Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | antonvs's commentslogin

What do you believe doesn’t reflect positively on the authors of that open letter? It raises valid concerns, and the statement you quoted is a factual observation.

It reads as a transparent attempt at intimidation to me.

That’s not a reasonable position to hold, unless and until Flock does much, much more when it comes to safeguards against abuse.

I can understand being pro-surveillance, but Flock is a case study in how not to implement surveillance systems. Believing that surveillance can be a public good can’t somehow turn Flock into a public good. It’s not.


> Types are properties of values, not variables.

In computer science, specifically programming language theory, types are properties of terms (syntactic expressions). It wouldn’t be possible in general to typecheck a program before running it if you had to have a value before you could discover its type.


Getting access to the weights for an OpenAI or Anthropic model could be payment enough.

I had an account banned simply for pointing out that there was a spare seat in that orbiting sports car, and implying that Musk would be a good choice of passenger.

It made me wonder how unlikely or impossible an event has to be before it would no longer be considered a real threat by whoever or whatever flags posts like that. Firing billionaires into the Sun? Hmm, probably too close to home. Sending them light years away to fire them into a black hole?


It might be regional? I haven't noticed it in the northeastern US, or in the multinational company I work at, where I talk regularly with people from at least 10 countries.

I have heard it on YouTube videos and elsewhere. "A" plus a y sound, or glottal stop. People talking about "ay answer" or "a yanswer" rather than "an answer". This has not made it into the written language yet, although some people write "a answer" rather than "an answer" etc.

The point is that in saying "I bought a car", you're not attempting to specify which specific car you bought. The fact that you obviously did buy a specific car isn't relevant to the grammar of this.

If the audience already has some context about which specific car you were going to buy, then you could say "I bought the car yesterday." In that case you're referring to a specific car that the audience is expected to already be familiar with.

I think some of the confusion over this seems to be coming from attempting to apply knowledge that you have to a sentence when the audience wouldn't have that knowledge.


AI doesn’t kill people, people kill people.

The 260 character limit is just a Windows problem. See my other comment in this subthread for a summary of the eldritch horror in question. The tl;dr is that backwards compatibility is a helluva drug.

It’s a Windows problem. There’s still, to this day, a 259-character limit on path length in the Win32 API unless the OS has been configured to support long paths and the application uses the correct subset of Windows APIs. For example if you use ‘CreateFileA’, you’re stuck with the limit no matter what.

There’s no problem with Python in general. The registry value LongPathsEnabled, which is probably the one you were asked to set, affects the entire Windows system.

However, there’s also an older workaround that allows programs to use “extended paths” even if that setting is off, by prefixing path strings with “\\?\”. So applications using that workaround can use long paths no matter how Windows is configured. But Python doesn’t use the workaround, it uses the modern APIs and if you want long paths, you need to configure the underlying Windows system to enable it.


Thanks for the explanation! This is indeed consistent with my observations.

But it brings me to two follow-up questions:

1) What is that registry switch even doing, if the problem can be solved with just setting it?

2) Why is Python not using the workaround like ~everyone else?


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: