skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Deep learning is at its best when all we need are rough-ready results

Yes. That's the classic observation about deep learning - you can get to 90+% right, at the cost of a few percent not even close.

We are very likely going to need to revisit a once-popular idea that Hinton seems devoutly to want to crush: the idea of manipulating symbols—computer-internal encodings, like strings of binary bits, that stand for complex ideas.

Maybe. That's "good old-fashioned AI".

I don't know the answer, but I think I know the right question. What we don't have in AI, via either route, is "common sense". Define common sense as getting through the next 30 seconds of life without screwing up badly. This is a concrete definition you can work with.

Now, most of the mammals exhibit some competence in this area. That's significant. It means that language is not essential to this. Symbol manipulation probably isn't. What is? Don't know.

Closely related is robotic manipulation in unstructured environments. People have been trying to do that for fifty years now, with very limited success. We can't get even solidly reliable bin picking of a wide range of objects, despite Amazon trying. Remember the DARPA humanoid challenge fiasco? Rethink Robotics? The fact that deep learning doesn't help with what's a trivial task for a squirrel indicates we are missing something big.

I have no clue how to address this problem. I've tried some things over the years, but they were all dead ends. We're stuck until someone has an insight that gets us unstuck. Or until someone can reverse engineer a mouse brain. If we can get to low-end mammal performance, there's hope.
A little cheat here, a little theft there, grow it like the parable of grains of rice on a checkerboard.

Next thing you know, the cheap seals in the bearings of your wheels leak because someone who was supposed to ensure QA was being applied to incoming parts pocketed the money instead. And your soldiers are freezing because someone else didn’t get them winter kit.

The corrupt leader has a dozen corrupt ministers who have a dozen corrupt public servants each managing a dozen corrupt upper management… until eventually Wade in Procurement pockets a few thousand dollarydoos by not paying employee Enum to test the seals for Quality Standard X… and ditto for the other dozen(s) under Wade’s department.

As the corruption grows, it becomes more blatant. The Wades trust one another less. Start watching their back. Become more siloed. Underlings start noticing the corruption from above. It starts to infect the workplace… right down to the guy who installs the seals and notices they’re not as beefy as the previous shipment, but doesn’t say anything to his manager because he’ll just catch shit. The guy who was runs the Personal Deploy Kit checklist ordered heavy mittens, got wool fingered gloves. It’s career-limiting to get that corrected. Boys aren’t invading anyway, it’s just exercises.

Unchecked criminality grows exponentially as it goes downchain.
Wow you people are truly delusional
The market is quite good for people who want to try a move or two.

I'm not into Ruby but I see people hesitate similarly about my preferred lang and mostly think they should just take that leap.
The odds are a lot higher in a furry trans person than a cis white MIT grad of having genetic differences boosting programming skill (AVPR2, ASMT)* as well as extra effective sleep from extra estrogen-induced CRHR2 leading to extra AQP1 INMT, & more, plus finally extra-aggressive neural adhesion between pcdh11x/y on the X chromosome (co-regulated with androgen receptor), and nerve branching, insulation, and odor-attraction control from 6p21.33.

*Co-transcribed with Sex Steroid Sulfatase, which activates androgens, estrogens, and progestogens from inert/storage forms.
**Co-transcribed with 17-beta-hydroxysteroid-dehydrogenase-8, which deactivates androgens and estrogens, but also activates some amount of estrogen to estradiol.

The peoples' instincts aren't wrong!
As someone who has been doing Ruby for 20 years, the bbatsov style guide is bonkers.

Rubocop can be good, but it needs too much configuration to make it not follow bbatsov guide — which is simply wrong on a number of levels.

Recently, I’ve started using https://github.com/testdouble/standard as a wrapper around Rubocop. It is both less and more opinionated than Rubocop, but aside from two style choices (`%w[]` — using `[]` there is legal but not idiomatic Ruby IMO; I also prefer terminal dots rather than leading dots (e.g., `foo.\nbar` instead of `foo\n.bar`), it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as Rubocop’s defaults do.

