skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Brilliant Pebbles-like system will be absurdly easy to build now (it was borderline technically feasible 40 years ago already) and unlike in the 1980s, there is a ready way to put it into orbit - in much bigger quantities than Reagan could ever dream of, and they themselves can be a lot lighter. And the world has way fewer ballistic missiles today.

From guidance perspective there is nothing easier than a boost phase intercept because on a boost phase, a missile is easy to see, and no countermeasures can probably confuse it. From a ballistic perspective it is the hardest intercept mode, but not if we start in the orbit.

Total mass of a working system that will protect against an attack from any country but Russia, and will protect against second strike from Russia - that is, will enable first strike against it but not protect against it's first strike - will be trivial and a lot lower than current orbiting mass of Starlink system. It won't even require Starship to launch it.

With Starship online, ballistic missile arsenal of all countries will become entirely worthless.
The others may have their own preferences to edit documents.

It's like you edited one code file in a project, and you want everyone to switch to night IDE theme when they open that particular file.
Clearly to whom? I think it works fine in C with 8 spaces per indent level. It works fine in python and rust with 4 spaces per indent level. For some languages I think it's worth going down to 3 spaces per indent level. But I've not hit that many languages where it's worth going much past 80 characters.
Amazing work Sean and team!
There is a world outside of Perl. There really is.

It's a general observation of how we are infatuated with composibility, then tire of it and unify and then learn to love it again because the unifications grow stale and weird of which Perl is an excellent example.
> To open a en-US XLSX file in a fr-CA copy of Excel, you will need the en-US language pack

Are you sure? That sounds insane. Maybe if you're exporting a CSV where you insert the formulas as text, and expect the Excel to do some magic conversion..

I'm pretty sure that XLSX file is "universally" openable, and the user using the fr-CA copy of Excel will see =SOMME( ... ), doesn't matter what locale the source Excel is.

ChatGPT says:

> The Office Open XML specification, standardized as ECMA-376 and ISO/IEC 29500, defines how formulas are stored in XLSX files. It specifies that:

> Function names and formula grammar are stored in a locale-independent (invariant) format in the file — specifically, English-language function names.

> You can find this in: ECMA-376, Part 1: Fundamentals and Markup Language Reference, Section 18.17 “Formulas”
The one that always bites me is Excel truncating the leading zero in US zip codes (they start with 0 in the Northeast US). I’m wondering if that would have happened if Microsoft was located in Boston instead of Seattle.
The article makes good career advice in general: understand what pays your salary, and contribute enough such that your costs are offset by your labor. For engineers, that means understanding how the company makes money, or how you can save the company money, and then focusing on those things.

As many, many others have pointed out however, modern companies, especially modern tech companies, aren't operating from that mindset. Presently they're all championing products for the sake of the product itself, rather than sticking to their profit centers. It's why everyone for the past decade or so has engaged in a "checkbox race" of adding the latest fad to their product suite, regardless of its value to said product or its customers in the first place. Likewise, internal politics has shifted to prioritize those working on the "right" product, as opposed to recognizing those who create the most value. It's a large reason why enshittification continues to grow: leadership doesn't care about value, product, or engineering, so much as they want the latest shiny thing to add to their sale sheet and make the Board and/or Shareholders "happy".

My own data points supporting this theory:

* Cutting a cost-center's AWS costs by 60% and saving the equivalent of my TC every 2.5 months (~$1.3m/year) got me sent to the Private Cloud team

* Building multi-cloud showback wasn't recognized because I wasn't on the Public Cloud team (a new team rebuilt it two years after I'd finished it)

* Building a Cloud-as-a-Service model with AI Agent hooks got me RIFed

So to add a caveat to the OPs own article for others based on my own experiences: if your organization isn't prioritizing value regardless of origin, your position is unstable. In those cases, you need to either find a way onto the "right" team if the company is important to you, or you need to brush up your resume and find an exit post-haste. Creating value in a company that doesn't acknowledge or respect it is a huge red flag that I naively thought tech companies ("we're a meritocracy!") wouldn't display, but I was gravely mistaken.
Are cookie banners really a requirement in that case? I think as long as you don’t share the data with a third party you’re in the clear?
farmers/ranchers always wanna bitch bout something (at least in the US). and we like the myth/nostalgia of the small operations out on the frontier so that's gets a lot of play.
Looks impressive and probably pretty fun. The soundtrack seems a little optimistic as you don’t hear a single electric motor whirring.
I second that. MCP is more of a scaffolding concept than a solution itself. There is no safety in consulting an LLM on anything. What you're building is a RAG app that must coordinate LLM calls and tool calls. Any safety built into that is going to built into your procedural code (in a programming language) and not coming from an LLM, which by itself cannot be "corralled."

MCP is just a way of specifying which user prompts go with which LLM calls and tool calls and provides no safety (or even functionality) of its own.
I just asked my company-approved AI chatbot the same question.

