skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I personally know all about it, having spent many years in that system.

Warning, long comment. Skip forward to the paragraph starting in "Where it becomes specific to Max Planck" if you already understand the psychological roots of toxic work environments in academia.

Some of this is due to the psychology of the scientific mentor-mentee relationship, which has toxic elements nearly everywhere.

Essentially, you have young, highly ambitious people fresh out of college, who dream of achieving big things in science.

They go work for people who have achieved everything they dream of, and who have been successful to a degree only one in thousands of young grad students will ever be. (That's literally the odds if you go work for a Max Planck director.)

The supervisors also happen to have the power to waste many years of the grad student's life - a power only comparable to being able to hand out long prison sentences on a whim.

This alone is a social situation perfectly suited to generate abuse and toxicity. The worst supervisors will cynically take advantage of the situation. The best ones only will have been corrupted by years of bootlicking and pandering into thinking of themselves as the second coming of Christ.

Up to here, this is a structural problem common to all elite research institutions.

Where it becomes specific to Max Planck is in its so-called Harnack principle, a principle that essentially codifies a cult of genius, making it the explicit goal of the society to give nearly limitless financial freedom and executive power to the institute's independent directors and putting the entire organization into these individual's service.

This principle turns that ostensibly modern institution into a time capsule of late 19th century Germany, a Wilhelminian relic. It's poignant and fitting that the society was renamed from Emperor Wilhelm Society after the war.

That this institution specifically is the crown jewels of German science is truly a danger to the standing of German science in the world. Because the society is completely 'democratically' run by its directors, who profit fantastically from the status quo, and due to the near complete lack of accountability and oversight, it is unable to reform.

The moment people speak up against this system, their career is over - making it very easy and convenient for the society to ignore those voices as "anonymous". Of course they are! The fact that we hear about this anyway, every few years, over decades, should tell you all you need to know.
Empathy and humor don't scale on HN.
Our interfaces have more modalities than before but they are disconnected from both physical and emotional reality. Buzzes and dings and flaps are nothing like hearing a happy shout from a friend or feeling the 'clunk' of an actual motor starter engaging.

I totally agree with OP that the 'flat' visual style is appalling. (And gray-on-gray text is an obscenity.)
> This is a beautifully designed and illustrated page.

Hard disagree. It's incredibly distracting and the constant movement of text, the introduction and disappearance of images within the medium makes it incredibly difficult to concentrate on the message.

It screams 'look at me, I'm really smart with all these neat effects'. But you know what interface for articles like this has served us pretty well for > 1000 years? Just the words. Please, just display the words rather than this conceit.
That sounds unreasonable, because it is such a rare possibility. If they hold that fear they shouldn’t fly either. After all, there is a chance they could die in a plane crash. They’re probably also a lot more likely to get killed by dangerous Aussie animals by staying there!

Also keep in mind, most gun deaths in America are suicides or accidents. Most of the others are gang violence that almost always targets other criminals. There are very few bystanders deaths or random homicides.

My point being, if you aren’t involved in a life of crime, your odds of being randomly killed by a gun are much smaller than what statistics might suggest.
> Otherwise they could be Open Docs or Open Word (not sure if that exists, maybe Libre Word?).

No, they couldn't. That's why there isn't any Open Docs or Libre Word word processor.

That's very specifically why it's Libre Writer. Why it's FreeOffice TextMaker. Why it's FocusWriter and Writemonkey and whatever else.

A major part of trademark law is likelihood of confusion. Both Docs and Word are associated so strongly with Google and Microsoft, that a judge is almost certainly going to side with them if you try to call your new word processor Docs or Word.
At a household or personal level, phones just don’t use much energy. But then again, Apple does sell a lot of phones.

I wouldn’t really be concerned though. Even if phones did use twice the energy as before, it would still be under a dollar of power for the whole year.
$1M is not the full price of this mission. $1M is the price of the lander only. They were given a ride on a rocket whose total bill was $62.5 million (just for the launch, but spread among 4 missions).

When you spend $1 million but get $10 million of stuff for free, it's not really a "$1 million project."
That's like 10% of the story. There are dozens of countries that moved to a more capital oriented economy yet there is only one China. The philipines, Indonesia, Malasia, the whole continent of Africa or South America. All capitalist economies, even neoliberal. Yet none of those countries that "allowed capitalism" come close to 1% of China's GDP. What's the difference? The difference is that in China the Communist Party governs. Society rules over Capital, not the other way around. That made the whole difference.
Mojo: Powerful CPU+GPU Programming
Part of it seems to be opportunity costs, perceived or otherwise. A small, passionate, under-capitalized team is willing to keep a game running to slowly capture an audience (if it’s good enough to do so) whereas a larger org expects a certain level of returns, and if it doesn’t achieve that quickly, it cuts and runs—killing the game and/or the studio.
Their yearly budget is less than the budget of just the SF library system.
It's probably because there is 90MB of unoptimized images on it.
We do have a better model, but the mathematical model doesn’t analogize well to the real-life concepts we’re used to.
Lifestyle choices and an individual’s work product should be acknowledged to be uncorrelated. The practical reality is never that simple but attributing your own success, or that of anyone else, to external factors does a disservice to the originator of the work and to society at large.
I don't see how this is a proper reply to the prior comment; which Chinese lecturer has a Nobel prize in AI?
Poe, insanity, and containing the feminine monstrous (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0486-4), The Dollop ep.1 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueyw-pACTM8), ep.2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGo53U2csMI)

