My mom got hooked in 99 after she slipped on ice at her house in Bluefield, WV.
Became a full blown addict after getting prescribed for the subsequent back injury.
She lost everything, disappeared, became a homeless addict drifting from DC to Baltimore to NYC and back, until she died of an overdose of heroin in a parking lot of a 7-11 in DC in December 2015. Her story and the impact on me and my 4 siblings is a drop in an ocean of suffering these smug assholes inflicted on this country.
This slap on the wrist is an insult to all of us, especially us Appalachians, who saw this starting in the 90s and got ignored because “hillbillies are genetically prone to addiction” as Purdue told the FDA.
If I'm a whistleblower in an active case and I end up dead before testifying, I absolutely DO want the general public to speculate about my cause of death.
There are some pretty callous comments on this thread.
This is really sad. Suchir was just 26, and graduated from Berkeley 3 years ago.
Here’s his personal site: https://suchir.net/.
I think he was pretty brave for standing up against what is generally perceived as an injustice being done by one of the biggest companies in the world, just a few years out of college. I’m not sure how many people in his position would do the same.
I’m sorry for his family. He was clearly a talented engineer. On his LinkedIn he has some competitive programming prizes which are impressive too. He probably had a HN account.
Before others post about the definition of whistleblower or talk about assassination theories just pause to consider whether, if in his position, you would that want that to be written about you or a friend.
In my province in Canada (Quebec) some IT worker in the government made a template .doc document that's widely used. They exported it with the document title "sdf fdsfdsfg". This title isn't in the actual printed document but it's in the metadata. If you Google that string in quotes you'll find tons of official documents with that title.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Sdf+fdsfsdfg%22
Congrats! The design looks nice, but I'm not very fond of the website design. There isn't a single picture of Trefolo that doesn't crop-out some part of it. Also, every picture is in a "sterile" environment. It would be nice to have a picture of it on a real kitchen counter or coffee corner to put its dimensions into perspective, and also demonstrate how it "fades back into the environment".
Also, IMHO, the sustainability pitch is a nice one but needs to be put down in more precise terms. It is good as it is for people who would otherwise buy a Nespresso machine, but anyone who has bought something above that level would need more convincing.
Overall, a good espresso machine already scores pretty high sustainability-wise. Apart from the used of sustainable/premium materials, a key factor to that is the replacement parts and repairability. So, how does Trefolo do in terms of replacement parts and compatibility with 3rd party parts?
For me, the future lack of replacement parts is especially concerning for the Turbina coffee grinder. The use of bespoke grinding burrs adds a wow factor and may be functionally superior to other types of burrs. But this is the one part in the whole setup that is guaranteed to need replacement down the road. What are the provisions for that? How much would it cost? And if you decide to stop selling it, would you e.g. be willing to commit to releasing the burr design so owners or some independent manufacturer can machine replacements?
My dad (age 75) got diagnosed with ALS and within a month of the diagnosis opted for MAID. He had only just lost control of one leg, but he knew what was coming. As much as we begged him for more time, he didn't want any of it.
Till his dying breath he kept repeating how thankful he was that he lived in a country that didn't force him to live on when he didn't want to.
He was a clear Track 1 case, and I realize Track 2 cases are more complicated, but just wanted to add my story as reporting on MAID spins out of control in our culture war milieu.
My Canadian parents are in their 80's so naturally a lot of their friends of the same age are dying. And two of them have been via MAID.
In one case, which was surprising to me, a man who had survived cancer - he was not terminal but certainly wasn't getting any better - elected to die via MAID after his wife died. She passed, he called his doctor and less than a week later he was also dead. He got a chance to visit his family, apparently drive around his hobby farm one more time and then that was it. He didn't want to deal with being alone and seriously ill.
Another friend was in renal and congestive heart failure and possibly could have lived longer but they were driving 100km daily to get to the nearest dialysis clinic and again, this person was definitely dying. So made and appointment and decided to go sooner rather than suffer along for an indeterminate amount of time.
It's quite surprising to me, but these people are in their mid to late 80's and of sound mind and know what they want.
I was struck by Ding's thoughtfulness, objectivity and humility when asked how he felt after the match (while clearly utterly dejected):
> How do you feel?
> I think I played my best tournament of the year. I think it was a fair tournament in the end. I have no regrets.
> Any message for fans?
> Thank you, I will continue to play, I hope I can show strength like this time.
Gukesh was equally as objective, humble, and gentlemanly in victory.
These attributes are what makes chess and its superstars so appealing.
That was a absolutely horrible finish to a really exciting championship if you ask me.
