skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People get so distracted trying to use certain significant words for what LLM’s do, even when the usage is strained and makes it harder to see how they actually work and what they excel at.

A better word for what they do here might be something like “preambulating” — it develops a focus to its later output by grounding more and more tokens into its active context, because they each narrow what else fits. That winnowing effect helps it produce a coherent and rich answer, and when you undermine its opportunity to use that technique, the answers become less coherent and more random.

This is not reasoning as that word is traditionally used and doesn’t need to be called that.

Yet it’s still a fascinating emergent phenomenon with incredible engineering opportunity. When you call it by something less culturally ambitious and more technically precise, it helps you stay focused on how to use it well and less distracted by some personal desire to prove this is the exact historical moment you want it to be.

We need to develop a better vocabulary around these things if we want to stop having the dumb Nascent AGI vs Fancy Autocomplete flamewar.

Edit: And I’ll even throw a bone to the Nascent AGI people and say that this kind of preambulating is absolutely something that people do too and easy to characterize as some form of intelligence. But it’s not reasoning, which has specific strong connotations of formality and logic, which don’t hold well with these particular tools.
IC thanks.
> the same spending power required to live in a house in the suburbs, or rurally, could usually be used to live in higher density living, closer to urban centers

Have you seen what condos cost? This is not true. Homeownership in walkable neighborhoods is basically reserved for plutocrats.
> Then you’d proceed to click on the first official-looking link you saw, even if it’s an ad. After all, it doesn’t really make a difference if you click on an ad or an organic link as long as you wind up on the site you’re looking for.

> You won’t think too hard about clicking a Google ad because you have no reason to be suspicious of them–they’re just part of the background noise of your digital life.

I don't really consider myself a privacy nut, but wow, when I read stuff like this I start to realise why others might!
Wow, I'm old. In my brain, it used to be about 80K. That was a long time ago!

Here is the official history: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/cbb.html

The jump between 2022 and 2023 is huge.
Congrat. Good work. I have some Google workspace addons. You can promote the addon via Reddit, Twitter, ProductHunt and Facebook.
I think this is incorrect. One way to think about it is that usually infrastructure costs scale with distance. So you need much less infrastructure per person in dense places. However, everyone pays the same tax rate (or more in dense areas because the property values are higher) which means that in reality the dense areas usually subsidize the suburbs.

There is a company (urbanthree.com) that does financial modeling and produces heat maps to show the net gain/loss of a city based on area. They routinely find that the denser areas are financially solvent and supporting the city and the suburbs are not solvent.

https://www.urbanthree.com/services/revenue-modeling/
That is good to know thank you. I always wondered whether stevia could be used as a substitute for sugar in baking for that exact reason.
comments 21 days ago on this were quite good i thought. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34795184
I can't speak for everyone, and I'm not particularly familiar with FOSTA-SESTA (I'm not from the US). But one possible rationale for differentiating between these two is that the covid restrictions were temporary, whereas FOSTA-SESTA seems like a permanent law.
370 Assembly had a machine operation for converting an EBCDIC-encoded digit string into an internal integer which seemed odd at the time, but the more I think about it (converting digit strings to integers is a surprisingly subtle operation), the more it makes sense to do this at the lowest level possible.

The other interesting thing about EBCDIC was that character codes with A–F in the lower nibble of the code were generally unused or reserved for uncommon characters. This restriction didn’t apply to the upper nibble (most notably the digits were encoded as F0–F9).
A lot more of the continent than most people think!

Further reading:

https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/nearly-half-america...
What does it mean to value human life? I would argue that the economic engine has given us ALL of the improvements in quality of life, and the fact that we live so much longer than we used to, IS valuing human life. There is no other way we could have given ourselves all of the amazing things (tech-wise) we have today.

