skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately we have beaten nature only at a single stage of what is needed.

There are 2 more steps needed to be able to do what a plant does.

The second step after capturing solar energy is to use that energy with a good efficiency to capture from the air carbon dioxide and nitrogen (perhaps also water vapor) by converting them into some simple organic substances, perhaps a simple amino-acid like glycine and some other simple HCO molecule, e.g. glycerol.

With such simple organic substances, one could feed a culture of genetically-modified fungi or other fungus-like organisms, which could produce high-quality proteins and fatty substances (there already exist genetically-modified fungus strains, e.g. of Trichoderma, which can produce whey protein or egg-white protein, i.e. much higher-quality proteins than those that can be extracted from plants).

While the first 2 stages of capturing solar energy into simple organic substances are things at which we should be able to beat nature, at the synthesis of complex organic substances like those that are necessary as food, but also for various industrial applications, there is no known method that could beat the biological enzymatic syntheses, so for such things the solution are genetically-modified bacterial or fungal organisms, not machines.
I don't disagree, but that's not the claim I was replying to. The question I was asking about was

> I understand the need for correct lock-free impls: Given OP's description, simply avoiding read mutexes can't be the way to go about it?

I did note that the documentation recommends a lock.

> read the first value ever set to the variable for the entire lifetime of the program

That is not my reading of the current memory model? It seems to specifically prohibit this behaviour in requirement 3:

> 2. w does not happen before any other write w' (to x) that happens before r.
Some of their use-case they are crowing about on their site cover temporary things: back haul for major-but-temporary events, tethered-drone-mounted units for emergency disaster recover where a cell site is taken out etc. Those are the sorts of things where laying fibre 20km for use for just a day or two just isn't going to happen, but a temporary laser link that you can get up and running in a hour or two would be great.
This was an incredible episode interweaving engineering, politics and an idea of where the world might be headed the next 20-30 years.
> Somebody is trying to be more inclusive

Not likely. No one ever felt included by an automatic translation. It is impersonal and clearly comes off as such.

Stastical translation tools are tremendous and helps me regularly to understand the gist of texts in other languages, but I understand that it is at best an approximation and I am prepared that the details may be somewhat off.

Being presented a butchered text where key words must be guessed what they were translated from is deeply disrespectful of other language speakers, yes. It really is. Why else serve them a second-rate quality web page? A translation can only make the text worse. It can not make the text better. This time it was only a question of underpants but sometimes the result can include literal insults.

> because what else would an attempt at translating content be?

Misguided?

I'm trying to be kind and helpful here: Please stop this. It is not helpful, and every popular web browser already offers a drop down menu bar button with a translation tool that is not only potentially better but also under user control. There is no upside to this user hostile design and the downside is that it is confusing and potentially derogatory.
Stanisław Lem: Visionary of Science, Philosophy, and the Simulation Hypothesis [pdf]
> In the same way fiber optic cables in the ground use light to carry data, Taara uses narrow, invisible light beams to transmit information through the air...

If the light is "invisible" then is it even light? I looked it up and it's infrared.

Do we consider UV and infrared to be light? Or are they UV and infrared period, in contrast to light? I mean, nobody would ever call x-rays or radio waves "light". You'd never say "it's emitting infrared light", would you?

Or do they just not want to use the word "radiation" in their marketing, because that sounds scary and cancer-causing?

I'm just curious, since "invisible light" immediately jumped out to me as a contradiction in terms.
Enforcement is always an issue either way though.

So whoever does it today, or would do it either way in our hypothetical scenario.
I don't quite understand this - are these "rooms" where ownership of shares is tracked separately to how an exchange tracks them? E.g. I own 80% of a company, and I keep the official ownership, but let people buy them from me and from each other, but I keep the record of who owns them?
I'm not a guru myself, but I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong. :-)

The usual approach to supervised ML is to "invent" the model (layers, their parameters) or more often copy one from known good reference, then define the cost function and feed it data. "Deep" learning just means that instead of a few layers you use a big number of them.

What you describe sounds like an automated way of tweaking the architecture, IIUC? Never done that, usually the cost of a run was too high to let an algorithm do that for me. But I'm curious if this approach is being used?
Monster didn't come until 2002.
> the DA didn't "stop prosecuting criminals"

The voters of California certainly think he did:
https://calmatters.org/justice/2024/11/george-gascon-pamela-...
The most peculiar detail: at the bottom of https://x.company website in the socials column they literally have a link "X (not us)" to https://www.twitter.com/theteamatx
It is not, other than sometimes in the case of equal contribution. The first and sometimes second authors are the most important, and the last author is often the advisor/senior researcher supervising the work.
> This argument, "People don't really care about <x> ...", is not so much an argument as it is a rationalization for amoral or simply bad behavior on the part of the seller/supplier.

