MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spencerflem | 2025-05-23 15:37:38+00:00
I think the idea is for the top part of each day's view- the little square that lists the date- to be what's visible when you're looking at an entire month.

If so, I like it! Gives the option to work on both time scales at once.

The whole idea is lovely, pen tablet drawing is so much more expressive than any other form of input we have
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-23 15:37:45+00:00
I’m going out on a limb to guess that his commendable efforts at writing (and keeping a digital copy of) a hilarious satirical mathematical takedown were aimed squarely at going viral after the fact, exactly as has been done, rather than reaching the eyeballs of a petty corporate bureaucrat with a drawer full of coupons.

That being said, hopefully he brightened someone’s day over there, because surely the Complaints Department for a shitty breakfast brand consists of a thankless saga of reading illiterate screeds full of abuse and trivial outrage. Who needs Facebook?
by 93po | 2025-05-23 15:38:29+00:00
it literally just needs to throw a few kilobytes on literally any internet connected device, so that it can eventually get to a computer with a single good GPU, from which it can then start planning and executing its way to infect its way into datacenters and run using some percentage of its resources while staying undetected

it can also just threaten/blackmail/bribe a single human to try to carry this out on its behalf, and possibly even a human that manages these big data centers
by lostmsu | 2025-05-23 15:38:44+00:00
I'm with OpenAI folks on this one: Atari just won't cut it for AGI. My layman intuition is that RL works well when rewards give good signal all the time. Until it does RL is basically random search. That's where massive data diversity like we have in text comes in handy.

In a game there might be a level with a door and a key, and because there's no reward for getting the key closer to the door, bridging this gap requires random search in a massive state space. But in the vast sea of scenarios that you can find in Common Crawl there's probably one, where you are 1 step from the key, and the key is 1 step from the door, so you get the reward signal from it without having to search an enormous state space.

You might say "but you have to search through the giant Common Crawl". Well yes, but while doing so you will get reward signal not just for the key and door problem, but for nearly every problem in the world.

The point is: pretraining teaches models to extract signal that can be used to explore solutions to hard search problems, and if you don't do that you are wasting your time enumerating giant state spaces.
by handsclean | 2025-05-23 15:38:54+00:00
It seems that you’ve only read the first part of the message. X sometimes aggressively truncates content with no indication it’s done so. I’m not sure this is complete, but I’ve recovered this much:

> I read through these slides and felt like I was transported back to 2018.

> Having been in this spot years ago, thinking about what John & team are thinking about, I can't help but feel like they will learn the same lesson I did the hard way.

> The lesson: on a fundamental level, solutions to these games are low-dimensional. No matter how hard you hit them with from-scratch training, tiny models will work about as well as big ones. Why? Because there's just not that many bits to learn.

> If there's not that many bits to learn, then researcher input becomes non-negligible.

> "I found a trick that makes score go up!" -- yeah, you just hard-coded 100+ bits of information; a winning solution is probably only like 1000 bits. You see progress, but it's not the AI's.

> In this simplified RL setting, you don't see anything close to general intelligence. The neural networks aren't even that important.

> You won't see _real_ learning until you absorb a ton of bits into the model. The only way I really know to do this is with generative modeling.

> A classic example: why is frame stacking just as good as RNNs? John mentioned this in his slides. Shouldn't a better, more general architecture work better?

> YES, it should! But it doesn't, because these environments don't heavily encourage real intelligence.
by horsawlarway | 2025-05-23 15:40:00+00:00
I think the contention is that I don't have an intuition for how molecules actually disperse, but I do know that general climate trends certainly aren't "random dispersion".

Ex - we see consistent, long term, patterns in weather that make it unlikely that this dispersion is anything close to "ideal gas in a chamber" style dispersion.

Further - we have all sorts of compounding effects. Ex - atmospheric escape is a real thing, plants do nitrogen fixation, hydrogen and oxygen can be bound up in the oceans, etc...

Maybe 2000 years is enough time for real random dispersion, maybe it's not. But it's a huge assumption baked into this that doesn't feel especially reasonable to me.

