skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, realistically what would be required now is simply not going to happen, and we should really start figuring out what that's going to look like and what it means. Tbh people who weren't paralyzed by hope could have told you this decades ago, human nature at scale isn't exactly unpredictable.

Ironically the one technology that could have really saved our butts (fission) was rejected for being environmentally unsound.
What about checking out eBooks? If you had an app that checked those out and scanned it at robot speed vs human feed, that would be the same thing. The idea that reading something that does not belong to you directly means stealing is just weird and very strained.

theGoogs essentially did that by having the robot that turned each page and scanned the pages. that's no different than having the librarian pull material for you so that you don't have to pull the book from the shelf yourself.

There's better arguments to make on why ClosedAI is bad. Reading text it doesn't own isn't one of them. How they acquired the text would be a better thing to critique. There's laws for that in place now that does not require new laws to be enacted.
I believe such comment might be helpful if only you envision that before the 'rogue state switch' 4000 BC people were much more peaceful (still debated, but you can fantasize!)
There are no limitations to simply being upfront and Hacker News can aspire to be better. It doesn't matter how other forums work.
LOL. Yeah, it loads in about a second on my PC which is five generations old and has a $200 GPU, so you definitely shouldn't have been struggling :)
Imagine taking pride in your craft rather than doing only the bare minimum to pad your ego, what a crazy approach!
Interestingly, it is not the case in the modern era. Cooperation is very effective. Take New Zealand as an example: when the Moriori were beaten by the Maori the latter ate them. When the Maori were beaten hollow by the British, they just incorporated them. At least for a century the Borg wins over the Klingons. But we don't know what the future will hold.
When it comes to mathematical concepts- to understand everything broadly, connected to its context, and to understant "what's the point?", nothing tops this book- Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning (3 Volumes in One) by Aleksandrov, Kolmogorov, and Lavrentev [0].

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Content-Methods-Meaning-V...
> Focus is a super power

this is crucial. from my own productivity I know that I can function at 1X or 10X depending on my focus.

being a great engineer requires practice most of all, and the consistency of focus during that practice will impact its value.

in my experience, engineering is all about efficiency, and as i have developed over time the scope of factors i take into account when calculating the efficiency of something has increased. in the beginning i only looked at the technical details of the implementation, and then over time that expanded to considering maintainability, team co-ordination, business objectives, etc.

the potential scope here is unlimited. when you start, just making something compile takes all of your focus, but over time as programming becomes reflexive you are able to expand the factors you take into account far beyond the immediate code, and it seems trivial by comparison.
(Australia)

I received my notice from the land valuer general yesterday (for unimproved land value).

Looking at building costs for my area and what other houses are going for in the street, the valuation looks spot-on.
It's the same on my 2024 MBP. Looking at a gamma calibration image [1], I estimate the built-in screen to have a gamma of ~1.4 (where the stripes and filled areas have the same brightness), way below the standard 2.2.

[1] http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/gamma_calibration.php
If you start a company based on a new-ish idea and you can't figure out how to turn a profit, that's on you.
You could probably reword this to be a bit more tactful.
Yea got many answers and I dont understand a single one. Good thing you barely need math in programming.
beat the game with 31 over par overall. im on an iphone 16 pro.

touchscreen users have huge edge over desktop for sure.
I'm Not Running in 2026, but I Am Getting to Work
A new Prius Prime starts at $33k
My first thought wasn't so classy, it was this banger from Billie Piper:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtT4MWzohRY
Indeed, in fact when it was up to the people, they preferred the Unimproved Value method.

See for example https://landvaluetaxguide.com/new-zealand-experience/

"In a general observation Keall states;

Wherever Land Value Rating applies it has been adopted by poll of ratepayers, representing a lot of work and profound social concern. Wherever Capital or Annual Value Rating applies it has been imposed by Government or Councils, contrary to the express wishes of the ratepayers in almost every case.15

With certain exceptions16 local LVT, assessed through the LV system, was preferred where democratic choice was allowed, but this choice was removed in1988 by the Labour government, which revoked the democratic polls that had kept the local LVT in place for more than 130 years."
The problem here is it's still illegal for me to do a backup copy of the stuff i bought, but they can do whatever they want.
Causal Labs Raises $6M Seed Funding to Build AI for Weather Control
Funny how fast those AI prophets went from:

- The government need to prepare because soon they will need to give money to all those people we made obsolete and unemployed. And there is nothing to stop us.

to:

- We need money from the government to do that thing we told you about.
>However, at the end of the day, there is an input and output and compute and memory needed to run the thing and if we look at that we realize, we never actually left the bounded physical realm and we can still engineer software systems against real world constraints. We can judge its efficiency and breaking points.

This is a common sense view of computation that's unfortunately wrong.

