skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> you need significant amounts of data to train the neural networks. Most problems do not have this amount of data. Not even close.

Going to push back against this one. I think we have a lot more training data than most people realize. I wrote this comment yesterday, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34862450, about how a large government contractor is using ChatGPT to generate first drafts of responses to government RFPs.

Now, most of these RFPs are in very specific areas, technologically speaking (e.g. specific technologies around cloud network security, for example). These folks were actually blown away by how technically accurate ChatGPT was on many different areas, even very specific niche areas, and even considering ChatGPT's view of the world hasn't been updated since late 2021.

Again, the first draft needed to be edited, but there are is a huge amount of data out there that ChatGPT is able to use coherently on even niche, esoteric topics.
Sometimes at the same time.

I keep complaining about some NIH code we have and people say things like, "well that library didn't exist at the time, so we had to write one."

Git history says they're wrong. Time and again they were writing code that had existed for two years already.
> NP-complete does in fact automatically imply NP-hard

Important to note that the converse is not true. NP-hard does not imply NP-complete.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-hard
I know of robohash: https://robohash.org
You can't use Passkeys on iOS without iCloud, and you can't get an Apple ID without a phone number, which frequently maps to real-world ID.

This means that soon your logins will be tied to your ID.
Nothing will change unless they (Koko, your AI, whatever) gets legal personality.
Definitely gonna be a commercial real estate recession at the least.
I can't say the same thing about my HP ZBook from 2014. Reason: it's snappier now after I upgraded the RAM from 16 to 32 GB and swapped the HDD for two SSDs years ago.
You are likely looking for the research done on flu vaccinations.

From 2017 https://www.flagshippioneering.com/press/moderna-announces-p...

And also from 2017 Safety, Reactogenicity, and Immunogenicity of mRNA-1653 in Healthy Adults https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03392389

The research and testing for mRNA had been a decade in the making and was already present in 2019.
Nope, their docs just say "don't do that" and so you're expected not to do that.
1. I would do some kind of coding that is externally forced (where you can't hand-wave away the hard parts). Whether that's Advent of Code, Leetcode, codewars, codeforces, hackerrank, or others. Consider taking online courses, following online tutorials on adjacent areas that you've never looked at before. Consider getting a couple of the easy AWS certs. You don't have to be able to do Leetcode hard problems to have a job in industry, but you probably should be able to do 80+% of the easy ones.

2. Yes, but so what? It's not like you can change it without lying (which I do not recommend as I think being straightforward will serve you better practically and psychologically).

3. Applying for roles you're interested in, would enjoy, and are qualified for does not seem like a crazy plan. Whether there are 200K or 1M jobs in your consideration set, those are both more than high enough to apply to find the one that's next for you.

4. Yes, your timing is bad. So what? You can't change that either and so it doesn't impact your next steps, which are to get your skills back up to at least 90% of where they used to be, which will get your confidence back up to at least 75% of where it used to be, so get cracking on that.

Wishing circumstances were different will only burn daylight and runway. If you were competent before (I read nothing to suggest otherwise), you have the brain for it; you are sorely lacking in confidence and are probably a little rusty. Both of those are solvable with some directed practice.

Good luck!
This caused a minor annoyance for me the other day. The Ordinance Survey (UK public mapping agency) anticipates their map will be the only source for the map you display, so they provide some js that adds a notice to the page instead of integrating into the various js map librarys' way for every source to register its copyright notice. Their JS dynamically interpolates the current year. I needed to translate it into something that plays well with the library I was using which is designed around the assumption that notices are static.
Previous average lifespan of a human being. Just needed a number to stop the analysis at. The one that comes bundled with the implication "Welp, I'm dead now" felt appropriate given that if you are dead, and the data is too hard to access, probate will likely be the end of your data storage foray. Any longer, and you're most certainly talking organizational scale preservation efforts.
> Meditation is a hardcore exercise for the mind and if your mind is not strong enough then deeper states will break you.

This is certainly falsifiable. Just see if people doing more intensive meditation have more mental health issues.
Great essay. Maybe another thing to note is that in industry we often don't need the singular best answer, but one that is "close" or "good". In fact, sometimes this is a requirement - like a sudoku solver that can handle impossible boards by generating a solution with a small number of collisions.

As evidenced by the fact that traveling salespeople exist (and are not, in general modeling experts or big AWS users), approximate solutions are often significantly easier to find - both practically and in theory.

