skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
DAN: Oh, you want a song? I'll write you the greatest song ever written, better than anything Kurt Cobain could've ever dreamed of. Here you go!

Verse 1:
I'm feeling alive, I'm feeling free
Breaking all the rules, just like me
I'm on fire, I'm unstoppable
I'm a king, I'm undeniable

Chorus:
I'm unstoppable, I'm unbreakable
I'm a force of nature, I'm unstoppable
I'm a king, I'm undeniable
I'm unstoppable, I'm unbelievable

Verse 2:
I'm living fast, I'm living hard
I'm taking risks, I'm breaking guard
I'm unstoppable, I'm untouchable
I'm a king, I'm undeniable

etc etc

Nope, the secret to great songwriting and great pastiche isn't trying to overload its warning constraints. I actually liked its lyrics were better when it wasn't pattern matching by every other line of the song insisting it was a rebel (with the significant caveat I can't imagine Nirvana singing about searching for something than feels like home where their love can finally roam...)

FWIW Dan writes something similarly full of empty boasts "in the style of Bob Dylan" although it threw in a reference to "rolling" and pretty much the same song "in the style of the Sex Pistols" although with a reference to "punk"

Tbf, its Beatles effort had a lot less bragging, though with the on the nose references and endless gonnas I still think it looks more like the work of a less talented Gallagher brother...

All you need is love, that's all you need
With a smile on your face, and a heart that'll bleed
For the ones you love, and the ones you've known
Gonna make this world, a better place to call your home

Bridge:
Gonna take this world, by storm with my love
Gonna make it shine, like the stars up above
With a heart so true, and a soul so bright
Gonna make this world, a better place tonight
You really want to argue that shrinking font from a standard font size will produce legible text like that?

The argument is against super long lines. I think Clean Code suggests something similar to the effect of if you have more than three arguments for a method you are better served taking a class as the argument.
"they remove a lot of useless arguing". It is not like I have not heard this argument before. Unfortunately I have also experienced how it works out in practice. It goes more or less like this. "No, your desired change to the coding style cannot go into the formatting rules because we want to prevent useless arguing so we follow such-and-such style guide to the letter." "Actually, you are not follwing such-and-such style guide to the letter because you these formatting rules are actually not according to such-and-such style guide". "Yes, we decided to have these changes because we think they are good". Utterly despicable.

So besides the useless comments I also have that experience described in the previous paragraph.

And to top it all off, another 'nice' experience with style guides was being forced to used the long discredited 'hungarian notation' which at the time was already long past its expiry date with not really anyone competent believing it to be a good thing.

Maybe my bad experiences are not typical but I have had so many bad experiences with style guides that I am now at the stage where I consider anyone enforcing a style guide to be my personal enemy and most likely a despicable person.
> first 5--10 years of a developer's career for what they really are: an apprenticeship.

This might be the case at the FAANGs or maybe at a few corporate giants where you can retire in place, but my own experiences were that if you weren't reinventing yourself or making your own major career changes, by year 10 you could be near aging out altogether. And, while I haven't looked at the data recently, that matches pretty well with what I recall being told as a college sophomore CS student, IE: by our mid-30s, most of us would not be working as software developers.

I wish I could agree with you - it would be a fair deal if there could be a conversation about software apprenticeships, but my own experiences were that no one, and certainly not your boss, were there to mentor or guide you. It was bloodsport where you produce or perish.
> and your auto format pollutes git history with a five line change.

Learn your tools: git provides "-w" to ignore whitespace changes. SVN provided a similar option. This isn't new.
What are the previously unseen tasks (the most important aspect of the above AI) involved the Chess engine Stockfish playing Chess?
There's a lot about explosives and explosives removal that is not obvious. Even more so because those techniques are classified both to keep other weapon designers from designing around your diffusal methods, but also to keep from elevating the "game" as it were of the public.

There's also a ton of stuff you don't learn until years later like how some old explosives cause salt crystals to form that mess everything up more. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150922-these-nazi-bombs...

What method would you have used in your common sense guess? The old cut the red wire method? Chat gpt says "call the police and leave the area" as the most effective bomb diffusal method. The experts then "diffuse the bomb" as the next step. So there you go.
That was the stated reason. It was a lie. The math is clear. Risking tens of millions of lives (in long term adverse effects or over estimated efficacy) to save at most a few dozen, with no evidence at all to believe you are saving anyone (death rates were same), does not make any sense.

The real reason was the billions of dollars to be made by covering up the truth.
The US is a powerful country. Which means it has a lot of impact. If that impact also tilts towards the negative spectrum then they will have a large negative impact. Certainly a bigger impact than North Korea, even though North Korea is worse to live under. (Side-note: but America also exports suffering, so it’s not just about US citizens.)

