MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by krisoft | 2025-04-26 22:24:45+00:00
> Which part of my statement you find difficult to understand?

I understand your whole statement perfectly. It is just wrong. My understanding is not the problem here.

We are not comparing them to other samples. We say that out of the currently existing X they are the best.

Imagine a town with 3 bakeries. Lets call them A, B, and C. Bakery A gets shut down by the health deparment and B goes bankrupt. Then we can, rightfully and without survivorship bias, call C the best run bakery of the town. Because if you get shut down by the health department, or you go bankrupt then by definition you are not the best run bakery. (Obviously it is not a high praise with that kind of competitions, but they still are the best run bakery.)

Staying in the business is not some incidental part of “being the best run bakery”. It is a core component of it.

Imagine a marathon with 100 runners. Henry runs the fastest time, and 25 others do not finish. Some got lost, some had medical issues during the race. Is it survivorship bias to call Henry the fastest competitor in that race? Of course not. You need to finish the race to be even considered to be the fastest. Just because there are others who didn’t make it, doesn’t make him somehow not the fastest. Definietly doesn’t make calling him the fastest “survivorship bias”.

Finishing the race is a core component of “being the fastest finisher”.

Similarly in the case of wikipedia. If other similar sites stopped operating then they by definition did not “successfully navigated that minefield”. Their bakery is shut and they did not finish their marathon. That is the very definition of “not succesfully navigating that minefield”.

This is how rationalwiki defines survivorship bias: “Survivorship bias is a cognitive bias that occurs when focusing on entities that made it past a selection process, while overlooking those that didn't.”

We are not overlooking the failed attempts here. We are considering them.

Bakery A and B is worse run than C. And we know that because they got shut down.

The runners who did not finish the marathon are not faster than Henry. And we know that because they haven’t finished the marathon.

The abandoned community edited websites are worse at “successfully navigating that minefield” than the ones which are still operating. We know that because they are no longer operating. They were not overlooked.

What you are missing is that the “selection process” here is not some independent, and unrelated thing. The selection process is, at least in part, is what we are talking about. You cannot be considered the best run bakery unless you are running a bakery. You cannot be considered the fastest racer unless you finished the race. And your community edited website cannot be the one who most succesfully navigates a minefield unless you are navigating the minefield at all.

Please let me know if any of the above is unclear. Happy to go into details.
by zahlman | 2025-04-26 22:25:20+00:00
There are multiple entire websites out there criticizing Wikipedia and what they have to say tends to revolve around the editing process, specifically the social/cultural aspects. Have you attempted to research this yourself?

Are you familiar with what Larry Sanger himself had to say about the bias that has emerged in Wikipedia (https://unherd.com/newsroom/wikipedia-co-founder-i-no-longer...)?

e: another comment elsewhere on this post brought up another source: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik... . I've read a bit of it and can generally endorse what's being said there. In particular, some specific usernames are cited and I recognize most of them, which in itself is telling. Other comments here suggested that Sanger's personal views are less than scientific, to say the least. I have not looked into this personally, but I don't think this in any way negates the argument about bias. (Nor is any political camp immune to pseudoscience.)
by washadjeffmad | 2025-04-26 22:25:41+00:00
When discussing results of a housing interest poll by prospective students at a cabinet meeting of a local university, members were dismayed that "high speed wifi" and "access to printing services" topped the list, and that none from their favored category of "luxury amenities" like discounts on cable television packages and smart appliances ranked at all.

The initial correspondence was also addressed to "the parents of $student".

Someone certainly felt confident in their clever little scheme to milk their endless supply of cash cows.
by int_19h | 2025-04-26 22:25:52+00:00
Funny you should say that. I just tried to install some recent Linux distro on my Thinkpad two days ago. Fedora 42 wouldn't even install because apparently the installer doesn't support boot partition located past the 2Tb boundary, and that laptop has a 4Tb SSD with the first 2Tb used up by Windows. The error was completely incomprehensible, though.

