Unlurker|Replay|About
C++26 is done ISO C++ standards meeting, Trip Report (herbsutter.com)
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I look forwards to getting to make use of this in 2040! Proper reflection is exciting.
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This is awesome. I've was a dev on the C++ team at MS in the 90s and was sure that RTTI was the closest the language would ever get to having a true reflection system.
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Biggest open question is whether the small changes to the module system in this standard will actually lead to more widespread adoption
Neovim 0.12.0 (github.com/neovim)
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I'm using VIM - Vi IMproved 9.1. What am I missing? I'm kind of desperate to switch. Getting massive FOMO from colleagues using VS Code. But I really like using the keyboard to navigate. What should I do? Does NeoVim support Claude Code?
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If it's just using the keyboard that's holding you back from VSCode, you'll be pleased to know it has plenty of its own shortcuts, as well as a "VIM navigation" mode you can turn on.
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What do you use?
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I unintentionally ran the main branch when testing some changes and a lot of my config broke (mostly around LSPs, CodeCompanion was much slower streaming its responses) so might wait a bit before upgrading.
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> - d21b8c949ad7 pack: add built-in plugin manager `vim.pack Can someone try to sell me this over lazy.nvim? I asked Claude to convert lazy config to pack and I was not happy with it because how verbose it turned out
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I'm assuming there will be something like lazy.nvim built on top of vim.pack. Some of the conventions might go away (ie constantly calling `.setup`).
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Always interesting when a project stays 0 ver for so long- anyone close to the project know what would be considered significant enough for a "v1" release?
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Maybe when `:!` works the way vi does and POSIX says it must. Just kidding, that will never happen.
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There is a roadmap and github issue tracking what is needed for 1.0. https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/20451 https://neovim.io/roadmap/
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Possibly never: https://0ver.org/
First Western Digital, now Sony: The tech giant suspends SD card sales (mashable.com)
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I have a giant storage RAID for my home server, with a bunch of 16TB drives. I bought each of the drives used about three years ago, and they cost about $120 each. They have been working fine until last night. One of them appears to be broken [1]. No big deal, this is what RAIDs are for, I go and try to find one and now they're going anywhere between 2-4x that price, for a used one! It's not going to bankrupt me (and having a home server is a privilege in the first place, that's not lost on me), but I really hope that the others survive, at least until this storage crunch is over. If it ever does end...sigh. I guess I didn't realize that even relatively slow storage like spinner drives was going to be affected too. [1] I think, I am really hoping it's just a bad connection or something but I haven't fully diagnosed it yet.
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Guess I'll find the old ones at the back of my cupboard for the time being ... oh wait. A 16MB SD card. Those were the days.
Why isn't production scaling to meet demand? Shouldn't the market address this.
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Because: 1. Factories take time to build. 2. Building factories requires capital to be invested now. 3. The return-on-capital will only be obtained in the next n years. 4. But if demand goes down, we'll have much more supply than demand, leading to a cutthroat price competition, which could prevent the factory costs from ever being recouped.
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Because when the AI customers explode N months down the line, you don't want to be on the hook for a new factory.
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Because the manufacturers of storage (and RAM) consider it to be an AI bubble, too. The surge in demand is a short burst, not a sustained one. Hence it makes no sense to throw a whole lot of ressources into scaling up production, when the demand won't be there anymore in 1-2 years when the factories will be ready.
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Why isn't magic just doing the magic things the capitalists always tell us is magic?
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Because it operates exactly as a drug dealer. It gives you first shot for free (reasonable opportunity to move up) and after you are hooked it makes sure that it extracts all your money (subscription and inability to own anything).
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It is the law of inertia, it applies to many more situations than we think. Markets is one of the, especially large-scale ones.
Modern cutting edge ones, yes. Not all fabs, by a long shot.
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Shouldn't countries wanting sovereign infrastructure create subsidies for creation of factories/job creation and also selling first/primarily within the region if it might cost on just a few million dollars (preferably a new competitor) I think one flaw in my thinking could be that there might be a lack of experience within the people for something like this, do you consider it to be a factor and would it be difficult to hire people relevant to such fab?
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
VR Is Not Dead (yadin.com)
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VR isn't dead. It's not alive either. It's just not it's time yet for mass adoption, however it might be. VR/AR continues to have an increasing footprint of usage and adoption as the technologies evolve. This has been the same cycle for over 20 years. Once we get past 4K displays to 8K at a reasonable cost level, it again will introduce a new audience to VR/AR, and a larger and larger existing audience will sit here nodding along. VR has gotten much better and it's fine for whomever it works for, it doesn't have to work for everyone, even if a big company took a bet on the timing of it being now.
