skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How LLMs come up with their answers?
I know the basics of RNNs and LSTMs, and a very high-level understanding of LLMs, but I'm still confused at how it can answer some of the questions the way that it does.

If you look at the example I give below, it really feels like it has a deeper level semantic understanding. It gave a VERY reasonable answer to a question that, AFAICT, has never been asked before and one I don't think you'd be able to necessarily piece together just from the words in existing docs on the internet.

Any good pointers that would help me (and I'm sure others) understand this better? Most of the stuff I've seen is either too basic (some probability of the next word) or so deep into the guts that its hard to understand intuitively what's happening.

==========================================

Prompt: What if basketball required the ball to bounce at least once before rebounding. How would that impact the benefit of height in the game?

Response: If basketball required the ball to bounce at least once before rebounding, it would significantly impact the benefit of height in the game.

Traditionally, height has been a significant advantage in basketball, particularly when it comes to rebounding. Taller players have an easier time grabbing rebounds, both on the offensive and defensive end of the court, since they can reach higher and cover more ground. However, if the ball had to bounce before a rebound could be made, the benefit of height would be greatly reduced.

Requiring the ball to bounce before rebounding would increase the importance of timing and positioning over height. A player with excellent timing and positioning could still grab rebounds even if they are shorter than their opponents. In fact, a shorter player with good timing and positioning might be able to get into position to grab the rebound before taller opponents have a chance to react.

Additionally, if the ball had to bounce before a rebound could be made, it would also increase the importance of quickness and agility. Players who can move quickly and change directions easily would be better able to anticipate the ball's trajectory and position themselves for a rebound.

Overall, requiring the ball to bounce before rebounding would make basketball a more dynamic and strategic game, where height is no longer the dominant factor in rebounding. It would give shorter players a greater chance to excel and force taller players to adapt their strategies to the new rules.
Context is important. What's being discussed is general work week trials, and the idea that nobody would publish a paper that demonstrates working less = decline in work done.

Individual firm metrics are useless to even bring up here.
It's called making fun of oneself. I know I know, incomprehensible for Americans. But do try.
At the very least one would expect the bank to be salting and hashing - PrivacyDotCom presumably has to keep the plaintext in some form in order to use them!

As a secondary concern, the bank has occasional 2fa, and definitely does some kind of anomaly detection. Primed by the ickiness of the user/pass request I just had a mental image of some hacky Selenium script on an AWS IP address filling out the login form and getting my online banking disabled proactively.
Markets aren't looking good, but I don't think that affects ransomware. They don't hodl.
I literally just printed on 220gsm card in a laser printer's feed tray today. Worked great.

Before I had a pack of card, I was indeed cutting up manila folders. I only had ugly colours (that's a rule for manila folders, apparently) so it wasn't ideal, but it worked well in a structural sense for what I was up to.
FWIW the sheer concentration of artillery firepower at hot spots in Ukraine exceeds anything seen in Stalingrad. Mariupol was one prominent example, and the ongoing battle for Bakhmut is another.
It's also the middle of a war zone. Why is it easier to get tomatoes there than the UK? Why can't the UK use its massive GDP advantage to get them?
To set my non-coffee-snob bona fides, I exclusively drink decaf (I've avoided caffeine for almost 10 years now).

The reactions this post is getting are kind of odd. A typical home coffee brewing setup is going to offer you just a couple of variables --- a set-it-and-forget-it grind size, water temperature, and the dose of grounds you use for whatever amount of coffee you brew.

It is not especially weird or "gourmet" to be interested in what the right values are for each of those variables. You figure out the right grind size and dial it into your grinder; you figure out the right temperature and hit that button on your kettle; you figure out the right dose and either weigh or scoop-measure that much grounds. Mostly what I'm describing is the simple act of brewing a cup of coffee.
That’s certainly part of it. A lot of people drink these dark beans black, too. One aspect of this so that cheap coffee machines are terrible at brewing lighter roasts.
Perhaps a better way to say the parent point is:

It is an emergent property of capitalist systems that people who love market manipulation will outcompete those who don't and thus end up in positions of such power that they effectively determine the characteristics and behavior of the system.

There are lots of people playing the capitalism game who don't want to cheat. But the system rewards cheaters who then use their power to produce the world we are all forced to live in.
> Curious how you feel about anonymous whistleblowers?

If the legislation survives for 50 years (it's not quite halfway there today), I'll accept it has passed the test of time. Until then, I'll likely continue to view it as a mistake but likely not for the reasons you expect.

Quoting from the Wikipedia page[0]:

> Between 1994 and 2010, the court had ruled for whistleblowers in only three of 203 cases decided on their merits, GAP's analysis found.

