skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Sheets.co – URL Shortener for Google Sheets
I know, URL shorteners are a dime a dozen. Since I work on spreadsheets (A LOT) and share them quite often — both privately (on emails) and publicly (on social media / speaking events), figured I'll create something easy to remember and specific to what I want to share. Turned out A VERY FEW in the world might get some use out of it too so here goes :)
When you are a small country where much of it is bordered by water and the largest distance from tip to next border is ~300km, and you have immense oil wealth, desal and distribution makes sense.

Not explain to me how that works for a state like Arizona, where the closest salt water body is ~80km to the state boundary, yet the closest metro area (Tucson or phoenix) is 250+km. How does processing and delivery get paid for? Note those are the two closest areas.

I picked AZ because there are neighborhoods growing and some are having to rely on trucked in water.
With this attitude you should probably pack up the US and call it a day.

1. Inequality has been constantly decreasing for most of the 20th century, worldwide.

2. Income redistribution has happened multiple times throughout history, and you can argue about the process and also about the results but it has happened repeatedly (French Revolution, Communist Revolution in Russia and all associated revolutions and coups, etc, etc).
When you can spend $2 billion to provide electricity for 150 people then it works fine. I'm not sure many cities would be happy with that though!
I agree, and Mozilla (like all nonprofits) definitely benefits from accountability.

But I would hope that a lack of future donations, combined with (former) donors voicing their specific concerns, can achieve more direct outcomes than litigation. I'd hate to see their already limited funding go towards legal fees.
I keep wondering what the long-game (if any) of LLMs is... to make the world dependent on various models then jack the rates up to cover the costs? The gravy-train of SV funding has to end eventually... right?
we’ll spend it oil company subsidies and tax cuts so it’ll be even more money well spent :)
This is a false dichotomy. There's no conflict between studying things from a social science angle and creating water infrastructure. They're not coming out of the same budget, they're not coming out of the same talent pool, they're not mutually exclusive, there's just no conflict there.

I agree that foreign aid is a good way to avoid conflict. I'd love to see the US help the entire world have access to clean water. Shame that they dismantled the apparatus for providing it.
It's just insane how this is a pattern with microsoft. That should be studied. It's not meant snarky. I am really fascinated. I dislike microsoft but feel that my bias is taking over whenever i get to say things like "of course it failed– it's microsoft". But it is also true every time. Somehow microsoft has a unique talent to take things and just find ways to screw it up in ways, people couldn't imagine. That is really, really fascinating.

But, of course: thank god they blow it every time. They bring the spotlight to the places where others create good things.
Passkey Garden
It got a bit complicated; it was a long research project, and it led to me starting my current company, Patchwork. Currently, it's at a few hundred. https://www.patchworkfood.com
..."request-based memory arena"...

there are some very questionable things going on with the memory handing in this code. just saying.
> I asked Claude 3.7 Sonnet "extended thinking mode" to review an earlier draft of this post [snip] It was quite helpful, especially in providing tips to make that first draft a little less confrontational!

So he's also using LLMs to steer his writing style towards the lowest common denominator :)
If you're interested in moving over to LibreWolf, I also submitted a thread[0] to /r/LibreWolf for recent Firefox refugees asking for suggestions and comments on how people dealt with the transition. It has nearly 100 comments, and some good info.

[0]:https://old.reddit.com/r/LibreWolf/comments/1j0ckr9/recent_f...
That's what representation in Congress is for, and why the Constitution specifies that Congress holds the power of the purse, not the president, and especially not an unelected billionaire with conflicts of interest.
Indeed, I also think consciousness cannot be reduced to computation.

Here is one more thing to consider. All consciousness we can currently observe is embodied; all humans have a body and identity. We can interact with separate people corresponding to separate consciousnesses.

But if computation is producing consciousness, how is its identity determined? Is the identity of the consciousness based on the set of chips doing the computation? It is based on the algorithms used (i.e., running the same algorithm anywhere animates the same consciousness)?

In your example, if we say that consciousness somehow arises from the computation the man performs itself, then a question arises: what exactly is conscious in this situation? And what are the boundaries of that consciousness? Is the set of rocks as a whole? Is it the computation they are performing itself? Does the consciousness has a demarcation in space and time?

There are no satisfying answers to these questions if we assume mere computation can produce consciousness.
> It's actually much better quality of power plant than nuclear because it can be scaled up and down throughout the day economically...

It's not that nuclear reactors can't be built to vary their output. It's that nuclear power is almost all fixed cost. If the average power level over a year is 50%, the power cost doubles. Geothermal has similar economics.
Gooey rubber that's slowly ruining old hard drives
They had a sustainable budget, but the government decided to cut already agreed budgets.
Ahh.