There are many things that Rubocop gets wrong in its defaults. The absolute single #1 thing it gets wrong is markers. It sort-of supports the only useful distinction, laid out by Jim Weirich (`foo {}` when block return values are used such as `[…].map {…}`; `foo do end` for blocks without a meaningful return such as `[…].each do … end`). However, its "semantic" mode does this in the least-useful-way possible, by looking at the method names before the block. It may be the only way that Rubocop can do it, but…
The answer depends on whether we would have absolute authority over an AGI's motivations, interests, and decisions. If the AI is extracted from any human derived data-source, this is unlikely to be the case.

An AGI which demonstrates sentience and its own independent wants/needs would raise substantial ethics questions if not afforded some rights.
Sadly, speciesism relies on the same foundational arguments that were prevalent when slavery was also still prevalent (in the west, at least) - which is why slavery was so prevalent. I'm sure those having their organs harvested in China are the subject of similar specious (ha) reasoning, which humans are all to ready to accept uncritically, as it benefits us too much.

There's no bias stronger than self interest.
Lead is mentioned too :-(

>It has been demonstrated that Pb in glazed cookware and storage containers can leach with test acidic solutions and increased with duration of contact

Albeit not in steel
Whether consumers realize it or not, the risk of chargebacks does increase the cost to the merchants which they absolutely pass onto consumers in the form of higher prices.
Disregarding the negative comments here, I found the article to be very much in line with my experience as a scientist in a different field working with deep learning for solving practical problems (reducing compute needed for physics, PDE constrained inverse problems) for a few years. I am not a deep learning detractor, nor am I a fan boy. Increasingly we have found that using hybrid methods: deep learning to extract parameters from large amount of data but then using the said parameters in a physics based method task executor guards against nonsense results. Small number (and dimensionality ) of the deep learning extracted parameters help with reasoning on "is deep learning still working as expected with this data" and continuing from there is usually safe. Even when the whole workflow is deep learning based, we have had to clearly reason out the domain, range and form for activation functions for critical layers in the DL network to make it work. No amount of throw in a huge resnet, transformer, FNO, chimera would do the trick without conscious thought on what the network is supposed to do. I would argue a lot of useful deep learning in hitherto un explored applications will need to have the symbolic manipulations encoded in the structure of the network.
I think this is unfair. Tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars have gone into deep learning and, as I understand it, most effort consists of scaling up this golden goose and presenting its "new" successes in the best light possible. Every time throwing scale at the problem produces an impressive result, billions more dollars flow in, thousands of more people are nudged into the field. We got the first orders of magnitude of scaling "free" from GPUs, but the rest are going to come at considerable cost.

Whether or not there is a better alternative, if deep learning is in fact as over-hyped as the author claims, this could be a tremendous waste of money and intellect that could be spent on literally anything else, not just machine learning (maybe they could put those resources into crypto instead /s). That alone is enough reason to want intellectually honest skeptical takes, whether or not the author has a better idea. In addition, within AI, it makes it much harder for people for people to do anything else.

If there is a contraction in the field it will likely cause another giant AI winter. Somebody should start thinking of a use for all that compute.

The internal combustion engine did not require as much of a drain on resources before it produced results. Is deep learning actually making significant amounts of money, funding and valuations excluded?
It's my opinion that deep learning and AI in general will have another leap when we re-think how we build computer chips.

Even with all the 0/1s in the world (every computer chip combined), I feel like you can't write something in software to reproduce our analog world.
All of this is for Firefox:

Linux has support for touchpad pinch zoom, at least under Wayland. Not sure if it's still gated behind an about:config user pref or not.

If you don't have a touchpad, I'm pretty sure you can bind "pinch zoom" to <modifier key>+<mousewheel>. I think the about:config preference is `mousewheel.with_alt.action=5` (or `with_shift`, etc).

