skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> “ In 1969, Reuters needed money to further expand in the Middle East and Western powers such as Britain wanted to bolster their influence against the Soviet Union by expanding news services across the world, the documents showed.

The secret government financing of Reuters - as set out in the documents - amounted to 245,000 pounds ($317,838 at current exchange rates) per year before 1969 but then reduced to 100,000 pounds per year in 1969-1970 and nothing in 1972-1973.”

I don’t grasp what the article’s writer meant by “current exchange rates” and “before 1969” here, but in any event it sounds like only a few million real constant 2023 dollar equivalents, total, were involved, which is less like a secret think tank and more like travel and bureau support, which is basically what is being admitted to.
Hi I'm ${first_name}.

I only ever ask what someone does if it's clearly relevant to the context in which I met them, such as their lunch break.
Free market is the race to be the first at the government money/feeding through. Elon Musk is a person particularly well in finding the quickest or even the only routes to those money through.
Political activism based on consumerism and brand loyalty.

Many users have invested themselves (time, friendships, network, money, job) in the twitter brand. They want to defend their investment.

Many others haven't as much but might like to invest a bit of disposable money to gain a return.

Twitter the brand benefits regardless. look how much it's users care for it.
That applies to every website
>I also don't buy that Americans don't want to live in walkable and bikable places either

The problem is that the walkable / bikable places are so few and far between that they're gobsmackingly expensive. Even on a FANG salary, getting a reasonable place in one of the few walkable neighborhoods is beyond what I'm willing to pay these days.

If you want more than 900sqft for your family, trading a 15min walk for a 25min drive just makes so much more sense with how American cities are laid out and how much competition there is over the desirable places.
I feel the other way. Local elites may be bad but they are bt definition local and you can leave from where they are.
they have the best sudoku games I could find
I disagree, maybe if the software industry self regulated like more traditional forms of engineering such as mechanical and electrical, we could guarantee some minimal level of competency in the field and wouldn't have to resort to weeklong interview processes and hours and hours of leetcode and whiteboarding.

With all due respect, if your "engineering title" is preceded by the word salesforce or prompt, you're not an engineer.
As pure designers yeah but Chinese government is about to do to chips what they did to solar and batteries so I wouldn't count them out yet. Might be 5-10 years before they catch up but they are by no means out of the fight.
Thanks for pointing that out, I'll add it to the list of words I'm supposed to use to sound smart.

However, I did find the main argument compelling, through my own waste of time (yes I learned it the hard way) I've come to acknowledge that the tradeoff for prompting GPT in order to get a valuable answer, is just not worth it.

However, it does seem that most of the people are intrigued by "it can answer anything with the right prompt" promise, and they devote a lot of time in order to fulfill it.

You cannot trust GPT, you cannot rely on it and it can't replace anyone, until it learns to prompt itself.

I think what this article really implies is that - we the humans are doing the quality assurance for the GPT answers, if we take that out of the equation, and we don't give it quality prompts, etc.

It's worth nothing.
Apple has ads in their News app, though not nearly as many as most new sites do.

They have paid placements in the App Store.

I suppose you could consider some of the music in the Music app to be promotional for that music.

It’s nothing like Google’s ad network.
Well maybe. You can consider taking a less-than-ideal job to give yourself a longer runway, while you keep looking for a good/great job.

As long as it's an "at will" job (as almost all are) you can quit in two weeks, two months, or six months if a better opportunity comes along.
BAYC creator Yuga Labs wins trademark infringement case against Ryder Ripps
I did the opposite and switched from duolingo to flash cards. However it was for improving a language I already know somewhat, and it seems duolingo is useful mostly when you don't know the language at all, but not once you already know it a bit.
Theoretically, yes, but in practice, no. Creating a manufacturing process is a very complex and time consuming process that takes a huge about of research and development, investment, etc to achieve profitable yields. For bulk CMOS processes, which is what digital circuits are made on, this is especially the case. Foundries like TSMC can't afford to let customers design custom transistors, and customers generally don't have the expertise to do so. There's a huge economies of scale benefit from having customers all use the same process.

That being said, there is a little room for tweaking. The manufacturing process has a ton of variation in it, and the center point / average of that variation can be moved around a little. I think most companies just take what they get, but I'm betting the big players (Qualcomm, Apple, Nvidia, AMD) all do internal tracking of the process variation when they get product back, and give feedback to the foundries to make changes to optimize their own yield.

There's also been a recent push in the very new and advanced processes for "Design-Technology Co-Optimization", where the digital circuit design (i.e. standard cells and memory) and the process technology design happens together. We got here because all of the low hanging fruit has been picked and now companies are chasing single digit percentages in yield and PPA (power, performance, and area) improvements. It's a collaboration between foundry and customer that happens before the process is even released, so again - big players only, and it's still more tweaking than custom transistors.