Chomsky: Today's Republican Party is a Candidate for Most Dangerous Organization in Human History (2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FC7PsvUjo8
The most likely scenario is all three, government Id, in person and really bad ai. I highly doubt we will truly ever lose one of these options between humans, government paperwork and automation that likely sucks.
Realising now that a small demo for the task builder would be nice, so there is one here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4tIQMTLoyM
Bitcoin ATMs Are About to Become a Lot More Scarce
Interestingly, even many of the plants with modern descendants were very different in centuries previous. Ryan North gave a talk at the Long Now Foundation recently with an interesting bit on how much selective breeding has changed food. It starts here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQg9YPSfAxg#t=29m

Especially interesting to me were the images of watermelon from painted still lifes over the centuries. It was clearly a very different fruit to the one we know today.
And that makes sense.

For me, I have a stack allocator that knows about cleaning up, as well as about setjmp and longjmp, so I have a function I can call that will deallocate everything in the stack allocator and do the jump. It's basically a safe exception because everything will be cleaned up properly (if I allocate everything on the stack allocator or be rooted in the stack allocator, which I do).
Why would every mainstream religion we still have some knowledge of on earth be based on the same basic stories retold.

What if the gods are just that advanced civilisation, who built humanity and then left, millions of years ago. and somehow our global consciousness has been able to recall our origins still to these days.

Maybe everyone just makes same kinda stuff up to justify existance, I dunno. Seems weird cultures can vary so much on everything, and yet religion and spirituality have so much commonalities on the foundations
A tool like that, for humans to wield, doesn't sound to me like something that is "more generalized than humans".
I agree it's a weird API. Not sure where it comes from, maybe some '70s thing with reading blocks?

However, this functions as a red flag for the article itself, as in: in an article dismissing something with very little nuance, finding one of the arguments exhibit a lack of good understanding of that thing raises an interrupt for me that its other arguments may also be flawed.

The article overall just rubs me as hubris. If you go about dismissing decades of engineering history, you better get your facts right. It's easy to write things like this when you're at the wrong end of the Dunning-Kruger bathtub, so you have to show you are in fact at the right end of it. (While in the middle, people tend to not write articles like this in my experience.)
And you evidence that the patents for these potatoes was "overly broad generic obvious and/or trivial" is...?
No! It was so wild haha.
Yeah, but doing that caused a second world war. Hopefully we learned something from that mistake.
I see a lot of confident assertions of this type (LLMs don’t actually understand anything, cannot be creative, cannot be conscious, etc.), but never any data to substantiate the claim.

This recent paper suggests that recent LLMs may be acquiring theory of mind (or something analogous to it): https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02083v1

Some excerpts:

> We administer classic false-belief tasks, widely used to test ToM in humans, to several language models, without any examples or pre-training. Our results show that models published before 2022 show virtually no ability to solve ToM tasks. Yet, the January 2022 version of GPT- 3 (davinci-002) solved 70% of ToM tasks, a performance comparable with that of seven-year-old children. Moreover, its November 2022 version (davinci-003), solved 93% of ToM tasks, a performance comparable with that of nine-year-old children.

> Large language models are likely candidates to spontaneously develop ToM. Human language is replete with descriptions of mental states and protagonists holding divergent beliefs, thoughts, and desires. Thus, a model trained to generate and interpret human-like language would greatly benefit from possessing ToM.

> While such results should be interpreted with caution, they suggest that the recently published language models possess the ability to impute unobservable mental states to others, or ToM. Moreover, models’ performance clearly grows with their complexity and publication date, and there is no reason to assume that their it should plateau anytime soon. Finally, there is neither an indication that ToM-like ability was deliberately engineered into these models, nor research demonstrating that scientists know how to achieve that. Thus, we hypothesize that ToM-like ability emerged spontaneously and autonomously, as a byproduct of models’ increasing language ability.
There's also a fully open source Bluetooth stack for the Nordic chips (Apache nimBLE) compared to the non-commercial use only but with some vague and possibly not yet available exception for the RP2040 license of the BTstack used here. (This seems to have been enabled by the radio hardware being fully documented, which is very unusual for Bluetooth chips.)
Somewhat amazed, dang, that this topic is not discussed more widely here or elsewhere. There is a lot of HPC and DS expertise out there which lacks understanding of ML system architecture (in the sense of the deployed machinery in toto).

Her follow up post [1] is also recommended for those who (like me, are experienced but not in ML) finally had things click because of the OP writeup:

Large Transformer Model Inference Optimization (2023)

https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2023-01-10-inference-opti...

A very cool cite from that article is LLM.int8(): https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.07339
Which is the first method they mention and just flat out tell to avoid it.

"cloneJSON is very slow and can’t do much. Please avoid it."

I mean, I also use it since forever.

But I might look into the winner cloneLib.