It got the golf ball volume right (0.00004068 cubic meters), but it still overestimated the cabin volume at 1000 cubic meters.

It's final calculation was reasonably accurate at 24,582,115 golf balls - even though 1000 ÷ 0.00004068 = 24,582,104. Maybe it was using more significant figures for the golf ball size than it showed in its answer?

It didn't acknowledge other items in the cabin (like seats) reducing its volume, but it did at least acknowlesge inefficiencies in packing spherical objects and suggested the actual number would be "somewhat lower", though it did not offer an estimate.

When I pressed it for an estimate, it used a packing density of 74% and gave an estimate of 18,191,766 golf balls. That's one more than the calculation should have produced, but arguably insignificant in context.

Next I asked it to account for fixtures in the cabin such as seats. It estimated a 30% reduction in cabin volume and redid the calculations with a cabin volume of 700 cubic meters. These calculations were much less accurate. It told me 700 ÷ 0.00004068 = 17,201,480 (off by ~6k). And it told me 17,201,480 × 0.74 was 12,728,096 (off by ~1k).

I told it the calculations were wrong and to try again, but it produced the same numbers. Then I gave it the correct answer for 700 ÷ 0.00004068. It told me I was correct and redid the last calculation correctly using the value I provided.

Of all the things for an AI chatbot which can supposedly "reason" to fail at, I didn't expect it to be basic arithmetic. The one I used was closer, but it was still off by a lot at times despite the calculations being simple multiplication and division. Even if might not matter in the context of filling an air plane cabin with golf balls, it does not inspire trust for more serious questions.
WhatsApp MCP Exploited: Exfiltrating your message history via MCP
Marketplace for Buying / Selling Extensions
Hi everyone,

I am the founder of Chrome-Stats. We just launched a marketplace for buying and selling Chrome extensions (https://chrome-stats.com/marketplace/forsale). Listing is 100% free. You can choose to reveal the listing to everyone (more visibility, but may have more spams), or to our premium members only (less visibility, but more targeted to serious buyers).

If you are interested in acquiring Chrome extensions, or selling your unmaintained extensions, then give it a try.
> "He explained that I was looking at a plan for a restored ecosystem. It was also a perfectly adapted money machine. There was a large area where the ancient elephants could graze, and this would be funded, in part, by carbon-offset payments from governments and corporations. The carbon value of a single elephant is about two million dollars, he told me. (An elephant increases biodiversity, in part, by spreading seeds in its dung and by crushing dense vegetation on forest floors, giving slow-growing trees the space to survive.) He added that the interesting educational opportunities and “sexiness factor” of Colossal’s creations would make its carbon credits “trade at a premium.”"

So it's a startup, valued at 10 billion?!
How exactly do they plan to make money?

Seriously, could anything be more 21st-century? Resurrecting extinct animal species (ones that supposedly went extinct naturally, mind you, not because of humans – what's the point then?) just to reintroduce them into parks and sell carbon credits.
So, prediction of future images from a series of images. That makes a lot of sense.

Here's the "full sized" image set.[1] The world model is low-rez images. That makes sense. Ask for too much detail and detail will be invented, which is not helpful.

[1] https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/...
Strange spin on it. I thought they were going to use tunneling magnetoresistance to mitigate mechanical wear:

Quantum Mechanics might have the Solution to Joystick Drift - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43601549 - 1 day ago (7 points, 3 comments)

... after reading again, it's likely to be some years down the road (until mainstream).
From what I understand, being arrested at the U.S. border while entering the country is strictly worse than being arrested by regular police while inside the U.S. In the latter case, the police arresting you will at least read you your Miranda rights, will have no right to search your phone unless authorized by a warrant, and will generally offer bail to get out of the jail in exchange for a court appearance. That's what due process, at a minimum, entails.

None of that happens at the border.

At this stage it doesn't even matter whether you have broken any U.S. law or not.
Totally with you. If the plumber in my neighborhood can start a business with all their overhead, then why can’t I on a $5/mo Digital Ocean server?

It really comes down to being willing to start small and grow within your means (even if that means a SMB loan or small investment).

But if you can’t find even 1 customer then it’s likely you’ve started building without talking to actual customers.
LLMs understand nullability
Right, so we have two competing ethical problems: extending life is good, but also, it removes the one (ethical) tool we have to handle the problem of accumulation of power in individuals. This is the conflict I'm grappling with. I don't have a good answer to the problem.
I think Game of Thrones cosplayers would be more likely
Using "disinterested" to mean "uninterested" has become more common over the past few decades, rather than using it in the older sense of "having no stake in the outcome, having no bias or partiality with respect to a conflict."

