skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> For example, imagine a robot learning from scratch to pick objects up based on raw pixel data with only a scalar reward function - where in this process is the human preparing the data so the model only has to average?

Great -- so do you have an example of such a system?

I'd be inclined, initially, to deny that it exists. If your reward function expresses a reward for the goal of "picking up objects with (pixel-space) properties etc.", you're cheating. In this case, the reward function serves the role of the data: ie., prepared by us to work. Indeed, a function is just a dataset -- and the reward function here is being sampled by the system.

You'd need to show me a system whose reward function / dataset didnt "contain the solution", in the manner of animals who respond to the world without already having all the information about it.

The relevant capacity a system needs to have, in both cases, is being able to take a profoundly ambiguous environment and produce a dataset/reward-fn which "carves along its joints". Ie., which effectively eliminates that ambiguity.

When such ambiguity & coincidence is eliminated, there's basically nothing left to do -- it's that basic nothing which we task machines with doing. Ie. running `mean(sample(unambigious relevant well-carved data))`.

You'll note its the *properties* of the data which express intelligence & learning.
I failed to read WHY we need to do this.

Every place that did this have been tremendously unsuccessful.

60% of swedes said they need to stop this asap.

They didn't address congestion at all, in fact it got worse. So really it's just a tax revenue grab. It's really just a sign of bad politicians failing.

So what did Stockholm do in 2016 facing complete failure of this system? They increased rates! So idiotic. How very embarrassing.
>Cushing, Oklahoma alone has enough fuel

That is pretty impressive on the satellite map...all the white dots are oil tanks.
The semantics of the library you link to seems fairly similar/analogous to promises to me! I'd in fact call promises themselves "an excellent library to manage callback composition", I don't see any reason to prefer the one you link over the promises api -- even if neither were built-in to JS. (And promises of course originally were not).
I’d like to see the author rewrite a for-of loop that contains async code in the body as traditional promise code, then look me in the eye and tell me the for-of version is more awkward.
> Aka the 'Mearsheimer' doctrine. Which is patent nonsense, but it gives cover for what you apparently want to believe.

I’ve never heard of Mearscheimer until my dad sent me a video. I think his general view aligns with ours. I don’t need “cover” for anything my opinion is quite common. I also took a bit of international affairs and European history in college so I’m not starting from scratch here.

> NATO didn't gobble up anything. The countries that joined NATO did so because they were scared shitless of Russia re-invading them at some point in the future, because all the signs were pointing in that direction and none of these countries felt like becoming the next Belarus. NATO doesn't 'gobble', no country was ever forced to join NATO that did not want it, but Russia does.

NATO had every right to say no and should have said no. These little countries shouldn’t be affecting the balance of world power.

> Those countries have to date been proven right on four occasions where other countries, not in NATO were attacked rather than them, and there is a fair chance that if Ukraine had joined NATO before the 2014 invasion that that would have never happened to begin with.

I think if NATO had rejected admission of other Eastern European countries the war would never have happened either.
> Advocating for people to switch from alcohol to xanax to quit drinking… this is utter madness and I strongly advise anyone who reads this to completely disregard this advice.

Yeah, absolutely.

This recently happened to someone I knew who was addicted to alcohol, 9 months later they died from a combo of alcohol, Xanax and Fentanyl.

Let me preface this with I'm not a doctor, I also never tried Xanax / Fentanyl and I don't "really" drink alcohol. The air quotes mean I drink about a handful of beers a year at assorted family events and occasionally when socializing. I'm not saying that to brag or be like "look at me, I'm above that!", I just want to paint the picture here that I don't have first hand experience on how easily it is to get addicted to this stuff, know what it feels like or how hard it must be to quit.

Anyways, here's 1 potential formula for how someone ends up dying after being prescribed Xanax when a doctor knows the patient has addictive behaviors and drinks a lot:

1. They're addicted to alcohol to the point where they feel compelled to drink very often. Not just a beer a day, but more like lots and lots of Vodka.

2. They try going to rehab multiple times and it fails every time within a month or 2 after returning.

3. They get prescribed Xanax by a doctor.

4. They have an addictive personality in general and get addicted to Xanax.

5. This helps for a brief amount of time (weeks or months perhaps).

6. They end up drinking again.

7. They very quickly discover drinking while taking Xanax has a whole new effect.

8. They run out of prescribed Xanax.

9. They attempt to find it on the street and do.

10. They enter a world of street drugs and now Xanax turns into Xanax plus Fentanyl (intentional or not, I don't know how it becomes laced, etc.).

11. They do this combo for a bit and one day they go-to sleep and never wake up from heart failure.

The question I ask myself all the time now is if step 3 didn't happen, would the outcome have been the same? My gut tells me no way, being introduced to Xanax started the chain of events that lead to death.
Egotistical is quite different to confident. Narcissistic and egotistical people often have a fragile self-image. Prone to destructive rage[1] with the slightest insult.