I think we are coming from different feelings about rewatchability.

If you asked me to rate movies as to their artistic merit, their excellence as films, I would say that those all fall into “instant classic” territory. However, I would not want to rewatch them in the same way that I might want to rewatch a Coen brothers film, for example.
> Just because code looks good and runs without errors doesn’t mean it’s actually doing the right thing. No amount of meticulous code review—or even comprehensive automated tests—will demonstrably prove that code actually does the right thing. You have to run it yourself!

I would have stated this a bit differently: No amount of running or testing can prove the code correct. You actually have to reason through it. Running/testing is merely a sanity/spot check of your reasoning.
> We need to invest effort into researching how to make quick, high-quality decisions as a collective

Getting rid of First past the post voting systems will reduce incidents of extremism. Ranked choice voting, multiparty systems amd coalition governments would be an improvement on the current American status quo.
The research is useful in the sense that actually understanding the issues being investigated would be valuable. The question is, would the funded research actually deliver a better understanding of those issues? Given the state of the social sciences, I don't think that it would.
A new OS to replace the incumbents will only be possible in conjunction with a disruptive innovation in hardware. The device driver issue makes it effectively impossible to build a new OS for PCs, tablets, or smartphones. We don't know what the next disruptive hardware form factor will look like yet: a lot of people are betting big on AR/VR goggles but it could be something else totally unexpected.
I love how your response conveniently ignores any mention of energy storage technologies, several types of which are having rapid technological advancement.
The Minerva Research initiative was created by Bush’s defense secretary: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/25482/chapter/3.

> The Minerva Research Initiative was launched in 2008 by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, motivated by the recognition that DoD was underutilizing the intellectual capital of university-based social scientists

Congress doesn’t specifically appropriate money for it. It looks like Congress appropriates money for the DOD’s Basic Research Office, and money is siphoned to this initiative by the executive branch.

EDIT: Corrected which administration.
As I am still on one of the older models, I have dodged most of the LLM tech incorporated into Apple devices in the last few years. But it really does seem like the company threw themselves in that direction without actually.. managing to make it useful.

Has anybody actually found a use for tech such as Apple Intelligence? What could actually Siri do that would make it worth using?
I think all the debunkings of Penrose's argument are rather overcomplicated, when there is a much simpler flaw:

Which operation can computers (including quantum computers) not perform, that human neurons can? If there is no such operation, then a human-brain-equivalent computer can be built.
Of course, I like that you did that. But it's not near fair enough considering people are starving. Bezos has given billions to charity. Will that do? Clearly not. So what you have done cannot suffice either.
I complement Penrose for his indifference to haters and harsh skeptics.

Our minds and consciousness do not fundamentally use linear logic to arrive at their conclusions, they use constructive and destructive interference. Linear logic is simulated upon this more primitive (and arguably superior) cognition.

It is true that any outcome of any process may be modeled in serialized terms or computational postulations, this is different than the interference feedback loop used by intelligent human consciousness.

Constructive and destructive interference is different and ultimately superior to linear logic on many levels. Despite this, the scalability of artificial systems may very well easily surpass human capabilities on any given task. There may be an arguable energy efficiency angle.

Constructive/destructive interference builds holographic renderings which work sufficiently when lacking information. A linear logic system would simulate the missing detail from learned patterns.

Constructive/destructive interference does not require intensive computation

An additive / reduction strategy may change the terms of a dilemma to support a compromised (or alternatively superior) “human” outcome which a logic system simply could not “get” until after training.

There is more, though these are a worthy start.

And consciousness is the inflection (feedback reverberation if you like) upon the potential of existential being (some animate matter in one’s brain). The existential Universe (some part of matter bound in the neuron, those micro-tubes perhaps) is perturbed by your neural firings. The quantum domain is an echo chamber. Your perspectives are not arranged states, they are potentials interfering.

Also, “you all” get intelligence and “will” wrong. I’ll pick that fight on another day.
I swear this was on the front page 2 minutes ago and now it’s halfway down page 2.

Anyway, I’m not really sure where Penrose is going with this. As a summary, incompleteness theorem is basically a mathematical reformulation of the paradox of the liar - let’s state this here for simplicity as “This statement is a lie” which is a bit easier than talking about “ All Cretans are liars”, which is the way I first heard it.

So what’s the truth value of “This statement is a lie”? It doesn’t have one. If it’s false, then it’s true. But if it’s true, then it must be false. The reason for this paradox is that it’s a self-referential statement: it refers to its own truth value in the construction of its own truth value, so it never actually gets constructed in the first place.

You can formulate the same sort of idea mathematically using sets, which is what Gödel did.

