skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you. I think OP is way off the mark here. I actually think Lex is super thoughtful and humble. Always giving praise to people and never bringing much of his academia efforts.
Not similar. The SUM() function was written by humans in a top-down fashion, DALL-E learned from the visual and textual data by a completely different process. DALL-E distilled something about the world and is using that to generate.
>As for this particular truck, it does not look like it's particularly impressive in terms of torque, range, etc. 400km range is well below the 500 mile range that Tesla is advertising for the Tesla Semi

Ah yes, the classic comparison of a real product versus something Tesla says on a website splash page.
> Anyone running a small business in a niche space knows that targeted advertising works.

My partner runs a small business in a niche space and spends a million/year on ads.

She doesn't need customers to be tracked across sites or long term information maintained about their interests or behaviour. She really just needs to sell ads via (a) direct searches and (b) retargeting people who have visited her own site.
IDK if they are unique, but Google is really big and feels like it lacks strong leadership and vision. Google has also never struggled or had a catalyzing moment that brings clarity to vision.

Apple makes tons of money, but they still have many people in leadership positions who were around when they almost went out of business.

FB has always been a bit paranoid, probably b/c they knocked off MySpace. They are having that catalyzing moment right now.

MS has had a few of those moments over the years.
A Celebrity CEO’s Rule of Fear Helped Bring Down Hot Startup Zilingo
I just see him as a guy that has interesting conversations with interesting people. I don’t understand the need to Joe Rogan him.
If we assume general relativity is correct, then singularities are an unavoidable result of black holes. The math simply does not allow for such a large density to not form a singularity. Having said that, we know GR is not correct, as it fails to account for any quantum phenomena; and we have thus far been unable to combine GR and QFT into a unified theory. Attempts to combine the theories fall under the title of quantum gravity. Several proposed theories of quantum gravity predict that black hole singularities do not exist.
988 and suicide prevention hotlines: A research roundup
Thanks James! We're just getting started, and the current thinking is that we'll add depth to our courses along different "branches". e.g after you've been through the basic stages of Redis, you can continue along a path to dive deeper within the persistence aspects of Redis, or the networking aspects.

You can preview the current stages for each of our courses here: https://app.codecrafters.io/tracks/go. You can do a trial to get a feel for the learning experience. If you find that the current stages aren't at the complexity level you're looking for, you should keep an eye out for future updates (would also love to hear what other stages / branches you'd suggest for our courses)
Why was it necessary to bring in pronouns to this discussion? It seems like a truly irrelevant dog whistle specifically in order to offend the identity of those that are non-binary. It has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand at all.

I thought hacker news strived to at least have some decorum in regards to discussion.
I get where you're coming from, and agree to some degree, but your example is just unrealistic hyperbole.
Show HN: Penumbra, a perceptually optimized color palette based on natural light
For this palette, I used recent advances in color science, which made perceptual design more accessible, to choose a set of colors (mainly for syntax highlighting) that have uniform luminance for less visually uneven, fluidly readable code, but at the same time maximally distinguishable hue and chroma. The background colors are based on natural (sun-)light and shade for a more pleasing look than equally neutral greys.

For much more detailed info, including the construction, check out the repository.

There’s also already a (bare-bones) VSCode extension, linked in the repository, but it could admittedly use more informed distribution of colors over tokens, language specific highlighting and perhaps more opinionated use in UI elements.
But how do you access the heat of a cubic km of rock three km below ground?

It would take more than a well. A lot of wells.

I love this idea in general but it seems to me it will only work if you find water underground to carry the heat. I am not a geologist
At least 50% of my day job could be described as "replace some guy's Excel file that got out of hand". I'm not even mad, I'll die before excel does.
We are building a SaaS BI tool.

To enable the users to connect to their databases... we have a form that collects the database credentials from the user, saves it in a secure way, and when the user writes or uses an SQL query, we establish a database connection right away (from our server), execute it, and return the results, and we keep the connection alive for like 15mins.

But with serverless architecture, first query could go to instance 1, so instance 1 will establish a db connection, then the second query could go to instance 2, so instance 2 will establish another one. You could end up with a lot of unnecessary connections.

If you use AWS RDS (for yourself), beside lambda for example, AWS have RDS Proxy to solve this problem.

So I was thinking about using Trino like the RDS Proxy, but for more databases, and for our customers database, not ours. Is that doable with Trino?
That's a non-sequitur, no?
Looks great, honestly would have loved something like this back in university!
I dunno, more effectively support causes you already donate to? Help less well-off people participate more fully in your hobbies? Fund cool projects in your hobby?
Sure, opened an issue.
Old news... Charlton Heston already figured out the secret years ago!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UPDUpjkHg0
>If I am being pedantic, "x^2" are still nonlinear though

yes, and this is where this paper should have been stopped, with no ill intention towards the authors.