Mint, OTOH, installed just fine and is working great.
by satisfice | 2025-04-26 22:25:57+00:00
Consciousness is a phenomenon, but not an illusion. An illusion is something that seems to be there, yet is not. But consciousness is a self-evident experience.

However, there are gradiations of consciousness. The experience we have on the edge of sleep is qualitatively different than the experience even five seconds after waking up to a cat attack in the middle of the night (I have experienced that).
by stefap2 | 2025-04-26 22:26:44+00:00
I think the retrospection should be why the massive influx was allowed to happen between 2020 to 2024. Because it did happened before, so it's not like we didn't know this will/can happen. There should be massive increase in processing of claims. Not extrajudciary deporting people. Why would somebody predict extrajudicial deporting if that hasn't happened before?
by h2zizzle | 2025-04-26 22:26:45+00:00
Ah, I'd thought that that Woolworths and Dixons were defunct regional chains (of which America has many, that Americans from other regions would not recognize or would have only heard about in passing). My bad.

Still, GP accurately describes much of the American East, Midwest, and South. Likewise, I would have to /s if I were to say that the British upper class were known for their down-to-Earth character. No one who is "posh" has ever been described as out-of-touch or "living in a bubble", particularly on the development of populist issues, after all. (/s)
by atq2119 | 2025-04-26 22:26:46+00:00
I'm not particularly fond of the whole "privilege" discourse, but this comment is a great example of somebody completely failing to understand a privilege they have. Which they share with many other people, sure,[0] but there are many people who, through no fault of their own, do need to worry about others learning about their location.

[0] Which is probably one reason why the discourse grates some. Privilege still sounds to me like it's something exclusive, like a 0.1%er thing. Naming stuff is hard.
by pcthrowaway | 2025-04-26 22:27:07+00:00
> Personally I don’t like the idea of releasing content with a “use it if I like you “ clause. He’s free to keep it for his own personal use.

And he's free to release it under whatever license he wants also. I don't like it as much as a free license either, but it's not my music, and IMO it's better than not granting use; there are of course many cases where people will feel comfortable using it (and in fact it has been used by many people already who have applied common sense to their usage of his work, and I don't believe he has sued anyone or revoked the license in the 18 years he's made it available under similar terms).

I also release my code MIT or GPL even though I find it tempting to use less permissive licenses like the "Don't be evil" license of JSON[1] or JSLint[2]

I would feel comfortable using Moby's music for lots of purposes personally.

I feel like you are overthinking this, I don't think it's about what you believe in, it's about what you think Moby would approve of. If you wanted to release a video promoting veganism, you could obviously use his music (even if you're a democrat). If you wanted to release a video promoting the Democratic party, there's some chance he'd revoke the license (but almost no chance he could successfully sue you). Even if you were a far-right activist using his music for a video supporting an abortion ban, he wouldn't be able to sue you (because banning abortion isn't exclusively a right-wing position), but I expect he would revoke your license if he became aware of the use and didn't believe in banning abortion.

I say that using it for Democratic party propaganda would be unwise because Moby himself is a socialist, or something in that direction. If you were AOC or Bernie and wanted to use his music for your own platform, you could probably get away with it; Whatever Moby's views on social democrats (or democratic socialists depending on who you ask), I think it's incredibly unlikely he'd revoke the license.

So you don't need to worry about "getting sued" unless you're using his music for clear violations of the license (e.g. "significant" commercial usage , or literal republican party promotional materials). If you're not clearly, unambiguously violating the license which itself contains much ambiguity, you don't need to worry about anything other than the license being revoked. And for determining if it might be revoked, consider why Moby made his music available for causes he cares about in the first place.

For many uses of the music, it can be replaced with something else fairly easily anyway

[1]: https://www.json.org/license.html

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C-JoyNuQJs&t=2480s "I give permission to IBM, it's customers, partners, and minions to use JSLint for evil"
by HideousKojima | 2025-04-26 22:28:02+00:00
>The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.