Now, the thing about this is that as far as I am aware (and I’m open to be corrected on this) this never actually happens in reality in any physical system. It seems to be an artefact of symbolic representation. We can construct a series of symbols that reference themselves in this way, but not an actual system. This is much the same way as I can write “5 + 5 = 11” but it doesn’t actually mean anything physically.

The closest thing we might get to would be something that oscillates between two states.

We also ourselves, don’t have a good answer to this problem as phrased. What is the truth value of “This statement is a lie”? I have to say “I don’t know” or “there isn’t one” which is a bit like cheating. Am I incapable of consciousness as a result? And if I am indeed conscious instead because I can make such a statement instead of simply ”True” or “False”, well I’m sure that an AI can be made to do likewise.

So I really don’t think this has anything to do with intelligence, or consciousness, or any limits on AI.
In isolation, I would bet that people from both ends of the political spectrum could read this as about the other and be in complete agreement.
Looks like you're being downvoted but you're right. A tiny fraction of high school students would actually care about these classes -- high school me wouldn't
some of us are woke :) we looked at all his living years, he’s been a public figure his entire life so easy to review his entire life&legacy. upon this review one can only conclude that he was sent down by God from heavens - a living messiah :) all ends up well as long as it is in his hands
Artificial Intelligence and the Labor Market [pdf]
The cooking class at my middle school was insanely popular, same with shop. A surprisingly large number of students also signed up for “consumer math” which was all about taxes, budgeting and such.
Some poignant projects that were canceled after already been awarded:

"What Sustains and Ends Wars: Will to Fight to Secure Ontological Significance Versus Material Capacity to Pursue Power", with a slide-reading lecture video on "seemingly intractable conflicts" [1].

"Military Adaptation and War Termination" [2]

""Un"Resilience: Drawing Insights from Societal Collapse" [3]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2i_EEHK_u6o

[2] https://minerva.defense.gov/Research/Funded-Projects/Article...

[3] https://minerva.defense.gov/Research/Funded-Projects/Article...
And it’s a relatively light material. So if you’ve got some place where the carbon footprint of collecting and transporting bauxite is relatively low, you can use excess power to smelt more aluminum.

The problem with opportunistic loads like wind and solar is whether you can afford to strand expensive factories full of equipment for hours or days at a time while the power availability is compromised. At least with geo this is a smaller problem.
> I swear this was on the front page 2 minutes ago and now it’s halfway down page 2.

It set off the flamewar detector. I've turned that off now.
I’ve also worked almost 30 years. Even in 1996 I was able to work remotely occasionally by logging into a mainframe (DEC VAX and Stratus VOS) for half of my work and using PCAnyWhere for Windows based work over a modem.

I’ve worked remotely since March 2020 across three companies. I don’t work in an office. If you need me in an office for some face time, put me on a plane. I initially turned down the chance to interview at Amazon because they wanted me to uproot my life after Covid and only ended up working there because they suggested I interview at AWS Professionsl Services.

When GCP reached out to me multiple times about a similar position after leaving AWS and they said I would have to be in the office, I immediately ended the conversation.
Chrome's UI is written in C++/native GUI toolkit. Firefox's UI is written in JavaScript/HTML (thinly wrapped in native toolkit).
Still, 1:1? Please.
You have created for yourself a prison and you think it inevitable that everyone else will do the same. None of what you're describing is normative. And yes, some people will have outlier bad luck. That's life and it sucks for them, but diseases that have an 0.2% prevalence are rare. There's no reason to reroute all of society to cover Meniere's.
> Workers will simply get fired if they don't come in and execs really want RTO, they're not going to get paid more.

If execs really want RTO then people will quit and they'll have to hire new people, pay retraining costs, pay them more because other companies are still offering WFH, lose out on all those lower cost workers in Latin America (or Texas or Virginia) and still be paying millions of dollars for office space their employees don't even want to be in.
Why do we have to go by your chosen definition?
I don’t think that citing the Russian revolution is the best argument you have. That wealth redistribution attempt took 30 million lives. That’s probably one of the best arguments why we should absolutely not kill the golden geese.
Self host one have control over the post quantum custom encryption you want to use, not at wimp of some corporate over Lord who know they are really doing it for user benefit or just a user acquisition trick.
The really interesting part is what if the agencies were a product of a prior loophole? We seem to be several generations deep in tenuous interpretations, using loopholes to counteract other loopholes. For example, if the executive branch is tasked with carrying out the law, how can we have independent agencies not subject to the executive power in Article 2 Section 1? How do we ignore the 10th amendment on the tenuous interpretation of the interstate commerce clause? It's all a game.
It's an internet term of recent origin, from a specific community, not a traditional one.