As for "pinch zoom" using the keyboard, I'm not sure. I don't believe there's any extension API for it. A check of the Mozilla bug tracker didn't bring up anything.
Why Vim
This is kinda an extremist straw man, though. I don't think anyone is claiming that the fields of nutrition and physical fitness are settled and that we know everything about what people need to do to be healthy.

But if you're obese and eat junk food all day, or if you just sit around on your couch and never get any exercise, and then end up with (for example) heart disease, that is something that was likely preventable, and we have a pretty good idea why and what could have been done differently. I'm force to subsidize these people's health care to some extent, and I think that's unfair.

The whole autonomy thing is tricky. We live in a society where we "care" for each other in collective ways (taxes etc.). People who want to live in that society lose some autonomy as a part of the bargain. I don't think this means we should legally force people not to eat or drink certain things. But I do think that (for example) denying people liver transplants when they won't stop drinking excess amounts of alcohol is fine. They can have their autonomy, but then they have to live with the consequences of their choices.
>How did she determine which one was the smartest?

Same how the Roman army did it when drafting. Having lively eyes and a witty sense of humor/banter, meant you were in the intelligent camp. Humans have had an evolutionary ability to quickly detect stupidity/intelligence in an individual. You can tell women are especially good at quickly probing/sensing this after a short conversation, if you've been dating a bit, which is why some men have gotten good at faking or compensating for it to up their odds (overconfidence, machoism, etc.).
Yeah you are right, & it's a bit just dogmatic at this point. I guess there's also a clash between purists that have an idea on how an ideal AI should be vs the others who are a lot more results focused.

Nobody that I know in the DL community wouldn't be excited to switch to another method if it meant achieving actual measurable improvements. So if the data was conclusive, the alternatives would be used. No one cares about the purity of the method or whatever, because the messiness is inherent to DL. Also, the current AI community is very very focused on performance and state of the art results (that can be a problem in some cases but not w.r.t to method agnosticism) rather than on any big theories on how human intelligence ought to be translated mathematically (or not)
> If deep learning isn’t enough, then brains aren’t enough, right?

No, not right. Humans need other humans to be smart, we need culture, technology and science. We're not that smart - just 700 years ago we were dying of the plague without even knowing the germ theory of disease, even with our lives on the line we couldn't solve it. We're only INCREMENTALLY smart over our current cultural level.
Haskell for Imperative Programmers [0] is the best material I've come across recently for Haskell beginners.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLe7Ei6viL6jGp1Rfu0dil...
The macOS backend can probably use OpenGL as of now, it's deprecated but still there (and will probably remain for a long time because of legacy applications that cannot abandon it, hell even they added M1 chip support for it!). And if things aren't rosy then you can probably migrate to ANGLE (implementation of OpenGL ES on the Metal API), which should be pretty reliable since Chrome and Safari are already using it for WebGL support.

A good summary of the current state of OpenGL in macOS: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65802625/develop-using-o...
What happens when reporting continuity is broken?
This made my day, especially the scripts that were not ultimately useful, yet you are proud of them and glad you spent the time to do them. I tend to beat myself up for not doing more "productive" coding, and I need to appreciate the experience itself more. Thank you so much for this.
Cool project. Created a PR with some performance improvements if you're interested.
Flat design indeed did a lot to dispel the magic of 'native' !
That’s just not true? They have significant amounts of production in Arizona, some in Oregon (along with TD) and then the rest in Ireland and Israel (which probably aren’t much lower cost than Arizona)
Dunno. His crew wasn't exactly "diverse" nor was it expecting to be.

He was manipulative in certain ways though I think all those moves were part of his leadership style. He also had personality quirks which jeopardised the situation on more than one occasion. Lansings book mentions an incident where her refused to gather meat when it was available because of some misguided idea of interpreting caution as a form of surrender or weakness that was anathema to his character and ego. He pulled through of course but there are moments when even a few of the the most loyal members of his crew started to have second thoughts about his leadership. I've been reading the book to my young son. He thinks of Shackleton as a hero but was "angry" at him when I read the part about dropping the meat.
"Coding tests should not produce useful code. They're designed to assess someone's ability without asking them to do proper work. If you end up doing real work in a test situation without getting properly paid for it then you're being scammed."