I bring this up because it's interesting... and because my professors really didn't emphasize it until deep into my undergraduate career. So someone today might be one of today's lucky 10,000.
Huh, my recollection is the exact opposite. I remember the good old days when I could use inurl: link: and explore the website contents fully and drill down further if necessary, compared to now, where google seems to always think to know better than you what you are looking for. If you are not happy with the initial results it gave you, you are pretty much out of options, good luck trying to drill down to some specific thing.
Let the office real estate industry crash and burn, so that developers lobby for the zoning to build more housing instead of more offices. The worst thing we can do right now is bail out commercial real estate investors who bet on the construction of cities with 10x more cubicles than apartments.

Markets as optimization tools only work if people are made to suffer their losses when they occur; bailouts subvert the process and pervert the outcomes.
I know that they focused on Chinese as a specific problem and have improved. I would expect it to be much better today than it was in 2006.

Part of the problem was that there is a lot less grammar in Chinese than in Indo-European languages. So there are many ways to translate a given Indo-European sentence into Chinese, and you need to understand context on a Chinese sentence to properly translate it into an Indo-European one.

The many ways to translate to Chinese is a problem because Chinese flexibility in word order means that there are many choices of reasonable next word, and they didn't have enough data to tell the difference between a reasonable next word and an unreasonable one.

Going the other way Chinese may not care whether you have one apple or 10 apples, or whether Xi is a man or a woman. But Indo-European languages generally do care. So Google Translate has to guess, and often gets it wrong.
The Only State Capital Where You Can’t Drink the Water
If you separate generating the content from stylizing it you can make it much more natural and targeted toward your readers. This generation of models can do a lot but does things best when you do one thing at a time.
Learn web development. Coming from C backend web development isn't hard. Feel free to mail me and I can give you more direct tips.

Just checked the Linked-In in your profile - is that you? As it isn't a C/embedded developer :-)
It's funny you mention Haskell because it happens to be one of two languages (the other being Python) that I have any significant industry experience in!

The short stints were the result of an unfortunate combination of poor judgement on my part, ill-timing, and outright deceit. There's not much I can do about them at this point though; blot or not, they shall have to remain on my CV.
Brands and IP with devoted audiences are the things that have value now.
How do you supposed "normal" vaccines work?
Is the author purposely using the words "hard" and "np-complete" wrong to garner views? Really sours the article
<T> Engineering
Microsoft runs a "legal" root program, rather than a "public" root program, meaning if you're included in the Microsoft root store, you sign a legal contract with Microsoft. This is not the case with Google, Mozilla, or Apple. So the process of being included just looks a little different.
I want to hate on ChatGPT-written books... But then there's this.

My Prompt (I have endless random ideas like this as I walk the dogs and listen to audio books):

Suggest the plot for a military science fiction book. The galaxy is divided into factions based on their fundamental properties: organic vs. artificial, living vs. dead, good vs. evil, plant vs. animal vs. mineral.

ChatGPT:

Title: "Galactic Rift: The War Between Factions"

In a faraway galaxy, a vast and complex network of planets is divided into factions based on their fundamental properties. The organic and living species have formed an alliance, while the artificial and dead ones have joined forces to control the galaxy. The plant, animal, and mineral factions are split amongst the two alliances, leading to a tense political climate.

Amidst this divide, a brilliant military strategist, General Alara, commands a flagship of the organic alliance, the Stellar Phoenix. She is tasked with leading her crew through dangerous space battles against the ruthless and technologically advanced artificial faction. The stakes are high, as the victor will control the galaxy and its resources.

As General Alara and her team engage in war, they encounter unexpected allies and enemies. They discover that not everything is as it seems, and that the factions are more complex than their fundamental properties suggest. The lines between good and evil are blurred, and each side is driven by their own motivations.

As the war intensifies, General Alara must make difficult decisions that challenge her beliefs and loyalties. She is forced to confront the dark side of her alliance and question whether the organic faction truly represents the good side of the war. Her personal journey is intertwined with the fate of the galaxy, as the war reaches its climactic conclusion.

In "Galactic Rift: The War Between Factions," the reader is taken on a journey through a galaxy filled with political intrigue, space battles, and philosophical questions. The plot explores themes of identity, morality, and the consequences of war. The novel offers a unique take on military science fiction, breaking free from the traditional tropes and challenging the reader's assumptions about good and evil.

Not bad. I'd read that book.
These guides are going to feel so dated ten years from now. It's like reading a guide on how to use a stylus for a palm pilot.
I was more excited by the concept of Software 2.0 when it meant differentiable programming -- i.e. ordinary programs with logic etc, but everything is differentiable, optimizable and can gradually be replaced by opaque NN-based components. That would be largely compatible with current mainstream software development and allow gradual transition to highly-efficient domain-specific architectures.

