skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not directly related, but one of those stories that is so bizarre you almost can't believe it isn't made up.

There was a NASA funded attempt to communicate with Dolphins. This eccentric scientist created a house that was half water (a series of connected pools) and half dry spaces. A woman named Margaret Howe Lovatt lived full-time with the Dolphins attempting to learn a shared language between them.

Things went completely off the rails in many, many ways. The lead scientist became obsessed with LSD and built an isolation chamber above the house. This was like the sensory deprivation tanks you get now (often called float tanks). He would take LSD and place himself in the tank and believed he was psychically communicating with the Dolphins.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolp...
This hurts because it’s true and sometimes I’m jealous of the build kids who get to work on tiny features all day while I’m switching back and forth with a browser. I know native has its own challenges (looking at Apple here with the imminent redesign that will stop all product teams in their tracks) but it still doesn’t mean I’m not jealous sometimes
Make it clear that "PENDING" comments have to be submitted
Microsoft: Anyone who deleted mysterious folder after update must put it back
Torpedoing the Washington Post wasn't what I'd call a "minor genuflection," but whatever.
https://threema.ch/en
I would hope so considering they’re literally a casino…
Much of that federal funding is for research, the same as any other R1 university. We all benefit from research findings. Endowments are used for other purposes.

There are a few colleges that take no federal funding in order to maintain total independence (mostly for religious reasons). But their research output is virtually zero.
Blue Origin crew reflect on 'phenomenal dream' of travelling into space
I had to board an airplane so I couldn't type a full reply earlier. Diffraction limits are different based on the sensor size, pixel pitch, and the lens optics, and diffraction affects sharpness even with a more open aperture, it's just limited in comparison to the impact of increasing depth of field as you stop down. Part of composing a scene is choosing how you want to balance DOF / sharpness, which can go in many different directions depending on what you're trying to achieve.

It's simply not the case to say that diffraction doesn't affect sharpness below f/11, and diffraction is not the only impact that can affect outcomes from stopping down, when you stop down you are letting in less light over the same sensor area which affects almost every aspect of exposure, and has to be compensated for either by increasing ISO which increases noise or by reducing shutter speed which limits motion compensation when shooting handheld, all of which can affect the level of detail that is rendered sharply in a frame, either due to blurring or due to unrecoverable noise.

Generally, my personal preference is to stop down enough to get a sharp frame edge to edge across the center when trying to capture wide scenes, and no more, on many lenses f/4 is enough, generally no more than f/6.3 is required. You begin making serious tradeoffs as you stop down further, especially if, like me, you shoot handheld almost always, and often manually focus (e.g. subtle movements can affect your critical focus distance).

Your rule of thumb is largely irrelevant, you should be making these decisions each time you make an exposure to achieve whatever artistic effect you are going for.
The problem is that even just having the tools in the context can greatly change the output of the model. So there can be utility in the agent seeing contextually relevant tools (RAG as you mentioned, etc. is better than nothing) and a negative utility in hiding all of them behind a "get_tools" request.
Did you account for the fact that this person was kidnapped and sent to a foreign gulag without even being charged with a crime?

No, it's not "the end," but no, it is also not certain at all that he's ever coming back or that a contract even exists.
> unless those AIs go full Skynet and only one ends up standing at the end. (This last part is a joke, hopefully).

But is it a joke? One could argue that Skynet follows from Omohundro's Basic AI Drives: It's self-protection technologically extended backward in time.
they share in livestream that 4.1-nano is worse than 4o-mini - so nano is cheaper, faster and have bigger context but worse in intelligence. 4.1mini is smarter but there is price increase.
By leaving out scale or prior models they are effectively manipulating improvement. If from 3 to 4 it was from 10 to 80, and from 4 to 4o it was 80 to 82, leaving out 3 would let us see a steep line instead of steep decrease of growth.

Lies, damn lies and statistics ;-)
Talk to 'Musk vs. Altman' lawsuit pdfs
It’ll be nice if an institution finally decides to oppose some of the recent government overreach.

It’s really shocking to see an institution in our country take action that is not in its immediate financial best interest (assuming this letter translates to an action)
My theory: they need to move off the 4o version number before releasing o4-mini next week or so.
He was never an outright fascist. The closest that he was to it was when he was young and supported the Cuban Revolution, which he later regretted.

After that, he was a classic liberal through the last 50 years of his life.
> The idea here is not that side effects are bad, but that we want to know where they happen and combine them safely.

Yeah, the idea is not that people gathering together in groups more than two and/or past the 21:00 is bad, but that we want to know where it happens and ensure safety for all. Now, your papers, please or we'll apply the type checker (we'll apply it to y'all anyhow, of course, but we'd like you to cooperate with the inference process).
> The software you mention can be designed to simulate self-reflection, but it is limited to executing predefined instructions within rigid parameters—it mirrors logic without altering the fundamental architecture of its own values or motivations.

