skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> No offence, but have you written any compilers or interpreters?

I have, but nothing sophisticated.

> The points that you discuss [...] may be performance concerns for application developers [...] but they have very little to do with the optimisations you can make as a compiler/interpreter writer. [...] The only one that's somewhat relevant is 'global scope by default'

I didn't mean to imply that these where the three common traits that make both Javascript and Lua particularly hard to optimize, I just picked them as examples for how Javascript and Lua are closer to each other than most other dynamic languages.

But let's dig in a bit on your claim that things like all numbers being doubles or having a array cum map cum record type has very little to do with the optimizations you can make as a compiler/interpreter writer, because it sure seems to me that LuaJIT and V8 do a bunch of optimizations around these things. Both have dual number representations under the hood and will try to avoid representing numbers that remain in the domain of 32 bit integers as double values internally when that gives performance gains. The logic for figuring out if that's the case doesn't seem to be super-straightforward or target architecture independent from looking at the comments in <https://github.com/LuaDist/luajit/blob/master/src/lj_opt_nar...>.

LuaJIT furthermore uses NaN tagging (as do some JS engines, although not V8), which looks less attractive to me as a representation strategy if your numbers are not all/mostly notional doubles (as is indeed the case in newer version of Lua where 64bit integers are the dominant number type). Do you disagree?

Also, as far as the super-flexible lua tables are concerned, I'm pretty sure LuaJIT goes through some amount of trouble to specialize various common use cases of tables, e.g. as arrays without holes, and surprise, so does V8 (https://v8.dev/blog/fast-properties#elements-or-array-indexe...). I don't think you'd find something equivalent in a high performance scheme implementation.

> but this doesn't touch the surface of the issues that make JS hard to optimise, such as the fact that your, say, memoisation of an object property or method may be broken by an `eval` call of an arbitrary runtime value somewhere else in the code (which, due to asynchronicity, could take place at more or less any time from the point of view of your given 'peephole').

Eval belongs to a core set of features that basically all popular dynamic languages share that presents headaches for high performance implementations. How is Javascript's eval particularly problematic in this regard, and specifically much more so than Lua's loadstring/load?

More generally what do you think makes (pre-ES6) javascript significantly harder to optimize than lua 5.0?
That's probably a good educational point in favor of the game, as it introduces the concept that material and energy scarcity can exert fundamental control over industrial production levels.
The thing is, somebody could (and maybe should!) launch a curated, versioned, audited package registry that just happens to operate through URLs. The URLs are just the mechanism; they make Deno less opinionated about where it gets its packages, but they don’t preclude something more managed and featureful like NPM.
There is a major character named "Piggy" in the book. They kill him in the end. The probability is zero that those events are thematically unrelated.
> I think there is a very fine line between claiming that a CNN's weights represent an algorithm and that its weights can be _interpreted_ as an algorithm.

Yeah, I agree this is an issue. It feels a bit reminiscent of Searle's Waterfall argument, and so I'm inclined to turn to Scott Aaronson's response here [1; Section 6] – basically, how much work is the interpretation itself doing? If you actually tried to use the "algorithm" to do what your interpretation says it should do, how much work would you have to put into that mapping? If the work required amounts to just implementing the algorithm and effectively ignoring the CNN (or waterfall), then the interpretation is what was doing all the work.

IMO the Curve Circuits case passes this test, since they show that you can mechanically take out the learned weights, drop in the weights derived algorithm they reverse engineered, and the model still works about as well.

> In any case, I would like to understand how a language model can represent an algorithm.

Likewise! :)

[1] https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf
Something I wonder: How far we are from having sensor density somewhat similar to the humans skin sensory?

Would it be possible to have an autonomous sensor on each termal tile that reports its integrity and the heat/pressure instead of relaying on inspections?

Feeling pain is obviously very useful to us, it's pretty much the primary mechanism of detecting issues, the limits and taking care of our bodies.

I suspect, maybe it can be possible to have a wireless sensors that function by RF(a nearby source that powers the sensors) or being powered by something like the heat gradient/MEMS that charges and stores energy from the movements.
Yes they are separate.
Haha you're doing your research! Yes, in that sense we are reliable for the reasons I mentioned. There is personalization according to different birth plans. At its core, cryopreservation is the same, but we cater to different scenarios whether its a doula, midwife, nurse etc. being involved and whether they bank cord blood, cord tissue, placenta. Whether they do a home v hospital birth. Whether they want to do delayed cord clamping or not. Whether they are encapsulating their placenta or want to bank. Whether they are doing a lotus birth or not.
Don't know if it would help, but Curcumin (tumeric extract with a pepper extract to potentiate it) is a near magic anti-inflammatory.

It's totally over the counter and without side effects afaik.