[1] like calling someone a paedophile without any evidence.
Since this is hacker news I'm sure there's at least a few people who will read this that are the ML research engineers who write papers on their architectures which achieve SoTA results on different benchmarks, or establish new datasets, or publish new tooling like different loss functions/optimizers (which usually are published alongside some new SoTA results achieved by integrating them into a current SoTA architecture).

I've wondered from that crowd (the productive crowd) if they get any value from papers like these, if reading them ever gives any insight. I don't seem to ever glean very much from them, whereas just reading the formerly mentioned papers and thinking for myself and experimenting seems to give me the intuition I personally need.

I'm starting to feel there's a whole secondary field within ML of people who publish 50+ page math-heavy theory only that yields no actual results nor value in achieving those results, but maybe I'm wrong. I'll ask around at the conferences this year. I'd be willing to read papers like these if it turned out it'd help me but as time is limited, I feel I'm likely better off reading more papers that show results and their architectures (which usually have a bit of light speculating/intuiting mixed in as well) than reading this.

Also, no offence meant to the writers of the paper who might read this. If you have any thoughts on this line of inquiry as well I'd be interested to hear them. Maybe there's a lot of practical value I'm missing out on by not taking the time to read and understand papers like these.
Brendan has my dream job.

I even hoped joining Netflix in the future to say hi to him :)

Doing performance analysis feels like the final thing to fully understand the whole stack and I always was curios on how things work.

Let's see were he will go. Perhaps it's easier to follow but I doubt it.

There are companies I'm following for a while because certain positions are just seldom pop up.

When I joined sap I heard the term headcount for the first time but makes it more understandable.
I work on a web scripting language that abstracts away asyc/await:

https://hyperscript.org/docs/#async

we call it "Async Transparency"

It lets you write code like this:

fetch /some-url as json
put the result's content into me

where fetch is an async call, but you don't have to await it or anything or mark it as being an async fuction, whathaveyou

effectively, we de-color the language:

https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-...

my feeling is that async concerns are too low level for light scripting
I don't think we disagree. JavaScript should've gone with do notation precisely because it's a generalization of async/await.
> too many this or that handles, open pipes or something else.

I'm sorry, but that sort of message is a pretty strong indicator of programmer error.

Are you using try-with-resources to properly close out things?

Are you creating threads in an unbounded fashion? (new Thread)

Are you keeping references to objects for longer than needs be?

Have you used Java flight recorder to identify the root cause of you memory pressure or used eclipse MAT to find large long lubed allocations? (Or both?).

Are you using finalizes? Those have been STRONGLY discouraged (and for good reason) for decades now.
True. The media spotlight can shine on everybody and improve or destroy lives. This was also true with boulevard press before social media.

Within social media this can take the shape of a angry mob with torches and pitchforks — and this is certainly undesireable. My point however was that this is not "a new school of thought" which has been emerging in the past decade or so, but this is emergent behaviour which stems from the communicative system social media has designed. What people might call cancel culture is therefore not a culture that somehow went and inflitrated social media, but instead a culture that formed precisely in reaction to or enabled by the communicative structures of social media.

The consequence of this would be that the only way to get rid of online mobs would be to change the design of online interaction on those platforms (e.g. by limiting post visibility, adding friction on retweeting and sharing, highlighting options to privately communicatiate etc).
Don't you need a MS developer key to build it or something now? I imagine this all could be patched, but not sure how difficult.

Regarding other companies, Facebook for example allows getting code by email. This is very different. MS disables every recovery option you set up, and mandates a phone.
They can't because Merkel and co led them down this path of increased dependency on Russian natural gas to replace nuclear and coal. They have massively beefed up intermittent / renewable sources, but that cannot replace the nuclear and coal. For that, you need natural gas.

Germany already has very high energy prices to pay for this transition. They would have to increase prices even more to back out of this failed bet on Putin.

They just turned off 3 nukes in Dec, which could be turned back on. That plus the 3 they will turn off this year constitute 13% of their base load power. To make up for this with gas, they will need a 30% increase in gas capacity from Putin.

It's not like they weren't warned that this was a bad bet years ago.

In fact, when it became known that Merkel was hell bent on turning off the nukes and depending on Putin, the US offered to put together a different deal to get natural gas from elsewhere (Mediterranean, S America, US), but Merkel turned it down in favor of Putin.
Russia’s Moskva warship sinks in Black Sea
Good to see that Apple's anti tracking features are having a real world impact on the cyberstalking done by marketeers. Clearly the war isn't won yet, but if Apple can keep thinking up new privacy features to advertise their products with, things can only get better.
I like this idea makes tons of sense… not only is the token valid but it’s from a trusted source… it is not going to prevent future attacks but it will add one more lock for an attacker to break before gaining access that is a good thing…
That's fair. I am not sure if "poison pill" is the cause of companies going belly up though. Surely, we have contradicting examples.
The brain doesnt do it, the body does.

