skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Plenty of RL systems learn to play video games just fine without fine-tuned rewards, but I see this line of thought isn't actually what you're getting at.

I would assume serious ML people would not be overly ambitious and overstep their claims beyond empirical realms. You were saying ML "uncovers latent representational structure not present in the data", but I would guess the claim, if that is what you're going against, is merely that the latent structures exist, and no Truth is really "uncovered" by ML per se, in the Heideggerian sense.

I agree ML hasn't really produced an Understanding of the world. The carving along the joints is in other words a symbolic abstraction of the world that is a radical simplification, for which only Reason is capable of, and ML hasn't shown to be capable of Reason. As an aside, I also would not assume the ambiguity you refer to can be fully eliminated even by human intelligence, just see how languages are fully of ambiguity, or even quantum mechanics.

But again, when philosophical critiques are launched against ML, the usual story is ML advocates would retreat to the success of ML in the empirical realms. I'm reminded of the Norvig vs Chomsky debate by this.
My mom was the breadwinner for much of my primary and secondary school years, so when she got laid off from her job she took it as an early retirement. It was bizarre seeing her during the week and the daylight hours, when I was used to seeing her in the evenings and the weekends for years. We have a good relationship.

My dad has some of the worst self-esteem I've ever come across, and he's also rife with anxiety. I have a hunch that he has un-diagnosed Aspergers, which would explain the countless examples of him missing social cues, saying things that are really off-color, seeing many situations as black and white, and seemingly having a lack of empathy when it comes to certain things that I've experienced first-hand. Do I love him? I guess, but over the years I've had to keep my distance from him.
The odd conclusion to me is how the last line I've post was interpreted as a serious statement.

Didn't the "Before he got his Netflix special.." or the fact Linux is pretty much the only game in town with no sign of even being seriously challenged served as a hint?
> Given the current price depends on his claimed intent to takeover

Does it? Others have argued there has been no effective "pricing in" of this "intent", due to...nobody thinking it'll happen.
It's been better written about elsewhere, but the fifth-gen 2021 M1 MBPs are a really good (if not timely) course correction from the fourth-gen (2016 - 2020) debacle. Solid keyboard, no useless touch bar, most all the ports back including MagSafe, top-notch display, and internal upgrades. I bought one to finally replace my 3rd gen (2013) MBP and it's just been fantastic.
so in the thread he talks about;how ideas can be lightning rods' He says

>That is just an unpleasant, inconvenient truth that all of you (regardless of your political leaning) need to accept about speech. Ideas really ARE powerful, and like anything else that is powerful, yes, they can be DANGEROUS.

thats the basis of free speech and the reason some people want to protect it. These guys dont agree with it and thats fine. I mean there are good reasons someone might disagree with free speech. But I mean be honest, be honest about what the debate is. Dont say you support free speech but some ideas can be dangerous. Just say you dont agree with giving everyone free speech at all times and have an honest conversation about that instead of spewing that silicon valley doublespeak
Considering how stringent their review process is wrt ensuring app behavior doesn't impinge on their own interests, perhaps it is time to hold Apple liable for nevertheless permitting behavior which harms the end user.
Looks pretty similar to the desk I had at Amazon UK. You have a nicer chair though.
What crisis? Who is dying from mild warming? The crisis that has been predicted every year since 1990 has not materialized. We have rather ordinary, rather boring climate conditions right now. No, really. Crop yields are near all time highs (although with man-made fertilizer shortages due to war, may take a hit this year) [1]. The earth is greening as a result of CO2 fertilization [2]. Deaths from natural disasters are near all time lows [3]. Sea level rise is marginal (1.5-3 mm per year) and not by any means catastrophic [4]. The planet will be fine in 2030 just like it is fine today. Please, go visit our national parks if you're in the U.S. Go hike Yellowstone. Go to Glacier National Park, which they predicted would melt by 2020 (didn't happen). Go look at the wildlife yourself. They are thriving. The polar bear population has more than six-tupled since the 1950s [5]. There is no, suddenly in 2030 everything is going to collapse. Earth has been much, much warmer, much more CO2 dense, and life was thriving. Warmth is almost universally good for life. It is icy and cold and dry conditions that life struggles to survive in. Yes, I know some ecosystems are under intense pressure as a result of manmade activity. But warmth isn't it. The majority of the biodiversity falls within the tropics and drops off as you enter temperate zones and then again as you enter the arctic zones. But meanwhile, it's not as if those tropic zones are expanding rapidly. They're not going to be any different in 2030 than in 2022.

The 2030 narrative is designed to terrify you. It is a narrative. It is not science. It's a deranged hypothesis focused on manipulating human psychology. And clearly, it's highly effective as an exercise in thought control.