- Rob Pike
by tcpiplab | 2025-04-26 22:28:10+00:00
FWIW Anthropic Claude understood the CONL format just fine.

"I was able to understand your configuration file without any difficulty."

I dunno what this tells us but I've been wanting to find a simpler syntax for LLM rules. Not a serious project of mine but I have noticed that LLM guardrails of various types are written in many different ways.

Some are Markdown-ish or unstructured text strings. Others are somewhat like yaml but contain enough additional complex functionality that you must learn the new language in order to understand the rules you want to write to protect your LLM. For example the syntax used for Nvidia's Nemo Guardrails rules.
by nolok | 2025-04-26 22:28:44+00:00
Same with France, also applies to warranty, or delivery issue, or... You buy from X you deal with X.

Not only is it much better for the customer, it's also clearly profitable.

It can also act as a differentiator, many retailers here including some big French ones tried to play around that law with the marketplace system, "we are not the seller just an intermediary", and while changes to the law is on its way to stop that it allowed Amazon to easily take over by not making that distinction.

There is still some issue about the difference between shipped by Amazon or not for the warranty request (not refund or fake or... but regular warranty issue), which I hope the law tackles head on.
by montroser | 2025-04-26 22:29:55+00:00
This is pretty under-specified...

> A cell starts with | and ends with one or more tabs.

|one\t|two|three

How many cells is this? Seems like just one, with garbage at the end, since there are no closing tabs after the first cell? Should this line count as a valid row?

> A line that starts with a cell is a row. Any other lines are ignored.

Well, I guess it counts. Either way, how should one encode a value containing a tab followed by a pipe?
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-26 22:30:43+00:00
I have a CDL and have driven a Class 8 semi for a short stint (it’s a valuable life skill from an optionality perspective imho). I did let the hazmat endorsement expire though. A family member was a long haul truck driver, I am familiar with the industry and what the experience is. As long as trucks are used to transport, it’s an economic option requiring minimal investment.
by rahen | 2025-04-26 22:33:11+00:00
These discussions seem to come up frequently lately. Both /e/OS and Lineage with microG provide good enough privacy for those who can't afford high-end smartphones like the Google Pixels.

The ranking would probably be:

- Pixel on GrapheneOS

- Any Android smartphone on Lineage or /e/OS

- iPhone on recent iOS (the best choice for technically illiterate people)

People concerned with privacy should avoid stock Android phones. Additionally, software only goes so far in protecting privacy. Some hygiene is also required, especially with iOS, where everything is sent to iCloud by default and E2E encryption is either not enabled by default or not available at all in some countries.

When it comes to hardware, nothing really compares to the Titan and T2 chips found in Pixels and iPhones though.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-04-26 22:34:55+00:00
You’d also have to make sure they were using clean computers without any local models installed, and coding models are pretty easy to run without high end GPUs.

I don’t know if I would consider this modern coding using modern coding tool chains anymore though. It might still be a nice competition to run, but it is increasingly displaced from what it means to be a professional programmer (I’ve stopped caring about these competition wins on resumes a long time ago).
by ChuckMcM | 2025-04-26 22:35:22+00:00
I was feeling a bit like the Petunia and thought "Oh no, not again." :-) One of the annoyances of embedded programming can be having the wheel re-invented a zillion times. I was pleased to see that the author was just describing good software architecture that creates portable code on top of an environment specific library.

For doing 'bare metal' embedded work in C you need the crt0 which is the weirdly named C startup code that satisfies the assumption the C compiler made when it compiled your code. And a set of primitives to do what the i/o drivers of an operating system would have been doing for you. And voila, your C program runs on 'bare metal.'

Another good topic associated with this is setting up hooks to make STDIN and STDOUT work for your particular setup, so that when you type printf() it just automagically works.

This will also then introduce you to the concept of a basic input/output system or BIOS which exports those primitives. Then you can take that code in flash/eprom and load a binary compilation into memory and start it and now you've got a monitor or a primitive one application at a time OS like CP/M or DOS.

