skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Lots of ballroom dancers are computer science students who could build this as a class project, and any programmer who knows a ballroom dancer can look at the paper slips and write software to automate it.

Feel free to write it. People have been complaining that they want something better for quite a while (in both the US and EU). This project has been around since 1997(!) and someone could have replaced it over 25 years. And yet, no one has.

This isn't a technical problem and it absolutely stupefies me that people can't seem to wrap their heads around this.

You will field customer support calls. A lot of them. Ballroom competitions tend to have lots of non-tech people in them. You will field irate calls because something went wrong in the middle of a competition (even if none of it is your fault).

All for $1000 a competition. Not per competitor--per competition. Roughly speaking--the price of tickets from two competitors.

I look forward to seeing your replacement.

(Note: In fact there ARE other "more modern" solutions in the space. And they all say "Contact Us" when you start looking for pricing. Translation: we're going to charge way more than $1000).
This seems to be a misdirect.

> After analyzing 17 clinical trials involving 230,000 people and comparing adults from the general public who got checked to others who did not, they found that general checkups had “little or no effect” on total mortality or cancer, cardiovascular, heart disease and stroke mortality.

So general checkups have a little or no effect on total mortality, but the studies themselves don't say anything about additional risks, they are more of an "opinion". And to add to it, “little or no effect” on total mortality or cancer, cardiovascular, heart disease and stroke mortality could mean a lot of things. Does it mean people die anyway, but get to live longer? Did the studies take into account effects of regular testing from a young age? The listed diseases are also closely related to hereditary problems, but is the finding the same for other health issues that may not have a genetic component to them?
Evil GitLab is unwilling to pay people what they're actually worth. Poor GitLab employees worldwide cannot resist from being taken advantage of and have to work for unworthy amounts...

Every time GitLab comes up someone will bring this topic up.

San Francisco salaries are not a worldwide benchmark of people's worth.

There are valid reasons why GitLab doesn't pay engineers in Kenya $200k.

Should I also swing your logic the other way?

If an engineer in Kenya for $50k does the same work and output as you, a $200k engineer in SF, can we now say you're being overpaid 4x what you're actually worth?

If people don't understand why companies pays local labour market rates, either look at GitLab's income statement and multiply 2000 employees by your definition of "worth" or start your own business and show how everyone in the world can pay 8 billion people the same salaries. Good luck.

https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-ra...
The independent review of costs for nuscale they link is brutal:

https://ieefa.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/NuScales-Small-...

> As currently structured, those project risks will be borne by the buying entities
(participants), not NuScale or Fluor, its lead investor. In other words, potential
participants need to understand that they would be responsible for footing the bill
for construction delays and cost overruns, as well as being bound by the terms of an
expensive, decades-long power purchase contract.

> These compelling risks, coupled with the availability of cheaper and readily
available renewable and storage resources, further weaken the rationale for the
NuScale SMR.
It's fun to see the IONIQ 5 on the road. The Model 3 design is getting rather old.

I'm hoping they create an IONIQ 5 option that lets you program animations on the LED taillight grid. Start with space invaders.
How Global Housing Prices Have Changed Since 2010
No. I find that many people with ADHD never even attempt to put themselves into a situation to develop these skills.

I am diagnosed with ADHD, and the best skill I've learned is putting myself into situations where I have no choice but to do the thing I need to do.

I refuse to be a person who offloads all responsibility to something that can be dealt with, with some effort.
Proposed Restrict Act and Data Act Go Far Beyond Banning TikTok
AI Field Notes
Infrasound aside, it seems that it's neural after all. Apes scream and grunt, so vocalisation follows gross mood. (I don't know if anyone has tested apes for ultra low frequency communications)
[deleted due to unintended double-entendre]
Parrots talk to each other.
> Xenophobia and racism prevents that

Huh? My understanding is the US scores lowest of any country on objective measures of both.