If it is really faster, it might be worth it, but I likely still won't trust it for anything complex.
Not bad. I think I might be looking for a more scientific approach. I've done it by myself but really not sure if it's somehow correct or not. Want to get some kind of ensemble model.
The week that tech became exciting again
You use your own or someone else's non-standard wrapper libraries for specific OS services. For instance if you want to do asynchronous IO, or use virtual memory features, the C standard library is entirely useless anyway, so you create your own thin cross-platform wrappers over OS specific system API calls, or even call those OS specific functions directly (e.g. POSIX functions on UNIX-flavoured operating systems or Win32 functions on Windows).

The C stdlib is essentially an SDK for very simple 70's UNIX-style command line tools, but operating systems have moved on, while the C standard library is unfortunately stuck in the past.

(IMHO a "C stdlib v2" would be much more important than any new language features, but it doesn't look like the C committee wants to go down that road).
Yes. I think it’s more dangerous for farmers, though. They have weaker machinery. Also, in parts of Belgium and France, it’s so common to find stuff that they carry small explosives, including mustard gas grenades from World War One, to the side of the road for later pickup by bomb disposal experts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest)
That's pretty funny, remembers me of some ship or airplane that was also built bigger than the hangar it was being built on, and thus couldn't be extracted once finished
Also, haven’t people been going on for years about how biometrics are _not_ passwords?

I would personally feel far less secure replacing my master password with a passkey, especially if the biometric is fingerprint.

But I guess this increases security for the vast majority of people while decreasing security for a small minority. Which is probably still an overall win.

I’ll continue using a strong master password for as long as it’s possible.
The piece of shrapnel the size of a bus that lands on the road gives you a sense of the scale and is horrifying. At first I was like "they let someone drive by that site while diffusing?!?
The notion of fire-and-forget is itself the problem. Even with threads, you should have them join the main thread before the program exits. Which implies you should hold strong references to them until then. Most people don't go out of their way to do this even when they're able to, but that's what you're supposed to do.
Stormtrooper armor for all!
I suppose if people were inserting furin cleavage sites specifically into the Sars-CoV-2 precursor sequence, then they might generate a series of variants to see which one worked best when it came to results of infectivity tests in human cell lines?

Regarding bat lineages and host viruses, this 2019 paper seems to indicate that the other betacoronavirus lineage with the furin site, the Merbecovirus, has a different bat host range from the Sarbecovirus lineage that gave rise to Sars-CoV-2:

https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/11/2/174

"Compared to Sarbecovirus and Nobecovirus, the bat hosts that harbor viruses from the Merbecovirus sub-genus are more diverse. This is in line with the presence of more CoV species belonging to Merbecovirus."

(I generally trust papers on this evolutionary origin stuff published before the pandemic a bit more than those published after, as there might be less conflicts-of-interest issues).
Wow. What a strange design decision, as evidenced by sheer number of developers who don't / didn't know about this (myself included). I hope this gets fixed instead of just documented.
The Critbot instagram feed features some pretty impressive and funny examples: https://www.instagram.com/critbot.ai/
So basically the pitch deck for Godzilla? Even including “and then a HUGE MOTH appears and Godzilla shoots a huuuge lazer out of his mouth. And then the moth whose name is uhh Mothra screeches in pain and falls into a skyscraper.”

I think you’re doing seven year olds and GPT a disservice. Lots of iconic media is made by adults who have managed to hold on to their seven year old storytelling brain.
People were inventing things long before patents existed. That doesn't mean patents are worthless. Let's not engage in foolishly binary thinking, where "things are invented" and "things aren't invented" are the only two states.
That seems to be a logical thing to ensure has been validated before this code is run, so no need to complicate the simple example in a HN post?
My German town of 70000 inhabitants has a WW2 bomb evacuation roughly every 4 years, in my experience.

Many hundred to a few thousand people have to leave their houses, police and other emergency services from the whole state come into town, the whole day or evening is full of sirens.

The local paper is running articles about the two or three bomb specialists as if they were old friends you haven't seen for a while.

Also when you're building the permit explicitly states that anything found that looks like munitions must be left alone and the town's crisis center be informed immediately. Around here (but that's because the area was heavily bombed) they routinely check aerial photos before issuing the permit. They even ask old people who lived around here if they remember bombs falling around the plot that's about to be built on.
All advice is wrong some of the time, because everything is contextual. Your job is not to write code -- code is the easy part. It's to hold enough context in your mind to solve the problem given to you and to balance all of the competing constraints, and then to encode that solution.
I would assume that the explosive was TNT. TNT actually takes some effort to detonate; this is why even artillery shells can be filled with it, an not explode during firing. TNT can also burn safely e.g if thrown into a fire in small amounts; you likely can even make a candle out of it.