For other types of processes, meaning non-bulk CMOS, customers can definitely design their own transistors. This is especially common in RF applications where you're often making chips with a few transistors. In some cases, it can be just changes in the shapes and/or dimensions of the transistors in the GDS, relative to what the foundry recommends. For this type of custom transistor, the foundry still controls the material science details of how the process happens. In other cases, though, customers are in control of everything from the transistor dimensions to the chemical concentrations and methods used for fabrication.
Film Review: “The man who knew too much” (2021)
>> The next major leap in LLMs (in the next year) is probably going to be the prompt context size. Right now we have 2k, 4k, 8k ... but OpenAI also has a 32k model that they're not really giving access to unfortunately.

Saw this article today about a different approach that opens up orders of magnitude larger contexts

https://hazyresearch.stanford.edu/blog/2023-03-07-hyena
Bare Metal Vi, Boot into Vi Without an OS
I mean, ignorance is worthless too. You’re still getting scammed by trusting the skeptics blindly, you just get scammed intellectually instead of financially.
That's true but better something than nothing, you can accept the crummy job offer, and then accept an even better one a short while later.
Someone was saying that in the Storage section of Settings, when you run low on storage, there is a prompt to enable iCloud storage and offload some content to the cloud. They are calling that an Ad.
From mass market sources, true. Probably because they're aiming towards the common American, who generally has similar feelings. Ergo, they're that + whichever politically-polarized biases.

As for whether averaging that out is useful...?

I'd be happy to have news from a "overall US" bias, without the right/left political spin.
see https://twitter.com/MartinS67861003
Word-for-word? Really? Sorry, I just don't understand your point.

Are you saying merchants in the 1700s didn't believe insurance outcomes were quantifiable? Or are you saying that software engineering output is quantifiable? If the latter, maybe you might shed some light on how you think that would work, I'm happy to be proven wrong.
There’s a lot of weird politics in that business.

I’m pretty sure the big players like Intel and Samsung put their r&d eggs into the G450C coalition to build bigger wafers. TSMC saw that as a threat, did not join and invested more on its own. In the meantime, the 450 thing collapsed for a variety of reasons and the billions of dollars invested went up in smoke and left Intel and other behind.
Do you mind explaining this more? How did your prompt save your business $15K in costs?
bridge girders are not made of cast steel and are not made by casting; they're made by rolling and sometimes welding, processes that are not really applicable to cast iron. even ductile cast iron can't withstand the degree of rolling used to make i-beams without cracking

it is true that some castings are now indeed made of steel, but bridge girders are not among them, and the casting steels used today postdate the bessemer process by generations. chrome wasn't used in steel until 01865 (except, to everyone's great surprise three years ago, in medieval persia), nickel until 01889

(you can roll them as much as you want without cracking, and in fact they're dramatically more ductile than actual structural steel alloys like a36, but generally people don't because they're far too expensive and not at all easy to roll)

this is not, as you falsely claim, a quibble about nomenclature, in which bridge girders are made of mostly iron and are made by casting but are just not called 'cast iron'. they aren't cast at all

as for 'improvements', bessemer's steel was not an improvement over cast iron in every way (it's softer, has a higher thermal coefficient, and can't be practically cast) but in any case brunel did not make the claim you falsely imply he does:

> At present cast iron is looked upon, to a certain extent, as a friable,
treacherous, and uncertain material; castings of a limited size only
can be safely depended upon; wrought iron is considered comparatively trustworthy, and by riveting, or welding, there is no limit to
the size of the parts to be used. Yet, who will venture to say, if the
direction of improvement is left free, that means may not be found of
ensuring sound castings of almost any form, and of twenty or thirty
tons weight, and of a perfectly homogeneous mixture of the best metal?
Who will say that beams of great size of such a material, either in
single pieces or built, may not prove stronger, safer, less exposed to
change of texture or to injury from vibration, than wrought-iron,
which in large masses cannot be so homogeneous as a fused mass
may be made and which when welded is liable to sudden fracture
at the welds?

(https://ia801404.us.archive.org/3/items/brunel-isambard.-the... p. 192 (224/603), letter of 01848-03-13)

this is clearly not at all what happened. i don't fault brunel for failing to predict the future; i fault you for claiming he did

you're wrong, you made a mistake, what you said isn't true, it's false, and by continuing to dance around that and play word games instead of admitting it, not to mention flagging my rebuttals so people can't see them, you're leaving traps for people in the future who read this thread to try to understand the historical development of metallurgy

and please leave the 'my dude' shit (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35664138) on twitter or wherever you picked it up, that kind of bullshit isn't welcome here. likewise the claim to be an authority on a subject because you took a class on it in college. a degree is not a substitute for knowing what you're talking about

in fact that is much of brunel's point in these letters
Not so bad, but it shows you are sometimes translating english constructs to french words literally.