Which country has less Xenophobia and racism? People throw out Canada often but I believe empirically that is false.
Much as you generally run HN moderation well, I disagree. If the cofounder matching worked well these treads would not exist.

A monthly or at least quarterly thread enables a quick browse of what people are interested in creating. I enjoy the sentence or paragraph cofounder pitches that can be read in seconds instead of going through scores of profiles. I raise my digital pitchfork in support of these threads!
43 votes for this thread in 3 hours, seems others do to.
bad actors are not gonna be stopped by their own "legal jargon"... the terms look like copy pasta or AI generated themselves. can't imagine the operators spent much time reading them.

though maybe true bad actors would try harder to pretend being a company with some humans involved, rather than this openly anonymous site.
Perhaps a fresh concept for you then: https://xkcd.com/1053
Medicine is still clearly medieval in this respect, and would be considered insane in any other field:

"Gosh I hope my SQL database still has enough storage, but I better not check because adding a disk to the RAID array might cause a failure on rebuild." It's not a factually incorrect statement, but the problem isn't with the checking.
> I'd say if it mimics something well enough then eventually it's just doing the thing

Right up to the point where it actually needs to reason, and the mimickry doesn't suffice.

My above example about the Football and the Coffemug is an easy one, the objects are well represented in its training data. What if I need a reason why the Service Ping spikes every 60 seconds, here is the code, please LLM look it up. I am sure I will get a great and well written answer.

I am also sure it won't be the correct one, which is that some dumb script I wrote, which has nothing to do with the code shown, blocks the server for about 700ms every minute.

Figuring out that something cannot be explained with the data represented, and thus may come from a source unseen, is one example of actual reasoning. And this "giving up on the data shown" is something I have yet to see any AI do.
What are we going to do about ChatGPT?
yes in hindsight, had I known the BBC would stoop, I could have set up something from an actual home IP. whether that be forwarding their web streams or forwarding a few OTA DVB-T2 streams. but even that could require physical presence for emergency debugs, reboots, retunes..
OK? Where can I buy a high-fidelity simulation? You might as well say that the solution to high energy costs is just to build fusion reactors. Great idea in principle but we don't actually know how to do it yet.

Simulations are already used in the early-stage drug development process and they're useful to reduce the number of substances that move on to animal trials. If you build a better one then you can make a fortune. But we are at least decades away from being able to accurately simulate the complex interactions in a human body. And I doubt that simulations will ever be useful for writing something like a clinical practice guideline for prescribing statins; that type of knowledge can only be gained by conducting human trials to see what works in the real world. Engineers accustomed to working with machines and electronics generally don't understand how messy biological research can get.
ZPNG doesnt, but LZ4PNG supposedly would except there are no links to actual implementation and Google doesnt know either. does it exist at all?
> In this Review, we make a case for an approach to preventing and managing cardiovascular disease that involves ‘sitting less and moving more’.

Its not just 'Reducing average sitting bout length ' though right ?

Also this seems like self reported observational studies?
GitHub reporting intermittent errors for Git operations
NATO's action vis a vis Russia is clearly deterrent, and the core purpose of the alliance is quite clearly deterrance. That the same command structures have been used to coordinate non-Russia-related actions (Yugoslavia too) isn't relevant to the point you're responding to.

You can deploy all the anti-imperialist hyperbole you want, but the "reason" for having a mutual defense treaty among quite-clearly-non-dominated nations like Germany or the UK is pretty obviously defense.
I'm not sure what other options have been considered (by would-be market entrants), but OutSail appears to be the first company that is attempting to package a sail into a 'box'. Some other companies have made devices like kites which were relatively vessel-type agnostic.
Lesser-known keyboards: I use a small 40% (45-key keyboard) or an ortholinear keyboard for my daily work.

On both I have layers for a built-in Numpad, mouse keys (for controlling the mouse cursor without taking my hand off the keyboard), shortcuts for working with text (selecting an entire line, copying and pasting, etc) and various other finger- and wrist-saving shortcuts that help me ward off the likelihood of RSI.