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From the article: "The main theme in the Spanish Golden Age playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La Vida es Sueño (Life is a Dream) from 1635 is the contrast between subjective and objective perceptions of reality." Huh? Is this AI slop? The basic problems with VR are well known. First, the headgear is too bulky. Carmack, who headed Oculus for a while, says that it won't get traction until the headgear is down to swim-goggles size, and won't go mainstream until it's down to eyeglass size.[1] "AR glasses", with just an overlay, achieve that, but it's not a full virtual environment. Second, a sizable fraction of the population experiences some nausea, and a smaller fraction will barf.[2] That's worse than roller coasters. When visual and vestibular data disagree, the brain doesn't like it. The most successful VR games, such as Beat Saber, keep them locked together, but then you're stuck in one spot. There's a really good discussion of this by Phia, a VR influencer who started using VR as a teenager and spends a lot of time in VR.[3] She has practical advice on tuning VR systems to minimize nausea (interocular distance matters!) and how to introduce new people to VR (it takes repeated exposures of increasing length.) VR Chat continues to grow, driven by young people who worked through the problems. VR Chat used to prevent free movement - you had to teleport from one seat to another. But experienced users wanted more freedom, and VR chat now allows it if you opt in. Really good users can do gymnastics with full body tracking while in VR. It's not just put on the goggles and have fun. You have to acclimate. Learn the gestures that drive the system. Practice. If you go for full body and face tracking, your avatar has to be calibrated to match your joint lengths and you have to strap on sensors. (Which are now good, small, and wireless.) You need a safe open space where you can move, where there are no dangerous objects nearby, and the VR system knows the real world safe boundaries. VR is a sport, and takes the preparation of a sport. So it works, but is not mass-market. [1] https://next.reality.news/news/oculus-cto-john-carmack-outlines-future-ar-knocks-magic-leap-for-marketing-hype-new-interview-0204639 [2] https://www.pcgamer.com/vr-still-makes-40-70-of-players-want-to-throw-up-and-thats-a-huge-problem-for-the-companies-behind-it/ [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixdNKc53VZQ
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The biggest impediment for VR is the fundamentally asocial nature of it. If there are fewer headsets in a room than there are people, it’s going to be awkward for at least one person. Trying to help someone debug something in their headset without me being able to see what they see is a problem (granted, this could be solved by software). Having to share headsets sucks. You have to faff with head straps, adjust IPD, focus. I’ve had exactly one evening where everyone had a headset and things worked well for everyone involved. I’ve had dozens if not hundreds of events filled with awkward moments, setup issues, problems, where everyone is continuously taking the headset off and need to figure something out. And this was while working for a VR company where everyone was quite computer and VR literate. Reflecting on it, it felt kind of like 90s and 2000s LAN parties, before the days of DHCP. Randomly copying values around, IP conflicts and not understanding subnet values. Good times.
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These are valid points but the upside of vr is still much bigger than the current downsides. The ability to explore worlds as if you're actually there is something no other medium really offers.
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I completely disagree. A lot of people lead pretty solitary lives explicitly when it comes you how they spend their time with technology. There is a lot of solitary phone, computer and video game time these days. I think the biggest impediment is just how bulky they are. If we can make them so it’s just like picking up and putting on a pair of lightweight glasses, the same way you pick up a controller, I think that there would be a lot more uptake, especially in the gaming space.
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IMO this blog post can be summarized as "Even if nobody actually wants to use VR for extended periods, it's cool so it will be coming in the future eventually!!" VR is the perfect metaphor IMO for how "the tech industry" at large has lost its way. It's no longer about using technology to solve long standing human problems, it's about how tech firms can find ways to insert themselves in the fabric of human existence so they can suck their rent indefinitely. I actually think VR is very cool, and I thoroughly enjoy playing VR games like Beat Saber. But building a really fun (short term) gaming platform, or finding some dedicated VR use cases in specific environments like construction, was never going to be enough for big tech. They wouldn't be satisfied unless all of us had goggles strapped to our faces for 8+ hours a day. Everything Meta talked about made this clear - they only invested a ton of money because they saw it as the new "platform" after desktop and mobile that they could own and control. And it's obviously why AI is commanding so much investment now, as companies are scrambling to own the means of production in human society for years to come. I agree that VR is not "dead", whatever that means, but I do find some joy that tech companies haven't found yet one more way to own the basics in societal existence.
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wanting to own the platform first before the "killer application" became known is how they intend to keep extracting rent for said killer application when it appears. Consumers need to be wary, and take steps to prevent such an outcome. Unfortunately, most consumers just simply dont know they're in a chess game with corporations they deal with, so don't see any setup moves as being threatening.
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There are degrees of VR usage I think. I've used it every day for about 5 years now. I use it for sit down flight sims, space games, driving sims often playing with others also in VR. I don't really like it for work compared to a few decent 2D panels in front of me, it's too isolating and I don't need the 3D feeling for that. The barrier is really the hardware cost so it'll always be a niche hobby in those PC sim areas. I read stuff like 'VR is dead' and know it really means the leaping around Oasis 'Ready Player One' stuff, when really that's just one possible use case. I don't know how it'll ever cross the chasm of being popular, probably when the hardware gets super light and the local computing powerful enough, but there is this VR hobby niche that exists still if it doesn't.
This has been the sentiment for nearly a decade now.
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Much longer. We had VR in the '60s.