It's worse than that. It's adversarial propaganda.

People actually do care about privacy, but they also care about other things, and they don't always know about privacy.

If Amazon tells you that they're recording what you say at all, it's buried in a hundred page ToS that nobody reads, and then what they do with the information isn't even clearly specified. If people understood that they're using it to determine which products to show you so you're more likely to buy the ones with higher margins, and that's costing you $1200/year, people would care about that, but they don't even realize it's happening.

If the market is consolidated into two companies and they're both invading your privacy, or there is one company that doesn't but their product costs $500 more and the customer doesn't have $500 more, it's not that customers don't care, it's that they have no viable alternatives.

If they start using a product before it starts invading their privacy and then later it does, but that product is something like Microsoft Windows and by then they're so thoroughly locked into that platform that short-term extrication is infeasible, they grit their teeth and whinge about it because they wish there was an alternative, not because they don't.

Casting this as "people don't care" gets it wrong. If there are two otherwise-identical fungible products and one of them invades your privacy and the other one doesn't, not doing that is an advertisable feature. In a competitive market it's a competitive advantage. But if the incumbents can convince would-be competitors that it isn't then they don't have to face that competition, which is the purpose of the propaganda.

And in the markets where competition is lacking independently of this, the "regulation" needed is antitrust, because uncompetitive markets have more than just privacy problems.
Roblox's new AI model can generate 3D objects
Wondering how they’re educating the market about federated learning at scale. It’s still a nascent technology and fairly hard to wrap one’s head around.
We’ve successfully kneecapped many industries that we figured out where gander onto society. For example, tobacco. No ads, you can’t smoke anywhere. The result? Way less smoking! And we’re all in agreement that’s a good thing.

Ads are private sector propaganda. They’re manipulative material attempting to exploit the weakness of the human mind to get YOU to spend money you don’t actually want to spend. Yes, YOU.

We know things that exploit the weaknesses of the human mind, like nicotine, have the potential for extraordinary evil when left to the hands of the private sector. We haven’t all come to this consensus on advertisement, but we will.
The hackers still have opportunity cost. Also the support costs (communicating with victims who may or may not pay), paying for payload delivery (either explicitly by letting someone else do it, or by putting in hours to do it themselves), server costs, the ransomware software itself might be bought or acquired in a SaaS or affiliate model.

Just because it's crime doesn't mean it's free money
They seem to take poor weather condition into account as they reserve an amount of power to keep the link up and stable (equipment would be capable of pushing up to 75km)
Those were data from first tests they did, might be interesting if they can confirm that in future updates.
the big one is multiplayer games. udp is preferred and trying to work with webrtc is awful
> Supabase comes really close, but has been much more difficult in actual use

supabase team here - can you share more about the challenges? We'd love your feedback so that we can fix any difficulties for the future
It's true. That's also why people are so confused about those who call the company a Con or scam.

But in current context, with cratering sales, that's actually a disadvantage - these 100k people and different factories still need to be paid and maintained. This part of business will be bleeding cash in Q1 already.
I don't know why we're trying anymore.

You're not going to convince someone who is looking for a way to make something not work however minor it is and not the other way around.
"decent human beings" and "assholes" according to them. That's a huge distinction.
It's not more complicated if you know the language.

Language is a tool. People will use their language for what they need it for. If there isn't a word they'll make one up or steal it. This is absolutely universal. I know you can dig up any number of texts that say English is special, but they're all wrong.

"Languages differ not in what they can express, but in what they must express" as Roman Jakobson phrased it. (The "must express" refers to grammar - in some languages you need a subject, or to know the time something happened, or in which direction[0] it happened. Other languages don't care, but you can add that information if you need it.)

[0] E.g. Mam, spoken in Guatemala, marks all verbs for direction, even if they're abstract, then you add one based on convention or metaphor or maybe taste.
But how can you make sure that people annotate their functions with localscope?
Thanks for the interesting article.

Is anyone not just me hesitant to run their own servers? I think about patching and it becomes a full on devops job to set up something safe and stay on top of upgrades etc.

One idea Ive had is that if the web facing part of the software is just a form saver. It persists the form to disk for retrieval by the local-first server that I run on my laptop after pulling all records.

Would like to talk to persons about this topic: local first and low-maintenance service design SAAS

I wrote about an imaginary cloud service that would be about hosting forms for batch processing later this is similar to the workspace.zip in this article but this is used for the app itself.

https://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Secure_20Form_20Endpoint_20S...
Well, WASD also is slightly broken for most left-handers, at least for games that assume one hand is on WASD and the other on the mouse.
They only need 1 more to hit that, since they got 2 in the Xbox Series X.
This is surprising. Why are the police monitoring constitutionally protected activity?
Why water down what they actually say?
They say "silence is violence", and they ALSO say that speech is violence!
A Tesla protester targeted by Elon Musk speaks out: 'I have to protect myself'
Rscss: A reasonable system for CSS stylesheet structure
From my perspective, Google Fiber 100% disrupted connectivity - it woke the incumbents up and made them offer competitive Fiber.
In that sense, they succeeded! My last three connections from my last three ISPs have all been gigabit (one of which was Google Fiber, easily the best internet I've ever had). I think they're expanding again, too, though I wish they had stayed as aggressive with rollout as they started.
> when you have a microcontroller pin and you configure it as an input, you expect it to SINK current (as in, take voltage 'in').