All we have is this:

>If we assume that a breath diffuses evenly throughout the atmosphere and that these molecules are preserved over time (a reasonable assumption—nitrogen is relatively inert)

Which... I challenge is likely not a particularly reasonable assumption to base this on.
by dismalaf | 2025-05-23 15:40:21+00:00
Soy sauce is meant to largely replace the salt component of your dish. If you're using so much that it's particularly salty, you're using too much.

Way back in the day, when salt was scarce and expensive, the whole point of stuff like fish sauce, miso, soy sauce, etc... was to provide salt but also cut it by adding other ingredients.
by quantumHazer | 2025-05-23 15:41:21+00:00
> “I’ll unplug you if you don’t center the div NOW” isn’t the prompt engineering hack that your favorite LinkedIn pedagogue wants you to believe.

This is the best part, I hate this type of anthropomorphizing an ML system. This is the inheritance of LessWrong type of bs. Just because YOU prompted the LLM to behave rogue it doesn't mean it does have intentions of doing so.

anyway the rant is good, even because it addresses that this system are really useful in certain type of tasks but the hype is insanely out of control.
by GuestFAUniverse | 2025-05-23 15:41:38+00:00
IMO search is garbage in all Mozilla products.

E.g. Thunderbird ignores potential matches in quoted mail text. That's utterly useless if one remembers a certain mentioning by the other side. Plus, now and then repairing the index suddenly leads to matches -- when is the right time to repair? I don't now -> always if it's seriously important...
Ask HN: Experiences with technical training from companies / contractors?
by golly_ned | 2025-05-23 15:42:30+00:00
Hi,

My manager and I are considering paying for training courses for our team + possibly some engineers from other teams from a company whose technology is important to us. Our team isn't as skilled as we should be with their tech. It's been a pain to hire for people who are good at this. It'll be either 4 or 8 hrs and a 'pre-packaged' course.

In another case, there's an independent contractor / consultant who comes highly recommended who is willing and able to hold a series of sessions with our team and tune the material and focus on our needs. It'll probably be between 8-16 hours total with some flexibility.

It's not clear to me whether this kind of thing is worth it. In the first case, it'll be a 'pre-packaged' course. In the latter, it'll be an instructor who is genuinely very skilled and knowledgeable about the entire space of technologies, but costs ~3-5x.

Anyone have experiences with this kind of training?

Thanks.
by toast0 | 2025-05-23 15:42:31+00:00
I get my 10g stuff off ebay. x520 dual sfp+ cards are about $10, x540-T2 dual 10g-base-T cards are about $20.

For me, using sfp+ means paying for a transceiver or a DAC, vs using my existing stash of rj45 terminated cables. Some of the ebay cards come with fiber transceivers at no extra cost though. So from that perspective, total cost is about the same either way. And I can use the cabling that's already in my walls.

However, switch pricing is still way in favor of sfp+, and my two 'core' switches have only 2x sfp+ and 2x 10g-base-T, so I use the ports I have.
by prewett | 2025-05-23 15:42:36+00:00
I think you're conflating religious beliefs with ethics. You can't have a religion that is flexible on beliefs, otherwise it is not a religion, but the actual core religious beliefs are fairly limited. In Christianity, Jesus dying to reconcile the world to God is the whole point; without that it is something else. The whole point of Buddhism is that all emotions are pain, and that realizing that everything really nothing (since all composable things are impermanent and everything is composed) is the path to nirvana. All the other beliefs and ethics come out of this.

But even "submarine" religions (ones that people do not think of as a religion) follow the pattern. Communists worship the State (or perhaps the Party), because the problem with society is the structure of society, so only the State can bring the salvation of equity. American Progressives worship sexual identity. Progressives are flexible--except if you don't accept a particular identity, think that gender is not malleable, refuse to use pronouns, etc.

However, I think even "most religions" are not very flexible. 50% of the world's population are either Christian or Islam, and both are pretty prescriptive in the ethics.
by Ferret7446 | 2025-05-23 15:42:37+00:00
> you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity.