In my experience in the real word, VR is a lot like racing sims. No one I know owns a VR headset, no one I know talks about it, no one I know is very interested in it at all, but both exist as ticketed experience at places in and around malls. So from where I'm sitting in my middle class suburbs, it's certainly not dead, but it's basically the modern equivalent of those actuated flight sim entertainment experiences from the 80s/90s. VR seems to be much bigger among the perpetually online. For us normies VR is hardly a blip on the radar. I still don't even really understand what Horizon Worlds or the Metaverse even was, or if there's a distinction between the two. I've heard of VRChat, but from the little I've seen, it seems extremely unappealing. I still think that most people don't want to strap a computer screen to their face, for any reason. I've done it, it's not very pleasant.
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As someone who has both interest in VR and racing sims (and other sims), and tried VR and loved it, I am genuinely NOT INTERESTED in owning a headset for the obvious health reasons that come with using one. There is no way this ever can be close to safe for your health than, say, not using it.
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I'm really curious what you consider to be the obvious health reasons - it's far from obvious for me.
VR's problem, in my opinion, is that I can get immersed (fully, exactly as the author describes it) in a 2D game just fine - the lack of stereo vision or head-tracking or motion controls is no more an impediment to my immersion than the limited binocular overlap or peripheral vision or lag in a VR headset. And 2D is a heck of a lot cheaper and more convenient (and less nauseating). That's not to say VR can never be successful, but I think it needs to offer something more compelling than just "immersion." Exercise or AR might be viable routes.
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There are many games for vr that cannot be done without the tech. It isnt all about immersion but facilitating unique experiences. What held it back from mainstream imo is an inherent space issue (you need room) and a lack of multiplayer participation (need even more room). Compared to sitting on a couch in a small studio with a few friends, it doesnt stand a chance. The other problem is most peoples first experience is with some shitty mall vr room where the “game” consists of free unity assets slapped together in a way that makes marky marks horizons look polished. Few people start off with something like the half life one.
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I like VR and immersion in theory. I like being able to look around, but I absolutely hate the movement controls. I know some people complain of motion sickness, but that doesn't bother me. I just want controls like Mario or Zelda on a regular joystick. Why can't this be done? It doesn't even have to be first person. I'd play a third person game like Mario or Zelda with a VR camera tracking them. I just want that kind of movement. Pushing a button to teleport in short hops is annoying as hell. I hate everything about it. I gave up trying in frustration.
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I always thought a great compromise would be games that gave you an overhead “gods eye” third person perspective. People seem to be obsessed with making VR games first person, but that’s where the movement problems come in. The game Moss did this well for a platformers. But it could also be really fun for realtime strategy/simulation games (StarCraft, sim city) or sports games like Madden.
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That would be fantastic. I think even being the Lakitu camera in Mario 64 would work. And you're right, it would kick ass for strategy, sim, and sports games. I wonder if folks have tried building the movement and camera before the main gameplay loop. Just to see what feels right.
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I feel that's like saying "I can get just as fully immersed in a book so who needs movies?" They're different experiences. I don't need Tetris or PacMan in VR. Conversely, Half-Life 1/2 etc are not remotely intense as Half-Life Alyx. In the first 2 you're watching a movie. In the later you're in the world of Half-Life
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It is like saying that, and it is a fine response to someone saying "VR isn't dead because immersion." The reason movies exist isn't simply "immersion", it's a different experience than reading a book.
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The giant advantage regular games have is that I've yet to smash my hand into a wall playing them. I think that the relatively low living space area for most of the world is a huge strain on VR adoption.
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The frequency of choosing to go out to the movies is also about how often I think "I wish I could do this in VR". Examples: - Before going on a trip, pre-visiting the destination in Google Earth with VR is very spatially informative & makes directional intuition memorable upon arrival at the real world destination. - Virtual role-play with environmental cues that cause make-believe to be ever more real. But most people don't need this very often. Picking up a book or throwing on some earbuds to listen to a book are far more frequent and compatible with simultaneous other activities. VR feels the same--a high-demand focused experience that is infrequently worth the effort.
The most important quality of any successful trend (eg windows, internet, smart phones, cloud computing) has been convenience. Which is also the reason why I think Meta Glasses have a real chance to take off.
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Meta Glasses will just recreate the whole “glasshole” response that Google Glasses got, except with a company that has even worse of a reputation.
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Also a key single use case that justifies the cost/friction of purchasing a new device. Meta glasses somewhat justify themselves just for recording hikes/cycles/weddings etc.
I’m on my third quest unit (my quest 1 died during the pandemic and I had to buy a new 1, and then the 2 came out). I still use it for around 3-4 hours a week and I’m thinking about upgrading to the quest 3. Just use one or two apps though (beat saber and fitxr), I never really got into actual gaming or social stuff on it. I wish a company would come around and seethe potential for fitness tech with VR, they could come up with better optimized solutions for it (and I don’t really count the mirror or stationary bike stuff). Fitness really fees like the killer app.
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I agree. I've been using the quest to regularly work out for the last 4 years. It's the only app I use. I think my issue is that VR is very much a solo experience. It's hard for me to have the free time and room to play with my kids and family. I would rather play 2d games with the kids.