Why would we value the environment over human lives? That just seems like nature-worship.
>The 1556 Shaanxi earthquake (Postal romanization: Shensi), known in Chinese colloquially by its regnal year as the Jiajing Great Earthquake "嘉靖大地震" (Jiājìng Dàdìzhèn) occurred in the early morning of 23 January 1556 in Huaxian, Shaanxi during the Ming dynasty.

>Most of the residents there lived in yaodongs—artificial caves in loess cliffs—which collapsed and buried alive those sleeping inside. Modern estimates put the direct deaths from the earthquake at over 100,000, while over 700,000 migrated away or died from famine and plagues, which summed up to a total loss of 830,000 people in Imperial records.[3][4][5] It was the deadliest recorded earthquake in history, and in turn one of the deadliest natural disasters in Chinese history.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1556_Shaanxi_earthquake

You might also ask people in Turkey, where at least 50,000 people have died so far, what they think of masonry structures.
Surely we're not surprised how detached, on this site, we mostly are from common consumption behaviors?
On the "pound of potatoes vs pound of feathers" question - ChatGPT's explanation is so convincing that it really understands the concepts. But it can be juked very easily.

I asked it what was heavier, 1,000 tons of helium or a cubic meter of osmium, and it told me that the helium weighs 1,000,000 kg, the osmium 22,600 kg, and therefore the osmium weighs more because it's way denser.

It's hard for me to believe that these LLMs are going to learn basic logic if only we throw more training data at them.

Transcript:

Me: What is heavier, 1000 tons of helium or a cubic meter of osmium?

ChatGPT: A cubic meter of osmium is much heavier than 1000 tons of helium.

One ton is equal to 1000 kilograms, so 1000 tons is equal to 1,000,000 kilograms. The density of helium is about 0.1785 kilograms per cubic meter. Therefore, 1000 tons of helium would have a volume of:

1,000,000 kg / 0.1785 kg/m³ = 5,604,069.77 m³

On the other hand, osmium is one of the densest elements known, with a density of around 22,600 kg/m³. Therefore, a cubic meter of osmium weighs:

1 m³ x 22,600 kg/m³ = 22,600 kg

So, a cubic meter of osmium weighs much more than 1000 tons of helium.

Update: I am continuing the conversation and I am now being explicitly told that, while 1,000,000 kg is much heavier than 22,600 kg, it doesn't change the fact that the osmium is heavier than the helium because the osmium is denser.

Update2: I then reminded it about the potatoes and feathers and how density was irrelevant in that context, and shouldn't it therefore be irrelevant in the case of the helium and the osmium? And instead of correcting its response on the helium and osmium, it's now telling me the feathers and potatoes weigh different.

Update3: it is now telling me that densities don't matter when comparing masses but do matter when comparing weights. I must say, it has a certain panache in resolving internal inconsistencies in its past responses.

Update4: after being corrected half a dozen times with contradictory information, I asked it to state its confidence in its latest story. It said "I can state with a high degree of confidence that my last answer was accurate". The shamelessness!
> some attribute

More than that. Every number is either even or odd! Super common attributes don't do enough.

> I found this number interesting enough to spend a few minutes on it, which is more than I give most numbers!

I would say you didn't find the number interesting, you found the context interesting. There are billions of similar numbers that could have gone in the same slot and you would have spent the same effort on them. But if you were set free to look for interesting numbers, without being fed this one, you never would have glanced at it. And more specifically, this is a context that would basically never produce the same number again; it's not a sequence with a generator.
Another aspect is that being near family while raising your children is immensely helpful. Housing prices have gone 30-40x since my parents bought, for example. Salaries have definitely not increased at a similar pace!
It especially sucked because none of those major rape scenes were in the books. They were added by the show runners. Drago didn't rape Daenerys; he seduced her. Ramsey Bolton never raped Sansa (and also never married her, that was a different character entirely, cut from the show). Jaime never raped Cercei.
> The economy doesn't work for the people anymore and drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.