1: https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields
2: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...
3: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-from-nat...
4: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012374...: https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index
5: https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-the-polar-bear-popula...
This. I tried nicely explaining multiple times, but it seems this is the case. The attachment issues are there too - like she needs people to constantly care for (she does some volunteer work, so that helps).

At this point I just try to leave it alone, be patient, and be kind.
Including Heroku CI? We don't use an external CI tool (or really any other integrations except GH), but I do see these download logs.
"Cures alcoholism"?

That's interesting...
> like the need to configure certificates in the app itself[0], not at the proxy, which can be (a bit more) troublesome if you are okay with a single WC certificate serving all your subdomains.

At this point, certificate management is 100% automated, so it makes no difference where the certs are configured.

> And the OP still uses Apache for 80->443 redirect.

As I mentioned in the post, I plan to use a tiny zero-config daemon for this purpose. Getting rid of Apache is an incremental process and I'm not 100% there yet.
Here is what they write below that figure:

"OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration. This concerns, for example, Mariupol and Volnovakha (Donetsk region), Izium (Kharkiv region), Popasna (Luhansk region), and Irpin (Kyiv region), where there are allegations of numerous civilian casualties. These figures are being further corroborated and are not included in the above statistics. "

But that somehow didn't make it into the quote by the GP.
I would probably think twice before accepting an offer if I had a peek in the codebase of some companies I worked on.
From weird practices to complete useless tests and straight copies of other projects without any planing.

But for first step a Psychotechnical test on the candidate, and to be fair, the team and manager.
Of course, but the fifth amendment only protects you from self-incrimination if you explicitly invoke it (or keep your mouth shut). Not if you lie.
The hard part about these companies is user engagement.

Currently, Twitter userbase is ripe for monetization.
actual pptx file:

pandoc -f markdown input.md -o output.pptx
Alcoholism and opiate addiction have some underlying biochemical similarities that a lot of people seem unaware of, even though this explains the effectiveness of naltrexone. For background:

> "Opioid Systems. Endogenous opioids are small molecules naturally produced in the body that resemble morphine and have long been implicated in the actions of opiate drugs and alcohol. There are three classes of endogenous opioids: endorphins, enkephalins, and dynorphins. They all exert their effects by interacting with three subtypes of opioid receptors—μ, δ, and κ. Researchers have hypothesized that positive alcohol reinforcement is mediated at least in part by the release of endogenous opioids in the brain. This hypothesis is supported by numerous studies demonstrating that opioid antagonists acting either at all opioid receptor subtypes or only at specific subtypes suppress alcohol drinking in a variety of species and models (for a review, see Ulm et al. 1995). Moreover, complete inactivation (i.e., knockout) of the μ-opioid receptor blocks alcohol self-administration in mice (Roberts et al. 2000b). The agent naltrexone, a subtype-nonspecific opioid receptor antagonist, currently is approved as a treatment for alcoholism in humans and is particularly effective in reducing heavy drinking."

Neurobiology of Alchohol Dependence, Focus on Motivational Mechanisms
https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh313/185-195.htm

Psychedelic drugs have also been used very effectively under controlled conditions (clinical settings) to break both opiate and alcohol addiction with remarkably high success rates. This is an entirely different approach than using blockers like naltrexone. For example:

"Psychedelics as an emerging novel intervention in the treatment of substance use disorder: a review "
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33231817/

> "It is believed that these agents allow for the reorganization of disordered neural pathways in the default mode network and attenuate maladaptive signaling in mesolimbic reward circuitry. The aim of this review is to examine the current standing of evidence regarding psychedelic psychopharmacology and to provide an overview of the use and effectiveness of these drugs in the treatment of SUD, alcohol use disorder, and for smoking cessation."
Many jobs don't benefit from these arbitrary signals. And people are born with diverse capabilities. So digging for weak signals causes systemic harm to whole groups of people. Folks who may be more than qualified for the work in question.

Let's learn from mistakes of the past instead of repeating them out of laziness or tribalism.
If I said something truly moronic as a teenager back in the “good old days”, but only my family heard me, I’d get punished and that could be enough to rethink my views or behaviour. My mistake would likely end there. Or at least your neighbours might never know.

Now some dumb kid can post to Twitter or Facebook and that can be used against them 10 years later by some random person. You could even be saying things that aligns with your communities values (say you have conservative religious views) and then a bunch of strangers who you don’t know will come after you because they disagree with you.

I can literally reach back in time and hold people accountable for things they no longer believe in.

Comparing this to not getting lynched is a really low bar. I would certainly hope in this day and age that we’re at least civil enough not to become pitch fork wielding mobs. That’s the bare minimum.
I've never found this to be much of a problem in good code. API failures in front-end code tend to fall into a couple of buckets that can be abstracted away. If you want to preserve the page and keep retrying with exponential backoff, you can just implement that as a function that you then await until it succeeds. If you can't recover and just want to show the user a "shit's fucked, refresh the page" banner then you just need one handler near the top of the stack and let the errors bubble up. Most people are working in a declarative environment like React where you can just have a hook wrapping your API calls that exposes a potential error state to render accordingly.