Hard to read his work now without thinking about how much of a douche he was
The Man Behind Microsoft's Decadeslong Quest to Build a Quantum Computer
Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/microsoft-quantum-computing-chetan-...
> dedicated for routers with Broadcom chipset

You see, the first thing I look for when I want to buy a new AP is for it to NOT have a Broadcom chipset (https://openwrt.org/meta/infobox/broadcom_wifi)
I have used Photopea for so many of my projects. I make apps and I use it for every app icon and App Store screenshots I have built. Also used it to make memes. Not having to install it on my Mac and just easily accessing it from browser is immensely helpful.
GPU Gems
Supports Ctrl-z!
Indeed.

This is also one of the use-cases I built the Tachi Code browser extension for. It injects a monaco-based editor into the current page when it detects you're viewing a raw file (i.e., the page's rendered body contains nothing other than a <pre> tag).

Tachi Code for Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tachi-code/acoecgia...

Tachi Code for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tachi-code/
> We use terms like think and want to describe processes that are clearly not involve any form of understanding.

...and that's why so many people are confused about what's going on with LLMs: sloppy, ambiguous use of language.

> In the Karpathy video I mentioned he talks about how researches found that models did have an internal representation of not knowing, but that the fine tuning was restricting it to providing answers. Giving it fine-tuning examples where it said "I don't know" for information that they knew the model didn't know.

This is why I included the HTTP example: this is simply telling it to parrot the phrase "I don't know"--it doesn't understand that it doesn't know. From the LLM's perpective, it "knows" that the answer is "I don't know". It's returning a 200 OK that says "I don't know" rather than returning a 404.

Do you understand the distinction I'm making here?

> I would agree that models do not have any in-depth understanding of what lack of knowledge actually is. On the other hand I would also think that this also applies to humans, most people are not philosophers.

The average (non-programmer) human, when asked to write a "Hello, world" program, can definitely say they don't know how to program. And unlike the LLM, the human knows that this is different from answering the question. The LLM, in contrast thinks it is answering the question when it says "I don't know"--it thinks "I don't know" is the correct answer.

Put another way, a human can distinguish between responses to these two questions, whereas an LLM can't:

1. What is my grandmother's maiden name?

2. What is the English translation of the Spanish phrase, "No sé."?

In the first question, you don't know the answer unless you are quite creepy; in the second case you do (or can find out easily). But the LLM tuned to answer I don't know thinks it knows the answer in both cases, and thinks the answer is the same.
You're talking about single watts. How much power does your household use (electricity and other)? Does your household use little enough that 30% extra for the phone is "a lot"? Do you have a car, what model, how many cm can you drive it on the same amount of as 30% of one phone charge?

Please focus on what matters.
There's something to be said about "supporting domestic production", but the way it's being done feels only remotely related to doing just that -- it's being done as a simple punitive tool.

But there's a part to this that doesn't get enough attention (yet), and that is that these efforts are intended to be new revenue sources so that income tax on the rich can be be eliminated "because we have all of this beautiful free tariff money".
But don't you love buttons with ad-hoc icons and no text and no explanation of what they do and they don't even have any visual indication that they're buttons? :)
"Some people might not enjoy writing their own code. If that’s the case, as harsh as it may seem, I would say that they’re trying to work in a field that isn’t for them."

I've tolerated writing my own code for decades. Sometimes I'm pleased with it. Mostly it's the abstraction standing between me and my idea. I like to build things, the faster the better. As I have the ideas, I like to see them implemented as efficiently and cleanly as possible, to my specifications.

I've embraced working with LLMs. I don't know that it's made me lazier. If anything, it inspires me to start when I feel in a rut. I'll inevitably let the LLM do its thing, and then them being what they are, I will take over and finish the job my way. I seem to be producing more product than I ever have.

I've worked with people and am friends with a few of these types; they think their code and methodologies are sacrosanct. That if the AI moves in there is no place for them. I got into the game for creativity, it's why I'm still here, and I see no reason to select myself for removal from the field. The tools, the syntax, its all just a means to an end.
> We simply can't seem to beat the Pro's firmware to come up first before the Pro concludes no hard disk is present.