If trees could just all agree to remain short, they wouldn't need to waste resources to outgrow each other to reach sunlight.
Another option is to use an approach like Prevayler: https://prevayler.org/

The basic notion is you keep your data hot in RAM and manage it directly. You make every change an object (or a command), and write that out serially to a log before you execute it. That gets you the ACID guarantees but with no I/O but linear writes, so it can be extremely fast.

It only makes sense when your data fits conveniently in RAM, but that's a lot of things.
There's also recycling. It's possible to recycle the lithium in batteries for example but not possible to recycle all of the oil that is pulled out of the ground to produce gasoline.
> Power hungry industries will become seasonal or migratory too.

Electricity will have to become orders of magnitude more expensive for this to be true. After you've bought the building, the smelter, and the guy to operate it, the cost of electricity to smelt aluminum is negligible. Its never going to make sense to leave all that idle if the cost of electricity bumps up a few cents.
ChatGPT vs. Google Search: In Head-to-Head Battle, Which One Is Smarter?
What was the “mocking” part? “Pics, or didn’t happen”?

Ps: I’m no native speaker and I don’t use Twitter. So I’m not sure about the tone and the behaviors here. That’s why my asking. For me, it doesn’t sound like mocking but disbelieve (but who knows )
Raw dogging is generally a more fruitful approach.
BCD was popular for a long time for values that had to be constantly printed in decimal, since doing repeated division by 10 could be slow on systems that had no wide multiplication and no barrel shifter (remember that integer division by a constant is just a wide multiply and shift). By storing in BCD you can skip the division when you go to print the value out, at the cost of making arithmetic on the value a bit more expensive. Even some video games of the 16-bit era used BCD for stuff that had to be displayed in the UI.
There are comments in studiomdl (Valve Software's model compiling program) that say stack fixups in Visual Studio 2002 or 2003 broke Release builds so optimisations are turned off for that project.
> deficit that was literally created by giving money to large companies and rich people in the form of tax deductions,

I have no particular knowledge of French macro economic policies, but a tax deduction is not "giving money". It is "not taking money". Your framing assumes that corporate or individual earnings belong to the government and the government can decide to allow the money to be "given" to the taxpayer. Whether that is an appropriate arrangement of private property rights and the relationship between the people and the government is a hotly debated topic, to put it mildly.
> American Social Security had an age of 65, but at the time of its passing life expectancy for American men was 58

That was life expectancy at birth. It makes more sense when considering retirement system design to consider the life expectancy of people who are at least old enough to be in the workforce.

Of the people who were 21 when Social Security passed around 65% of them survived to at least 65.

Of the people who were born around the time Social Security passed, over 70% of those that made it to 21 made it to 65.
Would they prefer the car, or is it just that the bus with poor routing and infrequent service is not a viable alternative and those in charge waste a ton of money which makes useful expansions not affordable.
> This is partly why iPhones got rid of the home button in lieu of Face ID

Home button went non-mechanical the year before Face ID was introduced FWIW.
Because they believe masking is more beneficial than harmful, and the opposite for FOSTA-SESTA.
"Umm aside" not-aside, I'm sorry for triggering you. it's too late for me to edit my comment and take that out but I would if I could. So this may not be obvious to you, but what's obvious to someone isn't necessarily obvious to other people, and vice versa. In any case, I can see why creating a separate account if you only have toddlers seems too onerous. Don't worry though, they'll become teenagers who want (and deserve) the autonomy and agency of having their own account before you know it, even if sharing your photos to their idevice wasn't enough to motivate you. Separate accounts seems the most reasonably way do implement a shared but-not-system to preserve privacy, a favorite reason Apple cites as their reason for doing things. I'm not sure how else Apple could do a shared system for teens.

I think there's a hack involving getting a cheap phone number for each toddler, adding that to iCloud, then disabling message delivery to that number but I haven't tested it.
> . Today in the US it's 77.8. In France, it's 82.

Its 73.5 for males. you only have 8 years after retirement :/

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/life-expectancy.htm
> I hate driving in Denver. The traffic sucks.

