skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You don't understand the scope of the problem and want to throw money down the drain in the name of border security. In order to meaningfully make a dent in the problem, given the size of the US-Canada and US-Mexico borders, and the East and West coastlines, and all of the international airports, and not just shift the problem around from one location to another, all of the border needs to be made more secure. I have no idea why you keep bringing up Ukraine either. You know we're shipping military hardware to them and not pallets of dollar bills right? What are we going to do instead of help Ukraine with that? Line up artillery shells on the border with Mexico and somehow that'll help the war on drugs? Talk about silly nonsense!

Understand the scope of the problem first and you'll be free to think about how to meaningfully address the border situation.
Ask HN: Regression to predict long-tailed variables?
Suppose I was trying to predict something like the number of votes an article gets on social media. I have a lot of data, millions of article submissions, but the data is noisy and has a large range that is nowhere near normally distributed.

For instance, the same article might get submitted 5 times to the same web site and get 0, 0, 9, 35, and 172 votes. That’s the output variable. The input variables are derived from the text of the article, these could be “bag of words” features, the output of a BERT-like embedding, or ideally, a fine-tuned model that outputs a number. I’ve got models working that treat it as a classification model and predict if an article crosses a threshold, and those definitely “work” but I get the feeling they are throwing information away. On the other hand, the L2-norm and even the L1-norm don’t seem appropriate here because of the nosiness and large range of the output variable.

Is there a better way to do this?
We can only imagine what the lightbulb world would look like if the Phoebus cartel didn't hamstring R&D.

Some might be tempted to believe that we'd have discovered what technology they suppressed, but they are insufficiently pessimistic. Technology gets worse all the time, and lightbulbs are a great example of that happening on purpose.
The e-bikes here are generally quicker off the mark at lights but that lasts like ten seconds before a decent road bike or legs zips by them because they’re limited to 15kmph
I don't know why this is getting downvoted, all of this is true. Prosecution in Germany is 100% a political decision. Policing (below this level) is supposed to be "automatic by law", but in practice, that of course also is not the case. All state bureaucracy is of political, always, but in the case of German prosecution, it's openly legal.
suboxone can be abused due to the differences in half life's of the components.
I hate how many of these things aren't limits of the technology but rather the result of cost optimization and general apathy towards the customer. We know how to mass-produce quality LEDs to the point entire TVs are made of the things. We know how to mass-produce rectifiers pretty much ever since diodes existed. We know how to cool mass-produced objects in compact spaces. But because we apparently can't have nice things, we don't get the product of all that knowledge; instead we get whatever cost optimized bullshit gets shat out of a factory run by MBAs.

This same reasoning is why I'm not bullish on AI; what the potential is and what we peasants get to use are vastly different
....it doesn't require examples, it is simple logic.

I assert that:

1) A monopoly can only be held accountable by the government.

2) The government can only be held accountable by the people.

Therefore, if the people wish to hold the operators of a utility accountable then having a monopoly control that utility is only introducing an extra, unnecessary, layer.

As far as I can tell, you make no claim that contradicts 1 or 2. You are, at best, saying that in practice having a monopoly run things is no worse than having the government do it directly. Feel free to correct my assessment.
TikTok and most of other social media is cancer entirely comparable to the tobacco industry. I wouldn't miss any of it.
Yeah, I don't want that part for sure. I could have been clearer, but what I meant is that the idea has been put forward that the people of North Korea have the Juche ideology so deeply ingrained in them that, if the regime were gone (hopefully through peaceful means), the country would struggle to put something better in its place.

