lacker

34 ms·

361.
by lacker 4y ago
The search isn't on hold, we just do it differently nowadays. SETI@home was great for its time, but distributing data to lots of end user machines just isn't the right architecture any more. Modern radio telescopes produce so much
362.
by lacker 4y ago
I don't disagree, Google has also made great AI advances and arguably more fundamental ones, with the transformer, Tensorflow, and Keras. But Google is also a for-profit, so that fits in with my thesis here that when corporations start
363.
by lacker 4y ago
Here's a good article about the debate: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html Basically, the ACLU used to be very focused on supporting the first amendment, and recently has sh
364.
by lacker 4y ago
As an EFF supporter I'm a little worried about this phenomenon where nonprofits sprawl out into many unrelated areas. The ACLU, for example, started off very focused on civil liberties but in the Trump era it seemed to generalize into
365.
by lacker 4y ago
Every for-profit pays its employees, right? I don't think the fact that they make these payments is unusual, they're just making it clear that partners with a stake in the for-profit recuse themselves when the nonprofit is approvi
366.
by lacker 4y ago
The name "OpenAI" still really bugs me. But it seems likely that turning into a for-profit corporation was critical to OpenAI's subsequent success. It let them raise enough money to pay for top-tier infrastructure. It also ga
367.
by lacker 4y ago
I'm surprised how unfocused Mozilla is as an organization. They make Firefox, which is great. It's a product that's really important to the world, but it's struggling to maintain its market share. So why are they doing a
368.
by lacker 4y ago
It's more accurate to say that "bank depositors" are taking the hit, in the form of increased FDIC fees. Which end up reflected in lower interest rates for bank savings accounts. If you only keep a negligible money in bank ac
369.
by lacker 4y ago
Spend a few hours with your finance team to minimize risk. That's great for people who have a finance team, but a startup with over $250k in the bank can easily be just one or two people who raised money and have no particular financ
370.
by lacker 4y ago
Brilliant! You are correct sir. Sometimes HN delivers ;-)
371.
by lacker 4y ago
It's a tough situation to handle, because if someone is simply struggling at their job, it can have the same symptoms. They claim they have too much work to do, and important projects always end up delayed, with their tasks being the o
372.
by lacker 4y ago
ideally it will be faster than doing it by hand That's a good point... I agree the tools are not ready. Most computer-assisted tools make it easier to do your work. It's easier to type a five page paper in Word than it is to w
373.
by lacker 4y ago
Personally I think they look pretty good. The really ugly buildings, at least in San Francisco and Oakland that I'm familiar with, are where they take a single family house and chop it up into a bunch of little apartments. It's su
374.
by lacker 4y ago
I love open source but I think this analysis misses the real problem. In 2023, communities built purely on "mailing list" style tools are much less engaging and useful than communities that allow live discussions. For example, the
375.
by lacker 4y ago
JavaScript and React - it's the most popular language, and there are a lot of entry level jobs available because people need to make a lot of different websites that aren't complicated enough to require a senior engineer.
376.
by lacker 4y ago
The larger numbers get, the more boring they are. 385734874675783289473 is really boring.
377.
by lacker 4y ago
This isn't surprising. "With our slower pace of hiring, we are planning for fewer promotions into L6 and above than when Google was growing quickly." Pretty straightforward, when you have fewer employees you need fewer leader
378.
by lacker 4y ago
Rust is a very nice fit for language tooling. It has several features that are particularly useful for syntactic manipulation, like matching, enums, and Result<x> error handling. And a focus on efficiency is especially nice for langua
379.
by lacker 4y ago
Here in CA we have spent billions of dollars on high speed rail over the past decade but the project just keeps getting delayed and the price tag keeps going up. If we could build these projects for merely 2x what it costs in other countrie
380.
by lacker 4y ago
[Languages like Rust] do help you to write more features with fewer bugs, but they are not of much help when you need to squeeze the very last flop from the hardware you rent. I do think that Rust helps you squeeze out that last 1% of p
381.
by lacker 4y ago
In a distant sense, I find the Culture series of novels to be an inspiring vision of the future. People develop AI and technology to master nature on a planetary scale, and largely live peaceful, happy lives. In a nearby sense, I am inspire
382.
by lacker 4y ago
No. For now the algorithms that search for extraterrestrial signals aren't trying to decode signals at all. They are only trying to detect extraterrestrial signals. The typical resolution for the Green Bank data is something like,
383.
by lacker 4y ago
TLDR no changes. Of the .net languages, Microsoft will continue mostly caring about C# but also supporting Visual Basic and F#.
384.
by lacker 4y ago
Is Nix good at dealing with cuda dependencies? I am always frustrated trying to deploy cuda-based environments onto machines with different sorts of GPUs.
385.
by lacker 4y ago
I don't know anything about specifically how OpenAI made this transition. But in general this nonprofit to for-profit transition happens a lot. In general, when you run a for-profit company, the board has a responsibility to the shareh
386.
by lacker 4y ago
Personally, I am not particularly excited for the next round of Moore's Law on CPUs. What else are we going to be able to accomplish if CPUs get twice as fast? GPUs, however, are exciting. ChatGPT is cool now. Real time voice recogniti
387.
by lacker 4y ago
Scientific publishers are basically the outsourced HR department of universities. Modern academic fields are too sprawling for professors to understand everything that's going on in their field. The members of a hiring committee or eve
388.
by lacker 4y ago
I think it's unfair to jump to the conclusion that Kalshi is to blame for regulators banning PredictIt. From the link you posted, PredictIt promised the regulators they would: * be small-scale and not-for-profit * be operated for acade
389.
by lacker 4y ago
I don't know... the story as written does sound really bad. My similarly-aged kids walk about half a mile to school by themselves, as do dozens of other children that live in my neighborhood, and it would be crazy to arrest parents for
390.
by lacker 4y ago
Ever try reading an ebook you paid for 10 years ago? Probably a different experience. This question made me curious, and I took a look. The first Kindle book I ever bought was Shadow of a Dark Queen, by Raymond Feist, in December 2010.

More ›