The simplest counter example is the busy beaver program: with as little as 12 states we have saturated the computational capabilities of the universe, but it looks completely safe and sane for the first few states you would be testing against.

You may call it pathological, and you'd be right, but the point is that you never know under which rug a function that takes more computation than the universe can supply is hiding.

By comparison power electronics engineers don't have to formally prove that they didn't accidentally include a nuclear power plant in their e-scooter design.
testing database triggers is a pain, i can change one line of code logic in server and hit ctr+s then i test the api faster than testing db trigger function + it is more readable in one place
It is difficult to assess - we could say similar things about the US network set up for extraordinary renditions. It is unclear whether the US or Chinese network is "worse". Although what worse means is very debatable, it raises questions of size, activity, goals and targets. We're comparing one clandestine thing to another and we don't have good data on either.
About 199x, Dortmund, Germany...

Lead to nothing. At least not at the time. AFAIK the initial garbage stream is still manually inspected and separated at most sites.

And the people doing that have a much higher risk of getting sick, because of all sorts of bacteria, mold, spores, chemicals, VOC, whatever.

Not to mention the stink.
Could not find the answer, kept getting general pages about how much current a wire can pass (without the result even containing the keyword I looked for, like temperature or heat or warm). To still have some indication of whether this is an interesting thing to keep looking into, ChatGPT says:

> Typically, high-voltage transmission lines are designed to operate at temperatures of around 75 to 100°C (167 to 212°F). However, under heavy loads, they can sometimes reach up to 150°C (302°F), but this is usually the upper limit for safe operation.

If that's a core temperature then the insulation might not make it significant, but if the outside leaks this much... I might not mind paying myself for a plastic tube and a fan to use around the line if I lived near one. Okay okay, it'll be more complicated than that, but still: free energy? And you're doing the power company a favor by decreasing the resistance in the case of most metals (https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/resistivity-conductivity-...) including copper which https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_cable says they're made of
This is quite nice! Thank you for sharing it. I think i came here after the good feedback had been incorporated. So i did not find anything confusing. It was quite fun to solve.
Best take so far
For others who missed it.. https://www.threads.net/@austinnasso/post/DFLc9-hv4xg?hl=en
"It's one thing to burn down the outhouse and quite another to install indoor plumbing." - P.J. O'Rourke
Astro 5.5
The Work Elsewhere
In my experience, admittedly not that long term yet, no one even looks at repositories. I got really good stuff in there, that demonstrates my developer skills, but hiring people never seemed to even have taken a look, nor shown any interest in what I might be able to present to them. Instead they me gave BS ad-hoc coding tasks in the interviews. Could also be, that they are unfamiliar with any of the not mainstream stuff I did and did not dare ask questions, because they felt out of their own depth.
Yea fascism, communism, etc aren’t abstract ideals in the real world. Instead they are self reinforcing directions along a multidimensional political spectrum.

The scary thing with fascism is just how quickly it can snowball because people at the top of so many powerful structures in society benefit. US Presidents get a positive spin by giving more access to organizations that support them. Those kinds of quiet back room deals benefit the people making them, but not everyone outside the room.
the length of time it takes a modern computer to count to 10 or 1,000 is perhaps inconceivably small by your metric

But I'd just call it "instantaneous" and something I experience frequently. Whereas 10^3978 years is beyond experience and even imagination.
The Most Forbidden Technique
Fair point.

"Do you look at the signage you pass every day?" - I do and so does my sodding car and it still annoys me when it gets the speed limits wrong!

I accept I'm not everyone and noting and warning about change is a good idea. We do have a lot of signs and I'm pretty sure I've seen signs warning about upcoming signage (not really 8)

I'm happy to report that I've driven in several US states (mostly FL, including around and in Miami and Orlando) and found it pretty straight forward. "Right on red" is pure genius and "four way pass in turn" is not, especially when multiple lanes are involved!
> If you had an app that checked those out and scanned it

You mean...made a copy? Do you really not see the problem?

> How they acquired the text would be a better thing to critique

Well...yeah that's what I said in the comment that started this discussion branch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43355147

This isn't about humans or robots reading books. It's that robots are allowed to violate copyright law to read the books, and us humans are not.
Land value tax didn't destroy the British Liberal Party in the early 1900s. The flawed neoclassical economic consensus (capital vs labor) did. The Labour Party absorbed most of the ex-Liberal voters and then became the Conservatives' main rival.

Then the wide adoption of technology like the automobile (which made it possible for many to simply commute to and from the city instead of be there all the time) eroded the political necessity to tackle difficult urban land issues for decades. "Drive until you can afford to live" only gets you so far though and we're hitting the limits of that in many places now.
Disagree.

What makes software unique to other engineering disciplines is that it isn't a discipline at all. What makes software so great is how quick the iteration cycles are.

