skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Heh, I remember running into something similar professionally, using the .NET Framework to generate random numbers: When asked to generate random integers, it has a seemingly innocent conversion from integers to floating points and back that ends up causing significant bias on large ranges. Specifically, `Random.Next(b)` produces an integer between 0 and b − 1 by

1. taking a random integer between 0 and 2^31 − 2,

2. dividing the integer by 2^31 − 1 to get a double-precision floating-point between 0 and 1,

3. multiplying this floating-point with b to get a number between 0 and b,

4. taking the integer part of this new number to get an integer between 0 and b − 1.

Do this for b = 2^31 − 1, and 50.34% of outputs are odd numbers, where you'd expect (almost) as many evens as odds.

Ended up doing a bit of a write-up here: https://fuglede.dk/en/blog/bias-in-net-rng/

Another fun thing about their RNG was that it was apparently supposed to follow Knuth's provably useful additive PRNG which, given n − 1 randomly generated numbers, generates a new number by taking the sum of the (n − 24)'th and (n − 55)'th numbers modulo some specific number; back when I looked, Microsoft's implementation for some reason uses 34 instead of 24, probably just a typo, with the unfortunate side effect that Knuth's theoretical guarantees are out of the window.
Even my Lenovo laptop can do this just almost as well as a modern Macbook these days.
> All the high-level nuclear waste produced in the world would fit in a single football field to a height of approximately ten yards.

> The amount of high-level waste produced during nuclear energy production is also small: a typical large reactor produces about 25-30 tonnes of used fuel per year.

That's such a propaganda way of phrasing it, because it considers the waste is essentially pure uranium you would never be able to store it like this. It is actually quite a lot.

Incidentally this is about the same amount of coal we burn per year.

> Worldwide, 97% of the waste produced by the nuclear power industry is classified as low- or medium-level waste.

So essentially the actual amount of nuclear waste is 30 times as high. It's also funny considering the later part of the argument is how highly radioactive waste is not such a problem because it decays quickly. Well guess what mid and low level wast has often much longer lifetimes and it's still as dangerous as much hazardous chemical waste.

The whole piece reads like a giant fluff piece, sprinkled with lots of nuclear industry talking points.
Speaking as a python dev with some experience in F# , one maybe minor point is the unfamiliar function call syntax that could throw off programmers not familiar with curried functions. Most other languages have parenthesis for function calls, so it can be a bit jarring to have a sequence of strings and not know whether the result is a function or a value. Furthermore some experienced F# devs love making custom symbols, which can also obfuscate the code
"I still believe both that there is a lot more to do and also that it'll be worthwhile"

Everyone here is debating what went wrong. But how would knowing that help?

I would like a CEO to articulate what exactly will be "worthwhile" to each stakeholder in the future, and not just to clean up the mess. Instead I fear we have a generation of leaders who tell investors that the good times will come back and tell employees to tighten their belts - crisis managers instead of visionaries.

I think rough times are precisely when visionaries should have their greatest impact, because people are open to change. The question is not what went wrong, but where to go now?
One might argue that intuition and understanding are simply complex cognitive processes that occur within the brain. In a similar vein, I think ChatGPT will evolve to understand and intuit through integrating with additional advanced machine learning models. Think of ChatGPT having side-car machine-learning models guiding it and having it edit the outputs as it writes. Similar to how we correct ourselves or rephrase something. I don't know what these look like but maybe they would be models for cultural norms (select your 'culture'), social norms, math, sciences and morality. Weighted decisions are made based on "values."

Cognitive processes as we think and speak are constantly refining our thoughts and understanding. Refining our outputs. I believe that is what comes next to advance ML. There might be a lot of hype right now but ChatGPT is a reminder in how far we have come and a small preview of what the future looks like.

Disclaimer:

- I don't know anything about anything.
- I already find ChatGPT useful.
- I might be biased, I was a Loopt user as far back as 2007. I will buy about anything sama sells.
Faxes are obsolete in every aspect.
I read this every couple years and it's a terrifying read every single time.
Thanks for this article. A few years ago I had a task involving reading some data files to understand whether they were corrupted or still usable. The software to read the files usually came as part of a proprietary package with a price tag high enough that it made no sense to license for this one small task.

I asked myself: "how hard can it be?"

I decided to search online for easy and free ways to read the files. It had been several years since I last programmed anything though I had done a bit of script modifications on some perl/awk/sed scripts. I found Tcl/Tk after a bit of digging and decided to give it a whirl.

In all I spent about 16 hours dinking around with Tcl and had a nice, short program written to read everything, display the data for a QC check, and write it to disk. The documentation was detailed and concise. Of all the programming languages that I have used over the years the fact that I could sit down and find the right set of simple commands and assemble all of it into a working program in a couple of days with no learning curve pain or friction was amazing.