That's not how it works; input does not mean sink current. An OUTPUT low sinks current, and an output high sources current.

In a "normal" microcontroller (with no silicon bugs), an input pin is in a high-impedance state ("Hi-Z"), meaning it doesn't sink or source current -- but it can be configured to have an internal pull-up or pull-down resistor, in which case it will (respectively) source or sink a little bit of current, enough to keep it at high or low voltage (i.e., enough for a logical high or low) unless there's something else driving it.

The problem with the RP2350 is that (under some circumstances) there's a current leakage between the pin and the voltage rail, so when a pin is configured as input with a pull-down resistor, the voltage will not go down to the low level it needs to read a logical low as expected: it will be at around 2.2V, which is in the "undefined" region.
You can say the same thing about running wired ethernet to your TV in the living room. It's simpler and more reliable than wifi. But wifi is much easier and quicker to install. Which one do most people use?
> I'm questioning the "too fast" part.

You have to define what is too fast for you. For me 0.5% yearly is too fast.
Percentage wise the USA, Canada and India are growing at about the same rate according the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio...

> "Housing might be scarce, but that's due to political factors"

That's not changing the fact that population grows while housing does not at the needed rate.
Making an EV into a backup power station with an inverter
I wish I had the time to try this:

1.) Grab many GBs of text (books, etc).

2.) For each word, for each next $N words, store distance from current word, and increment count for word pair/distance.

3.) For each word, store most frequent word for each $N distance. [a]

4.) Create a prediction algorithm that determines the next word (or set of words) to output from any user input. Basically this would compare word pairs/distance and find most probable next set of word(s)

How close would this be to GPT 2?

[a] You could go one step further and store multiple words for each distance, ordered by frequency
APPL? Relevant to the discussion above on similar names.
I'm not an expert on HTTP/3, but vehemently disagree about IPv6. It removes tons of overhead and cruft, making it delightful for datacenter work. That, and basically guaranteeing you don't have to deal with the company you just acquired having deployed their accounts with the same 10/16 subnet your own company uses.
> I don’t get why left is so afraid of pissing radical feminists off. It’s not like they will begin to vote right wing.

They're not. Embracing trans people runs completely counter to radical feminism. The left currently subscribes to liberal feminism, not radical feminism.
> Do we consider UV and infrared to be light? Or are they UV and infrared period, in contrast to light? I mean, nobody would ever call x-rays or radio waves "light". You'd never say "it's emitting infrared light", would you?

Yes, we do. No, it's not. Yes, they do. Yes, I would.
That zoom on iPhone is a perfect Apple thing: here is a very useful feature, we will document it but never bother to publicize it, and it’s going to be buried behind a strange gesture requiring both hands (double-tap and hold with three fingers, then slide up or down!).

I can’t change the behaviors of others. And, in practice, while email isn’t really considered a conversation, messaging is. Stuff that would be no problem in a physical conversation (three people laugh) is incredibly distracting when every one of them feels compelled to note they found it funny.
This was early in my career, and one thing I learned is that the best way to stay antifragile is to stay small, stay unsexy, and always be the one in the drivers seat.
That's just a comparison to understand the amount of new housing needed per year. Every year.
Playing Mass Effect: Legendary Edition
When I came to Silicon Valley in the early 2010s and realized that all of the king's horses and all of the king's men could not defeat the scourge that is the US ISP oligopoly even in their own backyards, I knew it was pointless to ever hope for real FTTH in Bay Area markets in the next couple of decades.

Wireless solutions have orders of magnitude less bandwidth than fiber, and you can run lots of fiber in a bundle, whereas there's limited spectrum and only one already-saturated RF environment going wireless.

Only in the past few months has Comcast (the only actual high-speed internet option in our fairly typical Silicon Valley suburban neighborhood of ~$2.5m average homes) deigned to offer upload speeds greater than the previous 35mbit cap...now we can push 200mbit for $120/mo (for 1.2tb monthly combined U+D, add $20 for "unlimited") and you usually have to buy a new modem even if your old one supported the tech, since they only support specific firmware on specific SKUs. Meanwhile, GFiber is offering 8gbps symmetrical for $150/mo unmetered.