You only really need to have try/catch blocks in 1 or 2 places unless you have a lot of novel async stuff going on that needs to recover from failures in specific ways. Most front-end code shouldn't have a try/catch around every API call.
Libertarians have beliefs like

> “in principle, there's no difference in mandating you use a seatbelt, and mandating that you stay in your home for three months.”

That is why there isn’t much anti-libertarian ideology unless it is redefined to be “anyone not buying all libertarian views” but instead what there actually are is a lack of people taking libertarian principles seriously because those are apparently things like seat belts equals arbitrary home confinement and also seem to be against seat belts and collective pandemic responses.
This is brilliant. Thank you for sharing that. I have always thought that writing code in front of somebody else was not indicative of skills. This is showing a very good and simple alternative.
this works in older versions of node too:

const wait = require(‘util’).promisify(setTimeout)
Context is hard with just text. Smarter people than me were confused :)
The hosts still have the authority to refuse to allow tenants to run encrypted workloads. The concept of ownership is preserved, but some owners may choose to give up their ability to snoop in order to attract tenants who otherwise would be incapable of using cloud infrastructure at all.
Someone made the same web app in 11 different languages and loves rails but admitted there's install issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQPlEnKav48 (rails is the first framework reviewed, from 1m 40s).

I only code in 2 languages (R, and ruby) and first installed ruby before I had any computer science experience, and it took me 2 weeks to install (I tried with rbenv, had problems, then followed stack overflow instructions which concerned rvm, which in hindsight borked my install, laughably, but completely innocent mistake at the time). Amazing to learn the terminal, ruby, rails and a bunch of other things all at the same time, but compare that to onboarding to a language like R, which takes 3 minutes from first google search to install (including the remarkable RStudio IDE). 2 weeks Vs 3 minutes.

I love ruby/rails but I think being honest about newbie experience is important. I think ruby/rails communities suffer a little from the curse of knowledge. i.e. lots of very experienced people can't quite fathom how a newbie could even struggle.

I think a good test is whether a smart/leading person from another language or framework can use google to successfully and painlessly get started. If they can get everything up and running in good time, then we're in good shape, but otherwise it's a signal for potential to improve the newbie experience.

All this said, I'm like an excited kid every line of ruby/rails I write.
Internet applications have become dangerously correlated.
Doubling down on the mass production of cheap electronics through unethical labor is not a holy mission.
This idea of security is interesting. Having a backdoor built into the OS (Android, Windows 10, 11, 7 with telemetry) has nothing to do with security. You can have as many so called "security patches" as you want as long as the OS makes what it wants behind your back.
Not "one of", by far the most important one.

Just look at his totally fully autonomous autopilot(TM), coming ~2014~ ~2016~ ~2017~ ~2018~ ~in 6 months~ any day now this time I swear.
Call it what you will, but the point is it would be easy for them to do.
The Heroku Migration Program
I like your comments, even though I fall into the DL fanboy camp.

I hope that you read Gary Marcus’s and Ernest Davis’ book “Rebooting AI” - I think it would resonate with you, and it made me get a lot more interested in so-call “hybrid-AI” systems.
No worries at all :)

> Sorry to be blunt, but chances are they aren't very good, and they are definitely not as good as they think they are.

I don’t know what to tell you.

It’s just so wrong it’s kinda wild how sure you are about this. At least half of the excellent colleagues I worked with in the past 10 years don’t fit your criteria. You’d be lucky to hire any of them.
I like what you're saying, but doesn't this just reduce to "garbage in, garbage out"?
Uh, wouldn't spammers just...stop using lots of hashtags? Part of what makes the problem difficult is that spammers are agents who respond to the techniques you use to stop them.
Zig as the “Kotlin of C” makes it very appealing. Kotlin has seen fantastic adoption in JVM projects because you can convert files one at a time from .java to .kt, with only a modicum of one-time build system shenanigans up front. Then your team can gain experience gradually, fill in missing pieces like linters over time, all without redesigning your software.

What zig offers is even better - because zig included a CC, you can actually reduce complexity with zig by getting a single compiler version for all platforms, rather than a fixed zig + each platform’s cc. And with it, trivially easy cross-platform builds - even with existing C code. That’s cool! Go has excellent cross-compilation, but Go with C, not so much.

Rust is a powerful tool, but it’s a complex ecosystem unto itself - both conceptually and practically. It has great interoperability frameworks, but the whole set of systems comes at a substantial learning cost. Plus, porting an existing software design to Rust can be a challenge. It’s more like the “scala of C” if we’re trying to stretch the analogy past the breaking point.
Almost every US company I've been at gave at least 2 stand-alone monitors to every engineer. That's what stuck out to me.
For an interview, I took a copy of the product's source code to the interview with me to talk about issues it had.