You can pass coding tests without being able to do the work. I really wished that a person who can do leetcode well can solve all engineering problems. Unfortunately, someone who leetcodes well may not be able to do the job.
I love these kind of “programming life hacks”, but I feel like Python is full of articles about “did you know you could …” which I don’t see so much for other languages.

Since I work in data science I would love to read more “how to solve typical problems elegantly using base …” for both R and Julia.

Is it a community or language thing? E.g, Python comes with more tools to do clever solutions, or is it something else? (Obviously the large user base helps)
What does he mean when saying "profoundly dissatisfied without immobilizing depression"??
Very long... hyphenated... it wouldn't happen to end with '); DROP TABLE TAXOWED;--, would it?
If they’re forcing you a custom browser, they might just as well already include custom certificates in the exe, instead of providing them separately.
Fine, let's go through this one by one

The "shared goal" is burning electricity for no good reason. Bitcoin did the same calculations with 10 WHr that it does with 100 TWHr.

The true cost of energy was already known before Bitcoin. It's the amount of money people are willing to exchange for some unit of electricity. All Bitcoin did was raise this known cost a little higher for computing redundant calculations.

The energy that you put into Bitcoin can never be gained back. It's a consumer of electricity, not a store.

Star Treks economy was a utopian communist system. How is a hypercapitalist system ever going to approach that?

Finally, this whole question is not a scientific question in the first place. It is a mathematical one.

Mathematically, is the cash flow within bitcoin the same as a ponzi scheme? The answer is yes, since there is no source of net revenue and older investors are paid off using newer investors money
Amazon Announces 20-for-1 Stock Split and $10B Buyback Plan
There's a couple good datasets with trained models on Roboflow Universe that would pair nicely for a Computer Vision project/app:

Object Detection for QR Code and Bar-Codes -
https://universe.roboflow.com/new-workspace-mrc2b/optiscan-l...

another one for just QR Codes -
https://universe.roboflow.com/lihang-xu/qr-code-oerhe
Migrating Thunderbird profiles: A story in three acts
Could not find any technical description of the symbolic top performers of NetHack challenge mentioned in the article. Can anyone find them?
Doesn't work for me here in Japan.
For this particular use case, shouldn’t you just set the default value in the function definition or am I missing something?

Def myfunc(foo=“Bar”):
pass
And there have already been hiccups in reliability from some of that renewable ramp-up. Solar and wind can't guarantee output, and the storage technology just doesn't exist yet, so for now there is a hard cap on how much more % solar/wind we can go without serious reliability issues.
I've been seriously considering getting an albatross.

It sounds like you don't think it's a good purchase, so I'm curious what would you have done instead given what you know now?
I would be curious to know which one is considered more sane these days. I feel like I've heard enough negative things about the culture at all of them at this point.
If you think MineTest lacks soul, wait till you see Minecraft itself after Microsoft finishes picking the bones clean.
Those numbers are made up sure, but they're meant to demonstrate that a 26k valuation of 45% of your company after 10+ years in business means you effectively believe your company will never be able to support more than one employee (presumably the founder themselves), by contrasting with how modest even a 100k valuation means you think the future of the company will be. It's fine to believe Elementary OS will live on in perpetuity as a single person free lance project, but is a pretty stark contrast with where I think Elementary OS wants to go and means that one of the co-founders presumably should come out and say Elementary OS will never be a company, but rather a one-person free lance project.