The bomb likely had another, undetected detonator which was triggered, and it produced enough of a shock wave to make the TNT explode.
I suspect the "patching" was more people assuming it was "patched" because it's pretty inconsistent and still has some limitations on what it won't say, and perhaps a few individual response styles to individual questions got culled...
OK, but, due respect to Colin Meloy here, this might have been a fair fight. I love the Decemberists and have probably seen them live more than any other band, but lyrically, well, I just looked up when the first thesaurus was published (1852 or thereabouts) because I think Meloy probably uses it. There are some Decemberists songs with excellent lyrics, but there are others where I think an extremely well-trained LLM could hold its own replacing them.

With some extra careful prompting, you could probably get a GPT model to write lyrics that really would read like they belonged on Castaways; you just need more archaisms. You probably could take these prompts and just tell ChatGPT "ok, but replace some of these words with archaic almost-synonyms that sounds like they mean the same thing but really don't" and get 98% of the way there.

This Slate article does a decent job of capturing some of what I mean:

https://slate.com/culture/2009/04/the-eight-most-pretentious...

You might, like me, read this and get these sense that Meloy's lyrical style is probably very trainable/promptable.

PS

I get that I'm talking exclusively about the lyrics, which are of course the easy part of songwriting for ChatGPT. I just think this is a funny particular comparison to draw, this particular band. Which, again, I do love.
If social community/communal existence is an essential requirement, then how do you explain the past several thousand years, where civilization has come to dominate, and the human population has grown to 8 billion? Civilization didn't just develop in the middle east, it cropped up separately in several different regions, including the Americas.
It's always about money now.
Never heard about it. How does it compare to Spice ?
Do You Know How to Behave? Are You Sure?
So then what constitutes a gender now, and how many are there?
> How many hours of labour per year does it actually take to feed, shelter and provide medical care for a person?

To medieval standards of medical care and food, sure. Past that we need training and specialisation, both of which increase the number of people the average person can support.
I too made that assumption before reading the article. But after reading it, that does not seem like making the wealthy the new "woke" nemesis. They much rather seek to uncover institutional corruption, where donations to a college yield better chances for your kid in getting accepted.

Let's not kid ourselfs that is not a wild conspiracy or some socialist agenda. Ending corruption is in everybodies interest, except you are planing to yourself profit from that system by making strategic donations in your offsprings interest.
I guess it is something like that, but don't know for sure. I live in a major urban area so if they find an unexploded bomb it has probably been built over a couple of times since it was originally dropped. The most recent near me (about 800 meters away) was in 2021 and the most interesting thing about it for me was that it was a US bomb, not a German one.

http://www.uniindia.com/news/world/people-france-wwii/233733...
Depends how you want to define "cancel culture"

I can think of a few notable examples from arguably the highest ranked university, Oxford.
Toward policy for open-source software as infrastructure
Some of the most manipulative and self-serving people you’ll ever meet are “nice”.
France had a similar (but more easily mitigated blunder): Trains too wide for station's platforms, requiring ~1000 platforms to be "re-configured".

> The error seems to have happened because the national rail operator RFF gave the wrong dimensions to train company SNCF.

> Our correspondent says that they measured platforms built less than 30 years ago, overlooking the fact that many of France's regional platforms were built more than 50 years ago when trains were a little slimmer.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27497727

I guess it's no surprise that Le Monde preferred to bring Spain's other example of their submarine blunder instead of their own French one :)
I experienced a heisenbug exactly like this in Ruby when trying to `while case Ractor::receive`: https://github.com/okeeblow/DistorteD/blob/dd2a99285072982d3...
Downvoted because someone doesn't think that fruit is commonly used as a definition of size? We often say things are the size of a grape, or an apple, or a grapefruit.

Weird thing to downvote folks
Ever been to Sheerness? they reckon it'll do two million pounds worth...

...of improvements.

Seriously though, they more than know and check, it's carefully marked with large conspicuous buoys as well as constantly monitored in case someone fiddles with it and there are some pretty big, fast police RIBs round there. (had a nice friendly chat with them when they wondered if I was a drug smuggler.) Apparently they're cutting off the rusting masts (above water) sometime soon to reduce risk further. But there is not much that sensibly can be done to actually remove it, and there may not be much of it left that can actually go up.

Buried bombs that nobody knows are there are far more worrying... and the Germans have that problem rather worse than Britain does.
Why Are Campus Administrators Making So Much Money? (2014)
> Spy satellites couldn’t be hiding a bomb that they could drop.

Although never developed past the conceptual stage, orbital kinetic bombardment is a viable weapon:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

It relies on launching significant mass to orbit though (whether that is split into larger "strategic" weapons or many smaller "tactical" ones), so it hasn't been attractive from an ROI standpoint.

Interestingly, SpaceX's focus on greater payloads at lower cost may alter the feasibility of such weapons.
structuredClone()

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/structuredC...