skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Has anyone tried the Scott Alexander AI bet prompts?

1. A stained glass picture of a woman in a library with a raven on her shoulder with a key in its mouth

2. An oil painting of a man in a factory looking at a cat wearing a top hat

3. A digital art picture of a child riding a llama with a bell on its tail through a desert

4. A 3D render of an astronaut in space holding a fox wearing lipstick

5. Pixel art of a farmer in a cathedral holding a red basketball
I completely disagree. From my experience it's virtually 100% genetics.

The reason it's not an "obvious/major/easily discovered and proven finding" is because it's basically illegal research. Anyone who tries to study the genetics of success gets their reputation and career destroyed because race and genetics are also linked.
I agree that there will be new and interesting abstractions for prompting, but I have this feeling that the promise of LLMs for the foreseeable future is to apply them to new and unique business cases. I think this will always require interacting with them at a lower level to some extent.
Well, Google could have easily not have shared its technology.

However, the bloat problem you’ve described are difficult problems to solve, and are to some degree endemic to large businesses with established products.
> Ask the mathematicians you know whether they do all their work on paper or use maple/octave/mathematica/python. 6/6 that i know do.
If a person who doesn't play piano told me they have a piano solo in their head, i would set them up with a midi sequencer so they can bring it to life. My preconceptions about their capabilities are irrelevant.

A MIDI sequencer is not a piano, and mathematicians typically don't use maple/mathematica/octave/python (unless they're in applied maths, which is a subset of mathematics as a whole).

The most important breakthroughs in mathematics, the kinds of things that push you over the edge as a society and that expand the scope of humanity's knowledge, are at the proof level, which those programs cannot achieve.

Your MIDI sequencer analogy is very apt, because while someone may be able to bang something out on the MIDI sequencer and have the computer play it, a MIDI sequencing is not a human piano performance.

But you're right, if you want a hollow fascimile of the real thing, then yes, those tools could work to impress someone.
I suspect these might be generated by chatgpt or similar.
I guess what I was wondering is, do we have any tools that help extract a hierarchical structure from the inputted information. Rather than having the user specify the hierarchical structure.
> There's a fine line

I don't think that's the case, not at all. I do think it's easy to think you're doing the first when you're not, and I do think it's easy to make the first look like the second, particularly in scarcity-based circumstances, or by "counting the outcome" differently.

I'm interested in hearing why you think that's the case, tho.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that the second (call it "forced equalization") can't or doesn't happen - I'm arguing against it being similar enough to opportunity elevation (good word choice btw!) that there's merely a fine line between them.
> was implied by the question

My intention was not necessarily to imply that, but literally ask myself the original question - why push people into this when the outcome for them will likely be poor? Perhaps a good followup is to ask is, what can we do to both get a more diverse pool of academics without punishing those without means? I would think a massive expansion of the tenure track program would be needed, which is kind of what it was created for in the first place, just got too saturated. But that has its own slew of problems.
I don't recall Bayes' theorem involving calculus. Are you sure you aren't thinking of some other theorem?

Bayes' theorem follows straightforwardly from P(A & B) = P(A|B) P(B) and P(A & B) = P(B & A). The latter tells us that we can swap A and B in the former without changing the value, giving us P(A|B) P(B) = P(B|A) P(A).

Rearranging gives P(A|B) = P(B|A) P(A) / P(B), which is Bayes' theorem.
No kidding. The whole idea of (even partially) evaluating a game's value/quality by how long it takes to finish it is a mind virus. It leads to bloated, grindy experiences where a shorter game might have been more appropriate or even more fun.
Its funny you say this because here in Canada, the reaction I get from saying I pay $10 for Youtube Plus is the same.
Organized, concise, and not wordy. Props to the writer, he shows a deep degree of written communication skills on a topic frequently cluttered with jargon.
Thank you! I’ll have to look into this approach.
I recently learned about Chimay.

https://chimay.com/
Does the Future Belong to Generalists?
This is something I’ve noticed for a while now: All of the major semiconductor manufacturers use the same set of tooling. In particular, they all use EUV lithography machines from ASML. So how can any one company maintain any sort of sustained lead? As a first order approximately, all of them should have the same level of fabrication capabilities. If TSMC tries to push too fast, they’ll run into major challenges. And if they figure something out, their competitors should match them in short order.
I've personally ran into the problems mentioned in the article many times, unsure it's "overhyped".
it's shipped as a default part of hardware
If you don't mind the power consumption I noticed that older nvidia P6000's (24GB) are pretty cheap on ebay! My 16GB P5000 is pretty handy for this stuff.
I'd use „hatten viel Spaß zusammen“ instead of „schöne Zeit”.
I agree. Kids are smart (especially the ones who could potentially succeed in STEM). They’re not gonna go all in on math so they can work in a fab from dusk ‘till dawn for mediocre pay.
> Why does Disney need to invest resources into Disney+ when they can just sell the rights to their content to one or two Streaming platforms and make more money?

Is this true? Presumably their intention is to make more money by doing it themselves.
> Why are so many clamoring to tear it down?

It stopped working for many people. Not many people can afford rent or a house anymore. We just got done fighting 2 long wars that we didn't win, mostly for the benefit of warmongers, who cashed out like bandits; others involved were scarred, maimed, mentally anguished, or outright killed. Good jobs are difficult to come by if you don't have a college degree. And who would want a degree with the ruinous undischargable debt it comes with? The ever more expensive food and water seems laced with poison or trace amounts of drugs, and when it causes people to get sick, few can afford healthcare.

Would you want to tear that system down?
> Passkey objects on macOS are encrypted at rest within the iCloud Keychain sqlite database in Library/Keychains/*/. It shouldn't be too hard to adapt the keychain extraction tools that exist.