Polynomial networks have gotten good results (my colleague https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=1bU041kAAAAJ has done extensive work on them) and there have been multiple papers studying multiplicative interactions and the effects of feature engineering, dozens of small tweaks on activation functions, not to start with the NAS papers automating the whole process. But higher numbers get a paper in I guess
Breaking it down into a series of operations would help a lot. perl-esque obfuscated one-liners are just that.
For Weaviate, you can check: https://weaviate.io/developers/weaviate/current/benchmarks/a...
This is not a benchmark against other OSS solutions, but it gives you an understanding of what performance you can expect.

For production this might be helpful: https://weaviate.io/developers/weaviate/current/getting-star...
At work we use meet.google.com for our standard chats. I've read a few articles and I'm still not sure what is happening to that.

Annoyingly meet.google.com kills my machine since Chrome on Linux has spotty hardware acceleration support and whenever I'm on a call it maxes out my CPU.
Can you give a more detailed description of what you were trying? I can't know for sure, but it sounds like Excel can easily handle what you've described, if you use it right.

>the entire paradigm revolves around knowing the shape of your data in advance.

How exactly do you program without knowing the shape of your data in advance? You need to know your database columns, or your JSON schema, etc.

>(I was using Google Sheets, but I don't think Excel would have been much different).

It would have been very different, because Excel has tables and Powerquery and Google Sheets doesn't.

>since it's a variable number of rows returned, it is difficult to then operate on that data without filling your formulas down for some indeterminate number of rows.

Were you using dynamic array formulae? They can handle the old problem of needing to fill down formulae to an arbitrary depth. Or again, tables.

Programmers routinely underestimate Excel. Unlike most Microsoft products, it has improved year on year over the past few decades. There are heaps of great power-user features they keep introducing. The skill ceiling is very high .. not as high as proper software engineering, but still damned high.

It also really annoys me when I see Linux/FOSS partisans tell Windows normies "oh you can do everything you can do in Excel in LibreOffice Calc" -- no you fucking well cannot. (And I use Linux on my personal computers full time).
They would call it Metaverse.
He asks for those explanations for the audience, in case a listener is ignorant of the subject...
Omnivore. This is the way it is and will be. Humans have survived due to this feature.

We are not ruminants. We don't have multiple stomachs.

Your emotions are the deciding factor in your position. I implore you to look at the animal kingdom with honesty and not a disney-washed, Blue Planet version for children.

Nature is harsh and awful. Animals often die by incredibly vicious means from predators. Gored and crushed in their jaws.

We are humane to a fault. Now people are so disconnected from the reality of nature, they expect to impose restrictions based on their emotions. I find this argumemt to be lacking substance.

The developed world you highlight is dependent on petrochemicals. Everything you have and use. Leather is one of the very few durable goods that is not.
He turned his youtube lectures channel on self driving into "MIT AI Podcast", which helped him get a ton of top ML people on and then pivoted that into "Lex Fridman Podcast" with a lot more IDW style crackpots mixed in, lending them credibility that they don't deserve.
Do you have analytics that back that up, or just statements and surveys?

As a backend focused dev who's very interested in low code, I've tried them all and they fall short after the honeymoon. Most recently Plasmic.app, had (has) great promise once their product matures. They nailed the developer facing workflow. The problem is twofold, (1) that the UI is big, slow, and buggy (2) the code that comes out the other side is super heavy. A blank component added 50% to my bytes shipped.

The hard question to answer is what does that interaction point look like? Why is the backend dev even tasked with doing the frontend?

You'll face a point where you will have to decide who your paid product is for, and every drag-n-drop for developers has pivoted to non-developers, because getting something that most developers actually love has proved impossible to date.
It's not though, they really do wildly exaggerate trivial things to aggrandize MIT; we could go digging for examples, there are many.

It's understandable, reputation is valuable, both for organizations and for the individual.

So, I can't blame Lex and I can't blame MIT, but I can say that I absolutely notice it.
the problem you run into then is how does it adapt to new domains? sure large models display some degree of generalization, but new tasks will certainly ask things the network couldn't get
I've not tested this, but I suspect you can get DALLE to create pictures that humans are more likely to describe as 'nonsense' by adding 'nonsense' or 'nonsensical' to the prompt. That'd indicate that it absolutely does have an idea about 'nonsense' and can recognize, & reproduce within its constrained output, 'nonsense' that's largely compatible with human ideas of what 'nonsense' is.

Asking it to produce noise, or raise an objection that a prompt isn't sufficiently meaningful to render, is a silly standard because it's been designed, and trained, to always give some result. Humans who can object have been trained differently.