FWIW I've recently used Michel Thomas method to learn a language starting from zero, and found I got comfortable building my own phrases very fast. It's audio only, you just have to respond to questions in the target language before the answer is spoken, almost painless. (this is not an ad, I have no relation to Michel Thomas method).
It's not perfect either but I feel it's the best introduction to the mecanisms of a forein language, after which you can start adding up vocabulary.
Why did you need an AI to tell you about that?
I’d be surprised if something like a pharmacy managed to adopt a tech that quickly. In my experience non-tech industries often take quite a while to adopt.
The court ruling: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.85...
That's what I meant, I will edit the comment to make it clearer.
but they do have a good reference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#cite_note-control-cent...

which eventually leads to https://web.archive.org/web/20130114034246/http://0pointer.d...

System D [in French, Système D] is a shorthand term that refers back to the French word débrouillard[1]. The verb se débrouiller means "to untangle." [...]

That sounds just about perfect to be honest "untangling the boot process" - yes please.

so the name wasn't directly inspired by System D, but the relationship was noted and approved of.
Here's a public versions of their nature comment written by the same authors. I should have linked to that instead of the original paywalled version but all these versions are making the same argument, presumably with sightly different wording for copyright reasons:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-climate-scientist...

If you're claiming this material is "climate change isn't real" then look into who the authors are.

The topic at hand is climatologists changing their minds about basic variables despite decades of making predictions with 100% confidence. The fact that their latest models are totally unrealistic, by their own assessment, is further evidence that the science here is seriously flawed and subject to major revision, still.
One has lower capacity than the other (probably due to small differences when they came off the manufacturing line resulting in them aging differently).

Or maybe the difference in distance between the AirPods and the signal source is just enough that one has to frequency hop or request retransmission of corrupted packets more often than the other, resulting in higher power consumption (I’m almost completely ignorant of the Bluetooth protocol so I don’t actually know how it handles dropped/bad packets)
https://archive.is/nJoEp
Since my blog post is linked, I wanted to clarify something. While this appears to be the broad message, I don't think the author intended to imply this about my post specifically, but I still feel the need that I point out the following in my prompt eng blog post (linked by the OP)[1]:

> To start, you must have a problem you're trying to build a solution for. The problem can be used to assess whether prompting is the best solution or if alternative approaches exist that may be better suited as a solution. Engineering starts with not using a method for the method's sake, but driven by the belief that it is the right method.

[1]: https://mitchellh.com/writing/prompt-engineering-vs-blind-pr...
If you like Sudoku, check out Sudoku + extra rules. This channel solves them daily, which I really enjoy watching, but they also have a link in the description to a great website where you can solve it yourself, for free. They are all hand-made.

https://youtu.be/ejhtYYvUs5M
Power Query does the same with its M language.

Recorded steps in the GUI generate code that can be manually edited.
> occupation: nazi hunter, linguist

Nice
Also not a variant of the D programming language meant for systems programming.
The poor quality of sports team branded gadgets [video]
> the pace of human information production would increase by orders of magnitude

you mean boilerplate and spam right?
> One is a tool to curb freedom and make the job of government as easy as possible, the other is designed to enhance freedom, restrict government control over its citizens and be an escape hatch whenever governments become unbearably controlling.

The flaw there is that if too many people use something like Bitcoin as an escape hatch from an unbearably controlling government, that government can close the escape hatch by becoming even more controlling.

You can't actually do anything physical with Bitcoin. For all your physical needs you have to trade your Bitcoin with someone for the physical goods, either directly or indirectly.

An unbearably controlling government could focus its monitoring on the physical goods, and make it illegal to buy physical goods using anything other than the official government currency. They could require all banking to be done at a government bank or at banks that report everything to the government.
I just want to know what they're called if someone were to say them out loud. Upside down A and backwards E probably aren't accurate.
You don't understand why I would care about the neighborhood that I live in? My house is the most expensive thing I own, I worked incredibly hard to get it. I am proud of it. I take care of it.

I want to live in a neighborhood with others who feel the same way.