It's good to be familiar with the word, as it comes up in adjacent communities like this one, but like with most slang, there are indeed clearer ways to say the same thing.

But also, some people don't realize that they've picked up a slang term or that people outside their community are part of discussions like we have here, so it comes up a lot. Now that you've spotted it, you'll likely see it here a lot.

(FWIW, I hate it and am grateful that nobody can see
me roll my eyes when its used. Same for "motte and bailey" and other comically pseudo-erudite slang from those folks)
It's always possible to compile a turing complete language into another turing complete language, so this statement doesn't carry much meaning.

The interesting thing with the original C++ (then called "C with classes") compiler, Cfront, which compiled to C, was that it was an 1:1 transpiler that offered only local transformations with no global analysis (you can transform one function at time without looking at the rest of the code). The structure of the generated C code closely matched the C++ source code. This is something that's not always possible when compiling a language into another, this only happens when a language offers essentially just syntactic sugar over another, like Coffeescript and Javascript.

I guess that if you compile exceptions using setjmp/longjmp and expanded all templates (I don't think you can compile templates into C macros), and also expanded method overloading and type inference, then all other features from modern C++ are only local transformations. Well maybe with the exception of couroutines from C++20 (which maybe can be compiled into setjmp/longjmp as well, if it can interact well with exceptions? But the purpose of couroutines is to compile into a state machine, which is a non local transformation)

The original Cfront compiler didn't implement even exceptions (they wanted to but Wikipedia said the code was a mess [0] so it was abandoned), but that another, later C++ compiler [1] compiled into C and implemented exceptions and other things

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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comeau_C/C%2B%2B
Being able to export a passkey sounds like a bug, not a feature. I was surprised that the spec was altered to allow hosting in the cloud at all, I thought it was more interesting as a means of keeping secrets in secure enclaves.
I don't think is available.

But you can do a couple of things:

1. Subscribe to the newsletter using kill-the-newsletter.com who creates an RSS feed for your subscription.

2. Follow the RSS feed [1] of their YouTube channel [2], they publish the monthly updates on a video format.

Can't find official Bluesky or Mastodon accounts to also offer you those RSS feeds.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCkT7pg-...

[2] https://youtube.com/@ladybirdbrowser
Yes but.

The main advantage of a phased array isn't related to efficiency, it's that it can be "pointed" a different direction purely in software.

The ability to focus electromagnetic radio power from any source is: "how many wavelengths across is the antenna?"

This applies to receiving as well as transmitting, which is also why radio telescopes need to be physically so much larger than optical telescopes, but for beamed power you don't care about the receiver's ability to focus, so the size of the receiver is determined by the smallest region the transmitter can focus on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinned-array_curse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pattern

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array
LOL, I'm sorry, I mistakenly replied to the wrong submission, yet somehow the outcome was not entirely off-topic.

Intended destination: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43235046
Thank you. I stopped reading after the octal discussion.
kind of a schizopost?
The Tiny Crystals That Make Smartphones Possible [video]
https://codeberg.org/librewolf/source

What are system requirements and time needed to compile

If it is easy then where is LibreWolf for Android
Yeah when it comes to these discussions, I think most people are unaware just how much the cost of solar & BESS (at the large scale) has fallen in the past couple years.
I found deleting all cookies upon exit to be really nice, in combination with a whitelist with some often used and trusted sites. The address/search bar is much more responsive and useful! I also adapted the practice of bookmarking anything and everything that I might want to find back later, throwing everything in one folder – only adding a few top-of-the head tags. It has become my second brain, and has made it super easy to fetch back stuff that I only vaguely remember.

Cleaning out all my browser history after every exit really has changed my relationship with the address bar.

Another way of looking at this method is as an antidote to ending up with hundreds of open tabs – I just bookmark it and close it, knowing I'll find it back later when I actually need it :)
Gosh that's some propaganda.

Every country has homeless people. There are truly homeless people in China. You don't need to put it in quotes, either.
> nearly no one would be interested.

I went to a public US high school with a nursing magnet program and an automotive program.

Both saw you with a phlebotomist license or a technician certification respectively.

These were wildly popular programs despite having academic requirements (for the nursing track)

I think high schoolers care about practicality, actually.

> also you need to keep budget in mind and the teacher shortage

crazy thought, though.

Maybe pay teachers more? Make it a more attractive career? Vote in superintendents with more education experience than corporate.

Idk… anything but throw your hands up and say “well nobody wants to teach so idk”
Interesting. This is actually behavior that I already prefer and enable in Firefox. It makes sense when you leave browser instances open for long periods of time (with multi-account containers for a large number of tabs that you save and restore the session of) and use a password manager to sign in when you do restart.