skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tried translating something from English to German (my native language) yesterday with ChatGPT4 and compared it to Microsoft Translate, Google Translate and DeepL.

My ranking:

1. ChatGPT4 - flawless translation. I was blown away

2. DeepL - very close, but one mistake

3. Google Translate - good translation, some mistakes

4. Microsoft Translate - bad translation, many mistakes

I can understand the panic.
I guess the question is how much Apple will charge for their USB-C cables... and whether the EU or anyone else is going to force Apple to remove the speed limit on data transfer for non-Apple USB-C cables (something that almost certainly will be possible to "fix" with a software update).
Even Machine Brains Need Sleep
Their point about diff pairs being more resistant to noise is correct, but it’s not the primary reason for using diff pairs.

Differential signals, at a physical layer level, are faster than single ended IO. It’s because you have double the current drive/sinking capability with two drivers. You’re also getting capacitive coupling between each leg of the pair working in your favor, which keeps your edge transition nice and fast.

Important stuff when your unit interval is under 500ps!
I think Google should create Google Spinner. A division whose only purpose is to spin off projects
> I just finished listening to a podcast about Lena Dunham

Which podcast?
Miller is a welcome addition to my toolbox. I just wish it was as 'easy' to use as jq... part of that might be how infrequently I work with CSVs
I could fine-tune a Detectron2 model a few months ago using PyTorch and MPS backend [1]. I'd be interested if it's working yet.

https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2/issues/4342
Ah, financial gravity comes to unicorns.
20x EBITDA starts looking reasonable, instead of the previous 40x.
The Price of a Big Mac Around the World, Mapped
Well, since lack of bank regulation almost destroyed the economy a little while ago, having a job that comes with incentives to reduce regulations is qualitatively different than those other options: more morally complicated, more dangerous.

The interviewer may have expected that fact to be self-evident to his readers, and that Barney Frank's unwillingness to engage with it, and to try to deflect in order to "win the argument," would speak for itself.
Very interesting to find the Nestle conglomerate "accidentally" being caught in the middle of a major drug smuggling operation. How could this have happened to such an innocent corporation[1]? /s

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoKLovtnbGY
It's important to note this is Bing quoting one source, presumably an attention-craving pundit on the internet throwing out absurd claims in order to get attention. This is not actually a prediction calculated by an AI.
Why is the top suggestion on a science video like that an anti-vax rant?
How is it proven, the answer is non-deterministic. It will probably be good but there is no guarantee. I just do not understand how you are unable to literally google god, unless you literally have no concept of how to write words.
If you are an investor would you buy stock in a company whose output is wealth or in a company whose output is diversity?
Yes yes yes....but. Which side is the sensible people with resources and which side is crazy yahoo's?

I would like to subscribe to your news letter !
"Yes, we burned the planet to a crisp. But for a few glorious months we made chatbots go insane!"
Played a solo-campgain with GPT4 for 1-2 hours yesterday, summary:

- Created character sheet for me, at desired level with spells and abilities

- Was able to add a cat to the game upon request

- Took hints.

- Was an outstanding writer, far better than any DM in terms of sensory descriptions and articulation

- Had to ask it to only tell 5 paragraphs at a time

- Performed combat rolls and math, all apparently correctly for a long while

- The first 20 rolls were all greater than 10, asked it give more random rolls and it seemingly did for a while

- Added elements on the fly consistently without losing track mostly

- Used puzzles and challenges and created a sense of danger. Adapted well on the fly to unusual character behavior (guessing an unreasonable answer for a puzzle solution).

- After a few hours it started confusing classes in my party (I think there is some context window). It forgot I had agonizing blast after a few hours.

- Sometimes fudged distances

Overall for a DM with infinite patience and an entirely customizable campaign on the fly with no need to plan/recover it seems promising at first. But some sort of prompt engineering will eventually prove necessary i think.
Expectations have changed a bit over the years. People want to be able to apply more formatting to text, incorporate images, videos, emojis etc. If you look at Slack I think you get some idea about what I'm on about. Especially with respect to embedded media.

You can, of course, do all that with HTML, but just using raw HTML posted directly from clients would result in too much chaos (and security challenges). Perhaps a somewhat constrained HTML that doesn't include styling so that styling is primarily done at the newsgroup level and can be overridden in the client? I'd probably prefer going with something simpler. Like Markdown.

Perhaps something could be done about how you quote parts of other postings. So you have markup for quoting text (that refers to a section of a posting).

Now, these things aren't stricly NNTP specific, but about content. But they would be easier to implement if you had some machinery for handling binary content, quoting content etc. in NNTP.

The idea of a single USENET isn't really viable anymore, so you'd have to think about how you can make something similar which is distributed in nature. Some of this is down to creating better clients that can deal with, for instance, you reading 100 forums spread across 20 servers without a lot of silly management. Another thing that would be interesting is to be able to quote content from or refer to postings residing on other servers than the one you are posting to.

