skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> that aims to surpass SQL in querying power.

What makes your approach likely to succeed versus all previous attempts to supplant SQL in the last 40 years?
Ask HN: Relocating to another country during the pandemic
Hi,

In March 2020 I got a job offer for a major software company in Canada. I have been waiting for my work visa since then.

I picked Canada because common sense said its immigration system was excellent. I have learned from experience it is far from that. After over a year waiting and with no light at the end of the tunnel, I'm mentally depleted and am considering giving up and trying someplace else.

My questions: do you have firsthand experience on immigrating during the Covid pandemic? Do you know of countries that sponsor works visas right now? I'll probably end up waiting (sunken cost fallacy), but if anything it would be reassuring to know there are other options.
> In 1993, NASA famously killed a search program intended to find microwave signals that were artificial in origin. “That had a chilling effect for a couple decades,” said Steve Croft, a radio astronomer and leader of the Breakthrough Listen project at the Berkeley SETI Research Center.

yeah because it was pseudo-science.
Those models require a _lot_ of training data to exist. And I have never seen supervised sequence model achieve super human performance at anything, the way AlphaGo did.
I think your first paragraph is too pessimistic.

You can get a decent idea of the behaviour of the programs you use when they run out of memory by running under 'ulimit -v' with a low limit.

In my experience most (though far from all) of the programs I use managed a clean abort with an error message (as from a traditional xmalloc()).
Well, blitsort's performance is exceptional in the sense that it's 15% faster than the next fastest stable in-place sort.

As for stability, it's useful when you need to sort a table with an integer index. So it might be of value to database software.

I probably should point out some of the weakness on the README.

Agreed on pdqsort being 3x slower worst case on "killer" input, but it's my understanding that's why it's not being used to replace std::sort.

As for runs of 50, haven't benched those, though I assume gridsort (https://github.com/scandum/gridsort) would handle those rather well.
Condensed Agile sprint timeline pros and cons
Contemporary C++ encourages this too. There’s a place for member functions—even convenience ones—but algorithms operate on data structures; they needn’t be part of the data structures.
Rare Sightings of a Glass Octopus Captured on Camera
Press Release Images:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/100i6J4n9ty4eEZLfDqT0...

Mov File:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZIqnYeY9uaexwCdOM_3pa20_xUo...
this is very, very safe to assume. There is probably a hundred engineer's worth of "secret sauce" for an entire managed DB product line.
Maybe humans sweat more than dogs and so feel a much greater effect from evaporative cooling?
> While I disagree about banning this research ...

For context to other readers, I had the following phrasing at the end of my comment: "This research is extremely damaging and should not be allowed". I removed it shortly after posting before I had seen sinenomine's comment, since, ultimately, I'm not in favor of censoring research (as along as limitations are clearly stated). My original comment was mostly a knee-jerk reaction knowing the uphill battle that life-extension research faces in the public discourse.
AP, Reuters, and Astral Codex Ten are as good as it gets, not perfect. The rest, you're just going to have to run an intersection on what they don't disagree on for a starting point. The rest of stuff they disagree on, revisit who's predictions were more accurate or not.
This happens to me too. It's like the turn is very far away and next thing you know you passed it. Apple needs to improve this.
Firefox send alternative with malware protection
AGPL projects will benefit from these huge coding models like everyone. This puts all code in an open position.
Reward function design and overfitting or “cheating” (optimizing to some incidental thing instead of the real problem) is a major reason genetic and evolutionary AI approaches never took off. I don’t think anyone ever figured out how to make reward function design easier or make any kind of unsupervised evolutionary learning work.

I played with EC a lot in college and these systems were almost comically good at the “cheating” part of overfitting. I watched evolving programs do things like learn the scheduling behavior of the OS kernel (because the reward function was threaded) or the disk timing differences resulting from where different parts of the sample set were stored on the drive. They could guess the answer by inferring load time.
This makes it seem like there are n jobs and n+m people so all n jobs should be filled. That's silly. You don't just go out and find n people in some sort of cattle pen. There might be 20 times the the available potential employees, and companies may not want any of them. Similarly the other way, There could be tons of jobs at companies that no one would want to work at. If there are vacancies at companies, the companies are unwilling or unable to react to supply and demand capitalism.
https://archive.is/j6410
G20 economy ministers endorse global tax deal
Megastructures are probably less likely, yes, but should be a much more confident detection. Who knows all the chemical production networks possible in a planetary atmosphere. But there aren't many ways to make a star-sized perfect blackbody.
I agree. Organic Maps also has climbing/mountaineering routes that are completely hidden on Google/Apple maps. My friends download GPX files prior to going out, I just open up OSM. :)
Season one of the podcast "Against all odds" is also about this.

https://wondery.com/shows/against-the-odds/
Shellnium: Selenium Webdriver for Bash and Zsh
I wish the author had picked a title like "Single-task reinforcement learning is a waste" or "Reward function engineering is a waste".