To your second point, yes, not all HOAs are great. If you frequent fark.com, you'll find multiple threads per month about some terrible thing an HOA is doing. But, that's why you do your due diligence when selecting an HOA. You carefully read the CC&Rs before signing on the house, you talk to others in the neighborhood before moving in. Much like selecting an insurance plan. For example, my HOA is setup so that leadership fully rotates every 3 years, with the rotations staggered. Worst case we get bad leadership for 1 year. Though, so far, in the in the 15 years the HOA has existed, they've done nothing but enforce rules everyone has agreed to. (Well that, and they killed off a bunch of common-area grass by hiring the cheapest lawn care they could find. )
They're anything but simplistic.
There's a large buffoon contingency that wants representation.
When I was 17 or so I built a simple inverter out of a big 12V transformer and some 3055's (RCA's, not Motorola) which was enough to run most of my gear when it was 'lights out' (or not...). So I understand the basics. But those transformerless sine wave inverters are interesting, they seem to get away with squeezing a 20 KW inverter into a relatively modest package at a ridiculously high efficiency.

On top of that they have to comply with a whole host of safety regulations, so even if the theoretical block diagram is as simple as you've outlined it the actual implementation is likely going to be a lot more complex and interesting.

Any pointers to where I can dig around without opening one up myself would be greatly appreciated, most of the youtube stuff is for very cheap or small gear.
They absolutely do sell your data, but only if you’re big enough and have enough money, and are discrete enough. They invited me as part of a role I played at a globo mega corp famous for being discrete, rich, and sophisticated with data to buy access to highly dimensional real time local data with amazingly detailed resolution, ability to structure and query, etc. You could do stuff like see what everyone who drives an EV is doing, what coffee shops are popular right now with liberals, etc, all in real time and with deep comparative history. It was remarkable the detail accessible on everyone everywhere all at once. It was anonymized and aggregated, so I couldn’t buy your specific data, and it was masked with differential privacy techniques - but you could certainly say they sell your data. They sold it to me.
Play store rules are much more relaxed than Apple's app store rules though.

Also, not fear mongering, just speculating -- I look forward to this happening actually! Will finally be able to get an iphone and use software that isn't kneecapped by Apple's gatekeeping.
Model 3 and Chevy Bolt comparison: https://www.motortrend.com/features/tesla-model-3-chevrolet-...
That is quite an insight. A "programmer" is really an "overfitter".
Artificial intelligence – coming to a government near you soon?
Again?

I'll probably listen to this at some point and genuinely like hearing about the origins of JSON from Crockford himself.

Apart from that, I'd be surprised if this adds anything to what I've already heard and read ad nauseam, including from Crockford himself.

JSON is just a nice, simple serialization format that compresses well and interoperates acceptly with most programming languages. Most importantly with the language that it was designed to be consumed by: Javascript.

If one needs better performance or better guarantees about serialized data types, I guess one should use Protobuf, and/or ASN.1 (was that even correctly spelled?) or any of the countless other formats I have no clue about.

If you need better schema restrictions and interconnected entities + circular references: use a database, I guess.

At least everything XML has done in this space has more or less failed (e.g. SOAP). Well, failed might be too strong a word.

But all the work on defining data types and schema seems almost independent of the underlying syntax.

Since I've now spent too much time on this uninformed first comment, I will now listen what Douglas Crockford wants to say. But I think I've already read this story in another form a couple of years ago.

JSON is really a good example of "worse is better". E.g. an OpenAPI spec with automated client code and TypeScript definitions is not much different from SOAP on the surface level.
I truly don't understand why you think in the example you give why a company would have standing to sue. I don't think any further conversation will be productive. From my point of view, you're using motivated reasoning to do your best to defend an obviously indefensible view.
The converse is also true. Humanities would love to do large, expensive projects, but the funding for that simply doesn't exist and so the proposals are never written. People aren't running entire research programs on the rounding errors in science budgets by choice.
Flipping the eyes is the same geometric reasoning the article discusses. The same thing applies to touch and motor control too.

Its just a general extrapolation of the same principle. It would also explain why creatures without sight as well like many worms.
Obscure topics like this often have bizarre wikipedia pages with only a few contributors. The articles are usually a few paragraphs, each touching on wildly different barely-related topics that connect to the main topic. Here's one from a few years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17591942 This article is also one of them.
Surely you can appreciate how difficult it is to take someone seriously who claims to have done research, only to conclude it’s mumbo jumbo?
Curiously some of the problems that state ownership has also show up in capitalism - corporations that centralise decision making lose the ability to make fine grained, optimal local condition decisions.

And bureaucracy becomes a major headache.

A very common refrain at the moment is businesses wanting to be "nimble like start ups" but are unable to do so due to a myriad of reasons.
This game isn’t a unique idea. I’ve played it with pen and paper before. It’s common in China.
I knew a guy who did this 10 years ago. He was living somewhere in South America, working an east coast US job remotely. He owned a property in his home state, rented it out, and used that as his "home address" for mailing/tax purposes. He also VPN'd into his home state just in case IT asked why he was connecting from a foreign country.