I had a wrist injury in the past and it had a big impact on my productivity as a tech worker so using these small compact keyboards is a real godsend.

Everything I need is literally just one key away from another--no more stretching or contorting my hands and fingers to do CTRL+ALT+DELETE or CTRL+SHIFT+F5 for example.

The 40% keyboard can be used as a daily driver but the ortholinear keyboard is my go-to since it's perfect for both work and play.
He seems to be complaining that NuScale keeps increasing the energy output of its modules. Am I reading that right?
On the build versus buy axis, Solid bicycle tires are an ordinary product.

https://www.google.com/search?q=solid+bicycle+tires&ie=UTF-8...

They predate pneumatic bicycle tires.
This is a valid concern, but one thing I find is that using the more modern walled garden OSS like Mac and windows can be prohibitively abstract and difficult for getting into programming. On Mac, you need Xcode installed before you can even run GCC. And I believe you have to jump through similar hoops for windows. They try to rail you into using a complicated IDE like Xcode of Visual Studio when all you need is a text editor and GCC on Linux. It’s got a learning curve as a daily OS, but give a kid a raspberry pi and everything they need to write and run some python or C++ is pretty much there. You can sit down with them for the setup but they won’t need you after it’s set up and they will have a lot to look at before it comes time to get into the weeds with IDEs, make files, system dependencies etc. no solution is perfect (Linux included) but I find the ready to rock state of a fresh Linux distro to be pretty helpful to getting a developer going.
Only stochastically.
Only a few weeks, so the experience is still pretty fresh. :)
I do like it, though: dead-simple once the setup was in place, and zero ongoing maintenance so far.

My plan is to keep it entirely organic — so far have I've only really sent a few emails around the more meaningful-feeling milestones. (Arriving home, one week, etc.) I think, long-term, I'd prefer to have the amount of content not feel _overwhelming_ when I hand it off; I'm not planning on having this be the primary way to document my kid's life, but as something "extra" to be able to pass off to them.

[Also, being a few weeks in: I'd warn against making any plans for the first few weeks assuming you'll have much brain capacity available to you. I'd say, don't stress yourself out too much if you can avoid it.]
Isn't that to be expected, though? There's plenty of people who wouldn't subject themselves to the ordeal of going to the doctors to pursue a diagnosis of an untreatable disease. You just suffer through it. In contrast, if there's a known treatment for it, then the reward (not having ADD symptoms) dramatically outweighs the cost (of drudging through doctors appointments).

I'd bet the number of surgeries significantly increased after we discovered anesthesia and sanitation. Not because more people were needing it, but because the outcomes were suddenly much better.
Nuclear waste from power plants is not a legitimate issue: https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/the-boring-truth-a..., https://zionlights.substack.com/p/everything-i-believed-abou....
True classical latin didn't have lower case. Initial letters were written marginally larger, but what we'd now (mostly) think of as uppercase is what all the letters looked like.
PDF chatbots are the new equivalent of todo apps... https://custombot.ai/. No doubt cool but loses the lustre after you've seen the umpteenth one that passes on the token cost to you and still hallucinates.
Any investor or anyone close to the numbers of OPs company who may see this post could likely figure out who they are those if they are even close to accurate numbers shared.
Yet another in the continuing series of "All you need..." (in software, that is) "...is X, and/or Y, and/or, etc.", where X and Y and Z are fundamental alternatives to a procedural paradigm. Sometimes these things are even presented as having the primary purpose and benefit of complexity management, within, and on the terms of, the software: what's not to like? Who could argue?

But each proposal founders upon contact with reality. The reality is that people understand processes (insofar as they understand them at all) as checklists; or, a little better, as decision trees; or, a little worse, as flowcharts. NOT as functions operating on data; that is a perspective that is only accessible to those mathematicians and logicians who have been trained in it.

