skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As for datacenter size/cost, it's a good point, but what if two 1-Socket servers could take up the same space as one 2-Socket server? :-) That may never happen, but some level of space optimization will

Oh it certainly exists. Computers are space-optimized to the point of nonsense. IIRC, most people don't even bother to use widely available 1U servers because you run out of power before you fill up 40U racks.

Hyperscalers, such as Google / Netflix / Amazon are a bit different of course (IIRC, you work at one right?), since they can specially build their data centers to have far denser power-delivery and actually support 40-computers or even 80-computers per rack. But more typical offices simply do not have the power-density to run 1U nodes or smaller (Ex: Supermicro 2xNodes in 1U nodes or Supermicro 4xNode in 2U).

In effect: modern computer systems usually run out of power before they run out of rack space. Especially when you consider that every Watt-delivered turns into Heat (Watts) generated, which then requires a more powerful air-conditioner to keep the room within operating specs.

So you're right that modern datacenters probably don't care about size. Space is relatively cheap, power-lines are expensive! 2x Sockets for 2x per 1U == 160 CPUs per 40U rack. 10 such racks would use over a Megawatt of power once we factor in air conditioning, so a typical building just won't handle that.

-------------

> I don't have a workload I'd prefer to see on 2x128-core: We're already microservices running across a pool of instances, and would prefer a bigger pool of faster instances than a smaller pool of slower ones at the same cost. Once we get a workload running on 100+ cores, I often see a lot of lock contention anyway. Going bigger usually makes that worse (worse ROI).

But that "lock contention" you're measuring is something like 250ns to 500ns over a channel that's 800Gbit/sec thick.

EDIT: To be more specific: I'm talking about the MESI messages going over the NUMA fabric.

In contrast, a packet over 10 Gbit Ethernet is basically two orders of magnitude less bandwidth and an order of magnitude more latency (maybe 2500 to 5000 nanoseconds of latency?).

If the application were truly limited by the communication paradigm between the NUMA Fabric, switching to Ethernet or InfiniBand would only slow it down further.

EDIT: Case in point: we don't do spinlocks over Ethernet. I mean, we could in theory (RDMA a region of memory over Ethernet and then hold it as a Spinlock), but we all know its a bad idea. We do spinlocks at L3 and/or the NUMA Fabric level (and maybe we'll do it over PCIe 5.0 / CCIX level, as cache-coherent I/O becomes possible).
Waking Up, by Sam Harris, Generous Free Offer
The last example is incorrect:

int foo(int (*array)[3]) { return (*array)[1]; } // VLA pointer

That is not a "VLA pointer" - there is no variably modified type here, that is just an ordinary pointer to array type, that worked perfectly fine as written back in your grandfather's C89.
This still makes no sense to me. Instead of emitting and offsetting carbon, let's emit less.
The explanation by the Audacity devs seemed pretty reasonable to me. Getting all up in arms and forking seems to be making something out of nothing, are these people just bored?
Audacity does a lot of useful stuff and it's free + cross-platform, and that's a major source of its popularity. But it's always had usability and stability issues for as long as I've used it (and that's at least 15 years).
Read all three? Have a favourite?
I made the switch 3 months ago and went from my laces coming undone around once per km or two to once in 3 months, and that was on purpose to tighten it like you say. I wish they'd taught me this in kindergarten! A lifetime of potential trips averted.
Copilot, to me, feels like a faster Stack Overflow. We already copy code snippets from all kinds of places across the web without thinking about how it's licensed. Sometimes, we copy whole functions and files. We're responsible for understanding what's going into our project. We don't blame NPM when it allows us to import a package into a project that subsequently violates the license. I'm absolutely sure this happens more than anyone cares to admit.
Look at the table of contents for this book and make your judgement. I say no.
Here's an example of a smaller project that added telemetry without suffering a fork:

https://github.com/com-lihaoyi/Ammonite/issues/607
The interesting part of this article is that it gives new examples of what life on other planets could look like.
/director hat engaged

I'm really surprised that most of the top level comments are so negative.