Right now, things are pretty bad. People are starving, there are human rights abuses, etc. If you want to change the course of a country, you have to remove the old order and (the part everyone forgets about far too easily) fill the void by somehow creating a new order that is stable and effective. This second part fails really often in history. I think it might be a huge challenge for North Korea if they ever get to that step.
Best response according to you.
They expect:

- To be paid a lot of money by OpenAI to go away, or

- To be paid a lot of money to have a role in vetting future AI products, or

- To be paid a lot of money by wealthy individuals in the AI alignment camp, or

- To be paid a lot of money by OpenAI's competitors to block research until they can catch up with OpenAI.
This is not censorship. Deciding what content was allowed on tic tok would be censorship, banning is not that. People are free to view and express themselves on a myriad of other platforms not owned by a horrid adversary currently attacking us from all directions.

Tic Tok has to go, I don’t want people near me using it so China can have a working graph of Americans at all time. They’re already famous for using 0-days in apps. This is just a common sense move I can’t believe any honest tech person would disagree with.
Scratch is also one of the largest places for kids to play games.
>unlike anything else I have seen in my career.

It seemed quite a lot like the microservices, nosql and ML hypes to me.
Except controlling communications, thought, and expression is different. The medium isn’t important. It’s what is being controlled.

I agree, it’s not different than an oppressive regime controlling means of communication. It’s in fact precisely the same.
Yes you get it! The humiliation factor. If it's related to sexuality, the victim can be pushed and squashed even further. One doesn't even have to download the movie, it's enough to share 32kb of it!
The limitations you describe make sense. But they seem like we can overcome them.

My home has 3 non-plumbing busses: AC to every room. Twisted pair to like 6 rooms that will never see use. Coax to 7 rooms that is only used for a modem in one room.

If we can run all that wiring, I think we can introduce a new standard for upcoming homes.

In fact, now that I think of it, my home has a trait that the homes I grew up in never had: the overhead lighting and the wall receptacles are never on the same circuits. ... I wonder if I can re-use the 14-2 Romex for DC and retrofit one or two rooms myself and see how it works? (I recognize this is a bad idea for many reasons, such as them being indistinguishable and wrongly colour coded, making it a dangerous trap for future owners).
This Will Make You a Better Storyteller
>Yet life is better on pretty much every material metric you list.

Lack of housing and the subsequent high cost of housing is a serious issue. Taking steps to avoid people becoming homeless in the first place is extremely important. And has certainly become much, much worse. It is a large factor in the amount of addiction and street drug use.
Quantity (lumens) is its own type of quality.
I'll add a second identical anecdote. I've witnessed about a dozen die after about doing about 1/10th their promised duty.
Can you explain how the dutch permissive drug policies (which are exclusively related to recreational use) have any influence on importance in international drug trade? Smuggling hard drugs carries a sentence of up to 16 years in prison in the Netherlands and is also frequently enforced.
I had to show an ID to get a local sim in Tunesia as well...

Also, what is a "strong" "government" ID? Are there weak, non-government ones, like library cards?
This reflects more poorly on your engineering leadership than your coworker imo. Where are the guardrails? Why aren't his migrations going through a pull request where you can review and say "this should be a batch insert?" If PRs are in place but nobody speaks up, why is the culture afraid of pointing these things out?
I think he was meaning the AI summarized news and not human summarized like Reuters does.
Or for an even more funny take, see https://rekt.news
It reminds me of a time when new ideas about spirituality and human position in the universe were so disruptive to the status quo operation of the church and kingdom of England that they were outlawed.

And pilgrims abandoned all they had to cross a virtually unpassable ocean to seek empty land to build from scratch but with the freedom to continue experimenting with their new ideas.

Funny how this country has come full circle.
I'm sure that China is going to honor the demands of activists in America and halt its development of AI projects
Yep, a fantastic read.
You are going back in time, to the origins of the BND, post WW2 and into the Cold War.

Does it seriously surprise you that Germany as the aggresor that lost the war, became a border country to the Soviet block with a large US military presence was influenced by the CIA or other US intelligence services?

It does not surprise me to the least.

I don't think your argument is particularly strong though if all you present to make your point are well documented historic facts going back 50-70 years.

You're missing a whole lot between those times and today.