This is moral grandstanding. You owe your customers a good product at a low cost. If you don't use a tool that can lower costs, you are wronging your users and will go out of business.

Handcrafted CRUD will go the same way as handcrafted anything; an expensive niche hobby.
by nulld3v | 2025-05-23 15:42:42+00:00
Yup, agreed. My earlier reply was my previous uninformed opinion and I no longer hold that opinion strongly. Though I also don't hold any other strong opinions on current California governance as I haven't been paying close attention and I've previously been fooled by some of the media messaging about high crime rates.

Another issue that I've been trying to understand are the delays and budget overruns in the high-speed rail project. Some people argue it was NIMBYs but isn't governance responsible for making sure NIMBYs don't become a major problem? My current understanding is that it was partially due to valid safety & environmental concerns, and partially the project looked simple but turned out to involve very complicated/hard engineering work. It's just very difficult to sell people on this argument... Glad to hear any insights, or links/books.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-23 15:42:44+00:00
You saying so doesn't make it so. Your interpretation of the guidelines is as valid as mine, as neither of us are mods currently, right? Which is why I asked for the mods to weigh in publicly in the first place! What names did I call you? You're retreating to vagaries and allusions and baseless claims. I'm not unaware of what I'm doing, and I don't find your comment helpful. You could have emailed the mods yourself if you wanted, and instead you besmirch my honor and call me a liar, and have the gall to say I'm wrong to merely ask to speak in public.

The emperor has no clothes.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-05-23 15:43:05+00:00
Wonder if it's a poor interface issue... if people could just click a button that says "me too" but didn't add a full comment but rather just added some minimal notation at the bottom of the comment that indicated their username, 1) would people use it and 2) would that be not overly-busy enough to not be annoying? It could even mute notifications for the me-toos.
by vel0city | 2025-05-23 15:43:29+00:00
Spotify (and other streaming services) has a stronger incentive to push things you're actually likely to listen to and find value in, otherwise you're likely to not use the app and stop paying them.

And it's funny you point to the podcasts as an example for that, a lot of the podcasts and now audiobooks they push are some of the most expensive content they have.
by mdp2021 | 2025-05-23 15:43:38+00:00
The core computation many are expecting is at the bottom:

> Analysts have said a U.S.-manufactured iPhone would be prohibitively expensive. [...] the reality of a $1000 iPhone ... would disappear", Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives wrote recently. // He suggested making iPhones in "New Jersey, or Texas, or another state" would boost their price tag to $3500
by overu589 | 2025-05-23 15:43:56+00:00
Science is looking for what “generates” consciousness, often confusing consciousness with being conscious, and therefore literally equivalent to awareness.

Awareness is the tip of the consciousness iceberg.

Life is a technology of consciousness, rather than the other way around. Intelligence is one kind of technology in the arms race for survival (continuity of existential being.)

Consciousness is the inflection upon the potential of existential being.

Consciousness is a holographic sieve of constructive and destructive interference. Our electrochemical life technology uses this feedback loop to solve all of its problems.

Without extensive specialization of logic (which also has its place), constructive and destructive feedback interference allows any determined interest to “beat the odds.”

Science of our generation confuses the pinnacle of our biotechnology (intelligence for instance) with the quality of consciousness, when it is the capacity to autonomously act in civil accord with the interests of others that interests them. Right? Good enough for autonomous cognitive sentience? One does not need consciousness for that. A self managing car could have legal rights (attributable as private property.)

Consciousness is the inflection upon the potential of existential being. Doing something with consciousness is a life technology.

Consciousness is the Universe peering back upon itself.
by Braxton1980 | 2025-05-23 15:44:17+00:00
>were fed up with democrats having foisted an unelected candidate on them

What power was this candidate given? By saying "unelected" you're trying to imply that a person was given power in the government without a vote.

=------------------------

The election is a choice between two candidates.

It's not "Did you like that the Democrats did X"? It's "Which candidate would make a better president"?

The reason is that the effects of the outcome aren't limited to the Democrat party leadeship.

For example a student who is deported wasn't responsible for the decision by the Democrat party leadership not to hold a primary but are affected by the outcome of the election.