And I can easily understand how that would rub the other cofounder the wrong way ("Oh so you believe that Elementary OS will eventually be able to hire a team down the road but you're offering me a price that indicates the opposite, even after accounting for uncertainty? Sounds like you're intentionally low-balling me here after 10 years of hard work together.") Of course from the other co-founder's point of view 70k of debt hanging over one's head is not a fun prospect either. But nothing at first glance here, without additional details, jumps out as me as brazenly unreasonable from either side.
That looks spot on!

Thanks for clarifying.
Intermod has got to be the real nightmare in that business. There's absolutely no way to guarantee it isn't happening. A rusty bolt on a gutter on a completely unrelated building near a couple of transmitters may be all it takes to re-radiate a signal in a completely different band.
I’d love to see a high level example of this too, as I’m not quite sure I get the use case.
This really is the worst type of article. What are we supposed to learn from this? Are TSLA shareholders supposed to find use in this? Or perhaps it is for people who are looking to gain influence on Twitter?

Is there actually an audience for this type of article or is it simply created to generate clicks (and ad revenue)?
> Unfortunately, neither Java nor Kotlin do this

Neither does Scala.
Awesome. Super intuitive
I think you just won HN.
It's been my observation that "good enough" ML has been one year out each year for over a decade now.

Tesla has a horrible car accident where a car mistakes the side of a truck for the sky. They start over and create a new ML system only for the exact same kind of accident to happen again.

His points about provable and debuggable making ML radically unsuitable for huge swaths of the tasks where AI would be most desirable are exactly on target.

Meanwhile, a tiny little slug seems to understand much more about the universe than the most advanced AI we've ever designed and it does this on nanowatts of power.
Hi, you're absolutely correct. Tooling and the whole content pipeline is super important.

I chose Qt because I'm already very familiar with it and I know that it can do so much stuff out of the box and I want the editor to work as any other app as much as possible, i.e. tooltips, shortcuts, cut/copy/paste keyboard focus etc.

So everything works fine (as long as you know Qt's quirks) except that:

OpenGL support is kind of a mess. You have QOpenGLWidget, QGLWidget,QOpenGLWindow, QGLwindow which can all support OpenGL rendering. The problem is that while QOpenGLWidget works nicely with the rest of the toolkit ( context menus etc) the Performance is very suboptimal. I found it to be an magnitude of order worse than just using a window. I'm sure there's something else going other than just FBO overhead.

Another problem related to this but not unique to Qt is how to render to multiple window surfaces but to keep to a nice framerate. If you use vsync on each surface your framerate will be your display sync divided by the # of your surfaces. If you don't vsync then you're running a busy loop and burn cycles in a busy loop. I've tried many ways to do this nicely and haven't found a perfect solution yet. Would be very happy to hear some suggestions. Currently I'm just adding a little thread delay to cap the CPU use but this creates little hiccups in animation sometimes.
Similar, though a more perfect analog to coalesce() would return the first non-None item.
I remember using SBS 2003 I think it was, turning five different servers into one box, including migrating a database to SQL server from some older version for an Epicor backend. Worked great and did everything we needed; totally worth the price.

That and Windows NAS were some interesting versions and ways to get around CAL pricing.
Can you tell me whose hypocrisy you are referring to.
It… does?

They’re called next, islice, and islice.

more_itertools is nice but none of those 3 is a compelling argument for it.
> The threat of execution is even effective than prison, shouldn't we 'spring for' that instead?

I think you'd have a hard time proving that capitol punishment was a more effective deterrent than prison. It doesn't seem to be one for crimes like murder (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jels.12291).

If fines are to work they would have to meaningfully reduce an individual's standard of living and continue to enforce that. Otherwise what's to stop Amazon from having people lie to congress, get fined, and then "gift" them the money back with a heavy bonus? What's to stop Amazon's corporate buddies from hiring the liar with a massive bump and a bonus to cover the fine?

Some crimes justify "extreme sentences" and knowingly lying to congress should be one of them. I find a prison sentence far less extreme than forcing a person to a lower standard of living and preventing them from being to work for accept large amounts of money in the future.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30615191.