skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I still don't buy it. Once you cut a person vertically in two half with a guillotine, you get two topological disks of skin. Each disk can be mapped into the 2D surface of the brain. It doesn't matter if the parts of the skin are in the same plane or rotated 90°.

Obviously some parts of the skin are stretched, so a 2D map will cause a lot of deformation. Also some parts of the skin are more sensitive than other and will need more brain surface. But this is what is happening, there are a few maps in the brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_homunculus and they are quite deformed, and they even have a few cuts here and there.

Once you decide to cut the map in two parts, each part can be projected in both orientations without geometric problems.
> the interest rates on those loans

Why are these important?

> actuarially-fair risk assessments

This seems to show that it's not about freedom, but greed.
Utter selfishness is not freedom, though people are free to be utterly selfish (to a point). Any freedom that's meaningful is freedom for others; everyone wants 'freedom' for themselves.

Hospitals, feeding the unfed, housing the unhoused, freedom for the oppressed - all probably have poor actuarial risk assessments relative to other investments, on purely financial terms used by Wall Street. Yet they offer tremendous return on investment in welfare of individuals, which is the purpose of an economy and society.

Money itself is not value, and it's a poor metric of value to the world. English literature (and other humanities) study provides the most value to our society, IMHO, however they are paid.

I don't want the arbiters of money to be the arbiters of education and free choice of people. Not only does it stagnate our society and economy, it's not a free society if we can only do what wealthy entities allow.
Related:

Boustrophedon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15539373 - Oct 2017 (59 comments)

Boustrophedon Order - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1547209 - July 2010 (12 comments)
An HOA is like socialism. It's great for the first two, maybe three generations. But then new owners come in and they DGAF about HOA rules and/or the HOA (what's a measly $150/year on my sr engineer salary). And finally the HOA and/or property starts falling apart^W^Wchanging.

We are witnessing this right now, having not moved from our townhome. First decade was great, everyone follow the rules, HOA cared about the look of our properties and kept everyone in check. Then HOA stopped sending letters about the dirty facades. Then the neighbors one by one all decided its okay to leave their garbage cans out even though the bylaws specifically forbid this. Then they cut back on services they offer (illegal parking is only enforced during HOA business hours, no more landscape maintenance), they stopped enforcement (neighbor has 4 pets, facades haven't been cleaned in 5-6 years, trash and toys are being left in the shared driveway). The final slap in the face, we got an email last month saying they are raising the HOA fee by 25%.

Unlike socialism, I can politic my way into the board and demand change. Which looks like something I'm going to have to do to get back the HOA (and property) that I loved
That's an interesting re-phrasing of the age-old question "what's the purpose of life?" (:
Even as LLMs get better over time at understanding ill-formed prompts, I expect that API prices will still continue to depend on the number of tokens used. That’s an incentive to minimize tokens, so “prompt engineering” might stick around, even if just for cost optimization.
When I read guides like this one, I wonder if "prompt engineering" is a misguided effort to pigeonhole a formal language that by necessity is precise and unambiguous (like a programming language) into natural language, which by necessity has evolved to be imprecise and ambiguous.

It's like trying to fit a square peg inside an irregularly shaped hole, without leaving any space unfilled around the edges of the square.
Magazine editor sacked over AI-generated Schumacher interview
Which has an extremely complicated proof :-(
Yep, we just got our Sienna hybrid a couple weeks ago. We literally waited 19 months to get it. It's beyond absurd at this point.

Maybe some people are buying SUVs because they can't wait until their new baby is walking and talking before driving them somewhere?
I don't follow this argument, unless you mean everyone should pay for college with their own money (which they obviously can't), in which case it has nothing to do with their field of study.
Probably closer to SEO.

Works for the time being while there's low hanging fruit, but researchers will use those exploits to help build more robust systems.

Eventually there'll be no point in doing it anymore.
Wouldn't this make GNU GPL not open-source, since it restricts people from using the software to create proprietary software?
This is the Hoover Institute, they don't like any kind of minimum wage.
Presumably it's meant for pre-interview screening - not as a replacement for what one would normally ask in the live interview.
Isn’t that Google in a nutshell?
I know scientists who are climate change skeptics. However, what gets published ("the consensus") isn't the same as "what scientists think".

This isn't only true in science, it's true in virtually all parts of human societies. It's hard to go against the grain and you're naive if you think doing so doesn't blight careers.
Fascinating. The magazine doesn't appear to have a way to pay to subscribe.

Very interesting idea described here. I think it would benefit from some animations.