This is a huge discussion in using ML for policy. In five to ten years time you'll have a hard time using ML in business without having the concepts these items address.

Will you ML model result in incidental bias to people with criminal records? The disabled? The elderly and other protected categories?

Does your insurance company require certain fairness metrics be deployed to maintain your product or service policy coverage?

Will your company pursue tax incentives that focus on certain definitions of unbiasedness?

Developers, data scientists, and statisticians have had a good run implementing loads of statistical models without considering the negative implications/externalities of automated decision rules and paths to KPIs. We will likely see this required in the future.

It will be hard. But, it will be hard to automate away for the foreseeable future (Github Copilot made a serious POC impact for standard dev work!).

/throws director hat back onto the hat rack, back to data science for me
My effort in this space is "furss", though it starts from an rss feed then aims to scrape the full article instead of an extract. https://github.com/jepler/furss
I have tried this app a few times, even those short reminder audio recordings by Sam himself, and every time I feel I have gained something from spending time on the app.
You can't, I can at certain registries in my town.
Does Snell approve any open-face helmets?
No chin strap, no protection for the chin, temples, unclear protection of the back of the head. This is useless, unless this serves just as an inspiration for a better design.
Canada's carbon pricing works this way (though, technically, it's not a tax) and, generally, has popular support. The rebate varies between provinces and is calculated along with your tax refund.
How do you ask your users about their experience with the software without collecting potentially personally identifying information? Most Audacity users are not going to be on a mailing list or forum. Would it be better to occasionally pop up a dialog asking for feedback? How do you account for response bias in that feedback?
> Of course this might not be important for the daily commute, or 99% of the vehicles' use. But for that remaining 1% it _is_ a huge deal.

That 1% use case should be priced for the externalities.

I'd like to see electric vehicle purchases heavily subsidized by taxes on fossil fuel vehicles and taxes on gasoline. If you really need to pollute 100% of the time you're operating your vehicle just in case you need that extra 1%, it should be priced in a way that really makes you think hard about that 1% scenario and whether there are really no alternatives.
Coinmama
Probably a good idea to wait regardless, gives them time to work out the issues that inevitably come with the fancy new shiny.
Canada could blow up or start producing 10 times per person it wouldn't matter. Look at the global numbers. China is the world's problem if you believe in climate change.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/920/idt2/idt2/9cc12cf8-9b60-4f...
“...police have not proven themselves to be statistically worth the ‘right to privacy’.”

Your comment is extremely poorly worded with the recent and historical explosion of derision against black people, etc.

Very poor choice of words. :(
How would they leave behind a wake, reflect radar, or be confirmed as visual objects by multiple trained individuals, at the same instance, multiple times, with all of those individuals containing otherwise "spotless" (no history of mass UFO boy cried wolf scenarios) records of military service?
It seems odd to believe that your god prohibits you from wearing a normal helmet, while not also believing that your god will protect you from the injury that results from not wearing one.

And if that's not the motivating belief here, why not just wear a normal helmet (or, why ride motorcycles at all?)
I don't beat myself up. I had 3 offers. 2 for 18k and one for 17k for the government. The fact I had 3 offers but nothing before that for 6 months was probably an artifact of getting better at interviewing. The job I eventually got I was accused of being "too polished".

The highest starting salary I applied for was 25k, and the highest I heard anyone get was 40k, but working on a trading desk for 12 hours a day.
I think spiking neural networks are still pretty interesting, because they're the only type that we have hard evidence of being able to produce general intelligence.

I agree, though, that if they're just doing 'conventional' neural network based machine learning, it's hyperbolic to call it 'the future of deep learning'. Anything these can do, by the sounds of it, GPUs can do a bit slower.