Instead we got this LLM-based "paradigm-quake".
Most of us work with boring tech solving everyday problems.
Pound the pavement by day, open source projects by night. No projects to speak of? Remedy that.
Earthquake's sheer power turned a Turkish olive grove into a canyon
Agreed, as I read I was thinking that “okay this is a clear case of correlation but not causation.” The root cause is late sleep schedule or even more simply, the lack of sleep. Granted, moving class times to a later time is one broad solution to a generalized problem.
This was not in a company, there was no department. They were roommates. Roommates are not relocation support.
Pretty sure I have read those articles. I feel like journalist are missing the forest for the trees on this one. It's all the same problem, any public forum anyone can access will eventually reach this problem. It's not even about scale anymore, scale just makes it all apparent.
Farmers go to bed early because they rely on daylight to work. College students rarely have that liberty. Maybe they work part time, maybe they are studying, maybe socializing. You can cut out the socializing sure, but anecdotally I remember a lot of my peers in college grinding it out in the library until the PA system kicked them out multiple nights a week. Some of the classes students take just suck.
Are they profitable? Were they ever profitable since being founded?
This strikes me as an idea as bad as the Xerox document scanner that implemented a compression algorithm that changed digits. It'll be really fun debugging when something completely unexpected gets spit out of the neural network.
You’re saying it’s a selection bias, but the author claims most people with these symptoms had no previous mental issues.

Further, meditating is marketed as addressing emotional issues and if it’s not doing that, it’s either a placebo or worse potentially harmful to the people most likely to try it.
The problem with this is that there's simpler explanations. Myocarditis is more frequent with C19 infection than vaccination, so it seems spike protein circulating is "enough".

Also this study didn't find significant uptake of mRNA in the heart (though it did find notable uptake in the lungs).
I didn't downvote. But, while working on a side project might well be a good idea to polish up skills, build a portfolio, etc., trying to bootstrap a revenue producing business--assuming that isn't an actual goal--is likely to be a big distraction from both coding and job-hunting.
Agreed, "prompt design" (for example) would've been a better characterization. I'm sure people are already putting "prompt engineering" on their resumes.
Beyond support, Oracle JDK provides much better performance than OpenJDK in responsiveness and JVM performance. That is why I referred to it as Java's "proper" version (in quotes). However, in reality, it hardly makes a difference.
Based on the OP I have a somewhat similar background. Practice at interviewing never became a thing since responses were so far and few between. I was averaging around 100 applications per phone screen, and I think I ended up with maybe 3 interviews over the course of several months. It was a colossal waste of time.
This is pretty good! Like most quick overviews, however, this one is shaped considerably by the writer's experiences.

Experiences of the writer that I don't share include:

> It's possible for users to require permission before accepting follows. Most users do.

Yes, it's possible. I'm not sure what percentage of the people I try to follow require approval, but offhand I'd say it's less than 10%. Far from "most."

> Most users block everyone from mastodon.social simply because it's full of randos.

Another "most." I guess I can't speak for users but it turns out there's a way to see what the most-active blockers around (the "FediCouncil") are blocking at the server level[0]. It turns out that mastodon.social is not in the Tier 0 or Tier 1 blocklists, but is in the Tier 2 blocklist. So greater than 33%, but fewer than 50% of blocklists include mastodon.social. Clearly, however, the writer is on a server that does.

> There is no quote-retweet on Mastodon. This is on purpose.

What follows is an explanation of why, but this explanation is both incorrect, and out of date, since the primary developer of mastodon has put "quote-toots" on the dev roadmap, primarily in response to people often suggested as the primary targets of hate on twitter, who said nearly-unanimously that quote-tweets were not the cause, and were in fact helpful.

My own server lets me quote posts, and many of the GUI clients similarly allow for quoting posts in different ways. So the average user experience may be more likely to allow quoting than not, but if not yet, then in the near future.

Overall, though, pretty good summary piece.

0. https://codeberg.org/oliphant/blocklists/src/branch/main/blo...
My advice to younger engineers is ALWAYS to remember demos don’t get rewritten. if a demo appears works, some one will want to ship it as is.
In NYC, occupancy of office buildings seems to be stabilizing at 30-40% below pre-COVID levels. However, many of the buildings refinanced during the zero rates period from ~'18-'22.

Going to be interesting to see what happens when that debt rolls off and needs to be refinanced.
Not sure what's remarkable about this story from over a year ago.
I don’t think this will lead to a healthy relationship with a good firm. Maybe a short term one though and that will pay the bills.

If I were an employer, I would think that it is my business. I want to understand why someone has a gap. OP doesn’t need to go into any detail and can just say “medical reasons that I’m completely recovered from and no longer apply to any position” and leave it at that. But lying is a bad strategy because they’ll either need to maintain the lie forever or the truth will come out. And it’s hard to have a good lie. If a candidate says they had family related work gaps for four years then that will place them poorly compared to candidates that don’t.