With AI, VR is even more promising. I have been working on a Gaussian splat renderer for the Quest 3, and by having Claude and ChatGPT read state-of-the-art papers, I have been able to build a training and rendering pipeline that is getting >50 fps for large indoor scenes on the Quest 3. I started with an (AI-driven) port of a desktop renderer, which got less than 1 fps, but I've integrated both training and rendering improvements from research and added a bunch of quality and performance improvements and now it's actually usable. Applying research papers to a novel product is something that used to take weeks or months of a person's time and can now be measured in minutes and hours (and tokens).
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Sorry if this is a basic question, but what's you workflow for feeding the papers into the LLM and getting the implementation done? The coding agents that I've used are not able to read PDFs, so I've been wondering how to do it.
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You might be interested in a new experimental 3D scene learning and rendering approach called Radiant foam [1], which is supposed to be better suited for GPUs that don't have hardware ray tracing acceleration. [1]: https://radfoam.github.io/
The bot situation on the internet is worse than you could imagine (gladeart.com)
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> The IPs of these bots here actually do not come from datacenters or VPNs most of the time; the overwhelming majority come from residential and mobile networks. So I started searching for what these residential proxy networks actually are. https://datadome.co/bot-management-protection/how-proxy-providers-get-residential-proxies/
> These bots are almost certainly scraping data for AI training; normal bad actors don't have funding for millions of unique IPs thrown at a page. They probably belong to several different companies. Perhaps they sell their scraped data to AI companies, or they are AI companies themselves. We can't tell, but we can guess since there aren't all that many large AI corporations out there. Is the theory here that OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI, Qwen, Z.ai etc are all either running bad scrapers via domestic proxies in Indonesia, or are buying data from companies that run those scrapers? I want to know for sure . Who is paying for this activity? What does the marketplace for scraped data look like?
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https://parallel.ai/ I bet lot of companies want to provide search results to AI agents.
So the elephant in the room: How much of HN is bot generated? Those who know have every incentive not to share and those who don't have no way to figure it out. At this point i have to assume that every new account is a bot
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I've thought about this a bit and I can't really see why someone would want to write AI content here other than to spam ads but they are handled quickly. Does anyone see AI content with a clear motivation or agenda here? There are very few rep based privileges right so that seems like an unlikely motivation as well.
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This is a venture capitalist driven community that attracts the sleaziest kind of spammers you could think of under the badge of growth hacking and networking. Besides this very obvious motivation to spam you have all kinds of nerds here eager to do it just because they can (on one of the most famous tech places where registration is made as easy as possible)
>How can you protect your sites from these bots? JA4 fingerprinting works decently for the residential proxies.
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TLS fingerprinting is not sufficient to stop residential proxies, the proxy acts as a transparent pass-through at the TLS layer making it trivial to use something like curl_cffi to mimic a real browser TLS fingerprint. However residential proxies do have a weakness, since they need to maintain 2 separate TCP conenctions you can exploit RTT differences between layers 3 and 7 to detect if the connection to your server is being terminated somewhere along the path. Solutions exist that can reliably detect and block residential proxies, for example: https://layer3intel.com/tripwire
I’ve been sitting on this page for two minutes and it’s still not sure whether I’m a bot lol. What did I do in a past life to deserve this :(
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On what page? https://gladeart.com/blog/the-bot-situation-on-the-internet-is-actually-worse-than-you-could-imagine-heres-why loaded effectively instantly for me.
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The cynic in me thinks that they’re mining bitcoin on our phones… And after completing, it claimed the page was misconfigured.
If you want “papers, please” every time you back out of your driveway or go beyond your government-assigned oblast, then your suggestion is the digital version of the physical authoritarian nightmare that was imposed by totalitarianist regimes throughout history. People have a right to complete anonymity, and should be able to go across the majority of the Internet just as they can go across most of the country. That’s what you are missing. Don’t get me wrong, I am also in favour of a single government ID, but in terms of combatting identity fraud, accessing public resources like single-payer healthcare, and making it easier for a person to prove their identity to authorities or employers. It should not be used as a pass card for fundamental rights that normally would have zero government involvement.
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>>> People have a right to complete anonymity Why? (Am not trolling. Genuinely interested) I walk out my front door in the UK and I am not anonymous. Every transaction I make either identifies me through bank, railway or other id, or quite simply by my face standing in front of the coffee seller. My walk down the road is observed by neighbours and postmen. Should my government arrest me without cause or trample on my free speech rights, I get that’s a problem but I am not sure why being anonymous helps. Having rights upheld by the courts helps, well trained police who respect the law helps. I am honestly open to debate on this but I do find the “what if Hitler took over government where would we be” to be a problematic argument not a final answer.
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> Should my government arrest me without cause or trample on my free speech rights, I get that’s a problem but I am not sure why being anonymous helps. Having rights upheld by the courts helps, well trained police who respect the law helps. You're suggesting the same government that would violate your rights would then help prevent it? I don't follow. Any power structure (tiered or not) was wiped away by authoritarians, historically. They will not be helping in the worst case. Ideological capture (corruption) has already started eroding at UK rights and that took a much less overt effort. America has had a robust 3-branch system (executive, legislative, judiciary) corrupted by a singular cult of personality. THAT was highly unlikely to happen, but here we are. With this being said, I do predict that anonymity on the web is going to be phased out. It will result in all sorts of changes to cultural norms across western nations that largely will curtail rights. I dread it. Shouldn't we try tracing IP addresses and fining organizations for letting the traffic through or originating the traffic first? Seems a lot simpler.