Its a fun road for students who really want to understand computer systems to go down.
by bitwize | 2025-04-26 22:35:39+00:00
Because it's fun.

I don't believe astrology is real, but I've assigned birthdays to some of my characters based on zodiac signs which are said to align with their personality, simply because it's cute and fun. I was inspired by the characters of Sailor Moon, each of which have a birthday in a zodiac sign ruled by their associated planet. (So Moon is a Cancer, Mercury is a Virgo, etc.).
by zizee | 2025-04-26 22:36:17+00:00
Sometimes it is good to tradeoff solving a known short term problem, by taking on a solution with a uncertain long term issue.

If the world had continued to adopt nuclear power unabated, it is likely that climate change would not be a problem, and millions of cases of cancer not occurred.

This is not to say it is now time to adopt nuclear carte blanche, but to demonstrate that your way of thinking is not without issue either.
by chgs | 2025-04-26 22:36:39+00:00
Perception in solicit is we should take people in £200k or £800k a year a lot more and leaver those with £100m in assets alone.

We’re up in arms when people block roads to highlight problems with climate change, but when millionaires get worried they’ll have less of a loophole with tax, we’re supporting it in droves.
by LeafItAlone | 2025-04-26 22:37:05+00:00
>That's what "siri", "hey google", "alexa" etc are all doing 24 hours a day.

You might have just convinced me that the “phone is listening” is total bunk, because these dedicated devices are just so bad at recognizing the very specific, short, phrases when explicitly directed at them that I can’t imagine they are listening for much more. Listening to my in-laws try to activate their Alexa and Google Homes is something the CIA might consider for their next torture method.
by SamPatt | 2025-04-26 22:37:09+00:00
>Show it a picture of a trailer park somewhere in Kansas (exclude any signs with the trailer park name and location) and I’ll bet the model only manages to guess the state correctly.

This isn't really a criticism though. The photo needs to contain sufficient information for a guess to be possible. Photos contain a huge amount of information, much more than people realize unless they're geoguessr pros, but there isn't a guarantee that a random image of a trailer park could be pinpointed.

Even if, in theory, we mapped every inch of the earth and then checked against that data, all it would take is a team of bulldozers and that information is out of date. Maybe in the future we have constantly updated feeds of the entire planet, but... hopefully not!
by int_19h | 2025-04-26 22:37:27+00:00
Based on some interactions I have had with CBP and ICE in the past as a legal immigrant, I'm confident that many of those people aren't doing it because of any sort of monetary gain or career advancement, but simply because it gives them an outlet to realize their sadistic tendencies.

And because is tolerated and even encouraged, these jobs attract exactly those kinds of people. Which is how you end up with an organization with an internal culture that revels in human suffering.
by smeej | 2025-04-26 22:39:45+00:00
I'm not actually assuming it only happens for one town. I'd assume it would be broader than that. I don't really think it matters much how it happens, though, does it?

Even if all that happened were a widespread cellular outage, it's unlikely I'd have that region downloaded such that I could still search for whatever address I needed. Locals very well might, even accidentally in their caches, which might let us generate directions to somewhere I could get a map...though it would make it harder to look up the phone number to verify whether such a place sells maps.

It's not necessarily completely unsolvable. It's just a lot harder than it would be if other people still cared about map navigation as much as I did.
by sage92 | 2025-04-26 22:40:01+00:00
Safe to say you tend to lean towards your second presentation of consciousness.

I tend to lean towards the idea that conscious is akin to a field in the sense of an electron field - that what we can measure are simply “excitations” of a more subtle field. Not a perfect metaphor, but it’s the closest thing to what matches my meditative experiences. IMO, it’s illogical for me to let another subjective being define what my substrate is, so I primarily rely on meditation and then supplement with objective observations.