An example would be saying that someone was "disinterested" in what was happening on TV, or in music that was playing.
Because it’s lossy compression. I also consumed a lot of books and even more movies and I don’t have good memory of it all. But some core facts and intuition from it.
Right, and so by that standard, self-driving companies should have literally zero death attributed to them per year given how few miles they drive compared to human drivers.

That is: until self-driving cars ride much more, obviously.
I don't disagree that it could use revising, but it's technically correct: it allows but does not require. If you've configured panic=abort, it will abort the program instead of unwind, but that's not the default.
Trouble is that there isn't much the consumer is willing to pay for anymore. They've become accustomed to devices like their phone where a single purchase fulfills an endless number of functions. The thought of buying much more is becoming a foreign concept. To complicate matters: For what they are not buying, they aren't saving up the money ready to deploy when something compelling does come around. They've decided to redirect that money into paying more for things like housing instead. Good luck chipping that away.

There is still plenty of opportunity to build a business that sells to customers who are collecting those angel checks (directly or indirectly). But that is dependent on at least some businesses being funded by angels.
> Someone who says no for too long doesn't last.

I actually think the engineering manager is probably in the wrong there, because if killer feature X is that critical to sales, then it needs to be prioritized in among the tech debt. It doesn't matter that the codebase health is not great if sales plummet. Being a good employee means sometimes prioritizing the health of the business and not the ergonomics of the work environment. And being a good manager means understanding when the health of the business is really at stake or whether the sales team is just throwing shade because they don't want to sell what the company has.
Wow. I was totally unaware that Linus initially programmed git. I'd argue that it's had nearly as much impact as Linux itself. How many lines of code have been cataloged with it over time? Pretty good track record for a stupid content tracker, ha
There's at the very least some freedom of choice, which makes it so if you don't get a good provider you can see if a different one meets your needs

If Oracle support isn't all the way there the alternative is basically to kick rocks
lifestyle businesses provide far more than "survival"
Gates and Allen used (stole computer time) at Harvard's PDP-10 and other computer resources in developing this proprietary code.
The whole point of his books was about how such rules were effectively impossible and the wrong way to go about making AI safe.

You need something like a calculus of morality and ethics - this is incredibly uncomfortable for people, because it will mean the invalidation of moral relativity and all sorts of arbitrary dogmatic and ideological tradition, and demonstrate a rational basis for intersubjective interaction. (
Take your is/ought distinction and bury it with Hume.)

We need progress, and the sooner we start, the less damage will be done by unaligned systems.
I feel like one of the biggest things that could really help like everything, including Trump's purported goals would be to break up some of these big companies/monopolies and bring some competition back to the market, and it's crazy that corruption will just flagrantly rule over all.
I got mine for just below $40, from what I believe (though one can never be certain) a reliable seller. Still haven't decided how I will proceed, I want to use it for a real project and not just as a decoration.
Interesting read, but none of the images will load for me. Throttled by wix?

edit: I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. The website looks like this to me: https://i.imgur.com/q6846RF.png

edit2: not throttled by wix, although they are hosted with wix. There's some strange url parameters in the image src attribute, which I assume are supposed to do something fancy. That fancy bit isn't working.
> At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in proportion to how much money it makes the company (directly or indirectly).

I really wish it were like that, but IMHO it's more of an exception to the rule than the rule. At least this is my experience of being an engineer and a manager.
His story is a bit suspicious to me, I believe that he was detained but I can't help wondering if the rest is fiction based on watching US prison dramas. He would not have been sent to a federal prison for one thing, and his depictions of violence are what I would expect from long-term convicted felons, not people being held for having the wrong visa.
First time on substack, apparently first time writing also. Enough undefined acronyms to get an 8th grader smacked.
> It's the same for robberies

The difference is robbery is much more clear cut than "causing offense", "hate", or other speech crimes.
Is plan9 awk different?
For my part, I've never used it in anger. But I like to praise it because it represents a hint of what I wish my tooling were like, and would like to see this concept of moldable development spread outside of the Pharo community. Not just in terms of using it for other languages, but also building it on top of other languages

There are a lot of things I like about Smalltalk, but the parent poster is right, Python is a more practical choice. Not really because it's better-known so much as because it's procedural. Smalltalk is so all-in on object-oriented programming that it puts me in the wrong mental space for just banging out throwaway code for getting a question answered quickly. Instead I'm constantly being pulled toward all this "clean architecture clean code" thinking because that's just such a big factor in my headspace for object-oriented programming. Even if I don't succumb to it, it's still a drain on my executive function.

And then yes, agreed, building on Pharo's UI system is a problem. That's frankly something that the Smalltalk community needs to get away from across the board. It's just too clunky by modern standards. And it would take a lot to convince me to agree to adopting a Pharo-based tool like this at work, out of fear that all the non-native UI stuff would become a major source of accessibility barriers. And I don't quite understand why the Pharo community seems to be so convinced that it's a necessary part of the image-based development paradigm, when lisp has been doing images without tight coupling to a single baked-in graphical IDE for decades.