Thanks John Ousterhout.
While it's true that the highly detailed docs are useful (practically mandatory ;>) too, the manga/comic approach is very good for intro material for some audiences.

eg people whose concentration spans reject slogging through large volumes of text, but readily take in the visual aspect

I happen to be one of those persons. :p
I recently watched an excellent Talk about IDE integration with Rust. Maybe worth checking out: https://youtu.be/N6b44kMS6OM
Indeed. Improvements in efficiency often have the paradoxical effect of increasing resource utilization. This is known as Jevons Paradox [0], and it's been observed in many real world situations.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
> ChatGPT, summarize the article

No true Scotsman. Flamebait
This is one of the most infuriatingly disingenuous argument devices: "People keep doing this irresponsible thing and get traction!" "Oh, so you mean everyone should not do a thing???"

Yeah, buddy. The most absurd interpretation of the opposite is what we mean...
> But the Apple equivalent of Microsoft’s Surface Pro? That would make much more sense, in my opinion.

Isn't that what an iPad Pro purports to be? I mean, that's why Apple gave us the $400 Magic Keyboard(tm) and support only for the latest Magic Mouse 2 (no support for Magic Mouse 1, because Apple...?). And of course, you can use any Bluetooth mice with it.

I think the convergence will not happen on the Mac side, but on the iPadOS side - with MacOS eventually subsumed by the iPadOS. Apple is just getting you comfortable.. frog in a pot of water and all.
> which means less land is used by farming, and more land can be maintained, or returned from ag use for ecological restoration.

I don't think this happens often in practice. Improvements in efficiency often have the paradoxical effect of increasing resource utilization. This is known as Jevons Paradox [0], and it's been observed in many real world situations.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Yeah this kind of thing is very routine. Whether it should be is a separate question, and the timing is probably why this is making the news.
> Just like clients have an edge over waiters, OpenAI’s CEO had an edge over his listeners — and what he did was take every single one of them for a fool.

It's funny that the author writes about Sam taking people for fools and then treats his readers as fools

> Large Language Models don’t understand anything

I'm not sure who the intended audience for this is, but I'm fairly certain HN readers don't think LLMs "understand" anything
Judging by the second paragraph, I think that was a joke.
look at the stupidest congressman of your choice (party doens't matter) that who you have to convince to convert the US over to the metric system. that is why we still use imperial
It's like when a lawyer tells the client not to do a 2 billion dollar deal after a 5 minute conversation and charges $1 million for his time. It's not the effort, it's what was avoided. They call it the Department of Defense for a reason.
> The general public does not understand agriculture well,

Nor do farmers, nor do people with opinions on farming.

It's in the economic interest of some to confuse knowledge of farming as an economical activity (i.e. industrial farming) from the biological activity. I fully agree GMOs and such get an undeserved bad name, but Big Agri deserves way more of that bad name than they are getting. Farmers are their Amazon warehouse workforce, not trained to understand anything, but to execute protocols to the letter, or else. These companies are planning for the next few years, whereas good farming would be planning for the rest of the farmers life and their children's too.

Big Agri farming is utterly unsustainable because it knows it won't have to pay those bills. When we make them, things will change.
Though to be fair, for a long time, it was actually hard to get decent multitouch on PCs. I recall using modded Synaptics drivers. It wasn't until Microsoft Precision Touchpad drivers came around that it really felt similar to Mac for me. Now even libinput on Linux does a pretty OK job with typical PC trackpads, so things have definitely changed. I recall hearing patents played a role in how slow this was to come to PCs, but I have no source.
I'm also very excited about how useful it is, after years of mostly academic papers and poor industrial attempt to utilize it, there's finally something that truly showed the power of the LLM model to the masses. It's the iPhone 4 of language models.

But iPhone 4 isn't fusion energy. It's incredibly useful and a tectonic shift in the cellphone industry, but it's not producing energy. The analogy might sound completely insane, but that's how different machine learning of today and general intelligence is.

This will replace humans in certain jobs - just like McDonald's touch order machines and 100000 other times when a machine of either digital or mechanical contraption replaces humans in history. This is not however the beginning of singularity where the AI gets a mind of its own and start a symbiotic or adversarial relationship with human civilization, this isn't even a step in that direction, this is closer to the internet or wikipedia than that.
And in the next iteration, Go has telemetry on by default, with no flag to disable it.

Because you know, they can. And what can you do when your stack is already written in Golang? ..
You've crossed into harassing that other user. This is not ok. Even supposing that they posted something lame, that's just how internet forums work. What you're doing here is aggressive and uncool, so please stop.

Edit: you've been abusing this site in enough other places as well that I think we have to ban the account. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34750115.
broccoli cheddar, it was a fast balloon
Has it ever been the go-to platform? I don't read on Medium at all, nor on Substack (which I view as basically Medium v1.1).

Monetization is why we got here.