Take down the site entirely because a couple humans get into a fit about it?
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I'm just saying, making visitors wait at least a minute while making their device turn red hot is going to stop 99,9% of your visitors. So at that point what's the point in trying to serve the content?
Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder (techfixated.com)
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> For the first time in the history of the universe, as far as we know, an object built by a living species had left the protective bubble of its home star system... Seriously?
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Voyager 1 & 2 is one of my favourite human science achievements, not even so much from technology standpoint, as it's relatively simple compared to what we have now (although that's one of the charms), but just the fact that it's so far away, it still more or less works long after the scheduled mission end time, we can communicate with it and despite all the modern technology progress, it would take decades to catch up. Absolutely amazing and inspiring!
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Wish javascript devs would read this. If the web is slow, its because of them
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This is one mighty tape recorder, hats off: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2053/how-was-magnetic-tape-decay-prevented-in-voyager-1#:~:text=Truth%20is%2C%20I%20worked%20at,vibration%2Dfree%20continuous%20tape%20speed.
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What really gets me is that the time between windows 95 and now is more than between voyager launching and Windows 95. Same for the moon landings for that matter.
My first computer had 32KB. Reading the headline there's still a part of my brain that went "69KB? Luxury!".
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> My first computer had 32KB. 1KB for me[0]. Then another 1KB[1] expanded to 16KB via my father's electronic wizardry. Then an official 16KB[2] and ever upwards from there. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX80 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum
There is a terrific documentary, 'Its quieter in the twilight', about the aging and dwindling team that still runs both Voyager missions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6L9Du_IFmI
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Such a wonderful meditation on career and meaning and fellowship and purpose. I loved it.
It's very distracting to have every sentence in this article be its own paragraph.
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It's LLM slop unfortunately, bears the hallmarks at least :(
I'd argue that once you have a very well defined requirement doc that mostly kicks humans out of the picture, as well as a patient boss who doesn't want anything ASAP or "Tomorrow morning first thing", engineering is not that hard, and is almost...enjoyment.
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A well defined doc evolves over time. it gets sharper with real-world scenarios, incidents, and experiments. Before Voyager 1, we didn’t have that kind of experience. You can’t predict everything upfront. > Theory only takes you so far
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Would sending voyager have been a real definite deadline?
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Absolutely. You could wait decades or centuries for a useful planetary alignment.
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I’d argue that you must not be working on interesting problems if you think that “engineering is not that hard”
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I think their point is that the challenge becomes more enjoyable than tedious.
There's almost certainly less than 69KB of useful human-readable information on any given page.
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I was actually a bit curious how much HN uses, since it's probably the lightest site that I frequent. According to Brave's dev tools, looks like just shy of about 90kb on this comment page as of the time of this writing. Obviously some of that is going to be CSS rules, a small amount of JS (I think for the upvotes and the comment-collapse), but I don't think anyone here called HN "bloated". Even that one page wouldn't fit on Voyager.
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There is more information in a typical, single page of comments here than there is on the average webpage. And I'd say a far higher signal to noise ratio (though depending on the topic discussed some will disagree).
Twice this week, I have come across embarassingly bad data (successfulsoftware.net)
I dislike the premise. I mean, good data is wonderful. But if institutions are expected to release clear data or nothing, almost always it is the later. What is important, is to offer as much methodology and caveats as possible, even if in an informal way. Because there is a difference between "data covers 72% of companies registered in..." vs expecting that data is full and authoritative, whereas it is missing. (Source: 10 years ago I worked a lot with official data. All data requires cleaning.)
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I don't think these issues are close to the issues the article talks about. The author does not talk about data coverage, data collection methodologies or missing values or whatever, but data that is actually wrong, ie location coordinates, prices, numbers that make no sense. Including swapping latitude/longitude and wrong decimal points in numbers. On the other hand, I agree that bad (but usually fixable) data is better than no data.
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But surely we should expect some basic sanity checks on published data? This isn't some petrol stations being placed in the middle of a field due to minor typos or bad rounding, or some petrol stations' prices being listed as all 1.00 £/l out of laziness, or even a case of all unknown locations being listed as 0°0'0" N, 0°0'0" E by default. What the author reports appear to be mistakes which should be rather trivially detectable on input.
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Sure we should indeed expect that they do that. But look at enough data and you'll learn that those expectations are a path towards never-ending frustration. I've been there, spending >100 hours cleaning data... that never got published because I was too damn focused on the dozens of years of errors that many, many people created. To be clear, I'm not saying that we should accept messy data. Just, reality is messy and it's naive to think we can catch and remove all of reality's messiness -- which includes the bureaucratic slop that led to the data being published in the first place.