At the very end of his essay he mentions some directions: homeostasis, Friston's free-energy principle, and predictive processing. I agree that all of these are very interesting. A few steps less ambitious is recent work on reinforcement learning to reach desired outcomes without specifying reward functions. All of these seem to require more focus on learning the model of dynamics in the relevant domain (what happens when I take action A from state S?) and less on value / policy learning.

Ok great, but why can't that happen in the context of "deep reinforcement learning"? For complex environments with partial observability, don't we probably want something like states represented in an embedding? As we improve our model, is there anything broken about the approach of optimizing a differentiable function?

"There are likely better approaches to deep RL, and they include ..." seems like a better framing than "deep RL is a waste of time."
Let's not focus too much on the messenger and ad hominems, and focus on the message instead: "Is aging inevitable?", and does this Nature Communications paper[1] (note, that this isn't Nature proper, by the way) tell us something new about the answer?

Well, the paper does not deal with genomic or molecular underpinnings of life, it only models the curves of species' lifespans and mortalities, and fits these to simple equations ... to find that the curves can indeed be fit, and the parameters indicate that the variability of lifespan in primates, as captured by the equation, is mostly explained by variability of early mortality. Mostly expected result, given no interventions significantly slowing/reversing aging have been approved by FDA as of now. Still, it's questionable as to why we don't see social stratification as a driver of human lifespan variability, as found in [2]. Overall, the paper is underwhelming compared to its title.

Thus, the question remains open. The answer, at the very least, should explain the following:

1) How come some species[4], vertebrate species even, have more or less negligible senescence? [3][5]

2) How do specific alleles from lifespan GWAS influence human aging? [6]

3) What are precise molecular mechanisms underlying hallmarks of aging?[7]

4) Can these natural mechanisms be manipulated via therapeutic interventions to significantly change organism's lifespan? [8]

If we accept the challenge and look at molecular biology of mammalian aging, we'll see whole new fields of science right there, waiting to be explored, some already bearing fruit, given we are witnessing more than a dozen human clinical trials on various senolytics[9]

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23894-3

2. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/25135...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence

4. https://genomics.senescence.info/species/nonaging.php

5. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31366472/

6. https://academic.oup.com/g3journal/article/9/9/2863/6026390

7. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/

8. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41573-020-0067-7

9. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joim.13141
I was so impressed with McDonald's in France I ate it several times last time I was there.
Ok, this comes at a right time.. I was just starting a new project and considering Neo4j. I think it is unfair to compare it to Postgres but the EdgeQL make it look like the nested queries are easy to execute and comes with graphql support too.
SO are there any pointers to how much production ready it is?
How does it compare to raw SQL queries and nested queries?
thanks.
Also could not find much on authentication and authorizations. are there any pointers/
The new hotness this month just says 'screw it; treat RL as a supervised sequence problem with causal transformers.'

https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01345

'We consider the following shift in paradigm: instead of training a policy through conventional
RL algorithms like temporal difference (TD) learning [6], we will train transformer models on
collected experience using a sequence modeling objective. This will allow us to bypass the need for
bootstrapping for long term credit assignment – thereby avoiding one of the “deadly triad” [6] known
to destabilize RL. It also avoids the need for discounting future rewards, as typically done in TD
learning, which can induce undesirable short-sighted behaviors. Additionally, we can make use of
existing transformer frameworks widely used in language and vision that are easy to scale, utilizing a
large body of work studying stable training of transformer models.'
Rick and Morty Free
My biggest issue with Apple Maps is that I know it has information that it isn’t telling me about, especially so when public transit is involved. Apple almost always picks the worst route when commenting through NYC’s subway, suggesting that you take the closest line and transfer in another station, rather than walking a block to the line directly. And it’s almost always the case that you’ll arrive at a mid-trip station just as your connecting train leaves the platform. You’ve just added a minimum 10 minute wait, plus the time and energy it took to walk through the station!

I would avoid Apple Maps entirely if they allowed Google Maps full access to the Watch OS.
> A simple comment explaining that the code is a booby trap would be enough for any human reading the code to know how to avoid it. The AI on the other hand has no capacity to understand that comment and to know not to put the code into its dataset.