Software sits at a higher abstraction level than physical hardware, so much of our time is spent throwing at the wall and seeing what sticks because that's often (although not always) the best use of time.
I think it means they're free to do things like things that lead to Bhopal or Exxon Valdez disasters, because adhering to regulations cost the bottom line!

Maybe I'm fantasizing, but isn't there some country with some law that companies operating there are required to buy from environmentally friendly suppliers...
2% sounds small but it isn't over time. Compare to our own investments where we really care about 1% (or commercial investments/funds where 0.1% matters)

Paul Graham writes about the illusion here: https://paulgraham.com/wtax.html (wealth taxes and land taxes have close similarities). Maybe needs more attention to inflation or capital gains. Discuss here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43357851

The argument about empty land remaining undeveloped seems rather vacuous when you think that empty land already has a holding cost [either (1) mortgage interest or (2) opportunity cost ≈investment_market_beta]. And city property taxes in New Zealand are low percent already.

Land ownership is zero sum so that makes it wildly different from equity (although many people think of capital as zero sum too).
I don't see what correction you're making.

The person you responded to explains that the most common ancestry in the US is German, but English is the dominant language.

You seem to be making the point that the most common ancestry in England is from England, but the Germanic language of English is dominant, rather than the Celtic one it replaced.

It's the same phenomenon, not a correction. That languages spread even when genes don't.
Briar does just that
TinyKVM: The Fastest Sandbox (and runs on top of Varnish)
This piece is kind of embarassing. It certainly attempts to lump a lot of blame on the feet of LVT, which is not too surprising given the author has a history of hostility to the idea.

Notably in https://labouraffairs.com/2022/07/08/churchill-arguing-for-a...

gets into a bit more detail:

"With that in mind a 4,000 strong land valuation workforce was recruited. It was on the basis of that valuation that the tax was to be calculated on subsequent sales of land. However, from the start the collection of the new tax was confounded by problems. It took time to embark on a national land valuation programme. In the meantime, many local Tory councils proved to be unsympathetic and obstructive and tax judgments and valuations were regularly challenged by landlords in the courts. This meant that by 1914 only £612,787 had been collected. The war further complicated the land valuation programme as well as sales in land and then after the end of the war the Conservative-dominated post-war Coalition Government delivered the coup de grace to land taxation when all traces were removed from the statute book."

None of this is actually remotely relevant to a modern day property tax system that focuses on land, but it just goes to show the intellectual dishonest framing of the author.

Notably, Australia had a different experience:

https://cooperative-individualism.org/dwyer-terence_taxation...

(p.276)
The cost of compliance and of administration of a land value tax system may be comparable to or better than an income tax or property tax system. An income tax has a cost of collection of around 1 percent of revenues (Australian Taxation Office 1979: Table “Cost of Collection of Taxes Administered by Taxation Office”). By contrast, the cost of collecting the Australian Commonwealth Land Tax of 1910 was 1.25 percent (Scheftel 1916: 86). This was a federal tax from 1910 to 1952, comparable in scope to a national income tax. However, it should be noted:
(a) The total cost of administration in 1910 was 3.5 percent, but that included the nonrecurring cost of setting up the land value tax system (Scheftel 1916: 86, 88).
(b) The Australian federal land tax was on a progressive, not proportional, basis, which made its administration more complex and costly than a uniform ad valorem tax would have been (Bird 1960: 392).

The average tax rate of 1.2 percent took about 25 percent of the income from landownership (assuming an interest rate of 5 percent and no land appreciation). With a higher tax rate and fewer loopholes for tax avoidance, the costs of collection and administration would have been a smaller percentage of total revenues."
Just learning about that guy and reading his Wikipedia page will give me nightmares for the years to come.
Yet ancestry.com can easily tell British with Anglo-Saxon and Brittonic ancestry apart from French with Frankish ancestry.
Y Combinator Urging WhiteHouse Support for the EU Digital Markets Act
I wouldn't call 5-level-nested code "surprisingly clean", and continuations are cursed. I wouldn't want to have to debug tests that relied on continuations unnecessarily.
That still doesn't answer the question "Why would I pay to improve the land if next year someone can simply outbid me and take the land off me?". Why wouldn't this world's Blackrock swoop in the instant a profitable lease comes up for auction?
its also an interesting prisoner’s dilemma:

telling people what works for me, crowds out what works for me

I see lots of takes on this thread alone, tempting to comment on them but it messes with the money
It would just scan for the MAC of the WIFI-enabled Keurig, home in to that, and then ping the RFIDs of the capsules, and grab one of those.

Wasn't that easy?
The methodology is unconstrained as another way to put it.

Which, indeed, is different from engineering where constraints are non-negotiable, and thus the methodology as well.

I think a lot of people doing functional programming, as an example, enjoy the constraints and the discipline that it imbues on their craft.
As a digital artist myself, it is quite simple. You have to sell physical objects.