Of course, 'quantity has a quality all of its own' and we wouldn't be doing things like GPT3 without GPUs... but then again the current approach of just throwing a bigger network at a problem seems to me to be a way to overfit your training data while pretending you're not.
I invite you to spend lots of time digging through search results, which I myself decline to do since these conversations are rarely productive, however this frequently comes up whenever there's a thread discussing declining white demographics in the US. There is usually someone who says we should stop collecting these statistics altogether because it gives fuel to white nationalists. There are more examples beyond that, but those stick out in my mind because they were so blatant.

And while people will surely respond to this post with "Ha, got him! He can't link to a specific example!", I don't believe it's a reasonable expectation of me to catalogue the thousands of comments I read on this website.
I have purchased exactly two Packt books.

One was actually fantastic quality -- one of the best ML/Python programming books I've come across.

The other was for some specialty GIS work, and it was tremendously terrible quality but the only source available.
The neurons in our head are analog so I'm not surprised that folks are prodding there.

I really don't like the emphasis here on circuit element sizes. If a computer the size of an elephant can train a large neural network more cheaply than 1000s of gpus why should we care?
Fair enough. But looking at the longest chain you have (from the two nodes you can connect to) and assuming it's valid is not sufficient. You also need some reason to believe there isn't a longer chain out there. (In practice this is by waiting for a certain number of "confirmations.")

Maybe that's assumed in "simply look at the longer chain" but I thought I'd point it out.
Has blockchain solved a single problem yet?
True, correct. I didn’t intend for my comment to be interpreted as suggesting that a claim in a patent is the same thing as a whole patent, I was just pointing out a fun fact.
That is absolutely how it works.

https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca

“The DMCA “safe harbors” protect service providers from monetary liability based on the allegedly infringing activities of third parties.”
As far as I can tell (and correct me if I'm wrong) while other open-source projects might be able to get away with opt-in telemetry, Muse Group has simultaneously (a) raised the ire of other open-source developers with the bungled response to e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27740550; (b) had technically correct but really optically horrid legal language about potential uses of the Audacity data, which implied a blanket granting of any metadata to any buyer of the company to use as they see fit, even if GDPR wouldn't let them do that; (c) didn't make it clear from the get-go that telemetry would be opt-in, nor make any sort of foundational commitment that it would only ever be opt-in; and (d) hasn't yet reacted quickly to describe their ownership structure in the interest of transparency.

It's a perfect storm of mistrust and crisis mismanagement. And the sad thing is that there are talented folks like Tantacrul, Head of Design at Muse Group, who could really benefit the community with opt-in telemetry guiding their product decisions, who have now been thrust into a crisis management role by this botched rollout, and are unprepared to give the transparency now required. Did nobody else at the company learn from WhatsApp's debacle on this?

It's especially sad because while few would shed a tear for WhatsApp's missteps, Muse Group's holdings in MuseScore and Audacity are literally the lifeblood of hobbyist and student music creators. Mistrust in that software can easily lead to "you know what, I heard bad things about Muse stuff, I won't pick it up" and that would rob the world of so, so much creativity. Muse Group, rein in your lawyers, swallow your pride, and act like the stewards of the future of music that you are.
But it is. The only network communication that isn't opt-in is the update checker, and that has an opt-out.
Native apps meant "for Windows and Mac only". While JavaScript has its problems, nontechnical members of my family are happy to run Ubuntu and get done everything they need to get done, because the browser can do it, because of JavaScript.
The problem with tax+dividend is that it makes net-zero near impossible to achieve. Not unless you tax absolutely everything which produces carbon, which would be highly damaging to the economy and therefore politically unpopular.

And if we actually want to reverse some of the damage we have already caused, we need to go massively net-negative.

I'm not a fan of tax+spend either, which is why I support a carbon market solution.
Actually seems to be from The Godfather, Part II

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sun_Tzu#Misattributed
There is no place without civilian traffic. If you fly from the east into the Bay Area you can look out the left window and see Groom Lake if you know what to look for.