Last reference to the CIA in your first link is that the German gov. expelled several high ranking CIA officers post the mid 2010s NSA leaks.

So where are you deriving the notion from that, today, the CIA controls the BND?

Give us facts, posts, experts, discussions, anything. And recent.

Not just an opinion.
> You make it worse than it really is, and simultanously miss all the bad stuff going on...

I am sure that I am making it seem worse than it is, which is why I asked for views from people who grew up with these laws. As a first-generation immigrant American, a lot of things that shock me about laws and culture in the US are quite natural to people who grew up here (the most obvious example being guns) -- so I'm sure that the case in Germany would be similar.

I am curious though, what do you view as "all the bad stuff going on" with regards to privacy?
Does spam costing more money stop spam? Does it cost money per account, project, version? If I can make $100 from one victim, is this spam still profitable?

What happens to the international developers who cannot easily get a payment method setup?

Does a $10/m "identity verification" stop a nation state from using the platform to influence?
The one about them being an inherently privileged group of oppressors.
They complain they get to effectively serve as Apple technical support, due to Apple's choice of shipping old versions of curl with their products. Which is fair.
31% is about 1 out of 3. That’s a big number.
Agreed. Sometimes I have multiple outstanding pull requests against the same code for features different enough to be different tasks. It rarely works out well but for whatever reason I don't notice it happening until the end.

Alternatives are: overloading pull requests with multiple distinct tasks (bad), sitting on my hands (bad), updating the code for each PR as others are merged (bad, error prone), or creating pull requests that merge into other branches pending review (less bad but annoying to maintain). I tend to do the latter.
Hi, I've spent quite an amount of time digging into papers on the computational models which Victor has linked to.

I do notice Victor's tendency to be hyperbolic and defensive, which is quite unfortunate, and I don't know or care much about the blockchain that Victor is also running. (By the way, I think that Victor's real name is probably Victor Maia rather than Taelin, as you can corroborate from a number of sources; it seems Taelin is just his handle on Github. It seems that Victor used to work at Ethereum Foundation with the title of Researcher https://bobsummerwill.com/ethereum-foundation-people/?)

On the other hand, the computational model that Victor's HVM is built on was invented by Yves Lafont, and strongly inspired by Jean Yves Girard (who is known for Linear Logic, Girard's paradox, and System-F (of which, according to Wikipedia "forming a theoretical basis for languages such as Haskell")). I can assure you that Lafont and Girard are logicians of the highest caliber, and indeed the promises that HVM intends to fulfill are the same notions envisioned by Girard and computer scientists working on Geometry of Interaction and Interaction Nets. If you spend a few minutes to consider the case on the README where HVM claims to outperform GHC (e.g. regarding Lambda Multiplication), it should not be hard to understand why it is possible in certain cases for HVM to outperform essentially anything else, and the potential that improvements in computational models can bring.

In any case, Victor has indeed put a very promising computational model to serious optimisation, and that alone is worth earnest commendation. Reading in the details on HVM will make it clear that although it works today, it is still very much a prototype in-progress. Personally, I think the computational challenges that still need to be tackled to bring Interaction Nets to life remain intractable (as do Asperti and Guerrini, in IIRC chapter 10 of The Optimal Implementation of Functional Programming Languages; Victor mentions basing his implementation on Asperti and Guerrini's work, which makes it surprising that Victor is surprised that optimal reduction has edge cases), but any serious effort in this direction is badly needed and should probably be encouraged. If VCs are putting their money behind bringing Girard's ideas to popular imagination, then perhaps for once they are doing good.
Next logical step would be the Antonov An-2 flying at negative ground speed, backwards.
When my garage+office was built a few years ago, the electrician used a bunch of faux-recessed LED fixtures (the brand name is "I Can't Believe It's Not Recessed!", which is certainly memorable). They surface-mount over standard ceiling junction boxes, but appear similar to recessed lights once installed. We have ~20 of these fixtures, both interior and exterior. They're quiet, flicker-free, and have a great dimming curve (with the standard Z-wave dimmers I've used). We've had no failures so far after almost four years, so they've passed the leading edge of the bathtub curve.