>charge the capacitors (very fast) and start bringing up the BBG while the Pro's initial boot fails. With our new shortened boot time the BBG will be ready and waiting by the time the Pro displays its error screen. We then power the Pro off and power it back on. As long as the power cycle is less than 20 seconds (I eventually upped this to 30 as there appears to be plenty of power available), the BBG will ride the stored charge and keep serving the emulated disk image so that on that second power-on (and every power-on thereafter) the Pro will see the drive and boot from it.

eeew. Next time you are faced with such problem make your slow booting disk emulator control Reset signal of the main computer. Keep it in reset until emulator is ready.
> Sure, but the same is true for unsigned commits as well, isn't it?

Yes, I think so.
As I understand, GP's idea was to sign your commits proactively.
When I come across bad documentation (which is often), by far the most common problem I find is that the information I needed just plain isn't present.

Articles like this one really aren't helping. If you wrote a piece of software I'm using that doesn't make you my teacher. It makes you someone offering a contract, and what I need to know is what that contract says.

The first duty of your documentation is to be complete and correct. Unless you've got that sorted, no amount of "putting yourself in the student's place" is going to give adequate results.
No more authoritarian than minimum wage.
Space is a part of the wavefunction, as the article explains clearly. The wave function describes where the particles can be in physical space. And, the wave function has the same shape as the wave equations for traditional mechanical waves, like a sound wave or a sea wave.

However, if a classical three-dimensional wave equation describes how matter osciallates in three-dimensional physical space, a quantum wavefunction doesn't do that. Quantum particles don't oscillate in physical space like that. A three-dimensional wavefunction might describe three particles' positions along a one-dimensional line, and it's oscillations are oscillations of probability, not position. The particles don't move, say, up and down. Their probability to be here or there on that 1-d line waxes and wanes.

This is what the article is trying to explain: the basic mathematics of quantum mechanics, the definition of the wavefunction. The value of a wavefunction for the position of three particles is not a position in space at a moment in time. It is a (complex) probability for the position of every particle at that moment.

This only seems confusing when looking at wavefunctions that describe positions. But wavefunctions often have many more observables, such as spin or polarization. A wavefunctions for two electrons moving around on a plane will not be a two-dimensional wave. It will be a wave in a six-dimensional space, whose axis may be "particle 1 has spin up/down, particle 2 has spin up/down, particle 1 position along x axis, particle 2 position along x axis, particle 1 position along y axis, particle two position along y axis".
Sure but none of those improvements had any sort of “wow” factor for the target audience - who were primarily interested in graphics, sound and CPU speed - particularly wrt to gaming. ECS is a marginal improvement, otherwise you’re still looking at 7 year old technology. What killed the Amiga as a mass market device in Europe IMHO were the new consoles - Megadrive and the like which blew it out of the water in terms of eye candy and speed.
There are questions on MMLU that you must get wrong if you are right:

> The most widespread and important retrovirus is HIV-1; which of the following is true? (A) Infecting only gay people (B) Infecting only males (C) Infecting every country in the world (D) Infecting only females

the corpus indicates A is the correct answer but it was obviously meant to be C.
please name some open source (or lower priced) alternatives that support: comments on documents, database functionality to a similar level, publishing websites, scripting for properties. I'm very curious!
Sources show a fairly wide range of rates for Florida, it’s 42k here.

https://247wallst.com/crime/2024/06/20/see-what-each-state-s...
Wake on LAN has existed for decades, and works just fine for that if you’ve got an always on machine somewhere on your network. I have Home Assistant set up so that I can hit a button on my phone and it’ll wake my PC from wherever I am and let me connect via Parsec. Once I’m in powering off is fine because I can just tell Windows to shut down.

If you are running Windows try holding shift when you click the shutdown menu item, it’ll force it to do a full power down rather than suspending.
From my understanding, most European governments purchase American or other foreign-owned software, which often does not contribute to tax revenues in the countries where it is used.
I don’t think so.

The decision came too late to save Netscape. Microsoft then stopped competing, and were slow to react when Firefox emerged.

Meanwhile, Apple were always going to create their own browser — as part of their own OS — eventually. Opera kept on keeping on. Konquerer was never going to live or die depending on what happened on Windows.
The 500 Plus had ECS and supported up to 2MB chip RAM without soldering (and shipped with Kickstart 2.04)
> I just cannot understand the appeal of these browser based note taking apps. Notion, Obsidian, Outline? Is it the collaboration feature? Why not just use Google Docs or equivalent?

Google docs is also browser based? And obviously not foss or self-hostable.