Even if it is, in some situations, optimal to implement certain levels of certain automations in a functional paradigm, the procedural paradigm must first be adopted in order to communicate with the eventual users. We must meet them where they are; they are not equipped to move towards us. And it is not only a matter of capturing the implicit flowcharts that underlie the real-world execution and verification of processes; as found, they are full of unmanaged complexity arising from the proliferation of edge cases and of indeterminacy arising from half-understood heuristics. Some of these things are even business-critical: but none of them can be automated. In order to automate the as-found processes, they must be rationalized to remove indeterminacy and then simplified -- typically quite drastically -- so that they can be implemented in a maintainable form. Where the heuristics or the edge cases are, in fact, business-critical, then the advice must be, firmly, to leave the processes in human hands. Machines aren't good at that, and if you try to force them to attempt it, the cost, the duration, and the error rate of the processes will all only go up.
These may be retweets from people you follow.
Amen to that, I absolutely want a "tell me what those crows are generally talking about" app.
A smart contract blockchain will allow you to deploy time and person-bound programs (though using exact-future-date as on-chain conditions is non trivial). An example is time-locked wallets. [1] Messages, files, money: you can put it all in there (big files won't be cheap).

My best bet is on Ethereum still being around in 20 years as it so entrenched.it'll be there for you. As long as people want to pay for using a blockchain to validators.

Non-technology, I would use a notary.

1. https://www.toptal.com/ethereum-smart-contract/time-locked-w...
A very interesting read, which describes how for ~50 years the community was lead astray by a seemingly simple oversight: studying dead animals instead of living ones!

>Charles Darwin theorized that monkeys had the vocal anatomy needed for speech, but lacked the necessary neural mechanisms.

>This was the most popular hypothesis until 1969 [when] Lieberman studied the vocal anatomy of a monkey corpse and concluded that other primates could not produce as many vowels as humans because of the position of their larynxes [which] cemented the idea that a descended larynx is a prerequisite for speech.

>Towards the end of the 20th century, evolutionary biologist W. Tecumseh Fitch realized a crucial fact – all the existing evidence was based on the anatomy of dead primates. Surprised that this had not been done before, Fitch used x-ray imaging to study the vocal tracts of live animals while they were voicing sounds. He was amazed to observe that their larynxes at rest remained high and then descended during vocalization to a position very similar to the human larynx.

>All these studies indicate that apes have all the anatomical characteristics necessary for speech. The reason they don’t is purely neural. Humans have much better control of the larynx, not because of its position, but because of the neural connections that connect it to the brain. Parrots don’t even have a larynx, but they have wonderful control of their speech organ, which enables them to articulate intelligible words and phrases.

Fascinating
"A small modular reactor should last a minimum of 60 years. Probably more, up to 100, frankly, if maintained properly. Wind and solar, after about 20 years you have to replace everything.”

I'm a big fan of the SMR concept, but this line about having to throw everything away for solar after 20 years is just wrong.
too long of an interval. Look at the LLM or Ai focused founders seeking cofounders. 6 months is a lifetime to wait if you are building that.
They can certainly communicate their wants and needs with words.

Some have shown the ability to communicate abstract thoughts and feelings.

Why do you say they can't talk?
> so that the toxicity of plutonium is roughly equivalent with that of nerve gas

Is not exactly saying that it is not toxic. I tried looking for actually credible sources for toxicity, one Los Alamos publication claims:

> For example, the LD50(30) for dogs after intravenous injection of plutonium is about 0.32 milligram per kilogram of tissue.

Less than nerve gases, but still I'd classify as "quite toxic"
Parrots parroting parrots parodying parrots.
I may have not expressed it well but what I wanted to say was that GKE communicates very clearly when you will be hit with a forced non-patch upgrade, not that upgrades are undesirable. Running a cluster without updates is a deathwish.
Sort of just proves my point, no? It's faster for me to just check its work than to do the work from scratch myself and that work isn't monopolizing the wetware of another human being. Cognitive bandwidth has increased. The system is capable of more throughput than before. In fact, how much more throughput could you get if you employ enough instances of LLMs to saturate the cognitive bandwidth of a human who's sole job is to simply verify the outputs?