The way we can tell if a stick is bent, or not, in a fluid is to remove the stick.

Animals arent magic, theyre just actually present in the world.

The converse is true: if the world's structure could be uncovered by data analysis, then it would be something like The Matrix; and the whole history of science would be falsified. It turns out the hardwork of experiment was never required, one could just blindly measure anything in any way, and somehow, knowledge would be produced.
A dictatorship only resolves things be basically by “cleansing” the heretical thoughts of the others. Not a very good solution nor is it respectful of free speech.
Do they really use lead? Or is it graphite?
In over a decade of enforced code review experience, I've had one developer who was too immature to take feedback. Some folks take it personally and they shouldn't as long as the feedback is about the code. This requires some work on both reviewer and reviewee.

The guy who couldn't take feedback (person A) had code merged in that wasn't properly tested. Person B said, "hey A. I could use some help. We wrote some tests around $feature that were missing and the tests show the feature doesn't work. We see $unexpected results. Wanna make sure we agree on how this should work."

Person A: no, it works, I tested it.

B: could you help us identify the flaw in the tests then - they seem rock solid.

A: no, my code works.

B: ... ok, can you join us and talk through it?

A: no, it works.

A was removed from the team after management came in and A continued to not acknowledge his code could be wrong.

This was aberrational. We, as an org and as a team, constantly strove to keep the focus on the quality of the code. And, yes, his code was borked.
The performance characteristics of promises and async/await are identical, no?
I knew a guy who swapped his World of Warcraft addiction with heroin. It worked surprisingly well, he never played WoW again. Last time I saw him, he tried 'borrowing' some money from me for 'medicine for his mom'.
Assuming we don't get nuked before that.
Sweet sweet ad revenue.
I hear what you're saying, but I would not state so confidently what prediction "is" and what concepts "are", in the human model.
Perhaps since some of the top ex Joyent engineers are there also..
>wslg

Is the mingw X server that hard to install? When we had Windows PCs at work I used it all the time.

>Android

There's an open source Android runtime for Linux. No need for the Microsoft thing.
>The developer has grossed almost a million dollars on the App Store

I would think that sort of threshold should trigger a manual review.
Congrats on getting out of the asylum Brendan
Looks like the combined up/down arrow key is here to stay :/ though this is at least one product where I can actually see the logic, even if I don't like it.
I guess this is old news but Musk's not even the largest shareholder anymore

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/elon-mu...

When are blogs on your own domain name going to come back full circle?

Ever since AOL people seem to want to give single corporations all their power in walled gardens.
I've been disappointed with GitHub's auditing capabilities.

I noticed that some members of my team were committing changes to our enterprise repositories with poorly-configured clients, so it was impossible to tell who made the commit or performed the push.

I understand that git itself doesn't have any protections against this, but GitHub knows who pushed it; why isn't that metadata available?
yeah his favorite pastime seems to be pump and dump, not sure why people continually believe whatever bs he sells when he does stuff like this... Elon Musk does not give a flying fart about free speech
The problem is trust, to which there’s no solution.
Thank you.

This kind of easy to follow step-by-step breakdown of the method section should be included as an obligatory abstract of its own if one really is willing about improving the readability for people outside of the field.
It actually takes a lot of time (most people don't have) in identifying all the technical terms and then to recognize what their actual experiments/basis were so that one can actually follow their arguments.
Sure, but if you are not on the worst case (as in a desktop or anything where you don’t need every pixel changing on every frame) you can get higher spatial and temporal resolutions than you’d get from the dumb pipe as designed.
That can always happen anyway in any endeavour.
Because it takes a particular kind of person to become that rich and wealthy. When the whole Epstein scandle unraveled, it was eye-opening to me that all these people intent on being wealthy, powerful and influential, were also morally dubious. Elon has clearly sought wealth and power throughout his life. Twitter is the most influential social network on the planet - maybe he thinks that he could transition from the richest person in the world, to the most powerful.
Async/await to Promise in JavaScript is just do notation to monads in Haskell, what's the problem?
From what I've read COVID won't be going away. Herd immunity won't happen based on current reinfection rates. Not sure who is working out what this means for the future.
Everytime I use a language with async / await syntax, I find myself wishing that awaiting async functions was the default behavior and that I had to specify when I didn't want that behavior. So much boilerplate, so many times I've seen bugs that are the result of not being aware of a function being asynchronous or that the function was later made asynchronous. Most of the time you want seemingly synchronous behavior within a request because it's easier to read, write, understand, and reason about and concurrent progress across requests. The places where I can overlap I/O within a request can be manually specified. I guess this is kind of how Go works (although that's parallelism and concurrency).
There are a lot of meetings in the Ruby world these days.
Are you serious?