I think it's much easier to design entire fixtures than retrofit bulbs, as there's much more control over heat dissipation and so on. Finding trusted manufacturers (and supply chains that resist counterfeits) is also extremely important.
Lots of people live in areas where for half a year, the days are short, cloudy, and cold.
The obvious: Co-dfns. It's an APL compiler that generates GPU code. But the interesting thing is that it's also _hosted_ on the GPU!
Elixir is made faster with Rust, too. Rust is a great skillset to have for those measured moments.
> The entire problem is that the US lacks even the most basic privacy laws.

Probably because we never needed to.

There hasn't been a major Internet company being used by western citizens until TikTok.

The US government has been able get data whenever it wants it from the major tech companies because they've all been in the US - and there's been no reason to worry these companies are giving US data to foreign (especially non-friendly) governments.
Ah yes, git is so "easy to use" that there are a million tutorials, tutorials, and explainers for basic functionality. At this point, it is widely accepted that git is a very poorly designed CLI sitting on top of a fantastic tool.
I mean, can't they just move the company to a friendly island nation, or elsewhere?

It's in our best interest the an American company is far and away the leader in this field.
I feel like this at times can fit me.

I am great at a lot of tasks.

I am bad at some of my tasks, which makes me disinterested in doing them.

I am clearly an expert level at some % of my tasks, but show very little growth in the other ones as the pain of failing repeatedly with no hope doesn't seem worth it when I can focus on what I am great at, and accomplish a lot of things.

Obviously I need to either improve at the tasks I'm bad at, change roles, or find other people to do the tasks I'm bad at.

I keep trying every few months to really attack what I'm bad at, but there's always so much work it's easy to get handed a task I'm great at, and just do that.

I'm told by my manager I am doing a great job, because it's easy to focus on the tasks I'm great at.

I feel like I'm doing a very bad job, because it's easy to focus on the tasks I'm bad at.
Kids ChatGPT – Learn, Play and Talk with A.I. For Kids
This is a 30 year old story?

How is this relevant at all?
I'm not entirely sure I understand your argument but when you say:

> but each behavior itself never actually leaves the text that humans wrote it into...

I assume you mean that all the LLM can do is produce text so it's not inherently dangerous, but it's rather trivial to hook an LLM up to controls to the outside world by describing an API to it and then executing whatever "commands" it produces on its behalf and feeding the responses back to it. Wouldn't a setup like that let its behavior "leave the text," as you put it? I'm sure curious people are already doing experiments like this.

The LLM doesn't have to have agency to interact with the world in a way that mimics an entity that does have agency, that's what they are already doing with the text they generate, and why people are so quick to personify LLMs to say things like "they reason", "they understand", etc. If the text they produce, which mimics a sentient actor, is embedded in contexts that allow it to affect the world outside of the text interaction, there you have it, the LLM affects the outside world. Wouldn't you agree?
Seems odd to me we just smoothly slid from the prescription opioid crisis to non-prescription, illegal fentanyl. I’m not saying it’s some big conspiracy where pharma is secretly selling to cartels or anything. It just seems like a weird coincidence. E.g. did the crack down on prescription opioids lead to a large backlog of unused precursor chemicals and feedstocks that could end up in the criminal supply chain?
We do have them weekly.
I feel it's more about conversation than webinars.
Primarily for alignment's sake, we're remote team – everyone be on the same stage and have some fun.
Formal. Almost certainly. Webinar (feels like Amway recruitment).
Not a big change. Schufa uses data from the last [period], court said [shorter period]. I don't recall the details of the two periods.
Yeah the Belle is the type of machine you’d expect to find in a hotel that costs more per night than even the most lavish home coffee setups.