I keep thinking maybe all it needs to be is something like an extension (or alternative) to the language server protocol for exposing some of the intermediate code analysis artifacts back to the developer. And then I can happily bang on that from a Jupyter notebook.
Is that really so surprising given what we know about how these models actually work? I feel vindicated on behalf of myself and all the other commenters who have been mercilessly downvoted over the past three years for pointing out the obvious fact that next token prediction != reasoning.
The other departments are arguably more so. Law, sales, finance, marketing.
Peter Marks, FDA top vaccine regulator, forced out
Thank you for the feedback.

Our latest attempt to explain why Glamorous Toolkit exists comes in a book I am writing with Simon Wardley in the open about Moldable Development. See it here: https://medium.com/feenk/rewilding-software-engineering-900c...

If you happen to have the time to look at it, I would be very much interested in feedback. In particular, does the environment makes more sense in the context of the problem described in the book?
The article is not talking about Excel at that point.

But the program thw author is promoting says it does support dates before 1900.

I would worry what it does for dates between 1582 and 1753 in Anglo countries.

Basically you need to quote the date system as well as the date to get it correct. Even today there are countries not using Gregorian calendar.

I record dates as Julian days (or modified to not need a 32bit number) which is what Excel stores just using a different base date.
Every time I open bluesky it seems to be full of over-the-top anxiety posting by delusional leftists - last post I saw was telling LGBT people to start storing cash in their mattresses before Trump confiscates their bank accounts. Either that or it's the embattled rear guard of wokism trying to impose increasingly arcane rules on other posters.

That's all less toxic than whatever is happening on twitter these days, but still harmful for the people involved and probably a net negative for society as a whole.
in my country you read and speak numbers 97 like 'seven and ninety'.
this is normal.. :p

aslong as we dont base our endianess on how french pronounce or read nrs i think we can work with it.

that being said, i am for ISO notation if you want to order something in a list. year, month, day seems logical in this case as it will easily sort chronologically. i dont see another real reason why one would be better than another.
Yeah, as if we're all going to be riding dire wolves and mammoths to work in a few years...
> It also uses /usr/local

That is only true on Intel—on Apple Silicon it uses /opt/homebrew—so it will only become less true as time goes on.

The only reason it used /usr/local in the first place was that at the time many of the software packages it supported were broken if installed anywhere but /usr/local. In other words, Homebrew didn’t pick that location to annoy you or because they didn’t know better, but for a real practical reason.

That location was always an optional default, you’re free to change it. If you do, everything will be compiled from source rather than using compiled binaries and won’t be offered support. But it does work.
> And heaven help the rest of the world if the Europeans, the Chinese, and the Africans ever figure out that if they work together they don't really need the rest of us.

That's the part I just don't understand, they think after the willful crash of the US economy the rest of the world will bail us out because...

It makes a lot more sense to invest the "seven trillion dollars" or whatever number they're throwing around in their own economies rather than build up the manufacturing base of someone else. Spanish factories in Spain versus Spanish factories in the US.

Then, assuming these companies do invest all this money in the US, they will just complain how the foreigners are buying up all the "strategic assets" and are a "clear and present danger" to American Sovereignty. America is not for sale, don't ya know?
VC Firm SignalFire Raises $1B, Will Let AI Help Pick Investments
Everything you said is supported by regular image formats. You can adjust white balance of any photo and you think image formats are only limited to 16-bit and sRGB?

That’s not why we use RAW. It’s partly because (1) if you used Adobe RGB or Rec. 709 on a JPEG, a lot of people would screw it up, (2) you get a little extra raw data from the pre-filtering of Bayer, X-Trans, etc. data, (3) it’s less development work for camera manufacturers, and (4) partly historical.
It's not misinformation. Yes ePrivacy predates GDPR but it had no teeth. The reason your replies are full of people saying, "Our lawyers told us to implement it for GDPR" is because it was a minimal thing you could do to meet GDPRs emphasis of receiving consent from users for data stored in cookies. Basically the fear of fines from not being GDPR compliant forced companies add them.

I agree with you these cookie banners are not sufficient by the text, but in practice unless EU commission and courts make lawyers believe these banners are worthless, EU legal teams will still recommend them.

> What these two lines are stating is that cookies, insofar as they are used to identify users, qualify as personal data and are therefore subject to the GDPR.

https://gdpr.eu/cookies/
That's not an important distinction, because the reason it was fooled is the sensor suite is deficient, which is the same whether it's FSD or Autopilot. Other less sophisticated systems are not fooled because they have sufficient sensors. FSD being a more sophisticated system doesn't negate the fact their sensor suite is fundamentally not up to the task.
What imports though? What the fuck is China supposed to do, buy 200,000,000,000 cases of scotch?