Then there's identity, encryption and all that jazz. The simplest way to solve identity is to just use whatever providers people already use (FAANG). But you could perhaps investigate other ways to solve identity. Especially if you want to support various degrees of anonymity.

(Then there's stuff like content moderation, the ability to modify and version postings etc etc)

I think the most challenging bit is to create good clients.
Empowering for some, maybe. The anecdote reinforces the now dominant view that networking is everything and people deserve benefits and opportunities that at a different time might be labeled nepotism or favoritism.

Honestly the best opportunities I’ve had in life (in different decades, too) were all linked to favoritism by this one friend. The message this sends is that I should have more well-connected successful friends. Is this empowering?
I think “red flag” is a bit of a red flag….

Whatever you think about diversity discourse, it’s surely a reasonable point that supporting diversity is not in fact how Google or FB got rich. Presumably now that times are tough, they are having to focus more on their core competencies.
I think Thread.yield() would do that?
And yet the comment from a member of the actual team in question underneath says the opposite…
> And is there ANY proof that the vaccines do this?

I did not submit this and I do not know what you are replying to: the linked paper does not mention any vaccines, just the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Anyway, your question made me curious. The paper says in the Abstract:

> Here we show that SARS-CoV-2 causes DNA damage and elicits an altered DNA damage response. Mechanistically, SARS-CoV-2 proteins ORF6 and NSP13 cause degradation of the DNA damage response kinase CHK1 through proteasome and autophagy, respectively.

Then the question would be, are ORF6 and NSP13 present in the spike protein as encoded in the mRNA vaccines/transfections?

Please note that I’m not an expert, can only point to what is said here or there.

From this other paper: “Functional analysis of SARS-CoV-2 proteins in Drosophila identifies Orf6-induced pathogenic effects with Selinexor as an effective treatment” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7992514/

> The SARS-CoV-2 genome encodes 28 confirmed proteins (Fig. 1a). These include the polyproteins Orf1ab and Orf1a that are further cleaved into 16 non-structural proteins (Nsp1-16) that form the viral transcription/replication complex, as well as the 4 structural proteins [spike (S), envelope (E), membrane (M) and nucleocapsid (N) proteins] and 8 accessory proteins (Orf3a, Orf3b, Orf6, Orf7b, Orf8, Orf9b and Orf 10)

If I read that correctly, neither ORF6 nor NSP13 are part of the spike protein, and thus would not be produced by transfection from the mRNA “vaccines” (I do not think the term vaccine is a good description of these medicines, whether they are good or bad for a specific person).

From this illustration in the same paper, it seems that both lie outside of the spike protein (S) section of the genome:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/t...

So, based on my limited understanding of this, since the only part used for the transfections is the spike protein with some modifications, it would seem that neither ORF6 nor NSP13 would be produced by them.

Therefore, this paper would seem to have nothing to do with any COVID-19 mRNA vaccines/transfections.
We need a distributed registry for things like this, something like Bittorrent.
I think he just used a common all-mechanical typewriter. Every typewriter I used as a kid had a fractional form-feed of at least two steps (half a line), and some of them had horizontal rulers and even tabs on the carriage so you could accurately return it to any position you wanted. I loved drawing things with them by just moving the carriage around and re-aiming the typing aperture.
It sort of exists: Area 120.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_120

https://area120.google.com
> The embassies actively sprayed in offices, as well as inside and outside diplomatic residences — sometimes five times more frequently than usual. Many times, spraying operations were carried out every two weeks, according to embassy records.

> There was also a correlation between the individuals most affected by the symptoms and the number of fumigations that were performed at their residence.

So, overexposure to nerve agents both in their homes and at work? Sounds like something decently easy to prove that it has occurred for most affected, and something that should be covered as some kind of work injury. I assume living quarters were provided by the employers.
Isn’t that exactly not the case here? This product existed for over a decade.
Ask HN: Why do students still hand write notes?
I see so many students at campus take hand writing notes with an iPad or pen and paper and it makes no sense to me when we have laptops. I tried to use an iPad with the Pencil to take take notes in class, brainstorming down ideas and typing up drafts of essays and it was significantly less efficient than typing notes on a keyboard. It felt like time moved slower.

The question is, why do students willingly chose an inefficient path by handwriting notes in 2023?
We can analyze another course of action from companies such as Microsoft. Not saying that is better or worse but showing an alternative in big corporations.

Microsoft launched similar initiatives every time for decades even failing at prior tries. In the UI front they "play" with Silverlight, WFP, Windows Forms, MFC and a lot more. Try and retry.