All in all it really depends on what you define as consciousness. The issue that I have with most “objective” interpretations of consciousness is that we can only measure the excitations of this mysterious “life” thing is. If there is more to us than can be measured, e.g, that there are first person experiences that can be felt subjectively but not measured objectively, then any objective measure of consciousness will likely be limited. Consciousness seems from my pov to be the Achilles heal of the axiomatic assumptions of our scientific paradigm (at least in the west)

In response to your question, it depends on your definition of consciousness. Is neural activity the source of consciousness, or is neural activity the result of consciousness? How can we know for sure which?
by godelski | 2025-04-26 22:40:30+00:00
I do like the idea of mascots, but truthfully I think they are better done as non-human mascots and need to be simple. I think Japan got this right with Yura-chara[0]. There seems to be a strong preference for non-human characters and when there are human ones, they're still overly simplistic.

Seems like same rule about flags[1]: a child should be able to draw it from memory.

Only Barty seems to fit these conditions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuru-chara

[1] https://nava.org/good-flag-bad-flag
by Braxton1980 | 2025-04-26 22:41:26+00:00
>This means someone today pays about 10X the taxes (controlling for for inflation!)....Is the typical taxpayer getting 10 time more back from the government

So the amount increased 10x , what does that have to do with getting 10x your money back?

Or are you saying that since it's 10x more there should be 10x greater quality?

Ok... the interstate system, the military, etc
by 8bitsrule | 2025-04-26 22:41:35+00:00
According to this non-official but prestigious NPO source [0]

Trump got 49.8% of votes for president, Harris got 48.3%. Vote total ~156.3 million. A rather slim 'mandate' methinks.

[0] https://www.cfr.org/article/2024-election-numbers (Council on Foreign Relations)
by elpocko | 2025-04-26 22:41:59+00:00
AI art is not limited to writing a prompt and hoping for the best. There's a multitude of ways to control the generation: img2img, ControlNet, Openpose, InstantID and several other techniques. You can train LoRAs on your characters for consistency.

It takes seconds to generate a panel for a comic; you make a sketch, then generate hundreds of candidates, pick the best one, maybe correct flaws in Photoshop, and it's still faster and cheaper than drawing it yourself from scratch. It's just another workflow for an artist. I use Blender to model rough sketches of 3D scenes, then use ComfyUI to render high quality images with lots of details.
by taurath | 2025-04-26 22:42:04+00:00
Wanted to say thanks so much for writing this all out - I've always thought of ordering as being sort of inherently against the point of parallel streams, so its interesting to hear about the state of the art and the benefits that are trying to be gleaned! I'm not thinking in stream processors terribly often so I wasn't aware of how dependencies are mapped.

If you don't mind another followup (and your patience with my ignorance hasn't run out :P), wouldn't the efficient concurrent consumption imply knowing the dependency graph before the events are processed? IE, is it possible in any instance to get to O(w+h) in a stream?
by ks2048 | 2025-04-26 22:42:56+00:00
Speaking of old-timers and "inference time" - there was a time when "inference" meant inferring parameters from data (i.e. training). And now it means "test-time". (or maybe the difference is if it's statistics community vs ML community).

e.g. Bishop's textbook says:

5.2.4 Inference and decision

We have broken the classification problem down into two separate stages, the inference stage in which we use training data to learn a model for p(Ck|x) and the subsequent decision stage in which we use these posterior probabilities to make op- timal class assignments.
by atq2119 | 2025-04-26 22:43:05+00:00
CMake can't do everything autotools does, but the stuff autotools does which CMake doesn't isn't relevant anymore in today's world.

The fundamental curse of build systems is that they are inherently complex beasts that hardly anybody has to work with full-time, and so hardly anybody learns them to the necessary level of detail.

The only way out of this is to simplify the problem space. Sometimes for real (by reducing the number of operating systems and CPU architectures that are relevant -- e.g. CMake vs. Autotools) and sometimes by somewhat artificially restricting yourself to a specific niche (e.g. Cargo).