For anyone who doesn't know, there was a lot of drama because Gukesh was playing amazingly coming into this (eg winning the gold medal on board 1 at the olympiad in crushing style) and Ding had been playing terribly. Then there were 13 games of back and forth with stalwart defending and imaginative computer preparation by both sides, playing a lot of fresh chess and both of them going for the most critical and challenging moves in each position. Ding was playing a lot better than a lot of people had expected and the previous game had been one of the best games in a world championship for a long time. Everything was tied going into the last game of the classical portion and the "bar room consensus" was that since Gukesh was so young and doesn't focus at all on the faster forms of chess (rapid and blitz) and is therefore much lower rated than Ding in those formats, that if this game was a draw then Ding would be a substantial favourite in the ensuing tiebreaks.
The final game was a complex struggle, with Ding keeping everything in lockdown with the white pieces so as not to give Gukesh a ghost of a chance. Most of the pieces had been traded and it was the most drawish of drawn endgames. Gukesh was up a pawn, but they both had a rook and bishop and all Ding had to do was hang on to his pieces and keep them well away from the enemy king. On the stream I was watching IM David Pruess had just been asked by someone in chat whether Gukesh could win and he said "1% chance".
Then all of a sudden Ding made 3 bad moves in a row. The first two were just poor endgame technique, putting his rook and bishop both on bad squares too close to the enemy king, then the real blunder. Completely inexplicably he traded off the pieces. Now he was in an endgame that was just dead lost. After 14 games of 4+ hours each It had gone from being a dead draw with him a big favourite in tie breaks to all over in a few seconds.
I live in NJ. I've seen these drones. They are not commercial airliners or helicopters. They are loud, fly low and slow, and make abrupt turns unlike any planes I've seen. Their lights are also very different from other aircraft.
I can see how it's tempting to chalk this up to hysteria, but they are absolutely large drones of some kind.
It is clear that Jones and his relatives have moved money and assets around in order to shield them from the verdict. Now, money that should have been already given to the victims is being used to steal back the megaphone that caused harmed in the first place. The end effect will probably be even more subscribers and money for Jones which he will use with even less restraint since he knows there are no consequences. There are no words for the evil going on here. What recourse is left when the legal system is this broken?
Isn't it a little strange, though, that the system notionally decided that the families are owed an enormous amount of economic power as compensation for the nasty behavior of Alex Jones' media company, but at the same time it's obliging them not to use that economic power to prevent the sale of the media company to a "new owner" still affiliated with an unrepentant Alex Jones, who will undoubtedly continue the nasty behavior? Just in order to get cash to compensate them at pennies on the dollar for his previous round of nasty behavior?
I have to say, just as a matter of gut instinct, it sure feels like when the court finds that Alex Jones damaged people—at a value orders of magnitude beyond that of his company—those people should be allowed to decide that, to them, there's value in snuffing out his ill-behaving company altogether.
Is the issue that there are other creditors who are unhappy with this, who would get paid before the aggrieved families' damages would? The lawyers seem to be fine with it, as they're the ones advocating for this plan...
Man, reading this makes me feel so small. Being a "software engineer" consuming APIs and updating database rows seems laughably childish compared to whatever the hell it is I just read. I can't even imagine why I should bother trying to understand it. It's completely inaccessible. Only an elite few get to touch these machines.
I built an interactive Music Theory course 8 years ago over a winter break and it continues to bring in enough to pay my rent each month.
I just thought there had to be a more intuitive way to learn music theory than the very boring and jargon-heavy alternatives.
It uses Tone.js to include little interactive pianos, guitars, and other demos.
I've done no marketing, it hit the HN front page for a day, and after that initial spike in traffic has been fairly consistent over the past 8 years.
It uses Stripe for payments and for the first few years it was only Stripe. 3 years in I decided to add PayPal support... revenue doubled overnight, mostly from international customers.
Did the test collect any data on the demographics of the takers, so that we can check whether the drop is within-group, or whether it’s just artifact of changing composition? For all we know, this might be just a case of Simpson paradox, where each subgroup actually improved, but the overall score distribution shifted downwards due to school children population growing more and more immigrant, after years of mass immigration. While US has excellent education, and immigrant children in America do better than their counterparts in their countries of origin, they don’t do as well as the modal group of white Americans, so as the composition changes, and the whites become less of a statistically dominating factor, the scores are expected to go down, even as the education quality improves.
For me, the license change upset me mainly for two reasons:
1. Many people had contributed their efforts to the Redis project for free - both in terms of code but also in advocacy, writing tutorials, publishing example code etc - and when they did that it was under the understanding that project would remain under the same open source license. It honestly felt like a betrayal of trust.