I have dozens of stories about it, just one is guy I worked with was taking Voltaren 2-3 times a day for his shoulder, hadn't played golf for two years. I gave him some and he played golf the next day.

He then went for holidays to UK where his sister and her husband are both doctors and they were taking it prophylactically against early onset Alzheimer's.

It has to have the pepper extract with it to be effective, if you have a sprain or similar it acts in 1-3 hours.

Could be helpful for long covid, chances of harm very low.
I'm glad you put the 2020 in the title, but I don't think it's necessary - this kind of story is timeless. Mark your calendar, next year will be the 20th anniversary of this tragedy.
I remember having to order a copy of the SA article for a small amount of $ (which I didn't have, but didn't not have, kids didn't have money) and a week wait at school from the state library.

Different world...

(And the hysteria in the 80s/early 90s was this was training for computer virus writers ;) but people also thought computer crime was fun so it wasn't like D&D style hysteria)
> "factoring a quadratic equation"

This is hard to understand because it doesn't make sense. Quadratic polynomials (or more generally, algebraic expressions) are factored. Equations are not factored.
I would be surprised if every country gets exactly the same product.
“Don’t trust stuff you read on the internet”.

I would be careful about this stuff as a lot of people are in the “productivity coach” market.
Apple is literally the best vendor in the field in terms of providing privacy controls for their tracking products.

Great if criticizing them sets a baseline for all other vendors, but given how the US government decided Apple was price-fixing ebooks while ignoring Amazon's monopsony (2012), I'm not really confident that they'll do something that isn't essentially a bill-of-retainer to limit Apple while not solving the tracker privacy problem at all.
The idea would be to covertly compromise an air-gapped system and ex-filtrate data from it over time while it remains in use. Maybe you've compromised it before it has any useful data, or maybe you want remote control of an agent like stuxnet, so that you can launch an attack at the time of your chooosing.
Periodic forgiveness of debts was fairly common in ancient societies - that's what the Jubilee originally was about, for example - so there's certainly precedent for it.
It's changing rapidly. Until recently, Firefox did have a sandbox, but lots of different origins lived together in the same sandbox. Which made it much less useful for many types of attacks. Since Fission (shipping now-ish?), each origin lives in its own sandboxed process—same as Chrome—so on the surface there's no longer any difference.

That said, sandboxes aren't all or nothing, and my impression is that the chromium sandbox is still tighter than Firefox's. (I work for Mozilla, but not on sandboxing, and I'm not in touch with the current state.) That is improving over time, and Firefox already has some types of sandboxing that are ahead of Chrome's.

The main threat model here is malware, probably malware being served to you through an ad network. Run an ad blocker.

Personally, I defend the principle of an ad-funded Web. But not the current practice. As long as ads are in practice an exploit vector, screw 'em.
> My databases course was very much a "select * from users" kinda course.

to be frank that doesn't sound like a very rigorous school for computer science... that sounds more like an information science curriculum instead of a proper computer science one. I'm talking university of california style learning or the equivalent.
it is @kathrynanja
Nice. I love these posts so much I keep a collection of them.

For this though “one of the easiest ways to make a program faster is to make it do less work”. Correct me if I am wrong but isn’t that the only way to make programs faster? Do less work on a single core is the only method I have ever seen. Everything, from memory alignment to SIMD is just reducing the amount of steps. Would be happy to know an exception to this.
Yup. Which is all why it's an academic paper, not a case study of a real-world example in the field.
Hydrogen is very expensive and takes a ton of energy to produce. Seems like investments are going elsewhere given the relative lack of efficiency gains on this front.
By all means, go. But pay for it yourself. If you can't personally afford Mars, the middle of the Sahara Desert is unoccupied and overwhelmingly easier and cheaper to get established in. Or, under the ice in Greenland. Or, revitalize an abandoned whaling station on an island off Antarctica. If those seem uninviting, I promise Mars will be a thousand times moreso.

Your "golly I'm on Mars!" euphoria would thin out very, very fast. "This place f'n sucks!" malaise would grow steadily and without bound.
Have we duplicated X yet?

I wonder how this kind of thing will fare a 100 years in the future, where X is drawn from a set of functionalities that is much and much larger. We would essentially get stuck on a single language.
This is the problem when criminal law enforcement and prosecution fails (as it seems to be more and more in this country) and you can only rely on civil litigation. The penalties need to be tailored to both the damage done and ability to effect change in the defendant. Otherwise, persons and companies with deep pockets effectively become above the law.
If the USA doesn’t up its education game, I’m afraid it is going to be outcompeted by those countries that do value education.
Not sure what that study applies to. Our lab director who was a former AABB accreditor has a stance that they do not expire or diminish in quality to the point that they are not effective for treatments.
> ordered flight controllers not to leave the building

If NASA employees are civilians, do they have any authority to do this? Was there special legislation used or something?
This is a great article and gives good context for orgs trying to dive in.
Oh sorry about that! We've fixed it a few days ago, but perhaps a glitch. I will look into it. Thank you!
You'd need to investigate why those people aren't actively looking to make meaningful conclusions. E.g. if they don't because they tried and consistently failed and just gave up, I think it's fair to count them as unemployed.
> I find it interesting (and, admittedly, frustrating) that a community like HN that likes to think of itself as being intellectually curious will at the same time insist on only the most surface-level art analysis.