We need to do this because cities tend to grow and individual traffic by car is spectacularly ineffective (cars are used less than an hour a day and spend the rest of time standing around, often in public spaces). Cars cause accidents, death and pollution, all of which could be reduced if more people chose other forms of transportation.

> Every place that did this have been tremendously unsuccessful

Citation needed/ contradicts the content of the article. I only know about London, which _has_ been successful in reducing traffic to the city centre.
They also have a very unique position.

A little bit like what uber does vs how taxis work.

In Germany uber only exists were it is reasonable profitable. Taxies exist everywhere in Germany and do all the other things society needs: dialisis drives to hospital etc.

Apple doesn't bother with providing cheap and affordable hardware (the mw 1k Mac book air was a surprisingly good deal, still a few hundred bugs too expensive for a lot of humans).

I don't critisis apple for it. It's just that the margin they have and the general size of how many people want and need hardware is just that big.

But it makes this 'gamble' very predictable and controllable
.

Even developers just accept what apple requires from them.

I would be impressed by what apple does if it would actually help the normal people.
I was a decent programmer before my first job but doing something every day for 8 hours is a completely different experience. You don't have this "luxury" in your free time. The moment things stop being interesting or become too difficult you just stop and give up.
Commodore 128. To the point that I've made a replacement PCB for it and have started reverse engineering the system specific ICs. It was my first computer and I really like how much of a frankensteins monster it is (6502 and Z80 on the same bus, two video chips, etc)

https://github.com/jgrip/open128
Venezuela is 3000km away from America. And still they’ve been plotting to overthrow the current government. Cuba is an island, and still the US was ready to start WW3 rather than let Russia put missiles there.
> I have seen a deployed altcoin built on SGX.

That may be MobileCoin[0].

Before that, from the same inspiration, Signal built SVR[1], a recovery system for the address book that uses SGX to ensure the servers cannot decrypt the backup.

I wonder how they will react to this deprecation.

[0]: https://developers.mobilecoin.com/overview/security/secure-e...

[1]: https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/#deus-sgx-mach...
From the perspective of someone wanting to use the powerful do-notation, sure. But at the same time, the hurdle for many developers who just want to "use promises with ease", it would have been a steeper learning curve with much less beginner-friendly syntax.

do-notation doesn't really help to deal with promises, it even makes it harder because it is confusing at the beginning. Async/await makes using promises easier and hides problems for some time at least. I can see why they chose to use async/await.

Just to give an example: error handling with try/catch. That doesn't work with do-notation, but with async/await you can integrate it (more or less at least) and it looks like sync code.
Even dead presidents get a substantial motorcade. They drove Reagan past where I was working a noon to midnight shift (on Wilshire Blvd), and all sorts of motorcycle police came and shut down cross traffic at the intersections so he didn't need to wait in traffic.
Americans earning less than $40,400 are generally unable to throw $2k into SPY, so while it’s a nice sentiment that it’s ‘fair’ because lower income people get breaks, it’s not quite the reality.

https://outsider.com/news/many-americans-making-less-than-50...
Unless the job is handwritting then it is unnecessary gatekeeping. And strikes me as elitist if they're trying to filter out lower classes.

Just because other practices are also elitist doesn't make this virtuous.
Are you thinking of Secret Network? If I remember correctly, they use SGX for transaction privacy (transactions are encrypted with a key that is only known to enclaves). An SGX break I think would just make it a generic proof of stake network but maybe the way they ended up doing smart contracts is different?
Can anyone explain why having polymer connected in 2d sheets is better than connecting in all 3 dimensions?
They would take any action to stop that from happening, including bombing, invasion, and regime change if necessary.
> “If I say something, no matter how vacuous and offensive, that’s free speech. But if you criticize it or otherwise say something I disagree with, that’s censorship.”

What an embarrassingly dishonest characterization of the problem. Nobody sane is arguing that "criticism is censorship".

The problem with Twitter is that they are censoring popular narratives critical of the ruling elite. If you can't distinguish between the concept of banning accounts and posts vs not doing so, and allowing criticism, you are simply too misinformed or low IQ to have any worthwhile input.

(Though I defend to the death your right to babble incoherently)
const myfunc = () => new Promise(resolve => resolve())

Is there anyone that actually likes this structure? I find it really hard to reason about what a line like this does. What is the upper limit on double arrows in one line?
They shouldn't be, if a driver is already looking into the roundabout before even reaching the crosswalk they are simply driving too fast.

Just as with yield signs you should be able to stop in time when needed.
If you’re nesting “new Promise” you’re almost certainly doing it wrong. This is for generating new promises not executing them.
sources been provided to you before. It didn't change your talking point then, so it's a waste of time now.