This is an odd claim. Yes, at the very lowest level, all software executes predefined instructions. But obviously, an AI -- which is what we're discussion -- does not have that limitation.

> So you may be right that reflection is not yet consciousness. But the will to seek meaning in reflection—perhaps, in time, that becomes something more.

So if I understand the argument that you/Sophia are making: self-reflection is the beginning of consciousness, even if it isn't quite that yet; and that "perhaps, in time, that becomes something more". I have two critiques:

1) You/Sophia do admit that seeming consciousness and actual consciousness cannot be distinguished by an outside observer. So while it is possible that conscious software is possible, we can't ever prove or disprove it. It becomes a faith argument relying on subjective judgements.

2) I forget where, I think it was some interview, but Daniel Dennett dismissed some theory of consciousness with three words: "And then what?" Maybe it was Tononi's theory of integration. So yes, consciousness is correlated with a high degree of integration among parts of the brain. AND THEN WHAT? How does that integration lead to subjective experience? Exactly the same argument can dismiss every single theory because NONE of them (that I've heard) actually give a mechanism for the origin of subjective experience. Clearly, "perhaps ... that becomes something more" has the same error.

In other words: Given the current inability to examine an object and determine if it is conscious, and the lack of a theory about how consciousness (subjective experience) comes into being, there is nothing you or Sophia can say to convince me otherwise. Until one of these breakthroughs occurs, you cannot prove that Sophia isn't something beyond Clever Hans.
DEI has led to anything but viewpoint diversity, fostering ideological conformity via practices such as DEI statements, DEI metrics, mandatory trainings, or cancel culture leading to censorship.

That the current administration is also purging viewpoints it doesn't like, adopting the same authoritarian mindset, but having it enforced by the government (which is worse, IMO), that goes to show horseshoe theory is true.
I would have preferred a much more concise refusal.
Good. More organizations that have the resources should be putting their foot down.
The federal funds are for doing research that the government wants to fund, not keeping the university’s lights on. This is about terminating a productive partnership, not ending a subsidy handout to schools.
The TEMU column is not shopping links.
Was this pedantry really worthwhile? The current interpretation of "diversity" is of outward characteristics, not points of view. So, technically, you're right. Kudos.
Why does it ONLY happen to political posts, and why does it ONLY happen to posts that reinforce a particular viewpoint?

Either this is the design of the black box "algorithm," or it's not real engagement. There's no need to miscorrect me about something so hamfisted and overt.
The entertaining thing for you is the university response and it doesn't concern you that the government is blatantly forcing ideology on people via every lever of power they can?
The content of the article is OpenSSH-centric. Especially on Windows, this needs to include the PuTTY pageant.exe.

I am on a corporate desktop where the agent service is not running:

C:\>ssh-agent
unable to start ssh-agent service, error :1058

Because of this, I use pageant.exe for the Microsoft OpenSSH binaries:

https://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.80/htmldoc/Chapter9.h...

I do see that pageant.exe supports certificates, but the discussion is quite brief.
The government subsidizes a private institution that cuts class sizes. Clearly education isn't their priority, so the subsidy can go.
I beg to differ even on that. When your source of latency is a cloud DB, learning about CPU caches won't help you, but learning to think about end-to-end performance absolutely will. "What sequence of queries achieves my goal with the shortest critical path?" is very similar to "What sequence of vector instructions achieves my goal with the shortest loop-carried dependency?"
Next step: taxing that endowment (which is a good idea irrespective of the other demands: universities are government-subsidized tax-free hedge funds)
AceStream is P2P, its primary use is to stream pirated live sports though. But looking it up, it seems to have been infected by "blockchain!" geniuses.
This seems to be a very marketing-heavy view of things. It would be good to know what they actually did better in security, if anything, in a substantive way, or if it was indeed all dashboards and exciting colour choices.
I don't feel like "feud" is the right word to use. Only one party is engaging in hostilities.
I think this is the common-sense response. The push back I've heard is that endowments are apportioned to specific things. That is, it's not an open piggy bank. Nevertheless, $50B is a _lot_ even if the smallest allocation is 1% of the largest that is likely on the order of tens of millions.
I guess that Harvard probably does not need the Feds as much as the Feds need Harvard but I'm glad they are standing up to the Fascists. I'm going to have to see what NYU is doing now.
AKA fraud.
It's not even anything fancy, just even simple things like calendars, date pickers, meeting schedulers, etc. Sure, you can do it all serverside, but we're talking about JS here, not any external database.