I'm hoping that LLMs will be able to generate and animate SVGs to help with this.
Same airline and flight. Why were miles so different?
You would not normally describe a company as being "funded" by its customers. NASA was and still is a customer.
Maybe things have changed but when I was a bit into weightlifting maybe a decade ago, common knowledge back then was that some forms of protein (ie amino acids mix of specific types and ratios) can't be realistically substituted by normally eating humans. I mean unless you want to prepare all your meals with scales.

Its not about theory on paper, but what people actually eat on a given diet and how their body looks long term. Its a fact that ie vegans lack: B12, D3, iron, taurine, creatine, iodine, calcium, zinc and have generally lower mineral bone density. Given that people with alternate lifestyles tend to take much more care into what they eat and focus on eating healthily and are well aware of this shortcoming, that's not a good result.

I mean lets have discussion about morality, sustainability etc. but when it comes to nutrients, science doesn't seem to be in favor of these alternate diets.

I personally wish people grokked that just reducing portions would bring massive improvements for everybody, including the planet. We simply eat too much (and definitely too much meat of any type), and often to full when it should be about avoiding hunger. I see 0 activism there, its harder to sell books, programs and overpriced supplements to desperate people rather than telling them this simple hard truth and having them actually accept it and act accordingly.
The fossil fuel industry has also grossly underestimated the amount of methane leaking from wells and fracking sites.

Researchers got some things right, other things wrong. What we have seen historically is that the pessimistic estimates of scientists have matched reality better than the optimistic estimates. Scientists have actually under estimated the effects of climate change.
As far as I have heard modern power electronics is sophisticated enough to do that
Many, many people in the software industry, especially at a place like Google, absolutely do not want to unionize, and for excellent reasons. Pretty much every union in existence assigns value to union members based on tenure, and it pretty much assumes members are "interchangeable cogs" in most other respects. A lot of people reasonably hate that idea, because they know that they can negotiate for more based on their personal value to a company.

I'm not anti-union generally, and I'm glad to see a revival of unionization where it makes sense, e.g. places like Starbucks and Amazon, where workers are largely treated like interchangeable cogs by management already, and so a union improves employee bargaining power. And I also think it would make sense for certain areas of tech, and certain software companies, to want to unionize.

But this is Google. As others have commented, many software engineers at Google easily make hundreds of thousands annually in stock awards alone. I can't imagine any highly competent software engineer there wanting a union, because it means that their bargaining power is no better than the "average" software dev, which is obviously false.

I think Sundar's compensation is absurd, but I also think layoffs were warranted given the obscene levels of overhiring many of these tech companies did during the pandemic. And when you say "compensation is way down", at big FAANGs that is largely due to the value of stock awards, but many people would rather get compensated in stock to begin with - Google employees especially reaped gargantuan rewards up until 2022 based on stock.
The disturbing part of this is how desensitized people are to certain kinds of violence, specifically state violence.

Charging someone $3000/month for insulin without which they will die? Preventing the import of the same thing from Canada at a fraction of the cost? That's quite literally state violence.

Housing (shelter) is one of humanity's basic needs. Denying this to people is again, quite literally, state violence. It's not market conditions that made this happen. It's not population growth. It's deliberate policy at every level of government.

Yet one person steals from CVS or breaks into a car and people lose their minds. As a society we will deploy the police state at a moment's notice in the case of property crime. Think about that.

In the US in particular, housing policy is a key tool in economic segregation, which is the replacement to literal segregation that was slowly made technically illegal post-WW2.

What do I mean by this? Redlining is an obvious example. A big one is the GI Bill, that provided cheap mortgages and free education to returning white servicemen. Coinciding with the flight to the suburbs, this created generational wealth. This allows future generations to live in those "nicer" areas and have access to better amenities. This is what I mean by "economic segregation". The "riffraff" are simply priced out.

And since so many amenities like education are funded in large part from property taxes, the wealthier areas get more and more of an advantage.

Some people like to say "I'm fiscally conservative but socially liberal". This betrays a deep misunderstanding of what systemic racism actually is. Many think racism is just using a bad word. It's not. It's the continued disenfranchisement of entires groups of people through economics, government policy and the police state.
What toxic material are x-Si panels made of?
Nice try, Nikola, but AC is too dangerous.
But that issue is related to the fact that insects have their nerves in the inferior part of their bodies, and the digestive tract on top, while we have our nerves in the back (protected by bones), and the digestive tract on the front, which would be the lower part if we were still walking with four limbs.

The issue described here is left-right symmetry, and it also applies to insects, so it is more general.
This is going to vary by climate.

Here in south Florida, if you can see the grass growing in the rainy season. Its insane. If you don't mow your lawn for a month, it will turn into a knee deep bug and snake infested jungle... its literally a health hazard.

In some dry, hot places, it would actually be good for the grass itself. Everyone I knew in central Texas cut their grass too short, as it stays greener and needs less precious water when long.
/\--- this.
There are software engineering domains, like aerospace, where the process is very stringent with rigorous planning and testing.