Edit:

What Medium has is what I call the "Pornhub Paradox". Nobody (very rarely) pays for porn nowadays. Bloggers and the blogosphere has established that no one pays for blogs. YouTube suffers from their own success. Nobody wants to pay for YT videos, they tried to monetize it behind a paywall and it failed (multiple times).

You'd think that having all this content is just a surefire way to pull in money. But nobody wants to pay for porn - so pornhub puts them up for free.
Yeah, although a fair bit better than the default.

I’m using Wooly on my iPhone, but might give ivory a shot now that it’s launched.
LEO satellites are great for RF reconnaissance for frequencies between 100MHz and 100GHz which easily penetrate the ionosphere. They can even geolocate the source on the ground by measuring the observed Doppler shift (caused by the spy satellites own fast motion)
But I have a theory as to why the idea of a touchscreen Mac makes me shrug — I’m a longtime Mac user

This is the truth. Someone who hasn’t used a touchscreen laptop extensively can’t really opine on the use of such a device. I’ve spent a number of years with an assortment of windows laptops with touch screens and now I use a macbook. My personal take away is that touch screens are useful as an additional input device on laptops (quick dismissal of dialogs, easy zooming and panning, snappy reshuffling of windows), but this advantage exists more on windows than on the mac because windows laptop trackpads are so inferior. The macbook’s trackpad is almost good enough that I never miss a touch screen, but every once in a while it would be convenient.

But I don’t see apple doing a simple straight macbook with trackpad + touchscreen as add-on feature. It is too obvious. I think it is more likely they would release something like this: https://www.asus.com/laptops/for-home/zenbook/zenbook-17-fol...
Crops on the field are not yet the harvest; grain in a granary is. Harvesting is a very intense process, because the crops need to be collected in the few days when they are best quality and haven't fallen off. Harvesting often occurs around the clock in the season, using monstrous machines.

The lower the yield per unit area, the longer it takes to harvest all, the more fuel is spent, and the higher the risk to lose a part of the crops due to harvesting them untimely. Lower-density crops are noticeably more expensive as a result.
My marriage and a good chunk of my career trajectory can both be traced directly back to having "grown up" playing AC and writing/coding for Crossroads of Dereth. It's a little scary to think how different my life would be if I hadn't picked up that box--possibly the only copy the EB Games in my small English town would get--and gone "huh, looks cool".

I think growing up during those years of transition, right before the Internet became mainstream and ubiquitous, was a huge boon. Sure, the early MMOs were far from the first international social forum enabled by the Internet, but they were right at the technological frontier at the time. There was something special about inhabiting this massive, 3D virtual space alongside people from across the world, and having that experience be just as novel to everyone else as it was to me.

You couldn't replicate that today, and growing up with the world at your fingertips on a pane of glass as a taken-for-granted fact of life must be a very different experience.
This article is from Thursday morning.

Google's shares continued to drop through the end of the week, and the final loss of value looks more like $200 billion.
Is this story real? The lack of verifiable facts and the propagation pattern seems suspicious.
CoinTracker is on my shitlist. My only transactions last year were staking rewards for holding tezos and etherium 2 on Coinbase and yet they want me to pay $179 for the premium tax plan.
I am trying to figure out what you mean by this. I was under the impression the official Tcl source was in C. Can you provide more of an explanation?
I really want to see more fine grained research on UPF that splits it into categories. If you control for the carbohydrates and calories, eliminate anything that's been fried at high temperature, and nitrate preserved meat, is it still unhealthy? What if you further control for BMI to eliminate the effect where people eat more processed food because the taste makes you keep eating?

Some preservatives and artificial additives seem to have safety studies showing they're at least not 1987 margarine levels of bad. I don't see why a long list of ingredients would be a problem by itself,and some processed tech should in theory be able to reduce the calories with fillers and might even be beneficial.

I could see grinding as being inherently problematic the same way juicing can be, but other than that, I'm pretty confused.

Eery study seems to show ultraprocessed food is bad. But I still have no idea if uotraprocessing is inherently unhealthy, or it just so happens that 99% of ultraprocessed food is made of horrible things?
Look to Google Earth and Caltopo.

These two already dominate more casual mapping
Do any base-10 Lychrel numbers exist?
AML and KYC really took ground around 2001. The 9/11 was the pretext, but the real reason was because there was now a technical possibility to electronically track all the transactions.

How we managed to live and fight crime without it for the previous millennia is a mystery.
The most successful people I know are regular smart folks who have patience, and can get into deep focus mode / zone at-will.

The smartest people I know have 0 focus, but they can grasp insanely complex topics that are interesting to them super fast.
How did they fail? Usually failures are just dusty insides. I've seen two "fail" and I'd fix them by using a toothpick.