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I read the premises as "1. at least look at it 2. Have a way to fix it" Those seem reasonable asks. Edit to add: the tragedy of the school in Minab is an example of how bad things can go--and it just hints at how much worse bad data can bem
Exactly. This is a big problem with "open data". A lot goes into cleaning it up to make it publishable, which often includes removing data so that the public "doesn't get confused". Now I have to spend months and months fighting FOIA fights to get the original raw, messy data because someone , somewhere had opinions on what "clean data" is. I'll pass -- give me the raw, messy data.
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I do not disagree with that, but I am not sure what "raw data" means in some cases like the ones the article talks about. The 1.700.000 is no less or more raw than 1.700,000. Most probably somebody messed up some decimals somewhere, or somebody imported a csv in excel and it misinterpreted the numbers due to different settings. Similar to swapped longitude/latitude. That sounds different to me than, let's say, noisy temperature data from sensors. Rather, it seems more like issues that arose at the point of merging datasets together, which is already far from the data being raw. The issue imo is that a person closer to the point the data was collected or merged is probably better equipped with understanding of what may be wrong with it, than a random person looking into that dataset. So I do not think it is unreasonable to have people in organisations take a second look into the datasets they publish.
Full network of clitoral nerves mapped out for first time (theguardian.com)
Page 7 [0] of the report seems to indicate that FGM reconstruction actually seems to have negative outcomes post-surgery. I'm surprised by this. I'm also shocked to see how prolific FGM is too (230 million women?!). [0]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.18.712572v1.full.pdf
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Male genital mutilation is very common
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Respectfully, this article is not about the male experience, it's okay to talk about women without putting men in the story.
This should be the story link.
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Indeed, wonder did OP really read through the article?
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
The RISE RISC-V Runners: free, native RISC-V CI on GitHub (riseproject.dev)
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Sadly still on quite old hardware, with no RVV. Hopefully scaleway will have some newer servers in the future and this can be simply updated to the new devices.
My experience with RISC-V so far is that the chips are not much faster than QEMU emulation. In other words, it's very slow.
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Oftentimes slow is fine, when the work is parallel and the hardware is cheap
Perfect for snooping on other people’s projects. No one in their right mind would touch this. It’s cheaper to buy the board yourself.
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Yes, what a devious plan: give open source software projects a free CI service so you can... read their open source software code?
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diabolical
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The target for this is open-source projects.
Say No to Palantir in Europe (action.wemove.eu)
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How do we differentiate between genuine empathy and love for the world and simple virtue signalling? If USA weren't the one safeguarding (contentious but please read on) the world and its modern interests then we would end up with something much worse. If you only focus locally, it is quite easy to dismiss any form of killing, any form of surveillance and any form of inconvenience. This is "Defund the Police" meme all over again. I gain social points by showing my disgust against the killings and murder done by the west. I gain nothing by promoting what they safeguard and promote that is necessary for the world to function. Such dynamics will lead to self ownage at the long run but social status points for oneself in the short term.
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> we would end up with something much worse. Whenever I see this, I recognize it as obvious scaremongering.
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When I saw "defund the policy" I recognised it as virtue signalling.
> This headline might as well say 'Say No to PostgreSQL' or 'Say No to Excel' or 'Say No to Salesforce', etc. Wild. Wat? These are wildly different things: > Say No to PostgreSQL Sure, if you self-host it, this would be a stupid thing to say. > Say No to Excel A little worse: it's proprietary and who knows what it does and where it sends your data. > Say No to Salesforce Way worse: they host the data, and who knows what they do with it.
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A lot of words but you could have simply searched to know that Palantir offers self hosting.
But it’s already widespread in Europe, or at least in the Netherlands. Amsterdam Airport uses it, as do the Dutch police and the Dutch army. So shouldn’t it be: kick out Palantir?
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Amsterdam Airport? Source?
Surprised by this take. Building a startup is already insanely hard. So I wouldn’t like to add more challenge by spending time integrating with non-US services if they are not top just because of my political views. I feel a better answer is for Europe to build real, competitive alternatives to US services.
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The eu can not move and function in any capacity standalone. The moment the is dropped out the eu tried to fill that hole with the other allies atoll.
Palantir's technology, as its own name suggests, is inherently dangerous, regardless of who controls it. The right alternative is to simply not build capabilities similar to Palantir in the EU - ideally, to legally forbid building them at all. This type of aggregated data flow simply gives too much control to whoever has access to it, and thus greatly harms democracy.
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You live in a world with adversaries. If you don't build and use tech like Palantir, the adversaries will come for you and destroy you. Its easy to show one's morals here but whats harder is to accept the dirty work to ensure society functions.
Yes whoever decided to let them do this has a lot of explaining to do. This data should never have left the UK.
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Grab them by the balls and make sure they are never able to make a political decision with such an impact again.
> ICE separate[s] families" is such a ridiculous mischaracterization It's accurate. They do separate families. How or why doesn't matter, the fact stands in its own. It's not a "mischaracterization", it's a fact.
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If context is irrelevant then every country in Europe already separates families, and thus how can this be a complaint?
Police used AI facial recognition to wrongly arrest TN woman for crimes in ND (cnn.com)
Has it not been fairly common to require police officers to have a bachelor’s degree? Or an associate’s? I think recently that has been relaxed but I’ve lived in places where it was absolutely a requirement. I don’t think they’re as stupid as you suggest.