They couldn't work out how I got hold of it. It wasn't open source and only distributed as a binary.

It got me the job. Risky strategy.
People have the notion that a latent representation in the animal sense, ie., a concept -- is the same thing as your "representation" in the NN sense.

That's not the case. You're right that if I find a predictive compressions of faces, say F1...n then they arent literal "rememberings". And they seem to be able to participate in a decision process (eg., classification) which doesnt seem to target pixel patterns.

However I think this is kind of an illusion. What `F1..n` are, are ambiguous pixel-space projections of the abstraction which isnt present in this projection. When I have the concept "this type of face" I can reason with it beyond similarity in pixel-space.

When we form representations we arent restricted to reasoning with them in only one space (eg., how faces look as pixels). We (perhaps superstitiously) impart to machine "representations" an actual depth which they lack.

They are templates derived from the spaces they live in, eg., pixel-space; and have only the properties that space affords (eg., pixel-geometry). Reasoning beyond that space, and those properties, doesnt work. People think it does. This is the illusion.

Templates derived from this data, that we provide, function like actual representations because we simplify the world for the machine -- and prepare its environment so that its pixel-space templates are good enough.
Relax it was a joke. You can state your appreciation without disparaging others who didn't follow your direct means of communication.
Sure, actions have consequences.

You align with free democracies so your fascist, mafia-state neighbor invades you.

Your mafia-state neighbor invades, so your democratic friends give you a whole load of weapons so you can humiliate the invading army, blow them up, force them to dig trenches in radioactive mud, blow them up some more, sink their capital ship, isolate their economy and make their joke of a military the laughing stock of the whole world.

Actions, consequences.
Starts off as an interesting thought exercise on privacy. Turns into a crypto shill. Crypto does not yield privacy. How many times does this have to be said?
I tried Seashore a few years ago but it was completely unstable. The link says they've done a lot of bug fixes to make it work on more recent macOS releases so I'm looking forward to checking it out.

EDIT: Downloaded and tried it. Glad that the UI is simpler than Gimp but it's actually less obvious how to use it. Sad, because I think there's real promise here. Hopefully Glimpse comes to macOS.
I forgot, Twitter is definitely where Obama hosts his most confidential direct messages he doesn’t want anyone else seeing
Seed banks: the last line of defense against a threatening global food crisis
I don't find the desk itself surprising, but I am surprised by the open office plan. I've found sharing an open space with more than two or three other people extremely distracting. I'm sure it depends a lot on the personalities of the coworkers.
I would rank that pretty low on my list of things to worry about a search engine doing. Actually, to me, that would be relatively fair in terms of monetization of a search engine product.

I would turn the feature on if asked by a reputable and well-meaning company. Especially in the case of a search engine seeing as they are providing the link afterall.
What percentage of the world's energy consumption do you think crypto uses?
One good lens I know is that a neural network is just good at approximating stuff. Trained properly, you can have it approximate a distribution. A conditional distribution like p(animal_species=dog | image=what I am seeing) (discriminative model, e.g. classifier), or even a joint one p(animal,image) (generative model, Autoencoder/GAN/VAE/Diffusion).

There is also an information theoretic lens about compression, which is probably very close to what you are thinking about, but I haven't studied it yet.

Regarding Image -> Animal. An image of an animal is a projection of the animal onto a 2D plane, plus lots of noise. So there is some dependance between an image of an animal and the animal. Biologists can get a lot of information looking at a photo of an animal. In some sense they are always looking at two images from their eyes.

But the problem you are talking about is indeed serious, and far from solved. You can't understand the real world from 2D images with the current approaches. Ideally we want neural networks to build a 3D (or even 4D, with time?) model of reality. Instead we find them trying to guess labels based on patterns. May favourite example is the tiger-dog [1]. Still, there is evidence NNs are doing some clever things [2]. My guess is that the problem is that we just haven't found a way to formulate the task for the solution we want. In the current formulation it's easiest for the model to minimize the loss by sticking to patterns, so why do something else?

There is a lot of research on more applied ML that asks the questions you are asking. It's just that this paper is another attempt at a theoretical explanation.

I agree on the self-driving cars. We can't have truly self-driving cars until a model can generalize, which none can't at the moment. The core question is: if we had a "dumb" model that does clever averaging and successfully covers 99% cases, such that the car is dumb in special cases, but smarter than most human drivers in usual cases, would it justify deploying the cars? If this was the case, dumb ML might be enough for self-driving. It's definitely enough for self-driving in walled garden conditions, so there is some evidence that with enough data we can brute force our way to a tolerable solution.

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/ucvflwwrm8idnp6/photo_2022-03-29_2...
[2] https://distill.pub/2020/circuits/
I am sure you are the life of the party.