I want to like USB-C because it's universal but it just breaks so easily. If they make a good mangentic one all is forgiven, I'm using a non standard "dangerous" one to alleviate it's fragility.
"Not better in any significant way" is a hot take, and pretty hand-wavy way of dismissing a whole group of languages. With so many people preferring that syntax, it might just be that you're actually wrong..

For instance, I'd say the piping is significantly better than the backwards reading of nested function calls you have to do in Python.

Data |> map |> filter |> group |> sum

Vs sum(group(map(a) for a in data if filter(a)))
California will inevitably shake like Turkey
I don't know that people are reacting to the error per se, so much as they're reacting to where they saw it: in a major, high-glitz public announcement. Like NPR quotes others, the human beings who prepared the announcement could've googled to make sure they didn't demo a product working as unintended.

I think people understand AI's current limitations. What they've lost confidence in is Google's judgement, not Bard's.
Look at how feedly does it.
"Ableism"? I'd give nearly everything I have to not have been born with my disability.

A thousand curses be on whoever came up with this nonsense and the sort who promulgate it.
Funny how when we do it, it's "aimed toward deterrence". When other nations do it, it's portrayed as a threat to the entire world.

"North korea fires unarmed ICBM into Pacific Ocean with aim toward deterrence."

That's more valid than stripes' title.
Case studies: https://www.first1000.co

Semrush Academy: https://www.semrush.com/academy/courses/
Disinflation
For me it’s all about making the biggest junctions possible with as high throughput as possible. There’s a lot of similarities with software engineering and concurrency here.

I always thought that when people were designing actual CPUs in games like openttd or factorio, they actually used tools to generate save games rather than do everything by hand? Is that not true?
I'm skeptical. At a small scale, you could put together a cluster, but other than for the fun of putting it together, I don't see the point. I'd rather have a older Xeon with a high core count and use VMs or processes because it's more reliable and easier to manage. Or rent a cluster in the cloud for an hour.

For large scale, dealing with heterogeneous hardware with questionable life remaining strapped to batteries that might start fires connected over USB or Wifi isn't ideal. Not to mention installing cluster software on all of them. At scale, you'd really want to strip the CPUs and mount lots of them on a single board, but that's not cheap to do. You're also dealing with 3+ year old technology that's been replaced by something more power-efficient.
The trick the devs used to ameliorate Krakening was pretty clever: they "smeared" acceleration between the reference frame and the ship components so that the position delta frame-to-frame was lower and therefore more of the interactions occurred in the higher-density floating point space of lower forces and smaller displacements.
If I understand correctly z transform analysis can't work as these systems are fundamentally non linear. In fact, the "non linear" part, i.e. the activation functions, are the part of these networks that allow for them to be universal function approximators and learn arbitrary things, versus just becoming a simple linear system.
that would mean a gear has understanding of torque?
Jobs himself would come to you and force you to touch your screen with your greasy fingers.

/s
Metrics like churn really need further processing to be most useful. One reason I linked code-forensics tool is that it produces deeper analytics and visualizations. For example, a diagram that shows both how large/complex a file is and how much it's changed is more useful. Another useful report from code-forensics is the knowledge map, which helps gauge ownership by analyzing the number of changes to each file by developer.

None these metrics and analysis will give answers, they are raw data to be used as input to thinking about organizational and design issues.
I was reading the original paper where the idea was first presented and came across a footnote that demonstrated to just how far we've come in the last 40 years.

"The attribution research findings, summarized later, imply that the impostor phenomenon would be found less frequently in men than in women. We have noticed the phenomenon in men who appear to be more in touch with their “feminine” qualities. This clinical observation needs to be researched"

The whole point of feminism is equality, it doesn't make sense to then restrict experiences to a specific gender. I think the idea that "some feminist idea wasn't intended for" you is the wrong takeaway here. These ideas and frameworks are meaningful when they can be applied to improve your life, the intended audience isn't important. Otherwise it feels like it'll induce imposter syndrome for the concept of having imposter syndrome. If you feel that this struggle applies to you, then the idea was intended for you. One of the definitions of toxic femininity is shaming men for not being "manly" enough and more generally policing femininity in others.

That kind of othering is the reason why some people react so negatively to certain kinds of feminism, and it's why I don't call myself a feminist even if I work to promote feminist ideologies. Exclusionary feminism is not popular as a whole, but it is very vocal. I feel classifying resonating emotionally with the female experience as LGBT+ is continuing implicit toxic masculinity and femininity. Implicit bias surrounding these topics is completely dependent on the environment you were brought up in, and it's one of the hardest things to break when you are older. There absolutely is subjectivity in all of this, and there is value in classifying specific things as a feminine or masculine experience. But I dislike how strongly some people work to delineate the two. It feels wrong to intentionally create a minority out of people and behaviors that fit into both categories.

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...
of course, you could always look at the third leg of the three legged stool, the cash flow statement.
Southern San Andreas shakeout scenario