Lots of people like to think of themselves as intellectually curious, including me and you! Let's not look at the mote in our HN neighbor's eye ... :)

Art challenges norms and people instinctively reject things that challenge their norms. On top of that, extreme reactionary culture is very 'normalized' now, so being closed-minded is legitimized rather than being seen as an embrace of ignorance.
> French with a severe head injury

There's a word for this: Quebecois
Left and right are relative, obviously. If we go according to the original definition of being opposed to the ancient regime in France then that would make essentially the entire United States decidedly left-wing. That isn't very useful.
I know it's en vogue to shit on boot camp students, at one point I did as well, but my experience with working with such students is that after a few years, they are on par with their peers who studied CS in college. Yes, they probably won't work in research roles or roles that require heavy math skills, but when it comes to your typical software engineering role, they're fine.

Also, runtime analysis isn't that difficult of a skill to pick up.
I mean it's just a generic blob of machine learning. It learned to do math because we write about math. It can't do arbitrarily long computations since it's only so recursive, but getting the basics down isn't too hard. It probably only struggles because it can't see digits, and can't do digit-wise operations (same with rhyming actually!).
Medicine as an Institution of Social Control (1972)
Is there an app on your phone sharing your call logs?
Rotational drag depends on distance between the star and planet.

Planets with fast orbits are closer to the star and get more drag- hence more likely to be locked.
I can no longer reply to your last comment @Grustaf for some reason haha but I'm guessing you're still reading these. We are currently the most affordable in the industry. When you add up cord blood alone amongst all cord blood banks and make the plans specific to 20 years, ours comes out to be ~3000. Others come out to be 3500+. Can send you some data on this if you'd like to correspond via email
less commonly cited are :
- turing complete
- The signal state
- Screeps
- Adventure land
- Bitburner

The be fair the 3 last are more programming than like :)
The University of Waterloo, which came up elsewhere in the comments, is one of the top CS universities in Canada and gives out B.Math degrees with a CS major.

When you say, "the emphasis is computer science" what exactly does the term "computer science" mean to you? I'm not trying to be a jerk here. I think the term "computer science" covers several related, but distinct, disciplines so it's helpful to know exactly what the other person is referring to.
I do greylisting. The first call from an unknown number plays asterisk standard recordings - SIT + "please try again". A successive call from the same number rings through. Legitimate callers have had no problem. I set it up this way because it was originally operating on a landline "in parallel" so that if the server failed the phones would still work.

Next up is some kind of system that takes calls from places that you can never reach directly and instead call you back at bleeding-eyes-o'clock (eg doctors' offices), answers the call, and puts the caller on hold while I wake up. "Bucket of stomach fluid" can be a two way street.
A sufficiently determined user (and these are often national governments) could easily target a phone they control. With sufficient monitoring and logging they could grab the exploit directly. The only thing stopping them is whatever contract/“EULA” they signed agreeing not to reverse engineer the product, and I doubt the big spooks would care about such a thing.
"I am the science."

-Anthony Fauci
I feel like attention would largely mitigate that, no? Has anyone looked at what the weights are while doing addition?
we send parents a stem cell certificate 1 month after birth. so you'd actually know that it's a good deal pretty immediately
There's an excellent Black Mirror episode about tracking a child, looking through their eyes using implant, and even blocking stuff that could be scary or upsetting for them. Needless to say, it turned our quite bad for both child and parent.

Black Mirror is great in exposing how ideas which look good on the first look can have very dark side. I even thought some of these things would be great (e.g. recording everything you see) before watching BM, I didn't think at all about all the negative consequences. It's sobering.

That said, I share location with my wife and also monitoring our children. If you have full mutual trust with other person, there are no drawbacks but there are positive sides. Full trust implies that one doesn't monitor location constantly, that there's no jealousy or stalking, that's it's used basically when you're worried that something bad happened. If someone is late from school or work it's a relief if you see they're moving towards home or that they are at known location.
> Yes much was built by slaves, but other empires also had slaves. So what was the comparative advantage of Rome?

Did it have any advantage? Rome has a special place for Europeans because it's "our" ancient empire, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was superior all of its peers. Also, maybe those peer empires didn't build aqueducts, but they built different but equivalent projects instead.
>A better solution is to physically disable the USB ports.