That machine requires some real TLC to keep in shape, as the clear coat over the brass will get damaged over time if water/coffee splashes are left on it. Once the clear coat is gone, the copper and brass will tarnish and then the machine needs a professional to restore it.

It’s the same story for their home models but on a much smaller scale, so a bit more reasonable for a loving coffee enthusiast to take care of. I’ve heard you can take the machine to some auto paint shops to get a fresh layer of clear coat sprayed on. People have also said you can repair chips/scratches with some touch up tools at home.
Not mentioned in the article are the LED replacements for full-size fluorescent tubes (i.e. 48in tubes). I got a bunch for my basement. The LED tubes really are a million times better than the fluorescents. For one, they aren't enormous fragile glass tubes filled with toxic mercury vapor, and two, they give off good light (for a basement work area) with very little power.
Perhaps you missed the /s or didn't know it means "I am being sarcastic."
A terrible argument made sarcastically is a good argument.
I'm pretty sure the author knew ramifications of FOSS before many his critics here were even conceived. He had decades to abandon the project, this predatory behaviour is not new.
Also used in Harvard's, excellent, CS50. I recommend this for any middle or high schoolers thinking about a career in tech.

https://pll.harvard.edu/course/cs50-introduction-computer-sc...
Because EU banned the free market. The ideal would have been a slow transition where LEDs would have had to compete with bulbs.

Like the others I want to buy an LED where the visible light cannot be meassured differently from a normal one, and with the guarantee that I can return it for a full refund if it fails before the 20k hours are up.
Interesting. I hadn’t thought about this as a pure money grab yet.
> Then, because they're friends who want to feel useful to each other, it needs to be riddled with inscrutable lore. That way there's always some handy bit of research, some nuggets of wisdom that they can share with each other. That's what this is really about: feeling like they can bond by sharing expertise about some complex hard to optimize problem.

> The actual problem itself is essentially arbitrary and subjective. In fact, it's better if it is arbitrary. Because any problem that can actually be solved means reaching an end to the ability to kibbitz and geek out. That's why bringing up objective metrics is such a faux pas in the audiophile world: it kills the game. And the whole point is to play the game together, forever.

Oh, so it's just like sports or politics. Makes perfect sense in retrospect.
Publishers Worry A.I. Chatbots Will Cut Readership
Is anonymizing data not good enough? That's what most of these trackers do. Something like Firebase Analytics even refuses to track if there are below a certain number of users.
On the other hand I lived in my last house for 5 years and didn't replace a single bulb.
Were they doing a lot of CORBA before that? If so, I might have run towards XML/SOAP too.
I Love XML. Well-designed XML is better than well-designed JSON IMHO for human readability.

However, I can live with its successor Lord JSON. But the ArchDemon YAML - my lord in heaven - who summoned that monster ? I get strong urges to quit software and go into a cave crying after any time dealing with it.
And no worries about the working, actually-pretty-nice, other part of Korea
> Wonder where was all this people when Elon Musk started releasing betas on FSD.

Loudly and openly for the entire duration, including governments specifically saying the marketing was misleading.
Humans aren't necessarily rational, but they are good at social stuff - humans are wired for living in social situations. You only need the latter to give people credit for having a "BS radar."
As we are now decades into the history of both film and gaming industries, at the top level of the pyramid, yes, this is naive.

Your experiences as a gamer will have little to do with the kind of decision making that yields billions of dollars at the margin. There are exceptions in the game space of overnight hits becoming cottage industries (Stardew Valley, Braid) but the way those liabilities are formed are much different. The developer is the tastemaker. They are almost industries of two types you shouldn't confuse if you want your claim to hold.
Please stop building git CLIs, just use LazyGit and be done with it:
https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit
The problem is evaluating quality before purchase. There's not a great way of expressing the sorts of factors that differentiate between good and bad LED bulbs that consumers can easily understand, let alone anything to encourage different manufacturers to use the same measurements. If the consumer can't tell what is quality, what's to get them to spend the money for it?