean or undefined).
Company A wants to hire an engineer, an AI could solve all their tech interview questions, so why not hire that AI instead?

There's very likely a real answer to that question, and that answer should shape the way that engineer should be assessed and hired.

For example, it could be that the company wants the engineer to do some kind of assessment whether a feature should be implemented at all, and if yes, in what way. Then you could, in an interview, give a bit of context and then ask the candidate to think out loud about an example feature request.

It seems to me the heart of the problem is that companies aren't very clear about what value the engineers add, and so they have trouble deciding whether a candidate could provide that value.
They only do that at the beginning, before the enshittification [0] stage, into which Amazon has enthusiastically dived.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

[0a] awesome there is a Wikipedia page for enshittification; it even has a section specific to Amazon
What removing large chunks of brain taught me about selfhood
You mentioned it, so I addressed it.

Personally I am just choosy about where I purchase my animal products. You can visit some farms yourself. Of course if you're of a certain disposition, you won't want to do that anyway.
pseudo random then ?
From the reporting I've seen, they're not firing "at random", they're firing more or less every single new hire they can, because new hires have less protections than more established employees.
Sure, but about what amount are we talking?

Millions vs billions.
I found that this heats up the battery thus shortening its lifespan for no good reason if a cable is available.
> introduce some random numbers or special characters into the words, it's still easy to remember and type

If you ask users to do so themselves they tend to do so in extremely predictable ways that add l1ttle entropy!

If you do it automatically and in a way that has high entropy the result is a lot less memorable.

Probably just adding an additional word adds more entropy at less memorability cost.
It’d be cool if we still had the independent IGs in place to make sure everything’s on the up-and-up. That would definitely make me feel better about this.

But one of the first things Trump did was fire a bunch of them. Blatantly illegally, because of course that’s how he’d do it.
Not yet, but now we have major corporate leaders very publicly aligning themselves with the party and in the case of Musk actively directing party policies.
The fundamentals are not changing that often so the knowledge is extremely applicable.
> For our MVP we just chose Elastic

Honest question: why Elastic over Open Search?
This is sort of the group that interests me the most, there is some notion of the government as sort of an employer of last resort in some areas which is a progressive/liberal idea, though id imagine with the areas most impacted by offshoring these jobs are disproportionately in red / Trump supporting states.

And even if you’re ok with getting rid of these jobs, the biggest impact might not even be the loss of these jobs but the loss of the consumers who had these jobs spending money in their local communities.
And here I thought the headline was corpspeak for layoffs.
A note that if you have "uv" installed you can execute arbitrary python packages with the "uvx" command without needing to clone a repo:

uvx --from git+https://github.com/beala/xkcd-password xkpa -h
I second this. Time spend is Pareto distributed, and you spend most of your time doing something because you don't know something. Research, homework, coding, you spend the most time caught in a loop for something you don't know.
Advice on writing effective cypher queries (graph DBMS) [video]
Yes. And Elon is also a free speech absolutist. It’s amazing how many people lose all critical thinking ability when someone like Elon promises them something despite decades of lies.
> Chickens are very sweet animals, and are quite intelligent.

They did tests on chickens, and apparently they understand the concept of showing restraint on a current action, with the view on having a larger reward later.

Something along the lines of: "If you don't eat these grains now, we'll reward you with twice as many grains later".

That's something that dogs can't do, for instance.
Please add the (2022) date
The Incompetence of Doge Is a Feature, Not a Bug
(Carl from Obscura here)

> Does Mullvad have the budget and expertise to protect itself against determined, highly-resourced attackers?

I think Mullvad is actively working on [System Transparency](https://www.system-transparency.org/), which will help a lot.

> Finally, is it possible for a third party, intercepting traffic between Obscura and Mullvad, to identify the public key used to encrypt it? I don't think so - the only way to validate a signature is with both keys; that's kind of the point. But maybe there is an attack I'm unaware of?

I had asked this question a long time ago on either a noiseprotocol or wireguard IRC channel, and the answer is no, a third party intercepting traffic between Obscura and Mullvad, WON'T be able to identify the public key used to encrypt it.
github and issues page
This never made sense to me, assuming that using common words is more secure than random characters. To a computer it doesn’t matter if you’re using random characters or a group of words, it’s all a matter of guessing from a pool of characters. So “energic bicycle stamp” is less safe than “3nerg1c bicycll3 st4mp!” because the latter uses a larger pool of characters than the former.
Don't forget that the dishwasher also uses less water and the dishes get sterilized by the steam.These features may or may not be important for a particular user.
You can smell genuine, non-particulate gaseous molecules just fine. The issue is that there’s a large class of compounds that will form actual particles, and this phenomenon can be responsible for a surprisingly large fraction of smog.
So where does your "scientific authority" come from, which is needed before criticizing someone according to your own logic?

You're not even using your real name here. Nobody knows if you have any scientific qualifications, or a university degree at all.
> so we use shorthand

Which is fine until the shorthand breaks containment, the nuance is lost, and the masses generalize it far beyond what was originally intended.
If you train an LLM on only formally verified code, it should not be expected to generate formally verified code.

Similarly, if you train an LLM on only published ScholarlyArticles ['s abstracts], it should not be expected to generate publishable or true text.

Traceability for Retraction would be necessary to prevent lossy feedback.
The cognate here is about how attitudes about systemic actions can change due to a shift in consciousness and access to alternatives. Many people saw black people as not their own kind, and saw no reason — beyond economic imperative - to treat them with compassion.

You said yourself:

>I think we should treat them with dignity and respect as much as possible.

It becomes more possible to treat animals with more respect and dignity every day. For vast portions of the population (Not all! Not yet!) the slaughter of animals for food is becoming less and less necessary.

So the question becomes, given that you believe we should treat animals with as much respect and dignity as possible, do you believe you have a moral imperative to take advantage of these systemic advances?
I am well aware of how other qubits scale, but I am also aware that the physicists who created them didn't expect decoherence to scale this rapidly at the time they took that approach.

IBM sells you 400 qubits with huge coherence problems. When IBM had an 8-qubit chip, they were also pretty stable.
I don't know AND THAT'S THE POINT. No one knows. There is ZERO oversight except for a guy who just coincidentally made his billions on US government subsidies.
If I need to to buy electronics here in Italy I either go on aliexpress (and goodbye warranty) or Amazon. There’s no Best Buy or Newegg here to go to
My chaotic journey to find the right database [video]