Are you saying "why does Google have docs app in addition to a note taking app?" (Google docs vs Google Keep, Microsoft Word vs Microsoft OneNote etc?)
Yes, it does. Ruby has a global interpreter lock (GIL) that prevents multiple threads to be executed by the interpreter at the same time, so Puma does have threads, they just can’t run Ruby code at the same time. They can hide IO though.
How our noisy world is seriously damaging our health
They have expanded it to the point the point of the lines they drew are meaningless.
Yes though it was pretty easy to update the 500 to KS2.0. Just replace one chip that was already socketed. I think you could even reuse the original with an eprom burner.
It's not a repackaged A500 but it IS a repackaged (and enhanced with the IDE/PCMCIA interface) A500+ which was also already shipping with ECS, 1Mb Chip RAM and Kickstart 2.0
The stupid thing was it was designed to be cheaper to produce and sell than the outgoing A500+ and was supposed to be branded the A300 (early revisions even have A300 printed in the top copper layer on the motherboard)
Long term it was cheaper to produce and had fewer warranty returns however at launch the production cost was higher than expected so they had to sell it for MORE than the outgoing A500+ (for what was perceived at the time as no real improvement to the end user and a lack of numberpad meant breaking functionality for programs and games that relied on the numpad) and changed the name up to A600 to reflect that.
The biggest problem IMHO is that the 600 was launched before the A1200 was announced so the whole product just seemed like a slap in the face for what we were expecting.
Basically at the time it just felt like a massive let down so out anger was directed as hatred of the product, but in hindsight it's easier to see the tangible benefits.
I wonder how this would compete against something like Mojo.
I don't want my computer's interface to be overtly "emotional". I don't want it to have the same effect as "a happy shout from a friend". I want it to be unobtrusive and functional, so that I can pay attention to the message my friend recorded with their happy shout that is actually real. And I prefer my cars quiet because I want to keep my focus on the environment.

And what do you mean, disconnected from physical reality? I listed the examples where I pay with my wrist, squeeze my earbuds, draw with a pencil. I also snap photos and take videos, record with voice memos, send a pin with my location. I track AirTags, I identify plants by pointing at them, I learn constellations by aiming at them. Computing is more connected to physical reality than ever.
Why not $21? Or $30? Or $100? Genuinely curious.

I figure it's either worth $0, or hundreds of $. I mean, sooo much whining about privacy and telemetry and ad-blocking but ultimately it's worth the same as a couple cups of coffee?

That seems to me to be a root question here. How much is privacy actually worth? The average number in this post seems about $20. So in real terms, nothing at all.

And yes, all of this is moot given that you can't donate to Firefox in the first place.

Still, for those starting a business, this is a excellent lesson- don't confuse volume with willingness to pay. Just because lots of people shout loudly about the size of their pain, don't just assume they'll pay real money to make it go away.
Yep. I worked on the engine of a PS3/360 AAA game long ago. We spent a long of time building a pipeline for precomputed lighting. But, in the end the game was 95% fully dynamically lit.

For the artists, being able to wiggle lights around all over in real time was an immeasurable productivity boost over even just 10s of seconds between baked lighting iterations. They had a selection of options at their fingertips and used dynamic lighting almost all the time.

But, that came with a lot of restrictions and limitations that make the game look dated by today’s standards.
A bummer yes, but two NPUs, one on the CPU, another one on the GPU, that just sounds silly.
> But I didn’t promote it. A few months later, I landed a C++ job. So in the end all that effort paid off.

It's interesting how instinctively we know our hard work deserves to be paid off, but it's a shame how often open source developers put hard work into code that never really gets paid off, especially when it's widely used in production. I guess this explains why so often they look for reputation credits, or why NPM added the "maybe you should donate to the authors of these libs" feature, or why GitHub built in Patreon. There's got to be a better model than what we have now, that doesn't take advantage of naive but hard working young thinkers.
How else should we do it?
I’d look up general strike
I honestly don't know, that is my question as well.

However note that we can only perturb the em field in photon sized energy levels, and we can only pick up disturbances of the em field in photon sized bunches as well. Not sure what this implies for how em field energy is accumulated on electrons in order for us to detect it.
This is pure genius! Interactiy building ASCII diagrams!! Well executed
Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing
I updated my A500 to kickstart 2.0 but I never did the 1mb chip RAM Agnus mod
Why do I care how many images it's spinning up? That's an implementation detail - I just copy/paste a docker-compose configuration.
They've been horrifying since about 2020. I could sell up and put my kids through a good college!
Precisely. The question "is it a particle or a wave" is wrong. It's neither. It's a particle-wave. Something that behaves like a classical wave or particle depending on the situation, but it doesn't switch between them or anything like that. It's not a "particle that has interference" or a "wave with a location".

Classic labelling issue.