2. From a purely selfish point of view, my favourite thing about open source licenses is that they let me know exactly what I'm allowed to do and build on that software without having to consult a license. Licenses like the new Redis one leave me potentially needing to get my own legal advice depending on what I'm building on the software. I don't want to spend my time, energy or money on that stuff!
I do also see these kinds of license trends as harmful to open source generally. It used to be that you could pick an open source project and build a business on it and expect that the project would stay available to you under those well understood terms. That's not the case any more - not just because of Redis, there are a number of other high-profile license rug-pulling projects. I'm sad about that.
(And yes, I do understand and dislike the trend of businesses building on open source without contributing back. There are no clearly correct answers here.)
> However, during the “writing years” (I’m still writing, by the way), I often returned to coding, as a way to take breaks from intense writing sessions (writing is the only mental activity I found to be a great deal more taxing than coding)
This has been my experience too. With both "Game Programming Patterns" and "Crafting Interpreters", writing the code was a joy while writing the prose was hard work. Gratifying, but mentally draining in a way that programming isn't.
I was at Mozilla when this was implemented.
It was completely optional for websites to support this. A few did at first.
A lot of people internally wanted it to be on-by-default, but the argument was that if it was, nobody would respect it – after all, what tracking platform would willingly only track the 0.1% of people who went into the settings to enable it? (Internet Explorer did eventually enable it by default, which got them good press but ultimately killed the feature since everyone stopped respecting it.)
Overall, I'm happy to see this sunsetted. I don't think it actually did anything – in fact, I think it implies that it did way more than it did, so it was just a faux feeling of security.
(All that being said, I would love if the cookie modals on each site became browser-level, but I'm sure there's many reasons that hasn't happened yet. And I suspect a bit reason starts with a G and ends with an Oogle.)
He was carrying all of the evidence with him, including the fake ID he used at the hostel, the gun & suppressor, mask, and even a handwritten manifesto that points to his motivation. It seems he wanted to be found.
You need to distinguish between "physical qubits" and "logical qubits." This paper creates a single "first-of-a-kind" logical qubit with about 100 physical qubits (using Surface Code quantum error correction). A paper from Google in 2019 estimates needing ~20 million physical qubits ("How to factor 2048 bit RSA integers in 8 hours using 20 million noisy qubits" - https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09749), though recent advances probably brought this number down a bit. That's because to run Shor's algorithm at a useful scale, you need a few thousand very high quality logical qubits.
So despite this significant progress, it's probably a still a while until RSA is put out of the job. That being said, quantum computers would be able to retroactively break any public keys that were stored, so there's a case to be made for switching to quantum-resistant cryptography (like lattice-based cryptography) sooner rather than later.
Every day that passes I grow fonder of Google's decision to delay or otherwise keep a lot of this under the wraps.
The other day I was scrolling down on YouTube shorts and a couple videos invoked an uncanny valley response from me (I think it was a clip of an unrealistically large snake covering some hut) which was somehow fascinating and strange and captivating, and then scrolling down a few more, again I saw something kind of "unbelievable"... I saw a comment or two saying it's fake, and upon closer inspection: yeah, there were enough AI'esque artifacts that one could confidently conclude it's fake.
We'd known about AI slop permeating Facebook -- usually a Jesus figure made out of unlikely set of things (like shrimp!) and we'd known that it grips eyeballs. And I don't even know in which box to categorize this, in my mind it conjures the image of those people on slot machines, mechanically and soullessly pulling levers because they are addicted. It's just so strange.
I can imagine now some of the conversations that might have happened at Google when they choose to keep a lot of innovations related to genAI under the wraps (I'm being charitable here of their motives), and I can't help but agree.
And I can't help but be saddened about OpenAI's decisions to unload a lot of this before recognizing the results of unleashing this to humanity, because I'm almost certain it'll be used more for bad things than good things, I'm certain its application on bad things will secure more eyeballs than on good things.
I've found using these and similar tools that the amount of prompts and iteration required to create my vision (image or video in my mind) is very large and often is not able to create what I had originally wanted. A way to test this is to take a piece of footage or an image which is the ground truth, and test how much prompting and editing it takes to get the same or similar ground truth starting from scratch. It is basically not possible with the current tech and finite amounts of time and iterations.
They opened the API for it and I'm sending requests but the response always comes back 300ms before I send the request, is there a way of handling that with try{} predestined{} blocks? Or do I need to use the Bootstrap Paradox library?
I’m a quantum dabbler so I’ll throw out an armchair reaction: this is a significant announcement.
My memory is that 256 bit keys in non quantum resistant algos need something like 2500 qubits or so; and by that I mean generally useful programmable qubits. To show a bit over 100 qubits with stability, meaning the information survives a while, long enough to be read, and general enough to run some benchmarks on is something many people thought might never come.