3 cases out of 204 means the court upheld 1.5% of Whistleblower claims. I find it extremely unlikely only 1.5% of claims had merit, or that only 1.5% would have succeeded in more conventional proceedings.

Anyone who throws away centuries of legal precedent in order to introduce a new legal concept to "improve things" and then produces a result that almost certainly provides worse outcomes for those it is supposed to protect was not, in my opinion, the once in a millenium legal mind that individual believed themself to be.

Given the high bar it needed to achieve to justify overturning centuries of precedent and the low bar it actually achieved, I think the Whistleblower legislation, as implemented, is an empirical failure.
Stable coins?
If by "only used" you really mean you never ever use anything else I don’t believe you are missing anything. Other than bragging rights of using Vim, of course /s

But if you occasionally use other editors, many of them have plugins or modes enabling Vim keybindings. In my daily work I switch between Emacs, IntelliJ, Vim and XCode, and all of them have varying degrees of Vim emulation, which makes switching a lot easier.
This feels like the arguments against electric cars saying the electricity is generated by fossil fuels anyway.
It isn't. The US is a military-industrial oligarchy whose elements of democracy exist primarily as theater.

Americans believe they live in a democracy because they've been conditioned through propaganda that their guns make them free. Yet their consent for American imperialism is manufactured by lies from the media, their police steal from them and murder from them with impunity, their intelligence services spy on everything they say and do, and their government is engineered to operate completely divorced from the will of the people. They suffer a quality of life worse in many metrics than other first world countries, with fewer rights and freedoms. But it's cool as long as they can shoot a senator in the head whenever they want.
Yeah to really appreciate the V60 you need a gooseneck kettle that can slowly pour without splashing, so add another 20 bucks to that cost (or 100+ if you want an electric gooseneck kettle). It's still all in much cheaper than even a nice drip brewer.
How dare you bring knowledge in here! Some people at work would be offended if they couldn't buy their A100 or DGX toys, or had to scale back their custom ASIC and systems R&D.
What purpose does that serve when this is a socioeconomic discussion?
This. The U (or typically J as I've heard it described) shape comes mostly from the fact that very many very unhealthy people lose a ton of weight and end up with a super low BMI.
I'm very confused how you get to the point where water and coffee are mixing in your Aeropress before adding the filter. I know that people like messing around with their coffee, but I assumed that the process had to be 1) filter, 2) coffee and water, 3) plunger end cap. (I guess you could switch 1 and 3, but I'm pretty sure liquid physics means that you need a container before you add the water)
Funny bit at the end with Yale "warning neighboring universities" attempting to blacklist the expelled students. Alfred Stillé ended up in UPenn right after he was expelled, and went on to a distinguished career.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150912092435/https://archives....
Why would you need a full JS runtime just to analyze what URLs are being imported? You don't even need a runtime for that. All that's necessary is to parse the AST, and in that case you don't even need an AST parser with full language support. It might not be as trivial for other language communities as writing a JSON parser, but it's not insurmountable or an unreasonable burden.

Honestly, I think the argument that one language community should lessen itself for the sake of another really bites. Using one language to analyze the dependencies of another really isn't a garden variety task. In the off chance someone really doesn't want to use JavaScript as their primary language for that task, what's so bad about calling an external runtime or parser from their language of choice?

I'm not saying I'm against import maps, because I think it's absolutely reasonable to want the features it provides, but I'm not being sold on any argument that they're necessary for almost anything. There's not a type of application I can think of that can't be written without anything an import map does.
> That looks like a minor issue in GitHub's stylesheet, not really an AsciiDoctor problem.

AsciiDoctor is adding p elements in places where it should not. GitHub could work around this error with CSS, but they have not done so, nor should they. It's a simple issue to fix, just emit the bare li elements.
Its pretty clickbaity to call symmetric encryption "quantum safe". Of course its quantum safe, the whole quantum crypto issues are with asymmetric crypto not symmetric*

* yes, yes, you want longer key lengths because of grover, but realistically that's not a threat anytime soon and also trivial to work around.
Yet another attack that requires the biggest malware vector, MS Windows. LOL
I'm wondering if the game requires you to know all the sail names. That could be a big impediment to doing things in it! It certainly adds some difficulty in even reading those books.
That has not been my experience asking cocktail bartenders what their drink of choice is.
>Cry me a river is all I can say to companies thinking that way.

Note that my argument works even if you're anti-corporate profits and pro-redistribution. Trying to perform redistribution and jobs guarantee at the corporate level causes a bunch of issues. Higher friction in the labor market is one. Another is that it favors large businesses over small ones. Large companies can afford the armies of lawyers to ensure that all the firing/layoff paperwork are compliant. They're also big enough that they have the law of large numbers on their side. A small business with 10 employees and one crappy one that they want to get rid of doesn't, and forcing them keep them on is going to handicap their cashflow.