Look at any airspace map of the California coast and it is littered with test and training areas:

https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/range-navy....

Not to mention a missiles launching from Vandenburg.

It’s not even surreptitious. San Nicholas island is exactly right there: “island is currently controlled by the United States Navy and is used as a weapons testing and training facility,”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Nicolas_Island
I've found this is the only thing that works when I have a melody stuck in my head. Actively listening to it tends to fix it up fairly quickly.
Topology Crash Course (July 2021)
"Inspired by the recent helmet law exemption for Sikh motorcyclists..."

So I guess it's trying to be better than nothing rather than a full solution to head protection. Unless you want a chinstrap on a turban. Bit like stronger thongs/flipflops maybe.
Claiming that generated work isn't work seems completely wrong. The hard to argue fact is, looking at the result, it doesn't really matter who wrote it, just how it reads, and what it does.

What is lost in so much of the arguments about Copilot is that someone still needs to actually verify the code does the right thing. I have a feeling this tool does little but increase little bugs like off-by-one errors or all kinds of havoc; primarily because of false confidence in the autocomplete.
> I don't agree any of those things should be taught in 3rd-5th grade because I think it is much more important to exercise the fundamentals of critical and creative thinking, logic, imagination, etc. at those ages.

That's exactly how you develop it. You teach complex concepts which require kids to sort truth from fiction. You don't teach one. You teach many.

> I also have a big problem at any level of schooling with these unscientific and unproven "theories" (if you can even call them that) being taught by people who have entirely bought into the cult thinking and have no ability to critically reason about them let alone the desire to.

I agree.

> Would lessons about socialism and collectivism teach why the system can generally only sustain itself at a state level by devolving into a single party police state dictatorship in which the people most certainly do not own the means of production? Doubtful.

You're generalizing an awful lot from n=1. We had the Soviet Block. That's the only time it's been tried. It'd be like evaluating liberal democracy from the French Revolution or the current collapsing Afghani government.

> It's like inviting a white supremacist to teach children lessons about nazism. Or a creationist to teach biology. Or a flat earther to each geology. Not a helpful lens at all.

I teach my kid those alternative theories too. I do a sincere job of it too. He doesn't believe me, in part due to other adults in his life.
Everything Cannabis and Wellness
Curious as to whether they'll capture the carbon they'll be taking in. Additional revenue stream perhaps?
I used to check on the Packt page where they gave a book away for free daily a few years ago.

Out of all of the books most of them were trash. There was a couple of really good ones in there. But all-over my clear impression from the books was that Packt has basically no lower bar whatsoever on quality.
Unfortunately, there’s really no way for anyone to ever accuse any cryptocurrency of being superfluous without its investors feeling personally attacked on some level. This frequently causes them to lash out.

Also unfortunate is the fact many internet users take silence as evidence of consent, and so just doing the obvious thing here — not having this conversation at all — would actively promote ignorance (see: “Bitcoin is obviously not good for small and fast transactions”).

> Designing a new blockchain that is good at that is innovation. Not a “shitcoin”.

Blockchains don’t create efficiencies: if not for decentralization and censorship resistance, which inherently come at a higher cost than centralization, there would be little point in the technology at all. A plain immutable database with cryptographic proofs of inclusion — e.g. ImmuDB — hosted by a trusted org would perform orders of magnitude better than a blockchain at the very same tasks.

As most people can plainly see, what passes for “innovation” in the blockchain space is often a solution in search of a problem, launched first and foremost as a courtship display to HNWIs, socially signaling for them to invest in the cryptocurrency at hand under the guise of it being “innovative”. Ethereum 2.0’s newly introduced “RocketPool” (RPL) token [1] is an unwitting quintessential example of this:

So if insurance isn't the real reason, then why do node operators
need to buy an additional 10% in RPL ($5,600 at current prices)? The
only logical answer is to force buying pressure and pump the token.