It's not an either/or situation.
I compressed it with a simple arithmetic compressor to 4368 bytes (3583 for the guessable words, 785 bytes for the hidden word set), using a zero order model.

I used an arithmetic compressor I wrote long ago at https://github.com/ChrisLomont/ArithmeticCompression.

Use 26 symbols, and then just feed all the words, a letter at a time, into the compressor.

Or, if you want to check it more easily, compute the letter entropy - you get the same result.
I suspect Von Neumann pointed a slightly different direction would have had a pretty good shot at it.
I don't think they are ethically obligated, but adds credibility to the idea that P0 is trying to improve security across the industry as a whole. Perhaps that makes their work easier because people are more receptive knowing that they are being treated "fairly" (at least in the same manner as the organization sponsoring the work).
There is definitely an alignment of people and their interests that work like that. After all, paying people more is considered by bankers as an unwelcome transfer of wealth from capital to labor.
Compilers don’t build crap on their own, and machine code is still a thing.

Anyway, a farmer can build a shack without talking to a structural engineer, and a banker can muddle through coding an excel spreadsheet. But trying to muddle trough via trial and error isn’t enough to build the Burj Khalifa or a modern OS. Thus we want to use formal methods to minimize risks, costs, etc. That’s what gives rise to CS and engineering disciplines, not simply trying to staple math onto a field.
Maybe they are interested only in future Ph.Ds and Professors. Anybody else is a burden to be sent somewhere else as soon as possible. Maybe they think they're doing a favor to those students because they won't be wasting their time on subjects that are too difficult for them to grasp in the short time of a university class.
Thing is, with robocalls, your a program is sequentially dialing numbers so even if you never share your phone number with anyone you'd still get robocalled. It's not very hard to guess a valid number whereas trying to build valid emails via brute force is not possible in the same way.
It’s the inverse basically. Harder (but still possible) at first but over time a network of trust and reference is built. As opposed to the sneaky/illegal house of cards that could fall at any moment.

A lot of people moonlight as a consultant until they can go full time.
"Enjoy this wonderfully styled course page"

I have the Tranquility! extension on my browser, which turns that web page into something quite readable. The web page as it is is the complete opposite of something readable.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tranquility-1...
Wine 7.2 Released
I actually think it's a shame. It seems that many English Lit departments (and associated K-12 pedagogy) have arrive at a kind expected & trite monoculture of thought.

There's a tremendous value to being able dissect a text, form an argument, and defend it. But what students ultimately find is that executing this well and demonstrating the validity of a viewpoint is not really the primary evaluation point but rather that the content conforms to pre-decided avenues of thought. These departments have the trappings and ceremony of rational thought, but none of the ability to face the revelations of diverse truths and viewpoints that challenge the established status quo.

As a result millions of students leave the classes without the tools to read and analyze for comprehension and to form coherent and rational opinions that reflect the things that are important to them. Even worse, when they are presented with these cognitive models, they've "learned" to reject them. These tools can not only reflect thought, but also help shape it. Critical thinking results from it.
Well, if the parents are worrying about the kids, it shows that they at least may have some self-awareness for themselves...
I've literally quoted Marx here on multiple occasions without problem when relevant to a discussion. The last bit being key.
How many such crashes happen in general? Is it a common thing in the USA? Are humans in any other car less likely to crash into standing cars on the Highway? Any experts here?
> `any` will be happy

> `in` will be very cross

I like this. People should anthropomorphize their operators more.
Does having one's phone compromised by Cellebrite et al. look like anything at all to the end user?
In mature forests, the replacement time is pretty much 1:1. If you disregard the nutrients being taken away from the soil and the energy needed to transport and dry the wood, wood would be a pretty good fuel. Slightly worse than nuclear, I imagine.
Professionals respecting their responsibility.
Do we actually have a growing economy in practice at this point? Or do we pretend that it's growing by inventing value out of thin air (as is the case with e.g. stocks)?
These are about the size of half a Hollerith (punch) card. I miss punch cards.

They were the perfect size to fit in my shirt pocket folded in half. And they were effectively free since everybody was getting rid of them.

Sadly, I ran out of my stash about 8 years ago. And now they're not free anymore.
> I do pay for New Deal stuff as part of admission to museums

If more people did, it wouldn't need government funding. Note that there are very many completely private museums in this country. Funded by the profits from the patrons.

> Some art is popular, therefore all art must be popular?

More like if people like art, they'll pay for it out of their own pockets. Art that was voluntarily paid for is all around you. There's no shortage of it. It's Big Business. Ever been to a movie? watched TV? bought a greeting card? seen an advertisement? bought a book? bought a house? bought a car? seen a garden? bought a lampshade?