The art has to be printed out and that is the art. Anyone can get an image of Salvator Mundi for free too. That is not the art, that is an image. The art is the physical object that is the painting Salvator Mundi.

It is no different than traditional art really, just at a different scale. You can buy really nice Picasso knock offs on ebay right now. Picasso himself could have made 10 copies of the Weeping Woman to sell without that much effort either. The "real" Weeping Woman is the physical painting that Picasso did not make a copy of. The others are just knock off images.

But the main problem remains. Selling art is really hard. AI art is already completely passé anyway. If anything the technology is regressing visually.

Music was in a several decades long bull market in physical media sales that crashed and burned. Now we have gone back to the pre-music media bubble days but with much better distribution and marketing channels.

Not a lot of people making a living playing ragtime piano or hoofers making a living tap dancing either.

The real amusing thing to me is you never hear scultpure artist complain that they are in the training data sets. Probably because they know it is literally just free advertising for their real art.
Well I mean the freedom to travel and choose where you live should be a basic human right, and local laws aren't supposed to override basic rights.
The whole point of this CVE is what do you do when the input you're parsing is so large that you run out of space before you can terminate. Tail recursion helps in the sense that the issue will happen later, but it isn't a fix when we're talking about arbitrary data like an XML parser.
Competition can only work when there is variation between the entities competing.

In the US right now you can have a death match between every AI lab, then give all the resources to the one which wins and you'd still have largely the same results as if you didn't.

The reason why Deepseek - it started life as a HFT firm - hit as hard as it did is because it was a cross disciplinary team that had very non-standard skill sets.

I've had to try and head hunt network and FPGA engineers away from HFT firms and it was basically impossible. They already make big tech (or higher) salaries without the big tech bullshit - which none of them would ever pass.
Interesting, but who’s the target audience? Federal workers?
All you need is plot -log(x) for x between 0 and 1 and you will see that log(x) transforms a uniform line into an exponential decay (towards 1). Its being said in a fancy way. This is also the origin of the log likelihood loss function in ML
That article says nothing about the percentage genetic component of the Indo European step people in the Indian population. It does mention a high genetic similarity to Iranians.
On the Linux side of things, I've found it surprising how easy it is to crash GDB by doing funny stuff in the inferior program. (E.g., fiddling with the PT_INTERP header can make it read a null pointer when loading the program, https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=30663. And at runtime, I've gotten several crashes by playing with the stack/instruction pointers.)

I wouldn't be surprised if some of these crashes are exploitable as RCEs, perhaps even through gdbserver. I'd be wary of running GDB on a malicious program without sandboxing both.
Great work! Thank you for making this.

This is beautiful and brilliant, and also is a great visual tool to explain how some of the fundamental algorithms and data structures originate from the physical characteristics of storage mediums.

I wonder if anyone remembers the old days where you programmed your own custom defrag util to place your boot libs and frequently used apps to the outer tracks of the hard drive, so they are loaded faster due to the higher linear velocity of the outermost track :)
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/analogia-is-my-passion
I appreciate the offer and agree with you that it could be learned, much in the same way I could sit down and learn French.

What I’m pointing out though is that I don’t actively know it currently and am still able to produce software and earn a significant income despite that. I don’t know that everyone not understanding how AI works or even how the software it produces is supposed to work, adds a new type of risk to society
Show HN: I hate emails and scheduling, so I'm building an AI to do it for me
I spend way too much time reading emails and scheduling. I just want something that handles it for me.. without needing a whole new app.

So, I’m building this thing that lives in WhatsApp. It helps with emails, scheduling, todo lists etc.. right from my whatsapp. Honestly, I feel like batman with alfred at my sevice lol.

Still veryyy early, but I wanted to check if others would be intrested. Would love to hear what you think. <3
But in my explanation, there is no x axis.
Suggestion: Every owner sets their own property "value". That value is also the price at which they are legally required to sell if offered.
> Great, please make all the software even slower than it already is.

It is more or less trivial to emit essentially optimal autovectorized and inlined machine code from functional iterators.

Rust does this, for example.
The stupid thing is that the oversized trackpads on Apple laptops don't support the Pencil. WTH.
fractions is a great answer!
Old TV wasn't 30Hz. 60i isn't the same as 30p.

Some TVs and monitors do temporal dithering for you... Accept 8-bit input, and temporal dither it for the 6-bit display doesn't look that bad. Probably extends well to 10-bit input.
This is incorrect. The most common ancestry in the US is in fact English.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Americans
Musk makes secret visit to NSA after saying agency needs overhaul
How can we exploit domestic robots' idle time? [pdf]
Current car is a 2011 with 60k miles. I hope to have this for another 10+ years. I bought it used in 2014 at 25k miles.