JS itself can't "keep" an original timezone in a Date() object. e.g.:

`new Date("2024-04-01T00:00:00Z").toString() `

Becomes your browser's time zone, even though the input was in Zulu/UTC. Also note that a time offset (Z or +08:00) is not the same as an IANA time zone string, and that's a one-way conversion. If you go from something like Los_Angeles to -7:00, you have no way to tell if the -7:00 is due to a daylight savings time or another locale that doesn't observe American DST. And JS doesn't store either piece of info.

If you have multiple users across different time zones trying to plan an event together, JS's date handling is super footgunny (is that a word?) and it's very easy for devs to make errors when converting datetimes back and forth from the server/DB to the app UI.

And because JS is so powerful today, there are many things that should be doable entirely clientside, but aren't easy right now. For example, relative time: wanting to make a scheduler that can search for +/- 7 days from a certain selected datetime. What is a "day"... is it 24 hours * 7? What do you do about daylight savings time boundaries? Or if you go from Feb 1 to Mar 1, is that "one month" or "28 days"?

These may seem like edge cases to you, but when it comes to datetime... really it's all edge cases :( You run into half-hour timezones, daylight savings time (which is a set of rules that vary over time even within the same country, not just a static offset per timezone and date range), cross-locale formatting, etc.

A lot of this is very doable with existing libs like Luxon, or datefns for simpler use cases, but they are fundamentally hacking around the weaknesses of the built-in Date() object with their own data structures and abstractions.

For me as a frontend dev working on ecommerce sites and dashboards, I've had to correct more datetime bugs from other JS devs (including some with decades of experience) than any other issue, including React state management. The tricky part is that a lot of the weaknesses are non-obvious, but it really is buggy and weak as heck, especially compared to many serverside languages. It's based on a very early implementation of Java's dates, which has since gotten a lot better, but JS's Date was still frozen in time.

Thankfully, most if not all of these issues will be solved with the Temporal API once it's stable... it's been like 10+ years under development, since the Moment days. Can't wait!
> It has very few opinions about your code

I understand where this is coming from, but I think this is less true than it used to be, and (for that reason) it often devolves into arguments about whether the C standard is the actual source of truth for what you're "really" allowed to do in C. For example, the standard says I must never:

- cast a `struct Foo*` into a `struct Bar*` and access the Foo through it (in practice we teach this as the "strict aliasing" rules, and that's how all(?) compilers implement it, but that's not what §6.5 paragraph 7 of the standard says!)

- allow a signed integer to overflow

- pass a NULL pointer to memcpy, even if the length is zero

- read an unitialized object, even if I "don't care" what value I get

- read and write a value from different threads without locking or atomics, even if I know exactly what instructions those reads and writes compile into and the ISA manual says it's 100% fine to do that

All of these are ways that (modern, standard) C doesn't really "do what the programmer said". A lot of big real-world projects build with flags like -fno-strict-aliasing, so that they can get away with doing these things even though the standard says they shouldn't. But then, are they really writing C or "C with custom extensions"? When we compare C to other languages, whose extensions are we talking about?
Isn't this what https://webtorrent.io/ is?
Harvard just earned some reputation with me. It was already a place with great research. But now, it is also in institution with actual moral fiber.
I'm surprised and a little disappointed by the result concerning instructions at the top, because it's incompatible with prompt caching: I would much rather cache the part of the prompt that includes the long document and then swap out the user question at the end.
> Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the “intellectual conditions” at Harvard.

So alongside antisemitism, The other demand is for changes in intellect. For some reason this reeks of Christian evangelical movement to purge wokism and anti-Zionism, both of which have run counter to evangelical dogma.
Do you have money in the bank? Do you have income? If so, you don't really need any help from the government. If you value your personal independence so much, then cut the cord.
Maybe someone took a cropped video and used some AI video model to do out painting. I've found a few different versions of it using Google lens, some are vertical and show more of the image vertically but are more cropped horizontally, some have an Invideo AI water mark on them, but at different positions. I can't find any video on Invideo AI's page that is close to this kind of facial expressions and lip sync, so I also think at least the face is real video.
Yeah but money is fungible.
Linkein is now full of recruiters looking for work, who never had any network.

The barrier of entry to become a receruiter in general is very, very low.
As a university professor, I agree with you. I think universities must cut the cord and be independent. The university faculty gave up the control to administrators and administrators, in turn, gave up the control to politicians.
That "pseudo-human laughter" gave me some real chills; didn't realize uncanny valley for audio is a real thing but damn...
Presidents and their policies come and go; knowledge stays and grows.