Copilot users can be leveraged to train the algorithm to emit less such comments/traps. Copilot inserts snippets by having an extension running in the editor, watching what is typed and responding. That's an opportunity to gather more training labels. For example, which lines of Copilot emitted code are frequently deleted soon after being inserted? Gather enough such training labels and the algorithm can start to recognize many of those comments (and/or the traps the comments call out) and stop emitting those specific lines.

At that point, warning comments help the algorithm better distinguish desirable lines of code from traps. And you'll be less likely to have traps leak into your code by using Copilot rather than copy/pasting snippets from the web (both are subject to human review, but Copilot will already have filtered some traps). So it's possible that widespread deployment of traps would drive adoption of Copilot by people who frequently copy/paste code from the web.
Nobody mentioned the battery/heat issues with Google Maps. My iPhone on a sunny dashboard running Google Maps almost always overheats and drains the battery.

I've switched to Apple Maps on long drives because it uses significantly less battery and phone stays cooler. Has anyone else experienced this?
and what would be different if they come to the office and they take 2 weeks to set up jenkins?
You're right that wasm programs can overflow internal buffers in linear memory, which can be dangerous. However, wasm does a lot more than only protect the boundary with the rest of the system, including

* Safe call stack (opaque / managed by the VM, and so uncorruptible).

* Safe control flow (no jumps to unexpected places).

* Safe(r) indirect calls (only methods in the table can be called, and the signature is verified).

However, wasm also lacks a few things, like the ability to write-protect static data (see "Everything Old is New Again: Binary Security of WebAssembly"). Future wasm proposals will hopefully address those things.
Rick and Morty Hq
Hey @mikeryan,

Thanks for sharing the feedback. I do agree the spacers doesn't work on mobile as the "dragging" part is a bit weird on mobile and the demo doesn't look good on mobile.

Gonna improve the responsiveness of demo layout for sure.

Thanks again.
I assume it varies a lot by region. 0.12 EUR/kWh for me (Finland, inc. transmission and tax).
Deep-learned convolutional nets work wonders for visual recognition. Visual recognition via "the old AI" looked impossible by 1980, but today it looks easy.

(I see the visual segmentation models for self-driving cars from the "autonomous systems lab" in the next building over and think... It would be so easy to make something that honks for cyclists.)

Text analysis, reinforcement learning, etc. seem to be areas where deep learning might very well reach a plateau. In the case of images the meaning is not changed by a random "hot pixel", but changing one letter in a sentence can reverse the meaning of a sentence, changing one piece position in a chess game is the difference between a win or loss. These "binary" situations aren't a good match with the assumptions of continuity, differentiablity and such that neural networks depend on.
> my only answer was "your recruiter..."

What did they say after that?
Can you not use CMake to generate those makefiles?
It's only been 123 F in Palm Springs 3 times and 122 F ~ 1/2 a dozen, so I doubt you remember this happening "all the time". It's never been any where close to 130F there, but nice flex anyway.
I hope we can one day identify intelligent life outside of Earth in my lifetime.
As a Pole I take exception to it. Our breads are just as great and just as varied. But yeah outside of Poland it’s only in Germany that I can find bread that truly tastes great.
Nine deepfake video predictions (Carrington Malin)
Well the failure of multilayer perceptrons to converge into useful models was because of limited compute scale, which eventually was solved with the advent of powerful GPU's and CUDA popularising using their parallel computationa meant for graphics rendering for the linear operations used during back propogation.

Maybe the problem isn't that the RL algorithm is wrong, but that it just doesn't work without a 3 billion year, atom resolution, planet scale computer.
That's only one page.
Are you a boiled chicken? Do saunas actually get that hot?

googles

I guess they can. Seems bonkers though.
“Voluntarily” is doing some heavy lifting there. Is it “voluntary” if it’s required to use the service — including aspects that don’t “need” it? Is it “voluntary” if the use of that data is governed by one-sided terms that the collecting party can change at any time, for any reason, with little notice or no notice at all? Is it “voluntary” if the technology is so complex that any average-intelligence user could not possibly weigh the pros and cons of such a decision in the face of a $1T company’s cabal of PhD holding ML scientists inventing new ways to exploit that information?

At this point, location tracking by companies is about as “voluntary” as using the web itself.