Also, the GPT models – another similar train-by-example deep-neural architecture – can give far better answers, or give sensible evaluations of the quality of its answer, when properly prompted to do so. If you wanted a model that'd flag nonsense, just give it enough examples, and enough range-of-output where the answer your demanding is even possible, and it'll do it. Maybe better than people.

The circumstances & limits of the single-medium (text, or captioned image) training goals, and allowable outputs, absolutely establish that these are different from a full-fledged human. A human has decades of reinforcement-training via multiple senses, and more output options, among other things.

But to observe that difference and conclude these models don't "understand" the concepts they are so deftly remixing, or are "just a very complex and impressive mirror", does not follow from the mere difference.

In their single-modalities, constrained as they may be, they can train the equivalent of a million lifetimes of reading, or image-rendering. Objectively, they're arguable now better at composing college-level essays, or rendering many kinds of art, than most random humans picked off the street would be. Maybe even better than 90% of all humans on earth at these narrow tasks. And, their rate of improvement seems only a matter of how much model-size & training-data they're given.

Further: the narrowness of the tasks is by designers' choice, NOT inherent to the architectures. You could – and active projects are – training similar multi-modality networks. A mixed GPT/DALLE that renders essays with embedded supporting pictures/graphs isn't implausible.
Isn't that because Duo comes installed on new Android phones but Meet doesn't? It might be that Meet has more daily users.
Technically it's slower, but absolutely meaninglessly so in the context of browsers.
I don't know, I kind of like his podcast and I'm glad he takes the more dry, analytical approach when compared to others.
My general impression is that it is, for many. Rust definitely has a reputation for being harder to learn than Python, for example, which is what I'm suggesting be fixed for one "step" of Rust. The ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes are a hurdle for someone who is almost certainly not going to be a full-time programmer, but needs to program sometimes, and more than toy programs.

I think even Rc might be a barrier, because it looks like more complexity than Pythonistas expect.
a) Laptops are serviceable and manuals/parts are available to self-repair them.

b) Headphone jacks are simply not useful for most people with the popularity of Bluetooth. And those that need them can use Apple's class leading USB DAC dongles.

c) Web browsers are such a significant security vector that I am fully in favour of heavily sandboxing them and restricting what they can do. I like my web sites to be different from my apps.
To be fair, none of the examples you gave seem just like "criticizing the government," honestly. Snowden physically leaked a bunch of docs he agreed ahead of time would be a criminal offense to leak. I think what he did was the right thing to do and we should have said that whistleblower protections apply to people in his position, but I feel like that's a different problem?
Toeverything/AFFiNE: privacy first knowledge base
You're right about the basic dynamic -- convenient platforms with network effects are always going to have the bigger draw, probably by orders of magnitude.

At the same time, though, the value proposition of a social networks & media isn't linear with user volume. There's always a floor beneath which the value isn't there, but once you meet that bar there's different kinds of value available depending on who is participating, what kind of effort they're putting into contributions, and maybe even value presented by limitations/exclusivity.

The Reader / Blogger infra could have been an effort to focus on high value networks vs high volume networks. Which, you could argue, is exactly what the value proposition of Google's core product (search) was in the first place.

Blogs still aren't an empty room, so I think the floor would have always been there.
Ooh, super interesting. Thank you! We weren't aware of Unidays / StudentBeans, indeed sounds like something we should explore. We have organically seen students sign up — so I'm sure a more favorable pricing to them could go a long way.
Like, subscribe and comment are all social interactions and they indeed are counted in recommendations.
He talks all about it in his Joe Rogan interview. From memory tl;dr: The positives of social media outweigh the negatives.
Yes. He may be a bit of a gray museum wall, but I don't go to the museum and think "gee, a pink polka dot background would really set off this Rembrandt painting."

He doesn't get in the way, and that's more than can be said about a lot of people vying for attention these days.
Well, HN comments are indexed, and HN itself links to >90% third-party websites. Aggregators like HN would likely be part of an (itself unlikely) resurgence of individual websites. It's like an interactive version of the old Yahoo.
What do you think is the practical difference between “track[ing] across sites” and “information maintained about their interests and behavior”, and “retargeting people who have visited her own site”?
Hi, I like capnproto as well, thanks for making it. :)
You mean a liquid hydrogen carrier pathway like liquid ammonia. That seems possible, but requires extra plants and equipment, and obviously you still have to store H2 if you want to burn it in an engine in a vehicle.
I use it in Rust just fine, FWIW.
DALL-E is the writing on the wall for those with a competing talent to start looking for other (non-art) work they may want to do in the future. It would be an egregious error to think that AI art programs are some new tool to learn akin to photoshop. Maybe that will hold true for a few years at best.