> Why is walkable so desired? When it's cold (like today) I don't want to leave my car. I'd drive through any day, I'd drive just to avoid walking half a mile.

This is an amazing example of the terrible disease that is Car Brain.

Instead of having a walkable city where you can walk to the shops/gym/restaurants, take convenient public transport to the theatre, and take the kids/dog to the park next door, live in a massive isolated bunker, drive your massive pickup truck to buy groceries, and wonder why the city is so congested with cars and trucks all doing the same thing. Madness.
> You are forgetting what if Nokia pivoted to Android in Feb 2011, than the first usable, mass produced ...

I'm not forgetting anything. All of these issues are present in a switch to the Microsoft platform too, and it was already clear to most observers when they did that, that the MS platform was dead in the water.

> hey would needed to compete with iPhone 4S

As did every other player, and outside the US the iPhone was not dominant in the same way.

> you can't tell them to fuck off like in the US

They had engineering units in the US which they could have done that to. And there are things you can do in most European countries too, when situations are dire.

> You may don't like Elop and his actions as much as you want, but there is zero chances they could do anything themselves.

I very much disagree, as do many observers. It could have been turned around with good management, but that doesn't seem to have been Elop's aim, his aim seemed to be to fulfill goals for MS.

> And guess who not only had the money but was willing to pour them into Nokia?

Yes, it was a stitch-up job for MS to buy an established name to try to save their dead mobile platform.
Martin Thompson
Also, the teensy audio library is great!

https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_Audio.html
> Beyond that I'm not sure I follow your specific point.

The question is why HN allows a meta-link about a corporate PR (for example, a Verge story about the PR, since you don't like the direct link) but not something like this? Why is "Corporation X announces Y" intellectually interesting, but this isn't?

Anyway, if this submission remains flagged, then this newer one should be flagged too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35063232
Rural areas have such a tiny population that the subsidy going to them is mostly used by urban folks.

If your food goes over a subsidized road that counts against you.
Why would it become an opportunity, if you can take care of that new demand with more automation (produced using existing automation)? The "redundant" people become permanently redundant in this arrangement.
it is a special(well I wish) kind of thinking where EVERYTHING belongs to the government, so the notion that someone gets to keep more of their own produce can only mean subsidy. It is really quite sick when one thinks about it
Lmao our economy will not be destroyed. It won't even be hampered. This is nonsense.
In ordinary photography, target selection eats better gear for breakfast.

Needless to say, specialist stuff requires specialist gear (e.g. underwater photography, fast sports shots, long-distance animal documentary filming).

For a lot of application scenarios, today´s mobile phone cameras are amazing for what they can do, how small and affordable they are. More often than not, one's best shots are spontaneous, and the only camera around will be the one in one's smartphone.

In contrast, in many sports (not chess, perhaps!), e.g. a better table-tennis bat matters enormously. As they say, a match won is attributed to one's technique, a match lost is blamed on the bat (never heard a photographer blame anything on their camera or wideangle lense!).

In software engineering and writing, a good laptop matters enormously. Among the properties { keyboard, screen, battery, RAM, CPU, SSD }, keyboard and battery life are the most crucial elements to me, followed by RAM and SSD size followed by screen and CPU. In the past, ¨faster CPU¨ would have been higher up on the list, but even today's slowest machines are already very fast!

Whatever you do, new/better gear make it more fun! So if you want your kids to enjoy the new school year, buy them new colors or a new school bag.
It's important not to conflate "suburbs" and "rural."

For example, most of the Santa Clara Valley is suburban, consisting of subdivisions of detached homes with front yards, driveways, garages etc. But the area is definitely not rural: millions of people live here and 4 of the 5 FAANG companies are headquartered here.