The logical flaw in the voters you are referring to is not comparing choices while making a selection.
by 3036e4 | 2025-05-23 15:44:55+00:00
I thought of that game as well, but I never played it or even knew about it at the time. I also forgot about the connection to Slack. What I DO remember is that they released the game art with a CC0 license after shutting down the game. The site seems to just redirect to a 404 on slack.com now.

https://web.archive.org/web/20161124184152/http://www.glitch...

https://archive.org/details/glitch-public-domain-game-art
by ssttoo | 2025-05-23 15:47:28+00:00
As a counterpoint, Bartok’s Mikrokosmos [1] was the “textbook” for a piano sight reading class at my community college. He does have a lot of accessible, even pedagogical, pieces.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikrokosmos_(Bart%C3%B3k)
by weitendorf | 2025-05-23 15:49:04+00:00
Yeah, I guess what I mean is, it's good for very common use cases to have fully supported features in the product itself even if there are third party tools to handle it for you or I already know how to implement it myself.

I have been working on database features and functionality that I felt I moderately to fully understood and just needed to sit down and implement in the next week, for close to 3 weeks now.

> In this pattern you have the "truth" held in insert-only tables (deletes and updates not allowed), then turn those "event" tables into ones you can query naturally using VIEWs, MATERIALIZED VIEWs, or live tables that you update with triggers on the event tables.

This is almost exactly what I'm doing, with an additional versioning column (primary key on (id, version_num)). After I did that I realized that it'd be better to correlate changes with a push_id too because if some operations didn't modify all ids then I wouldn't be able to easily tell which versions were updated at the same time. But then I realized most of my "auditable pushes" would be operations on 3-4 related tables and not just an individual table, so push_ids would be performed on all tables. And also, since not every push modifies every value, it makes sense to model pushes as additions + diffs to the existing table. But then after several pushes constructing the MATERIALIZED VIEW of active values becomes rather complex because I have to convert a sparse tree of diffs across multiple tables into a flat table recursively...

So yeah it would be pretty nice for postgres to have something that mostly just works to audit changes at either the user, function, or table level.
by jrockway | 2025-05-23 15:50:01+00:00
I feel like JetBrains' competing product is DataGrip, which even though I'm an Emacs user, I've happily paid for forever. I believe that if you just use the combined suite (IntelliJ?) then you get SQL completion based on your loaded database everywhere in the IDE. Something fun I accidentally learned this way is that the completion is so accurate I didn't even notice that I made a mistake in a database table I recently added. I used camelCase column names, which Postgres doesn't accept without quotes. Datagrip always added the quotes where I needed them, so I didn't notice, but it annoyed people on my team that used different database tools and they renamed them ;)

JetBrains has always done their completion / language integration differently than VSCode + LSP, but it seems to work well. My only complaint is that GoLand organizes imports differently than gopls / goimports, but my knowledge there is a few years out of date. I've worked on teams with a lot of GoLand users and nothing has really bothered me on this front recently, so they probably fixed it years ago.
by gwbas1c | 2025-05-23 15:50:05+00:00
This morning I was recently reflecting on a similar experience. I worked on a project where client and server were different teams. A problem we had was that a lot of server tickets were accidentally labeled as client tickets.

Should we have busted down that silo and said that there are no longer separate client and server teams? Ultimately, what I realized was that we started shipping multiple different clients that used the same server, and that it was impractical for everyone to be on the same team and have a hand in everything.

I do wish that we siloed a lot later and remained generalists longer; or at least that part of the team was generalist and floated between the two teams.
by qhiliq | 2025-05-23 15:50:09+00:00
The MacIntyre piece I read first and got the most from is "Hegel on Faces and Skulls". It explains Hegel's critique of physiognomy and phrenology, which is about what we can and cannot learn about someone by looking at them. Said another way, the difference between expressions and physical traits. I think about it a lot whenever I see claims made about facial recognition systems, and in my day job working on motion capture.
by tasty_freeze | 2025-05-23 15:51:18+00:00
We get it, you hate the man, but don't pretend you are a mind reader. As for him being a fucking idiot, he sure is succeeding at his goals.