There are others, like consumer app development, where there's simply no need for that kind of process, so it doesn't exist. HNers might complain, but average people don't care if their social media app crashes once in a while and they have to restart it — so why should developers care? Better to spend their time on other stuff. Whereas people care a lot if their airplane crashes.

I don't think it suggests anything about the relative value of working in those domains.
How do you think Apple is granting device access to law enforcement?
> through prompt engineering and other techniques, you can produce neutrally-written text

Through thinking and editing, humans can (and often do) produce neutrally written text.

What does AI change? Also, who decides what's neutral? The AI's programmers and operators - humans. Who decides if your AI's output is neutral - you do. Why couldn't you do the same with a human writer?

> Even if NewsNotFound articles are only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source.

Nothing is 100% sensationalistic. Anyway, I can (and do) find endless non-sensationalistic news.

AI changes nothing; you are an editor (which is a good thing to be - I wish you well).

But the idea that AI is somehow more neutral than humans, or that humans aren't in control here, is very dangerous. That is my concern.
You don't have to trap exceptions separately on every line. You trap a whole block of code and match on the exception type to determine how to handle the problem. It isn't perfect, nothing is, but I prefer systems languages where typical failures cannot easily be ignored and yet you are not burdened with constantly thinking about it.
> There are fantastic deterministic libraries out there that can turn strings like "next Tuesday" into timestamps with extremely high accuracy.

Which libraries? I know of Duckling [0] but what others?

0. https://github.com/facebook/duckling
Related to the same topic is Stolen Focus and has been mentioned many times on HN.

https://stolenfocusbook.com/
Let kids be kids. And don’t abuse child labor to “marginally bring down prices”.
The problem is that we want names with distinct first letter for the simple chess notation and "horse" and "queen" conflict with "king" and each other.
Bitcoin transactions aren't exactly exploding. And now that chain is also getting cluttered with trash jpegs (Ordinals).

I get the idea and appreciate it. But it's too cluttered with scammers, fraud, and plain money laundering to fulfill its original mission.

I would be happy if it goes down because if it does succeed in its mission, it pretty much means some truly awful human beings will have disproportionate power in our new financial system.

I'd rather not live in a world where Justin Sun owns a large % of my currency supply.
We've banned this account for using HN for (some kind of?) ideological battle. That's not allowed here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Since Quanta is a nonprofit foundation-funded publication, all of its resources go toward producing responsible, freely accessible journalism that is meticulously researched, reported, edited, copy-edited and fact-checked. And our editorial independence ensures the impartiality of our science coverage — our articles do not reflect or represent the views of the Simons Foundation.
It doesn’t offer advantages for most people in the United States and we’ve had decades of people making claims which were highly fanciful if not fraudulent, with the hucksters behind them refusing to engage intellectually with anyone who points out the flaws in their business plans. The field has tried rebranding a few times (“web3”, NFTs, etc.) to shed that reputation but most people simply burnt out on the topic since promoters weren’t making competitive services.

That doesn’t mean that there are no problems with the status quo - for example, PayPal and western Union have many critics - but rather that the blockchain companies would have been much better off building things which were competitive rather than relying on MLM marketing. International remittances are so bad that even Bitcoin is better but there aren’t many cases like that and “slower, costs more, riskier, harder to use” is not generally a compelling sales pitch.
Let teenagers get enough sleep and learn useful skills that are not actively being worked on being roboticized by the companies currently advocating for this change.
Unbelievable... What an incredible backslide. This ideology is trash
The pictures with the finger at the end are even more confusing. They conflate the mapping from body parts to cerebral cortex (the cortical homunculus) with the mapping from the homunculus to some other part of the brain were the 3D environment is allegedly mapped. They don't make sense to me.
We've already jumped to assuming the birds are annoyed?

What if it's more like using an old telephone or a black-and-white TV? A hindrance, but better than what came before?
All this talk about pupil dilation being more obvious with blue eyes (and thus an attractive trait to possess), yet I haven't seen anyone comment on darker eyes tending to nearly always look dilated, and therefore less of a threat.

For a couple of animal-world examples, take the black Labrador Retriever - the ones with black eyes look more playful than the ones with intense looking brown eyes, when outside in the sun.

Blue eyes in the sun would look piercing (and therefore more threatening) compared to dark brown eyes. This is super easy to see in Siamese cats, both because of eye colour, and the extent that their eyes can dilate.

You can also see how blue eyes are often savagely played up in Viking imagery.

So while there are arguments to be made, there are also counter points that should be taken into account.
Land appreciation is not inflation. It is wealth transfer to landowners.
C(++). There is clang-format which has good defaults, but it's highly configurable.
That’s the theory, but it doesn’t really work in reality. The chance of a major reform like that ever passing is very close to zero.