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Police departments are known to avoid hiring people that get high marks in school, under the principle that such individuals will become bored with the job and quit. They literally look for average people with average intelligence: C students. Now factor in the slow decline of our educational institutions, where grade inflation has systematically diminished the credibility of a degree. I would wager that many C students today would have failed out completely 30 years ago. In that light, it is not surprising that people are seeing ICE agents behave like brown shirts. No one in power wants those people asking any kind of hard questions about what they are being ordered to do.
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> I don’t think they’re as stupid as you suggest. I'll just leave this here: https://abcnews.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836
This is a weak or misleading story about AI. First, the detective used the FaceSketchID system, which has been around since around 2014. It is not new or uniquely tied to modern AI. Second, the system only suggests possible matches. It is still up to the detective to investigate further and decide whether to pursue charges. And then it is up to court to issue the warrant. The real question is why she was held in jail for four months. That is the part that I do not understand. My understanding is that there is 30-day limit (the requesting state must pick up the defendant within 30 day). Regarding the individual involved, Angela Lipps, she has reportedly been arrested before, so it is possible she was on parole. So maybe they were holding her because of that? Can someone clarify how that process works?
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> It is still up to the detective to investigate further and decide whether to pursue charges. And then it is up to court to issue the warrant. This is how it should work, but I still think it is important to discuss these failures in the context of AI risks. One of the largest real-world dangers of AI (as we define that now) is that it is often confidently wrong and this is a terrible situation when it comes to human factors. A lot of people are wired in such a way that perceived confidence hacks right through their amygdala and they immediately default to trust, no matter how unwarranted.
In the US there are no consequences for people in power failing to follow procedures, laws or regulations - except for being told to stop doing whatever illegal thing they're doing, and possibly getting sued way down the line, which gets paid by taxpayers.
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Case in point, the US is supposed to have a strong mechanism to prevent this sort of thing. The right to a speedy trial. In practice they generally make it de facto impossible to get one. You get charged with something and if you want to have the trial right now , before you have any idea what's going on, then you can insist, which basically nobody does because it's pretty crazy to go in blind. But if you don't then you've "waived your right to a speedy trial" and now you're stuck in limbo until the system feels like getting to you.
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This isn’t how it works, you can invoke your right to a speedy trial at any point you want. You can spend 2 months waiting and then invoke it if you want. The timer starts from when you invoke it, though. The 2 issues, which she may be caught in, are that it’s “speedy” from the perspective of a court, and that it really means “free from undue delays”. There is no general definition of a speedy trial, but I think the shortest period any state defines is a month (with some states considering several months to still be “speedy”). A trial can still be speedy even past that window if the prosecution can make a case that they genuinely need more time (like waiting for lab tests to come back). It’s basically only ever not speedy if the prosecution is just not doing anything.
Show HN: BreezePDF – Free, in-browser PDF editor (breezepdf.com)
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Love it! Bookmarked for the next time I need to sign a PDF and then will pony up the $$.
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Notice the IMO poor behavior of the author on the previous thread. [1] Search for 'philjohnson'. This post removes the contentious word "free" but still does not convey that no sign-up is required but you are apparently limited to 3 files without signup. Reading the previous thread was a turn-off enough for me to warn you. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47555636
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Great idea, though I haven't had a chance to use it much (yet). I especially appreciate the end-user control of the documents - that they never leave the user's computer. A question for any newish PDF application developer: A valuable feature of PDFs is wide and long compability. What I output now should be fully readable and usable on any system and in 20 or maybe 50 years. [0] How do you have confidence that what you implement meets that specification? For example, if I edit the text, how do you know BreezePDF isn't subtley corrupting it? If I compress or flatten it, how do you know that about the output? In fairness, it's a question for any file-based application, but PDF has a special status in it's universal availability and functionality. [0] Is the timeframe in the spec somewhere?
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Is this a viable alternative to the Adobe PDF app on Windows? I'm looking for an alternative for our company to replace Adobe's bloatware.
This may be outside your plan, but I really could use a pdf editor that makes Internet Archive book scans more readable. Apparently, the scanner(s) adopt some compromise setting that renders halftones OK, but gives all text a "dishwater gray" background. If there are few pictures, I run the PDF through a quartz filter in Preview to threshold the text and later merge graphics pages with the "contact sheet" view from an un-threshold-ed image in Preview.app. This is slow and tedious. Of course, computers are "smart," so they tell me, and should be able to recognize a picture from a block of text on the same page and render each one appropriately. I used to do such editing of really important documents (like ads for pioneer computer products and gizmos like GENIAC and such)[0] pretty much by hand, splitting a PDF, if needed, into multiple images and hand/batch editing, then merging again. I could use ImageMagick ... but it's not adaptive, as described above. Geniac ad sample (imgbb.com) [0] https://i.ibb.co/67zpBDgh/OIP-2472099845.jpg
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Sounds like a job for ScanTailor. I'm not aware of an actively developed alternative. The version on my system comes from ScanTailor Advanced [3]. [1]: https://scantailor.org/ [2]: https://github.com/scantailor/scantailor [3]: https://github.com/4lex4/scantailor-advanced
TSA lines are so out of control that travelers are hiring line-sitters (washingtonpost.com)
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The basic competence of elected officials and they people they appoint matters.
we already have this with TSA Pre
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The TSA Pre lines are often as long as the standard lines.