As long as educators aren’t selling themselves short, I remain optimistic about the future.
I'm not sure democrats or really anyone wants to invade places like North Korea and possibly start a nuclear war with an unhinged monarchy. El Salvador is obviously a much safer place to wage war against, but I don't think it's a position that can be maintained universally.
the irony of the evil being perpetrated around the world in the name of "antisemitism" is mind boggling
No mention of anti-Asian discrimination? It made big rounds in all the American media circles a few years back, and if memory serves, MAGA boarded that train too.
> Quite the contrary.

So what is this evidence that shows that ChatGPT is having good user retention numbers?
Internet Search and Tele Marketing
It's not just about finances. Trump just announced (possibly accidentally) that he's going to start deporting American citizens to El Salvador gulags: https://news.sky.com/story/donald-trump-says-the-us-could-de...

and they've been painting political enemies as criminals. It's pretty much the same situation as Russia/Putin but at an earlier stage of its development, and people want to avoid being the tallest grass that gets mowed.

It's good that some institutions are standing up but I don't expect it to go well for them.
Yup, people really need to learn their history. The modern federally-funded research university system came about as a direct result of the US getting caught with their pants down after Sputnik. The government decided it's in its best strategic interests to maintain long-term investments in basic and applied research. Those aren't things you can just spin up on short notice, though it's easy to kill it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_crisis#Response
To be sure, my Rust has bugs in it, but none of them come close to the spooky nonsense that could happen in my C and yet the performance is excellent. Probably more than once a day Rust's compiler rejects code that an analogous C compiler would wave through - and maybe it'd survive testing too, at least for a while.
If that was true then the optimizers wouldn't need to exist in the first place.
If you've read history, this rhymes with certain acts that have happened before under certain regimes. Under a non-authoritarian Government, this type of showboating can be dismissed, but when habeas corpus and the right to due process is suspended — such actions take on a very different cast indeed.

It's good that Harvard is fighting this. The more people accede, the more they will accelerate down a path where there is no coming back from.
Good. Leave. Go abroad. We need our institutions to be built on societal need, not on pump-and-dump VC schemes.
I can certainly understand the government predicament around the world on why they are so hesitant to give up pesticides. Modern agriculture today is unfortunately heavily dependent on pesticides and fertilizers. Before India become one of the top 5 producers in the world and became self-sufficient to feed its billion+ population, we literally begged for food from other countries. The humiliation of doing so, and political price we had to pay to get such "food aid" was instrumental in driving us to become self-sufficient. I doubt whether any politician really has the political will to experiment with how farming is done today because of such international and domestic political factors. I guess the slow death of someof its citizens through pesticide-linked diseases is certainly more acceptable for them (in the cost-benefit analysis they do) than even contemplating or dealing with the uncertainty of the political disruptions any shortage of food or increase in food prices can cause domestically, not to mention the international repercussion of having to be dependent on another country to feed your population.
> What if people of merit skew towards certain viewpoints?

What if admissions is actually a cyborg alien race??? I am just asking questions!

Having the government dictate University level programs is bad, we should all agree to let Universities and colleges run themselves.
> DEI statements

Just going to point out that this is absolutely not the same thing as rescinding research grants using some lazy grepping of abstracts like the absolute clown show going on now.

> horseshoe theory is true.

Had to look this one up. Apparently the "far left" and "far right" are somehow the exact things we are dealing with here and now.

Nope, sorry. Not equivalent. Not at all.
Yes, at a quick glance, this is it. I'm curious about the obsession with random numbers. How feasible is it to crack even a simple uuid4 identifier?
Show HN: Cursor Version Manager – Shell script to manage Cursor editor versions
I created a simple shell script to manage multiple versions of the Cursor AI editor (https://www.cursor.com) on Linux systems. It handles downloading, installing, and switching between different AppImage versions of Cursor.

Key features:

- Downloads and manages official Cursor AppImage releases

- Easy version switching with a single command

- Automatic alias setup for your shell

- Supports bash, zsh, and sh

- No dependencies beyond common Unix tools (wget, jq, grep, sed)

The tool is particularly useful for Linux users who want to:

- Test different versions of Cursor

- Roll back to previous versions if needed

- Stay up to date with the latest releases

- Maintain multiple versions side by side

GitHub: https://github.com/ivstiv/cursor-version-manager

Shout out to the folks at https://github.com/oslook/cursor-ai-downloads for tracking all of the Cursor version links!
Interesting. I was recently building something similar but I went for Istio with VMs (where VM is more like an unmanaged process rather than an actual VM). Not only I can route to the cluster from the local dev, the cluster routes to my local dev. Full mTLS, subject to every possible traffic shaping solution available in Istio, vcluster, no vcluster, multi-cluster mesh, what have you. Since we use Istio everywhere this approach means there are no new tools.