There’s a sort of religious reaction people have to quantum computing: it breaks so many things that I think a lot of people just like to assume it won’t happen: too much in computing and data security will change -> let’s not worry about it.
Combined with the slow pace of physical research progress (Schorrs algorithm for quantum factoring was mid 90s), and snake oil sales companies, it’s easy to ignore.
Anyway seems like the clock might be ticking; AI and data security will be unalterably different if so. Worth spending a little time doing some long tail strategizing I’d say.
I'm the one running itch.io, so here's some more context for you:
From what I can tell, some person made a fan page for an existing Funko Pop video game (Funko Fusion), with links to the official site and screenshots of the game. The BrandShield software is probably instructed to eradicate all "unauthorized" use of their trademark, so they sent reports independently to our host and registrar claiming there was "fraud and phishing" going on, likely to cause escalation instead of doing the expected DMCA/cease-and-desist. Because of this, I honestly think they're the malicious actor in all of this. Their website, if you care: https://www.brandshield.com/
About 5 or 6 days ago, I received these reports on our host (Linode) and from our registrar (iwantmyname). I expressed my disappointment in my responses to both of them but told them I had removed the page and disabled the account. Linode confirmed and closed the case. iwantmyname never responded. This evening, I got a downtime alert, and while debugging, I noticed that the domain status had been set to "serverHold" on iwantmyname's domain panel. We have no other abuse reports from iwantmyname other than this one. I'm assuming no one on their end "closed" the ticket, so it went into an automatic system to disable the domain after some number of days.
I've been trying to get in touch with them via their abuse and support emails, but no response likely due to the time of day, so I decided to "escalate" the issue myself on social media.
"Phishing report to our registrar, iwantmyname, who ignored our response and just disabled the domain"
One registrar off the list of registrars you wanna use.
> The real issue? The board. Full of people like Boeing execs.
Literally, Gregory Smith, former Boeing CFO is a member of the board.
Bring back Pat.
Was Pat perfect, no. But Pat acknowledged Intel’s problems - something Otellini, Krzanich, and Swan never did. These CEOs, all non-technical, focused on dividends, buybacks, and next-quarter results while Intel fell behind in advanced nodes and innovation.
Gelsinger inherited a disaster: 10nm delays, TSMC pulling ahead, and no GPU strategy. He had the courage to cut buybacks and slashed dividends. He poured billions into fabs in Arizona, Ohio, Germany, and Ireland. He delivered Intel 18A, powered on first silicon, released PDK 1.0 for Microsoft, and secured Microsoft and Amazon as customers. There were even rumors Apple might join.
Contrast this with Nadella at Microsoft back in 2014. He didn’t reboot the company by tearing everything down. Instead, he built on Ballmer-era wins like Azure, Office 365 while shifting Microsoft’s focus to the cloud. Gelsinger had to start from scratch in many ways, tackling years of neglect while facing harsher challenges.
Yes, Intel’s stock dropped $150 billion, but Gelsinger was upfront - it wouldn’t turn around before 2025. He was trained by Gordon Moore and Andy Grove, and while some saw him as arrogant, that confidence came from decades of technical leadership.
The real issue? The board. Full of people like Boeing execs. They don’t get engineering. Trusting them to fix Intel is like hoping a plane door won’t pop open mid-flight. They’re the ones who should be replaced.
I think it allows for too much. I was glad that JSON only supports double-quoted strings. It is a feature that removes discussions about which quotes to use. Or even whether to use quotes at all (we still need them for keys with colons or minus in it, so what gives?).
The only thing that JSON is really missing are comments and trailing commas. I use JSONC for that. It's what VSC uses for the config format and it works.
Can we do gambling ads next? We banned tobacco ads and then seemingly forgot the lesson that it's actually bad to let advertisers shove addictive and self-destructive products in the publics face, including to former addicts at risk of relapse.
I bookmarked this comment a few months ago because I thought it was hilarious and increasingly accurate:
It's approaching a very strange situation where people make overly wordy and bloated AI generated content and other people try to use AI to compress it back into useful pellets vaguely corresponding to the actual prompts used to generate the initial content. Which were the only bits anybody cared about in the first place. One guy pays the AI to dig a hole, the other guy pays the AI to fill in the hole. Back and forth they go, raising the BNP but otherwise not accomplishing anything.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41635079
More seriously though; I wonder if/when we will reach a point at which asking for a Neuromancer-esque précis summary video of a topic will replace the experience of browsing and reading various sources of information. My gut feeling is that it will for many, but not all scenarios, because the act of browsing itself is desirable and informative. For example, searching for books on Amazon is efficient but it doesn’t quite replace the experience of walking through a bookstore.