The last big legislative reform of anything in the US was the Affordable Care Act, which, despite being a relatively modest reform by the standards of any country with a functional political system, was a once-in-a-generation effort requiring huge amounts of political capital and luck. Any serious reform to higher education would dwarf that.

When I said I wasn’t aware of any serious proposals for education reform, I didn’t mean because politicians (like Sanders) don’t want them. I meant because such a reform is impossible.
Clicked the link to find out how much Duolingo can teach us, but hoo boy is this information hard to find in the article.
> How exactly do you propose to heat the average person's home when all fossil fuels are no longer available

Atom & renewable sources. 256x256 km of solar panels is enough for whole world.

> And any derivative products of fossil fuels such as plastics

You mean trash (99% of plastics produced)? Stop producing it.

> fertilizers

Use regenerative agriculture. Agriculture can perfectly well function without fossil fuel inputs.

> tractors and other machinery

Electric tractors. Should have been here decades ago.

> your idea of human fluorishing is where a massive perecentage of human labor is doing farm work again like in the 19th century

Maybe we shouldn't insist on 70+ % of workers working bullshit jobs, and let instead few of them work in agriculture instead. Many would like it, if they could support themselves with it.

It's only because of the exploitation of the soil, natural resources and humans, that current agricultural practices prevail. If it would mean that our food production would not be dependent on use of poisons, i think that would be good thing for everybody.

> fluorishing

Humour?
I don’t find the core idea of this article (learning a language/syntax is hard but $subj) important to its reasoning. And there’s an issue with new languages that it doesn’t mention.

In my experience, learning a new syntax isn’t hard. The hard part is to become familiarized with the ecosystem, common methods, pitfalls, history, roadmap. To detect that the article you read is obsolete or fringe. To realize that there is a better/easier way. To become an actualized member of a community, even if read-only. Learning new syntax is nothing compared to that. You can learn a language in a few days. But you cannot become an efficient developer in it in less than a year.

All new languages have the same issue: their ecosystems are not well-established. They will lack features and documentation (out of PL’s scope itself) and they will evolve and break compatibility and their communities are small. We may need more programming languages, but not until we invent a way to just take pip, cpan, npm, etc and merge them automagically into that new PL. so that algorothms, libraries and frameworks could live outside of a language. Otherwise, all these new PLs are doomed to reinvent the wheel and repeat the mistakes.
Wholeheartedly fuck this article.

Talking about the benefits to businesses and customers? Who cares. Let kids be kids. Let kids focus on exploring and figuring out what challenges they would like to tackle instead of serving French fries to ungrateful jerks for 85% of minimum wage.
> "Why is this a problem?"

It's a problem because of the aforementioned disproportionate energy consumption.

> "Animals also produce higher quality protein with higher bioavailability"

Hey look, you don't have to pitch me on meat -- I'm basically a carnivore. Personal preferences don't change the underlying engineering dynamics.

> "and provide nutrients that people cannot get from plants."

I love meat and I'll defend it as stridently as anyone, but this just isn't a rational argument. I want meat in my diet, but I do not require it to live. There are many ways to achieve a balanced diet either with other animal products, or without meat altogether.

The really weird thing about diet is that many (most?) of calories a typical American consumes are in excess of a healthy amount and are hurting us rather than helping us. It's a very strange dynamic, because the vast majority of Americans suffer from excess nutrition -- not malnutrition.

These excesses not only hurt our health, they harm the environment. Fat people create far more greenhouse gasses per capita than thin people. I eat meat, but I also eat healthy portions -- which puts me far ahead of most people regardless of their diet in terms of the resulting carbon footprint.
Sure, it's a perfectly reasonable question and I ought to have justified it better.

Ok, so, total energy produced to by all nuclear reactors in the world in 2021 was apparently 2,653,344 GWh[0]; if there was a Chernobyl-scale disaster every year, that would add just under $0.30/kWh to the cost of electricity[1]. As reactors didn't have such a poor MTBF even then, I think a decade is a less unreasonable guess for rate of exploding, which is 3¢/kWh.

This may seem too concerned with dollars and not enough with lives, but similar things can be said in favour of lives cost per unit of energy produced, and again that's in favour of a yearly Chrenobly over all the fossil fuels, though not the renewables: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... (I remember an older version that had much worse PV death rate, justified on the grounds installing stuff on rooftops is dangerous).

Like most arguments in favour of nuclear, it's more about the world we used to live in than the one we now live in; if you'd asked me 10-15 years ago, I'd have been all-in on nuclear to save the planet, but now, I think we have better options. But these were my reasons for being pro-nuclear at the time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24790%20billion%2F2%2C...