The people arriving on private jets have always bypassed these bureaucratic procedures. Brotherhood and equality.
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As somebody who doesn't travel on private jets, I'm very, very happy that I'm not anywhere close to those people. Imagine the pandemonium that would ensue if Taylor Swift were to enter an airport terminal through the normal entrance.
Why should private plane passengers be subject to TSA? TSA (paid for by you and me by the way, not for free) exists to protect the public from harm, on public flights by common carriers. It used to be contracted by airlines themselves. Unless you are the most extreme of pro-seatbelt law people, it would make little sense for TSA to screen anyone on a private plane manifest unless the client asked them to.
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It seems to me that the people flying private jets are the biggest threats to humanity.
https://techland.time.com/2010/09/14/steve-jobs-vows-to-never-visit-japan-again-after-ninja-star-incident/ For reference
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"Update: Apple called Techland saying that the story is “pure fiction.” According to the New York Post, Steve Jobs himself has told them the same."
No, the TSA exists because 19 people hijacked 4 flights and succeeded in crashing 3 of them into various important buildings in the US on 9/11/2001. Private planes are just as capable of crashing into buildings as commercial jets. The TSA has picked up some ancillary public safety functions over the years, but their raison d'etre is to prevent hijackings.
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No; the TSA exists because we needed a government jobs program that was easy to promote under the guise of terrorism.
Were you born after 2001? Did you remember those planes that flew into the buildings? Private planes can do the same thing.
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And the TSA wouldn’t do anything to stop that Hell the TSA doesn’t do much to prevent that on commercial flights, but requiring private flights to start going through commercial security would be completely pointless
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Inconveniencing wealthy people might create motivation to fix the problem.
So it’s complete building destruction that is the protective mission here? Not loss of life or general terrorism or something else? I’m glad we are clarifying I wasn’t aware that DJI drone with 60lb payload was subject to more regulations than a Citation leaving TEB but I guess I’m open to learning what those are.
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Why are you spending so much effort helping the most privileged people on the planet? Makes no sense to be their white knight
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
The Failure of the Thermodynamics of Computation (2010) (sites.pitt.edu)
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I think I arrived at the same suspicion independently -- it was when I was trying to understand thermodynamic entropy as an instance of Shannon entropy - where the latter is defined abstractly as a property of probability distributions - which left me wondering about where the thermodynamic probabilities came from. I was wondering whether they were supposed to be subjective probabilities, or derived from ensembles. Then I recalled that entropy was originally defined non -probabilistically as dS = (1/T)δQ. Then I started reading about Boltzmann distributions as a bridge between Shannon's entropy and entropy in the earlier sense (Clausius entropy). I then concluded that instead of thinking about bits and bytes, it was much easier to think about gases and machines doing work, like a 19th century engin-eer building, er, engines. I am pretty ignorant of this field.
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Very clear intro to this notoriously slippery area.
It's an interesting article but I fail to see the point they are trying to make. I always thought of reversible computing as a sort of platonic ideal that cannot truly exist in real life, but the principle can still be used to reduce waste heat and energy use. For example, it will be interesting to see if the chips from Vaire ever become practically useful: https://vaire.co/ https://spectrum.ieee.org/reversible-computing
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From the abstract, the idea is that we can continue to shrink: "...in a manner in which no thermodynamic entropy is created or passed to the surroundings." The objection seems to be the "free lunch" assumptions being made about shrinkability. "What Is TANSTAAFL?" https://youtu.be/ZrZUe7R44eA?si=oK2H1L9ha1zQhDOh
Show HN: Sheet Ninja – Google Sheets as a CRUD Back End for Vibe Coders (sheetninja.io)
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This is a great project, very cool, but it is actually insane to me that CRUD is so apparently hard that Google Sheets is the best solution
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You do not need to go through these guys Google provides access to the URL to use the sheet as a database and also allows you to deploy Javascript and even host the site with AppScript (example https://script.google.com/macros/s/AKfycbzYt_aXBdQlnMM7idlVDiOihiUQC9l9VsmuA3Qg-AI6PPpExvXWbhVL66lMjvC-vpY/exec )
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Version-controllable, plaintext knowledge bases have a durability advantage that no SaaS tool can match. Your notes will outlive any company.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Show HN: Create a full language server in Go with 3.17 spec support (github.com/owenrumney)
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Have you tried out https://github.com/tliron/glsp ?
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I actually started out using that. I wanted a debug UI to track messages which was the major driver in creating my own tbh
But you don't have to add a docstring. Cases like this are worse than no docstring at all, because it wastes the reader's time. If you add one, at least make the effort to provide some useful information. For example which is more severe: higher or lower numbers.
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Boilerplate docstrings are lint that spreads, and stale ones are worse, I've seen sevreity fields documented less clearly than the code they annotate.
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