Or about as voluntary as actions which are performed with a pistol to one’s head.
I'm curious as to what the context here is.
Using a smart DNS to masquerade as being in a different country to have it route differently to you does work often. I'm not talking about entering in some new address in Windows, by itself that won't work at all.
What era? My own childhood (in the 80s) was filled with recess and free-play and gym class. However, I got the perception from parents of kids who attended elementary school in the late 00s and 10s that recess has been cut or dramatically shortened and nearly everything is scheduled and academically-oriented. This predates COVID, and is a consequence of the general climate of fear and hyper-competitiveness that's followed the 08-09 financial crisis.

My kid plays in the dirt, but he does it with me, not at preschool (where apparently they don't even do play-dough and sand these days). He does have some recess & free-play time - I can't imagine managing a 3-year-old without it - but it's time-boxed into 30 minute increments.
Has there been any work on "growth" based RL models ? Like how a human baby starts off with a small brain and little capability to move around, but slowly starts to roll over, gets head control, crawl and eventually walk, grasp and develop fine motor control as their brains and physical abilities grow together.

The current method looks to me like starting from scratch with a fully capable human with a huge untrained brain instead of progressively expanding their actuators and control plane
No, but by treating a SQL server as a way of storing and retrieving data efficiently FIRST then the times when a complex query is actually necessary tend to stand out better.

In reality most tables and queries start out simple enough, and poor schema choices are usually accompanied by poor architectural choices. It can be painful to come up with a decent migration scheme when the business needs change, especially if there’s fear/pressure involved, but often that’s going to be better than trying to keep the data layer the same/similar and shoehorning in data to represent new scenarios. This is what leads to a fragmented design IMO and allows the schema to diverge from the actual goal of efficient data storage/retrieval.
And just how much sunlight was in your sauna?
How do you use Apple Maps in rural areas? The lack of an offline mode makes it impossible to use without internet. Google maps I can download the area.
Nice. I wonder if the stateful merits provided and marketed by containers orchestrates (e.g. K8S) is something they will consider in the future? ..
> But that's not what he asked you to volunteer for. He didn't ask you to perform ethically at a job. He asked you to actually go get a PhD, do a post-doc or two, and then turn down well-paying industry jobs to work at the FDA and get demonized all day.

That doesn't seem to be what he asked. He asked us to Try telling someone in a position of serious power who is going to loose his kid next year to back off.

It isn't clear what losing a kid has to do with qualified officials approving a failed Alzheimer drug, ostensibly in blatant and clear violation of their own protocols. Presented with that non-sequitur, I chose to restate the event in play.
My child is an interesting person, who I am glad to know, and whom I am proud to have influenced to become what she is and will be.

I never wanted kids until I met my wife, but now I'm happy she talked me into the idea. Our child has made our lives better and stands a pretty fair chance of having a good life on her own.
Apple Maps doesn’t have cycling navigation anywhere, kinda strange for such a hip and (self proclaimed) environmentally conscious company. That renders it literally unusable anywhere, IMHO.

[Edit: I just learned from another comment that Apple Maps _does_ have cycling directions at least in London, which I didn’t know about]
That's colour temperature, not actual temperature.
Openstack?

https://www.openstack.org/
Although I don't agree with all of the things in here, I do personally feel like we are coming to a standstill. In recent years it seems that reboots have become more and more popular. We are even seeing old stuff being revived and people are eating it up. Ever watch the rehash episode of southpark?

I think that we have moved extremely fast in the last decades and either can't come up with really ground-breaking new ideas or just people were kind of burnt out and just wanted something familiar. Personally I think that there is a strong correlation between reboots/old stuff and the increased insecurity/instability in the western world.

I also feel like religiousness is increasing (or staying the same as I thought that with my generation, it was going to plummet). And of course, as with anything in this world, there are always people too far in any end that kind of ruin it for everyone else.

I don't know what to think about a revolution being over. At the end of the day I feel like this is just companies/celebrities taking the easiest route to the buck. When we discover that, currently, familiar stuff gets the job done for the majority of consumers - we sell them familiar stuff. There is currently no need for new things. I'm sure that the kids of the '15s-'25s will be tired of our crap and start a heavy-metal-like culture again to rebel against everything that is currently popular.
I'm pretty sure this is objectively not true. Christmas is only a religious holiday if you're already religious, and even then, you're ignoring the fact that today's "Christmas" is mostly an assemblage of traditions "borrowed" from other earlier religions.

To a lot of people (and I tentatively claim most people, probably) Christmas is either a mostly or entirely secular holiday, celebrating family and the coming of lighter days after the winter solstice, the southern hemisphere notwithstanding.
PAMA Recommendations for Neutral Nomenclature in Pro Audio [pdf]
Just discovering EdgeDB. How does it handle graph queries (specifically, traversing joins across > 3 tables under the hood)?