I also think that these issues are worse when you are dealing with hardware: do they open the codebase to continue playing with the devices? I am on the European side of not only repairing youself but opening "dead" code or somethink like that. It is just an idea.
Higher blood caffeine levels may reduce weight, risk of type 2 diabetes
Ah, so this is how Frankenstein and Jurassic Park come to be...
Could you point to someone who argues (with solid arguments) that it won't happen in the next 50 years?

AFAIK more or less "everybody" is saying that it will happen "soon-ish". The optimist say AFIK 10 to 15 years, but even the pessimist say something around 25 to 35 years.

I also don't think raw computing power is or will be the bottleneck. But you can more or less brute-force problems with enough computing power. So that's an important factor. OTOH it could be that with clever tricks we reach something that looks like AGI way sooner. (Even completely "stupid" AIs without any "real intelligence"—whatever this is—like ELIZA or now the GPTs were and are good enough to fool the majority of people into believing that those machines are intelligent; intelligent enough even to be a substantial thread to humanity.)

I think the reason for a lot of confusion is that most people overestimate the human level of intelligence (likely even by a huge amount actually). The point is: Humans are not much smarter than other big apes. You can simulate intelligence credibly enough for most people by just throwing out language tokens by a big statistic. That's imho quite telling… Average people are actually quite terrible at things like logical reasoning, or in general joining the dots. That's the core of the issue that makes bullshit-generator machines like GPT3/4 so dangerous: Most people have no chance to recognize complete nonsense as such if the nonsense get recited eloquently and with enough self esteem. People fall for the same logical facilities the whole time since inception. That's for sure not because people on average are smart…
>and the problem with Versailles was the incredible conspicuous consumption while failing to address the problems and starvation outside the magic castle walls, leading to an uprising of the public and middle-elites which got the entire aristocracy murdered.

The author feels that big corps are not focused on the reason they exist but simply they are concerned to distractions outside of their objective.
I think you've missed my point. As you break down "the grind", it breaks down into projects like "fix this bug" or "speed up that API", and those are impactful and can lead to promotion. Sure, no director is going to be promoted to VP for fixing a bug, but it's useful stuff for a new grad to have completed and would feed into their promotion.

If there is "grind" that is truly not impactful, then why is it being done? I'm not talking about for promotion, I mean why would anyone make changes that have no impact?
Putting aside the fact that Venus's clouds consist of concentrated sulfuric acid, shouldn't our assumptions about colonizing the planet be based on what we are capable of achieving? I am not aware of any floating settlements in the air (though I do know of floating settlements on water), so it's hard to imagine one on Venus.

Moreover, if we are to consider possibilities beyond our current capabilities, why not focus on building space stations with artificial gravity instead? There would be no need to be tethered to Venus when we could exist without any attachment (although we would still be subject to gravity of other entities).
The pricing modes are confusing - I've seen it at other websites too, is this some kind of trend?!

The issue: when I choose "yearly" subscription, the page still shows price per month. So you're about to charge me every month? Despite I chosen to pay yearly. And where's the "2 months free" if I end up paying monthly??

Your starter pack costs:

$79/m (in "yearly" subscription) - so $79*12 = $948

(or $79*10 ??? because of the "2 months free")

$99/m - so $99*12 = $1188

$1188 - $948 = $240 - so it's actually more than "2 months free".

It's super confusing and I leave immediately no matter how badly I just wanted to buy it.
> This paradox is a street level wisdom from many people who have actual experience with Russians: if you are attacked, you have to attack back fiercely. If you don't, you are not respected (more precisely, you are disrespected and considered weak and exploitable), if you do, you are, if you win, they might very likely consider you as their friend.

Finland is a good example of this. The beating Russians got from Finland in the Winter War[1] is legendary and Finns are respected for that. Finland enjoyed relatively good relations with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, far better than most countries, which allowed it to act as a mediator in key diplomatic events of the Cold War.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki_Accords
Kansai International Airport
Graceful Disagreements
In this week's edition of The Manager's Prism - “Graceful Disagreements”, I share my observations on disagreements and a few things we could do to find common ground.

This is something that I often see people battle with in their own ways. My hope here is to give everyone a structure to their thoughts when dealing with disagreements.
I give up. When Americans use the term left and liberal, and even socialist I have absolutely no idea what they mean.
For sure, but until we do, it's reasonable to ridicule it.

(And I'm saying that as an optimist because I want the billionaires to develop that tech: the ability to fully terraform Mars into a self-sustained world is necessarily also sufficient to handle any imaginable damage to Earth up to and including a surprise impact with a moon-sized rock that excavates the crust and mantle everywhere to a depth of a few thousand km, meaning that things like greenhouse gases and biodiversity would become as easy to fix in that future as a single broken window is today; even just the bare minimum of a single self-sustained domed city on Mars means most environmental issues have to be "solved").
That was exactly my first idea - have multiple of these in different speeds to create polyrythms.
> everyone in a position like Ritchie's had a personal secretary

maybe everyone in a position like the one he later had, definitely not while he wrote his PhD thesis... but even then, I don't think researchers at Bell Labs had personal secretaries.
Glass just wasn't very good. Tiny low resolution display, poor quality camera, uncomfortable to wear, terrible battery life. Pivoting to "for Enterprise" was just a half-assed attempt to make back some of the $$$ wasted on development without putting much more effort into R&D. Not a surprise that adoption was limited.