> Someone has to do the work after all

The whole point of the person being laid off/fired is that the work isn't needed. You think companies are laying off people for fun?

>and demographics will only make the problem of a lack of workers worse.

If the workers are actually needed, why do we need to force companies to hire them? It's like arguing we're running out of natural gas, so we need to force households into buying more natural gas.

>And for what it's worth, companies in countries with extremely strict labor laws like France don't really have a problem either.

Remind me, what's the average going salary for software engineers in france and how does it compare to american salaries? And where are the top tech companies in the world headquartered?
> The updated version of Google’s code of conduct still retains one reference to the company’s unofficial motto—the final line of the document is still: “And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!”
You used macOS for 5 years and never once used cmd+Q?
He mostly does history education through the lens of pop culture. He's a bit outside his expertise on this subject, but uses it as a launching off point for educational content rather than trying to be a "military strategist". He even says as much at the outset.

> keeping in mind that I am largely reliant here on the expertise of others and so am operating from my ‘professional thing explainer’ role, rather than as the expert
You might be interested in sailing on such a ship irl then: https://www.gotheborg.se/
Strange in the same way it's strange that people might say that playing Russian roulette increases risk of death by an easily-calculable amount.
Well, two conceptions of human beings are in conflict: (a) humans are controlled by their own "will" (b) signaling system (biochemical interactions) control stuff. (a) is a cultural intuition. Now many life sciences researchers sell us a hybrid version: both (a) and (b) are true.
Just close things with CMD+Q... the close button usually doesn't do anything on macos

All the other points - 100% valid. And there are so many more
Homemade tends to be milder than store bought and less vinegary. It continues to ferment as it sits on store shelves.
"I intend to live forever, or die trying." - Groucho Marx
> More than 353,000 units were vacant but unavailable in 2021, up from 248,000 in 2017.

A 42% increase in 'vacant but unavailable' sounds pretty significant, even if artificial...

https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/5/17/23108792/nyc-apartment-vac...
I don’t really get why a pour-over has gotten this reputation as some sort of fancy/advanced way of making coffee.

Doing pour-over with like a Chemex or Hario is super easy. Just skip any steps that don’t feel necessary after you’ve done it a while. For me, filter, beans, heat water, pour pour pour, done seems to work just fine.

What’s the alternative, use a coffee machine or something? Coffee machines look like a real pain to clean, the Chemex is just a glass pot, it is fine with just a swirl of water at the end of the day. Aero press is super easy to clean too, just rinse.
The column that was rushing towards Kyiv consisted in large part of the Russian National Guard units - those are the guys whose primary purpose is to beat up people in opposition protests. And they had the anti-riot gear packed, as Ukrainians have found out when going through the wrecks. So, yes, they were absolutely planning to suppress civilian opposition to the occupation.
A number of academic researchers (including us) have studied malware samples from past open-source supply chain attacks and identified code/metadata attributes that make packages vulnerable to such attacks. Packj scans for several such attributes to identify insecure or "weak links" in your software supply chain (e.g., missing or incorrect GitHub repo, very high version number, use of decode+exec, etc.). Full list here: https://github.com/ossillate-inc/packj/blob/main/packj/audit...
There is plenty of government censorship happening in US as well. Entire books have been written on this subject. I'm not aware of any country that doesn't have censorship in practice.

I think the idea that people living in a country understand their own lives worse than an outsider is beyond absurd. People can certainly understand whether they are happy with their lives and whether their quality of life is improving or not. Given that vast majority of people in China claim this is the case, I'm going to go with their lived experience over your notions about what life in China is like.

Frankly, the fact that people in US have been convinced that they know better what life in other countries is like than people living there do is a testament to the effectiveness of US propaganda.
> Asciidoctor is actively overhauling its output I believe

It's been 9 years. That is not actively by any definition of the word.
What if you eat a lot of vegetables though
I believe that's what System76 is trying to do.
I like your analysis. I think you could generalize it to any (even more-hotly) debated topic. People can hear the same thing and imagine two (or more) very different things by virtue of life experience, upbringing, morals, or any number of factors that make us unique.

I don't think that's a bad thing. It's a good perspective to keep in mind when disagreeing with someone though.
There are plenty of crypto assets that hold their value and wont be frozen

The ones remaining have withstood the heaviest stress test across all asset classes, increasing the confidence in them

The price declines and high profile implosions are really just tip of the iceberg in the topic of “crypto” and largely a distraction
As someone who went to University in Germany but left for the US right after I found this very interesting. My daughters are going to (state) universities in the US and there are profound differences between the systems, some of them appear to have a very long history, judging by this account.