There will come a point, much sooner than later, where the value in typing prompts into an AI is going to only be worth minimum wage.
It's far too early to tell if consciousness is adaptive. Has it enabled humans to be wildly successful? In the short term, sure! But the long term is unclear.

E.g., look at how the technological progress it makes is at risk of destroying human civilization. A series of ecological boom/bust cycles could lead toward negative selection for consciousness. Or we might manage to wipe out ourselves or, say, most mammals, leading life on earth to start over as it did 65m years ago.

But even without that, it's not clear to me that consciousness will really win out. Look at the number of successful people who are not only painfully unreflective, but need to be to keep doing what they're doing. I could name a lot of people, but today's good example is Alex Jones, whose whole (very profitable) schtick is based on refusing to be fully conscious of what he's saying: https://popehat.substack.com/p/alex-jones-at-the-tower-of-ba...

And this is hardly a new idea. Vonnegut wrote a novel where humans end up evolving into something like a sea lion. The point being "all the sorrows of humankind were caused by 'the only true villain in my story: the oversized human brain'", an error evolution ends up remedying.
> work for oculus too, but then leave

Not sure about his current work status with Oculus, but he did not leave immediately; turned into a consultant or something like that - from CTO
How does he misrepresent himself?

The MIT directory lists him as a "Research Scientist"[0] and he has solid set of papers he's published on self-driving cars and AI[1]. This is completely consistent with the way he describes himself: "I'm an AI researcher working on autonomous vehicles, human-robot interaction, and machine learning at MIT and beyond"

[0] https://www.mit.edu/directory/?id=lexfridman&d=mit.edu
[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=wZH_N7cAAAAJ&hl=en...
There's a science-fiction story somewhere in there. Imagine an alien planet where brains evolved using a structure completely different than a neural net... some sort of classification model where they were incredibly efficient inside their domain, but broke unpredictably when brought outside of it.
I actually do almost everything in the CLI (checkouts, pull/push, branches, most no-conflict merges, most rebases, tags, etc), however when you're rebasing, messing with branches and merges, nothing beats a visual medium to just even look at the graph and make sense of it.
"Excel" became a synonym for spreadsheets. There are millions of SMEs, today, running on spreadsheets that aren't Excel. My wife runs her little SME with her paid-for Google Workspace / G Suite: she and her employees are happily filling 'em little cells from the browser in their Google world (for better or worse). There are millions of SMEs like these.

I should know better and run some spreadsheet locally (or maybe use Emacs, which of course can do simple spreadsheet stuff) but I don't bother: I use Google spreadsheets for my VAT, tax, fuel/car mileage computation etc.

Many people around me do just that: they never used any advanced spreadsheet feature and Google spreadsheet is sufficient.

It's as if anyone using GMail who eventually discovered the "Google Drive" then realized he had "Excel" there too (it's Google spreadsheet but they don't care, they still call it Excel). How many people are using GMail?

I also know, shocker, one Apple afficionado using Apple numbers although the Apple users I know typically have GMail / Google spreadsheet.

Now here's the funny kicker: besides during that one gig in a 50 K employees boat, I don't know anyone still using Excel. And, oh the irony, at that gig I was tasked with porting a spreadsheet to a dedicated app.

Of all the Mac laptop users who don't bother having a desktop anymore... Certainly there are some (like my wife) who need a spreadsheet right? Are these people actually all buying Excel to run it on their Mac? Or are Mac users not spreadsheet users!?

I'm confused.

To me a more correct article title would be:

"Spreadsheet never dies" (and "Excel" became a synonym for "spreadsheet").
I like my strictness just as much as anyone else, but this seems like a "works in practice" vs "works in theory" issue to me. Linearizability is just not as important as some people make it out to be.

(On a slightly meta level, you can see this happening for a great many issues in programming. Memory safety is undeniably nice, but approximately none of the worlds databases or kernels are written in memory safe languages. Type safety is nice but a huge majority of frontend code is untyped. Don't even get me started on the value of unit testing vs its absence in academic code)
If you want to be able to see data in the browsers network inspector, you do. If you are already serving gRPC-web, you can use the gRPC-web transport in connect-web, it supports both protocols. It doesn't support plain gRPC because web browsers do not expose trailers, and gRPC uses them extensively.
> Transactions are applied independently on each storage host

I’m not talking about transaction application, but obtaining your slot in the global transaction log. How does a replica know it isn’t missing a transaction from some other shard if that shard is offline come its turn to declare transactions in the log? It must at least receive a message saying no transactions involving it were declared by that shard, no?

This is pretty core to the Calvin approach, unless I misunderstand it.

> I'm not at liberty to say.

I think scalability is something that is a function of both theoretical expectations and practical demonstration.
That's his thing though. He acts humble but behind the scenes he manipulates