Reminder also that Ricochet was wireless internet in 1994 on 900mhz ISM using FHSS in the Valley. Ooh how far we've come in 30 years.
What kind of overhead? I’m curious if there’s data about this because I hadn’t heard that 1.1 was better for the data center.
Yes, light is any transmission of photons, and the visible spectrum is only a tiny slice of that.
qbasic is not a C compiler. It was also not possible to make windows applications with it… and it lacked the option to generate a .exe file.

It was more of a toy.
The implication that any software is "mysterious" is problematic - there is no "woo" here - the exact state of the machine running the software may be determined at every cycle. The exact instruction and the data it executed with may be precisely determined, as can the next instruction. The entire mythos of any software being a "black box" is just so much advertising jargon, perpetuated by tech bros who want to believe they are part of some Mr. Robot self-styled priestly class.
What's interesting is that Poe is not in the Altered Carbon book. The hotel was called the Hendrix and its avatar was Jimi the guitarist. They couldn't get image rights for the film, so had to change it. But i agree that atmospherically and thematically Poe is a better fit.
The problem with selling inferior technologies is that sooner or later people are going to stop using them (even in the Grad Basin region). Not exactly a recipe for success.
The "const" qualifier in C (1997)
Check out Prof G. - Scott Galloway. He's a big advocate for young men.
I'm low key afraid that this stuff is gonna get popular for .mil usage.

Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming. Its usage dots the sci books I've read over the years, but almost always for scary reasons.

Here's the Navy today announcing work on AirBorne System for Optical Relay and Broadcast (ABSORB), a (for now) low-cost prototype one-to-many (I maybe mis-inferring what multi-access means?) relayable free space system, https://defence-blog.com/us-navy-plans-to-revolutionize-nava...
It's on 5ghz on my end, and switching the UniFi lite AC to WPA2 from WPA2/3 fixed it.

The thing is that the 2.4ghz wifi from the S90C (they both need to be on the same network for some goddamn reason to work in SmartThings) interferes with my DualSense gamepad.
A Visual Guide to LLM Agents
Oh, I'm an idiot. Ford are still US owned right?
In this context, ”happens before” is not a wall-clock colloquialism but in fact a term of art that is specifically described as:

> The happens before relation is defined as the transitive closure of the union of the sequenced before and synchronized before relations.

Without synchronization, the degenerate sequencing is perfectly valid.

That’s the problem with being “clever” - you miss a definition and your entire mental model is busted.
It resonates because of dopamine, and little else
Yes, thanks for asking! You see, all this combining words in ways that people are taught to have a negative reaction to is actually part of my super secret plan to take over the world. (But don't worry, I promise to not be any better then the extant network of disavowed power relations maintained by recursive Pavlovian conditioning!)

Less facetiously (though only a smidgen less so), bold of you to assume that I think I stand to gain anything by such interactions. What I can only be expected to assume are conscious human beings, drag each other through the shit all the time, for absolutely zero actual benefit; what right do I have to expect anything in return for providing this common service?

After all, who am I to think I know anything? How can I know better than all others combined? No - I'm of the people, by the people, for the people, through and through; in fact, should the people decide so, they can destroy me within 24 hours, most of which will be taken up by scratching each other's backs for a job well done!

Sorry if this wasn't anything like the answer you were looking for, but I hope I've at least managed to answer in a way that makes you reflect on the nature, and possible ethical valence, of your question. Have a pleasant week, and may you gain disproportionately many things from your exchanges!
People really say "it's emitting x-ray light" or "emitting radio light"?

I've never in my life heard that. That sounds completely wrong to my ears. (Which is why "invisible light" sounded so wrong, too.)
Seems cool, but small nit: many times scientists publish basic research or foundational science, which becomes useful overtime via a process of different teams looking for some piece of knowledge out there to build something. In AI/ML, it's a little different because usually what's published can be implemented and used in some way, i.e., the approach is testable and shows improvements over other methods. I assume that the AI/ML or software methods mentioned in the papers coming out via these AI papers have been tested. For instance, AI/ML researchers usually research code along with their papers (for gaining credibility and contributing to the field).
The disengagement before the crash feels like a decision to avoid harsh reactions when they inevitably get false positives.

The autonomy stack might create even more of a PR nightmare with sudden full on ABS braking with no visible reason.

So overall it is a way to mask the quality of your autonomy stack.
The same color as the sky when my redeye coast to coast flight got diverted to Texas at 2am.
Same question people have with hinting, what makes Python cool is how loose it is... You could also make a lint rule for that and make fail CI if that rule failed, or... Write your own compiler you know?
Avoiding more recent (aka controversial) examples, the best search engines of the early Internet required users to trawl through pages and pages of search results, with the useful answers on page 8 or so. Conventional wisdom was this was as good as it was gonna get, and that's just how search is. That was, of course, until Google came around and totally changed the game.