My biggest complaints about the US system: sports and other non-academic activities as well as administration consumes way too much money. On the other hand, German universities are still much more selective so class hierarchies are reflected in the trade-school/vocational school/university hierarchy. Whether that's a good thing or not is a different question.
Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adjustment_Bureau ,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecop , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val%C3%A9rian_and_Laureline , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_(2001_film)
> Words including "fat" and "ugly" were removed after being reviewed by sensitivity readers, who check for potentially offensive content.

What a fragile Society.
Yeah, I find a moka pot coffee the optimal (for me) balance between effort and quality. Nothing complicated about using the moka pot, but it does need to be watch because overbrewing will ruin it.
It seems like most people in this thread missing the point of this statement.

Section 2 is a clear condemnation of NATO expansion into Ukraine.

>The security of a region should not be achieved by strengthening or expanding military blocs.

I don't think there is any other way to read this. Russia is not expanding a military Bloc. A "military bloc" is a set of countries with military alliance. This is perfectly in line with China's historic perspective on the issue.
Hahaha well apart from the extra Saint I hope you liked your results
The guy is a military historian, so armchair military strategizing is literally a part of the job. Unlike the rest of us, though, he actually studied for it.
Crew Alerted to Problem Just Before Ohio Derailment, Investigators Say
That's more of a free market thing. "Free market" and "capitalism" are distinct concepts that can, but don't have to, coexist.
My main interest is in doing it solo, I don't think I'd enjoy it nearly as much with other people around. While this does look interesting, it doesn't appeal to me in the same way
Thanks for the feedback, I'll try to investigate the issue.
Seems to me that it's far more likely that you are the one who is misinformed as opposed to people living in China. Not sure what this lack of political chatter that you allude to is to be honest. Anybody who actually follows politics in China knows this statement to be utter nonsense.
Well this is a complete tangent, and I'm not at all claiming it's what I meant in GP, but increasingly I'm thinking (or realising) that 'a brand' is all a business is. So much is just the same crap minimally packaged, marked up, and branded to sell for as much as possible.

Even if you, as I do, buy decent traditionally marketed clothes made from natural fibers - the company selling them, unless it's an actual tailor you can literally take some cloth to, is nothing more than a brand on top of an Indian (say, probably - at least in my market) wholesale operation.
Dwarf Fortress is what a game would feel like if its rules, storytelling and lore details came from an advanced LLM :D
Not my experience at all, at least with pourovers. Others have done blind taste tastes with beans upto 6 months out from the roast date (light roasts), which seem indistinguishable on pourovers and immersion brewing. The taste tests suggest that peak flavor develops at about a week out from roasting, and degrades very slowly - much more slowly than conventional wisdom suggests. The norm has been that beans are essentially stale 2 weeks out from roasting. These tests suggest that as long as you store your beans reasonably well, they're good for several months. Depending on your technique, the loss of the bloom might require modifications, but they're still good beans.

I can imagine that the same probably doesn't hold true for espresso, since the back pressure from out gassing is crucial to extraction.
Hmm ok it should never do that, I'll look into it. Thanks.
I have to say, I installed Debian and KDE Plasma on both my work computer and my personal computer 6 months ago and have absolutely stunned at well they simply Just Work now. It boots fast. It's stable. I can tweak things. I haven't been this satisfied with my desktop experience since the day before GNOME 3 was released.
I'm honestly some what surprised that reading about this is that disturbing. In a world where Saw 18 is being made, and all of the other gore trash that get lapped up the description of a Colombian necktie just seems tame to me. Who says people don't get desensitized again?
> I'm not sure where you get this notion that China is not a democratic country. First, people who actually live in China seem to disagree with you. In fact, far more people in China think that their country is more democratic than Americans think US is. https://www.tbsnews.net/world/china-more-democratic-america-...

I'm not sure if I'm supposed to pretend to be shocked that in a country who's censorship apparatus is not only the worlds best, but well known by the name "The Great Firewall of China"[^1]. The same country who has demonstrated they will jail you for having or expressing thoughts contrary to the ruling party's stance[^2]. That people who live in said country, when asked, agree their country is the best. If I was worried that admitting I have questions about my country would get me sent to an interment camp, for some forced "re-education". I'd likely adamantly agree my country was democratic.

But even I'm mistaken about all the human rights abuses in China, and it's actually a great, misunderstood place. I still wouldn't trust the majority public opinion about something. Because unless I'm curious about sentiment, it's far better to trust and rely on experts, rather than the feelings of an opinion poll. Which is something I'd hope you agree with given you cite a Cambridge study in this very comment.

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_China
[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_press_in_China
Welcome to management. At best you'll be making directionally correct decisions. Don't wait for perfect clarity. It's unlikely to happen, and it's probably too late if it does. You know what to do here. Go do it. Then go read The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team.