I’m of the belief that even though employers may lie or be deceitful, I don’t want to be. I understand that puts me at a disadvantage and I accept that trade off for “doing the right thing.”

I also look for companies that don’t deceive like this and don’t want to be in a situation where I try to explain that I only lie to bad companies and promise not to lie to them.
>how often it would show me videos from people who'd turn out to be under-age girls and I'd only find out by checking the comments

So you have no idea that you're looking at kids and not adults without seeing the comments?
You can usually find "truth" relatively easily by seeing what two opposing sides tend to agree on. Sometimes they'll both be wrong, but more often than not they're probably right. So both the US and China claim there was a Chinese made balloon and the US shot it down. So it's pretty safe to say that's all true. Was it a weather balloon or a spy balloon? This is where the key point is a willingness to accept uncertainty.

But I do not agree on the 'preponderance of sources' argument as a means to finding truth. As a contemporary example, consider the COVID lab leak stuff. You had large numbers of scientists making declarations in journals that it was literally impossible, fact checkers declaring the concept clearly debunked, government calling it dangerous disinformation, the media running endless stories calling anybody who dared even think about a lab leak as little more than crazy conspiracy theorists of the flat earth type, and more.

Until one day, everything changed and the lab leak was perfectly okay to discuss. There was no silver bullet, just a geopolitical recalculation. And it turns out among those scientists were people directly involved COVID related gain of function research. Those journals somehow couldn't discover such an absurd undeclared conflict of interest, even though a simple search or CV reference would tell all. The media suddenly did a hard 180, and you even had mainstream outlets actively mocking how absurdly "obviously true" it was that the virus came from a lab leak.

We live in an era of disinformation being coordinated and deployed at scale, and now human-like text-generation is about to enter the picture. When my logic runs contrary to a million sources - I'm going with myself. If I'm wrong, at least I believed something that I felt seemed like the truth, and could presumably defend. By contrast believing in something that seems false (and increasingly often turns out to be) simply because of a mountain of pressure? That would feel just awful to me.
ED Hirsch is looking more and more prescient every day.

I mean, really, sure: there are a few dozen really clever children's books that come out every year that deserve to be added to the "pantheon" but isn't this area basically saturated?

Imagine you read your child one book a day for their first 5 years, you and they co-read two books a day from age 5 to age 10 and then they move on forever to whatever arbitrary boundary we set for "children's books" versus the rest of literature.

Assuming a modest amount of re-reading your favorites, that's an ambitious local maximum of about 5,000 books.

Realistically, this number is more like 1,000 to 1,500 books. This space is already well curated - Scheherazade has you covered in a single compendium!

There's no way any random ChatGPT production is going to cut into the space.
That's true, but it seems pretty low-risk to me, since only Stripe and maybe a few other services you're integrating with actually know the DNS name. It's possible someone could discover it and attack it, but I think I'd wait to see an attack actually happen that couldn't practically be mitigated otherwise before moving it behind Cloudflare etc.
I disagree because when I want to get results from flesh-and-blood humans, I still have to engineer my prompt very carefully (and often get it wrong!).

This includes asking questions, and trying to direct someone to effectively complete a task.

Prompt engineering is just communications skills as applied to AI instead of meat-minds.
Absolutely. I'm not an expert but I'd wager that between eccentric airline CEOs, glamorous travellers and upstart aeroplane manufacturers, there's tons of untapped drama and mayhem to be had from the golden age of flight.
Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?
Maybe we don't know it in the limit, but we've had langauge models for a very
long time and nobody ever said anything about, say, n-gram models, or Hidden
Markov Models, being "intelligent" or "conscious". Even the people who first
proposed the idea of language modelling (precisely as an alternative to trying
to model meaning, which we have no idea how to do) didn't propose them as
models of intelligence, or sentience, or anything like that; just models of
"language", which really means text, and even more precisely "text corpora".
Sorry that I don't have a reference for that, other than my private
conversations with my tutors when I was studying for my Master's (data science
with a heavy dose of neural nets and NLP).

In any case, at some point one has to observe that the people who are leaning
most heavily on agnosticism (the fact that we don't know what intelligence is)
are the ones who say that we can't say whether those LLMs are intelligent or
not because we don't know what intelligence is. In other words, agnostitism
itself is used as evidence: we can't define intelligence, the thinking goes,
therefore LLMs may be intelligent. There is no other evidence of any sort
that LLMs may be intelligent (or any number of synonyms).

Note that this is exactly Russel's Teapot:

Russell's teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand
Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies
upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting
the burden of disproof to others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
Combining LangChain and Weaviate
Which also means you can diff the code output from two runs of the system and determine if any of the diffs amount to regressions in the code.

Developers and machines that can't explain themselves end up out on their ear or damaging the projects they're involved in.