If you look at the leap from GPT-3 -> GPT-4 in terms of hallucinations and capabilities etc, and you combine that with advances in cognitive architecture like reflexion and AutoGPT, it's pretty clear the trajectory is one of becoming increasingly competent and trustworthy.

The degree to which you need to check it's work depends on your use case, level of risk tolerance, and methods for verification. I think one of the reasons AI art has absolutely exploded is because there's no consequences for a generation that fails and it can be verified instantly. Compare that to doing your taxes where it's high stakes if you get it wrong, you're far less likely to rely on it. There is a landscape of usefulness with different peaks and valleys.
Was your degree really worth it?
Tell HN: Llama 33B is the Tower of Babel. It's time to celebrate
Some guy I know ran Llama 7b, 13b, and 33b, quantized. 7b provided poor translations. 13b provided incorrect translations. 33b translations, even for difficult legal text, was spot on, and relatively fast on his m1 mac [1].

To me, this is a *really big deal*. Private, translated conversations between all people of the world is now a thing. I'm so incredibly excited about this.

I really want to say thank you to ggerganov, antimater15, nomic ai, all those who contributed there, Meta, Meta Research, Mark Zuckerberg, and all those who contributed to this. I also want to give a special thanks to Sam Altman and the great folks at OpenAI for spearheading the scene and turning it into this movement that it is today. Finally, I want to thank YC, HN and pg too!

This has truly opened a way for people of the world to be connected in ways not possible before. There are no walls between us people anymore.

2023 is not the time for quarrels between nations - it's the time for us all to truly be able to understand each other. Thanks everyone!

[1] Feel free to try it yourself if you have Llama, just prompt with "Translate this to ______: <source text in another language>" where ______ is the language you wish to translate the source text into.
>a levelized cost

The LCOE "represents the average revenue per unit of electricity generated that would be required to recover the costs of building and operating a generating plant during an assumed financial life and duty cycle", and is calculated as the ratio between all the discounted costs over the lifetime of an electricity generating plant divided by a discounted sum of the actual energy amounts delivered. Inputs to LCOE are chosen by the estimator. They can include the cost of capital, decommissioning, fuel costs, fixed and variable operations and maintenance costs, financing costs, and an assumed utilization rate

I think solar should be a major part of any future energy generation regime, but I've also never seen an LCOE for solar that I actually believe. They also ignore the timing mismatch between generation and consumption (batteries help there, but even then, it's still a challenge to maintain an on-demand grid with solar).
>Mechanical systems aren't inherently better or more resistant to hidden flaws.

Besides the fact that failure modes of mechanical systems are generally more understood than software, you're again conflating my point and having an entirely different conversation. This isn't about some "mechanical vs. software" dichotomy. I literally said there is nothing about software that makes it inherently dangerous and that using software as an engineered mitigation is fine if the mitigations are implemented properly.

What isn't fine is all the process and design gaps that occurred. Things like using software as a mitigation, not because it was the best alternative, but simply because it was cheaper/faster. Things like not following your own hazard analysis when it comes to mitigation. Or not characterizing the risk accurately or the failure modes because you didn't understand the system interactions.

>Remember it was a failure of the mechanical AOA sensor that initiated the MCAS failure.

This is exactly why, had they followed their own procedures and hazard analysis, redundant sensors would have been a default. A "critical" item (like MCAS in the hazard analysis) is supposed to get redundant input as a default.

My post isn't about mechanical vs. software. It's about the the allure of using software as a workaround that leads to process gaps and bad design philosophy. Like removing sensors because of a supplier/cost issue and assuming "we'll fix it with software" instead of doing the hard work to understand, characterize, and mitigate the risk effectively.
This made me LOL