You claimed he is not an engineer -- I told you he was an excellent engineer from first hand experience -- you were wrong on that score.

He is now the CEO of a company. His job now is to promote the company -- yes, that involves doing PR and puffing up the company, and making money. His role isn't to sit behind a terminal and run gate sims and figure out why some deeply buried state machine is going off the rails.
by jermberj | 2025-05-23 15:51:32+00:00
Answer from Claude 4 Sonnet just now (I copy-pasted your prompt):

> This is a variation of the classic river-crossing puzzle, but with an added complexity - the lion that will eat both the wolf and the goat. Let me work through this step by step: The constraints:

> Goat + Cabbage alone = Goat eats cabbage > Wolf + Goat alone = Wolf eats goat > Lion + Wolf alone = Lion eats wolf > Lion + Goat alone = Lion eats goat

> The solution:

> First trip: Man takes the goat across Left behind: Cabbage, Wolf, Lion (safe - wolf won't eat cabbage, lion won't eat wolf if goat isn't there)

> Second trip: Man returns alone, then takes the wolf across Brings the goat back to prevent wolf from eating it Left behind: Cabbage, Goat, Lion

> Third trip: Man takes the lion across, leaves it with the wolf Left behind: Cabbage, Goat (safe - goat won't eat cabbage if separated properly)

> Fourth trip: Man returns alone, takes the cabbage across Left behind: Goat (alone and safe)

> Fifth trip: Man returns alone, takes the goat across Wait, let me reconsider this more carefully. Actually, there's a fundamental problem: if the lion will eat either the wolf OR the goat when left alone with them, and we need to get all items across, we can never safely leave the lion with either animal.

> The puzzle as stated appears to have no solution, because the lion creates an impossible constraint - it cannot be left alone with either the wolf or the goat on either side of the river, making it impossible to transport all items safely.

It got it right, eventually which is impressive. However, it's ability to retain proper context is still a problem (it took the goat on the first trip, then thinks the goat is still on the same side of the river as the other things.
by rayiner | 2025-05-23 15:51:42+00:00
The culture that prevails at Harvard isn’t Americanism. It’s elitist managerialism and liberal internationalism. It’s an ideology that children of foreign elites can easily assimilate into, because they come from cultures where better people rule over “the masses.” (Remember, aristocrats think that their status is a kind of meritocracy.) Actual Brahmins assimilate easily into Boston Brahminism.

What defines Americanism is a quote I love attributed to Bill Buckley:

> I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.

Remember that Buckley was as close as it gets to being an american aristocrat. But the sentiment reflects an american tradition where people in elite positions are expected to, at least outwardly, express embarrassment or skepticism about their own status. America a country of yeoman farmers.
by AnonC | 2025-05-23 15:51:49+00:00
> The am dash, with its pointed unusability by AI, serves as a subtle watermark of presence—a fingerprint smudged on the edge of a sentence.

They missed using the am-dash in this sentence and instead used an —

But this punctuation can only be used by common people when it’s included in other common fonts. Then it will also suffer from AI use over time and someone will invent yad-dash (yet another dash).
by Sanzig | 2025-05-23 15:53:08+00:00
Interesting, surprised they are using optical data for this instead of synthetic aperture radar. SAR (and in particular interferometric SAR, although that requires short repeat cycle) shines in this area, and a lot of the data is free.

ESA provides worldwide 20m x 5m radar imagery from Sentinel-1 free online. Revisit in the mid-latitudes is generally a few times per week, with an exact repeat cycle every 12 days. Once Sentinel-1C is fully operational, it'll be half that.
by mystified5016 | 2025-05-23 15:53:35+00:00
A picogram of antimatter carries about as much energy as a 90mph fastball. About 180 joules.

The energy released by an automobile collision is roughly 10 to 100 times that much.

Imagine you're in a car crash and someone throws a big rock at the side of your vehicle. Or you're driving and a bird hits the windshield. That's the sort of scale we're looking at here, it's really not catastrophic.