(I worked at X 2013-2015.)
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28298729 (273 points | Aug 25, 2021 | 66 comments)
Maybe, maybe not. Again I'm not thinking so much about the very top of the company as almost everyone is not in that position and never will be.

For me, it's not necessarily true that showing impact on a completely new feature is easier than showing impact in improving an existing one. It's a lot more work to measure new things as we don't have the tools to measure them yet, or as you have to introduce new measurements to colleagues and get buy-in that they are the right thing to be measuring. On the other hand, saying that I reduced an existing error rate by half is very easy to communicate, understand, prioritise, and even reward.
Nit: it indicated I had chosen the 3rd highest scoring word, and listed a Latin word as first.

Don’t normal scrabble words preclude foreign words?
The point is: Humans are not much smarter than other big apes.

So if we're not that smart, and we build a compute smarter than us, even if just by a bit? Who cares? We've built a pretty dumb computer, according to you.
As one of the comments on reddit posts - it's not just big tech companies, but also entire university teams which feel the goalposts moving miles ahead all of a sudden. Imagine working on your PhD on chat bots since start of 2022. Your entire PhD topic might be irrelevant already...
>The real question will then be, how to give all these jobless people both means of living (redistributing wealth) and dignity (a place/utility amongst others).

These questions are not exciting to technologists, so they will not be solved.

And if the rebuttal is that we could solve them today, then one must necessarily ask why we don't, and come to some grim conclusions.
Exactly - it's not that there aren't people that want to buy games, it's that giving games away for free and then selling microtransactions is more profitable.
We’ve been in a cyberpunk not-dystopia for decades. There is a lot of case law that there’s no expectation of privacy in the workplace. [0]

Employers can do stuff that is illegal for private citizens.

For example, employers can key log everything you do on your work equipment. Without your consent. They can video everything you do at work, without consent. They can keep the fingerprint you use to log in and keep the eye scan and biometric data for many purposes.

Note, I’m not defending this. Just stating facts. As they are useful facts and if I expect my employer to not do this then I need to confirm they have some practice in place to prevent it of their own volition because US law doesn’t prevent it.

I learned a lot about this when working on my org’s ssl MITM policy so it would not MITM for personal sites. While legally they could proxy and log bank logins and such, it is internal policy not to do this and to communicate to employees. Now employees can’t commit fraud with it or facilitate crimes (eg sell passwords) but they could do lame stuff like sell employee profile data (eg, prepend banks with XBank).

I only do work on work equipment. I keep a personal phone and personal laptop for any personal business.

If I didn’t want to be monitored in this way, I’d have to seek out a rare company and I’m not even sure to how to audit to make sure they actually adhere to their stated policies.

Note, this is only for employees on employer owned equipment. So I think it’s perfectly normal for Apple to log biometric data on test devices and use it for training. And to use all images on those devices for training purposes.

[0] https://www.justia.com/employment/hiring-employment-contract...
But executives at companies can also have extensive access to nonpublic information about rivals, partners or vendors through their business. Buying or selling stock based on that knowledge can run afoul of insider-trading law, according to experts.

Insider trading requires some "consideration" given in exchange for the information. Matt Levine has covered that the SEC takes a pretty broad view of "consideration" and it can include things like "friendship".

But if, you hear rumors from multiple people in your network about your competitor having trouble and you trade on it, that's not insider trading. That's just early access to information.
I know, right? Or because a constant flux of immigrants is a totally sustainable situation..

We somehow need to be able to view immigration and its effects through a lens of reasoning, and not passionate politics. If you suggest that maybe, you know, a lot of immigration or immigration of uneducated workers is bad, automatically you are somehow far right.
Grift too.
What a dishonest thing to say. FB was abused by bad actors but it wasn't at Mark's direction or by his employees and you freaking know that.
Keith Richards is 79 and still touring. Still smokes. And is more handsome than ever.
I am a millennial, but I feel old when I remember Google Labs. They started GMail and Google Calendar there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Labs

Area 120 may try to revitalize that, but it seems to feature more Press Releases than actual demos.
If you were an NLP researcher at a university whose past years of experience is facing existential threat due to this rapid innovation causing your area to become obsolete, what would be some good areas to pivot to or refocus on?
Kernighan also wrote Pic, a *roff/*TeX preprocessor. He knows a thing or two about typesetting. And, obviously, he's the 'K' in AWK.