Adding a token means the protocol is now more likely to contain bugs,
audits are more difficult, users are confused, and taxes become
a nightmare.

I hope greed isn't the real driving force behind the RPL token,
but that's the only conclusion I can draw. They increased smart
contract risk for a payday, and it's possible the entire Ethereum
ecosystem will pay for it.

“Gee, do we really need this new token and blockchain?”

“Couldn’t there be other ways of doing this which aren’t obviously designed to enrich the founders?”

Put simply, launching a superfluous blockchain and token is just poor etiquette, and the people who point out this dynamic don’t deserve to be dismissed with endearing terms.

Bitcoiners have nothing against defi, it’s just a question of whether a new token or blockchain is needed to do the things these people purportedly want to do for the world, or whether the new token/blockchain is really just a pretense for self-enrichment.

HTH

See also: Nomic [2], SmartBCH, or Stacks

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethstaker/comments/ncqqu2/rocketpoo...

[2]: https://nomic.io/
So everyone pays the cost for a handful of Linux users?

I mean, even if you were fine with that, nowadays pretty much everything is available on Linux too and crossplatform development tools for native applications existed for decades already.
"Immoral" and "illegal" are not logically equivalent. An act being immoral does not make it illegal and an immoral act is not necessarily illegal.

Immorality is extremely nuanced and heavily influenced by society. Eg. homosexulity is illegal in some south Asian countries such as Indonesia, but is not seen as immoral in most parts of the world.

Conflating the two - or preferring the term "immoral" over "illegal" inherently lends itself to allowing people to rationalise illegal activities - such as child pornography as only being "disapproved of by society" (morality being a fairly abstract concept) rather than an act which violates the laws of the land and is officially and formally condemned by the government.
Towards the Personal Potential of Software
None of them ever happened AFAIK, but there were some crazy ideas.
*doing them no favours. Sorry for the writing mistake.
Trucking Industry Looks at Cannabis Legalization and What It Means for Drivers
Intrusive Thought
They probably earned it.
I've seen smart tech people unable to say that men are on average taller than women because (I believe) they were afraid to say that some "favorable" outcome (tall) was a result of some component that could be genetic.

I've taken some pertinent college classes, like Intro to Psychology and Social Psychology. These are really hard things to debate in good faith because people look around them at the world, see the reality that men are, on average, taller than women on average and assume genetics when we don't actually know the reason.

So if you have good faith reasons to wonder put loud or speculate about such things, you are likely to get treated dismissively and not taken seriously.

There is a huge component of "them that has, gets" and it's really hard to sort out exactly why x person got y outcome. If you are interested in social justice -- or even just making your own life work when you are the "wrong" demographic -- then these are really frustrating discussions to try to have. It may be some hypothetical argument for someone whose life works well, but it's often a desperate attempt to get a fair shake of some sort by marginalized people.

So there's a lot to unpack there and it's hard to unpack it and there are legitimate reasons why some people feel strongly compelled to not go along with "the obvious answer" that "everyone" knows to be true, even though they may not know how to effectively argue against it.
If this is a simulation, it could have been “created” as a set of physical rules (which we perceive as physics). Everything that happens within it could have just evolved naturally from those rules. For example, maybe the Big Bang was the initialization of the simulation. Life wasn’t explicitly programmed into it, but it just happened after running the simulation for billions of years. Now that life exists, along with the pleasures and suffering that go along with it, this higher intelligence could step in and change it, but that would certainly corrupt the natural progression of the simulation.
GhostCell is pretty much designed for this sort of use case.
How to get paid for Ransomware attacks?
Please let's not go into religious flamewar.
Have coffees with technical people and ask them to introduce you to technical people they know who may be looking for opportunities at the moment. You should also learn enough to understand why you need a technical co-founder and what you would want most out of them.
Fortunately, we already have multiple vaccines that are based on multiple working mechanisms. Also some vaccines, especially the mRNA based ones, can be adapted quite fast.