You could say similar things about LA, or the areas outside Chicago and NYC, etc. They are definitely suburban, and definitely not rural.
I wonder why he is treating only Twitter employees like this and not Tesla or SpaceX. Is he treating Twitter just as his toy? Or I wonder if the media just doesn't care to cover Tesla or SpaceX
Sunflower-Associated Reductions in Varroa Mite Infestation of Honey Bee Colonies
Why'd it get flagged? This is the new narrative after all.
Why would it lock out most advertisers?
> The strengthening of social ties within the union gives you a pulpit from which to influence

Hmm. If a pastor uses the church pulpit to convince their flock to vote a specific way, that's okay from your definition. If a well-loved ceo at a company spontaneously meets with the employees in the breakroom, over their free coffee and free lunch, and decides to use that pulpit to convince people to act a certain way politically, that's okay from your definition.

There is a saying: "What's good for the goose is good for the gander" [1] which is "used to say that one person or situation should be treated the same way that another person or situation is treated".

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/what%27s%20good%2...
costco.com is legal, malware is (often) not. Google is distributing malware, and getting paid for it. It is also actively promoting rogue websites that stand for the original product. This all seems very different from your costco example.
i think this is a simple consequence of euler characteristic, and the property that any addition cut intersects each of the others at most once. You can set up a sinple equation that gives you an upper bound and a simple configuration which achieves it.
I was thinking about something similar but wondering if you could do it over Ethernet and the VST API with low enough latency to be useful for a DAW. Or if you can figure out a way to make latency less of an issue all together and enable remote VSTs.
Unfortunately it seems like "Plan D: treasury_money_printing" is the easiest option politically despite its eventual problems.
It seems unbelievably stupid to me to build solar panel based homes where I live: the northwest US.

Makes a heck of a bunch of sense in CA or TX though.
Wrong on two counts. The minor one: a VW ID.3 also has disc brakes.

The major reason you're wrong is that the very manufacturer of the braking system, ZF Friedrichshafen AG, has described exactly why they decided to design and develop an entirely new type of drum brake system instead of using proven technology like disc brakes.

Here's what Manfred Meyer, Senior VP of ZF's Safety division said about them:

> The braking system for a battery-electric vehicle utilizes intelligent integration in a number of ways. For example, we can eliminate the need for a mechanical locking mechanism in the drivetrain and keep the vehicle in park mode through software that controls this function within the ESC and redundantly in the Electronic Brake Booster unit. The brake system itself helps ensure that the car cannot move – this saves cost and results in less weight. This system also allows for automatic stability control and advanced driver assist features that require automatic emergency braking.

You'd think if rusty rotors and seizing calipers were what motivated them to use technology that's almost universally seen as inferior, people like Manfred would be quick to defend their choice by pointing out the obvious flaw with disc brakes and regen, as you've been so enthusiastically doing.

Not sure it matters much to you though. If I were Manfred Meyer himself and I explained in great detail why you're wrong, you'd probably still insist on maintaining your ignorance so you could win some sort of HN contest.

To save us both some time: you win. You're right. The VW ID.3 has drum brakes in the rear, and disc brakes in the front, because "regen seizes brakes," and we have you to thank for setting the record straight.
Without these features, people have to resort to dynamically generated SQL queries in procedural or functional languages, which is much worse! SQL has also become significantly more complicated by adding all sorts of second-class features to get around this composability limitation (CTEs, table valued functions, views, etc.).

Besides, I don't think it would be as bad as you say. You can approach it as a simple template expansion into flat SQL queries except where a data dependency occurs, at which point template expansion proceeds in stages, one for each dependency.

LINQ on .NET provides most of the composability I'm talking about, although it has a few limitations as well. Still worlds better than raw SQL.
When was HBO not an incredible and influential arthouse? Mr. Show ran from 1995 to 1998 and galvanized the careers and tone of comedians that would carry adult swim and comedy central through their golden eras.

Lightning in a bottle is par for HBO.
What makes you think that project is relying on passive solar? In green building that concept has been largely superseded by newer standards like Passive House and Net Zero which generally rely more on air sealing and super-insulation with highly insulated windows.