Really? That sounds awful. So now everything is passwordless and tied to a single database that can be stolen?

I thought the whole point of passkey was to tie the login to a TPM, Secure Enclave, HSM, etc. managed key because that means the private key is in hardened, tamper proof storage that simply signs challenges.
> I, like anyone with any knowledge of nutrition, am saying "it's obviously protein and fat, the stuff that helps you grow"

Every major study comparing keto and other more balanced diets disagrees with you. Carbs aren't just good for what they are mixed with, but also because they can displace more harmful sources of energy, like saturated fats. Most things that are 0 carb, have lots of saturated fat and cholesterol. Note: Dietary cholesterol can have a disproportionate affect on blood lipids depending on your genetics, despite all the people clamoring that it doesn't matter.

It's not nit-picking if you're giving blanket advice that's misleading.

Necessary does not mean sufficient. In biology, necessary doesn't even mean harmless. It is often best to get small, or even minimal, amounts of needed things, like salt or iron.
> Second, there is a small chance you're absolutely right, and you've just obviated a whole field from first principles.

Mostly when I read about things like this happening, it's happening to a formerly intractable problem in mathematics. Do you have examples outside of math?
Adding Intelligent Search to a Rails Application with Weaviate
Well, we don't if these ads come from the bot itself or just get added by key word afterwards.

And it occurs to me that another step down the road is when the company offers an AI chatbot interface to it's advertisers so they can fine-tune where the AI will switch to trying to sell their product and how.
But nobody talks about Netflix shows because there's no shared progress, so you can't even begin to discuss it with your friends until everyone is completely finished with. Then at that point, it's finished, why bother?
>The author doesn't seem to realize that it's not necessary for Mastodon to reach the same scale as Twitter or Facebook. We might be headed for a more pluralistic future, with a large chunk of people on Mastodon, another big community on Bluesky, etc.

Did you read the article? It's right there in the end:

>Mastodon will continue as a niche community and it will have lots of happy users. I’m greatful for the admins that have dedicated so much of their time running instances, and thank you to the admins who shared their instance financial information.

>If you love Mastodon I’m happy for you. The internet needs bold bets and people to invest in them.
If clustering has worked on what amounts to basically the entire world of information things get a bit fuzzy though. I don't suppose you are technically incorrect, it's just that these words lose practical meaning when we talk about models that encode tens or even hundreds of billions of parameters.

Predicting the "next token" requires an "internal model of the world". It might not be how we do it, but without something that acts like it I'd be very interested in how you think it comes up with its predictions.

Let's say it needs to continue a short story about a detective. The detective says at the end: "[...] I have seen every clue and thought of every scenario. I will tell you who the killer is:". Good luck continuing that with any sort of accuracy if you don't have some abstract map of how "people" act. You can see how I can think of a lot of examples that require something that acts as a model of the "world".

There's a definite structure and pattern to everything we do. This (to an LLM) hidden context gives rise to the words we write. To re-invent them, like it has to do, it must basically conjure up all this hidden state. I'm not saying it gets it right, I'm just saying that there is no other way than to model the world behind the text to even get into ballpark-right territory.
> I sat on it because I wasn’t sure of the optics of posting such an essay while employed by Google Brain. But then Google made my decision easier by laying me off in January. My severance check cleared...

I'm really baffled by how people think it's OK to write public accounts of their previous (and sometime current!) employers' inner workings. This guy got paid a shitload of money to do work and to keep all internal details private, even after he leaves. They could not be more clear about this when you join the company.

Why do people think it's OK to share like this? This isn't a whistleblowing situation -- he's just going for internet brownie points. It's just an attempt to squeeze a bit more personal benefit out of your (now-ended) employment.

Contractual/legal issues aside, I think this kind of post shows a lack of personal integrity (because he did sign a paper agreeing not to disclose info), and even a betrayal of former teammates who now have to deal with the fallout.
> Continually breezing past the points I've made does nothing to convince me this isn't odd or interesting.

I’m sorry that it feels like that to you. I’m doing my best to adress your points to the best of my abilities. If you feel I am breezing by your point that just means I haven’t understood you yet.

> They didn't lose contact on impact, but minutes prior.

I see what you are saying, but that is not true.

The Hakuto-R Mission 1 reports they have telemetry about the craft free falling. They talk about an altitude measurement system possibly miscalculating. They also talk about the thruster running out of fuel. [1]

The Beresheet had an Innertial Measurement Unit fail, then they had communication issues, and they regained communication, but by that time it was too late to save the lander. They also had telemetry up until the impact if I read it right. [2]

Which one is the third you are refering to?

1: https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/japans-ispace-prepa...

2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beresheet
> The judge in the Epic trial, YGR, invented a whole new market concept out of thin air, "digital mobile gaming transactions", a market that neither side in the case argued for. I thought that was complete crap and a bad decision. What's the legal basis for a judge inventing a market? This seems like a classic case of judicial overreach.

This actually happens all the times in antitrust cases. Almost always the plaintiff argues for a very narrow market and the defendant argues for a very wide market. Then the judge has to come in and look at actual consumer behavior to decide what the relevant market actually is.

> One of the weirdest things about that market definition is that the App Store is not a game store. Of course there are a lot of games that make a lot of money in the App Store, but there are a ton of non-games in there too. (Also, WTF is "digital" supposed to mean? Are there analog mobile gaming transactions?)

I agree that the relevant market probably should have included all app transactions and not just gaming transactions but frankly it would not have changed the outcome of the case.

> That was precisely my complaint! So if I have a misconception, then apparently the Department of Justice also has the same misconception.

The way your original comment was phrased implied the problem was with having 93% market share in the first place. I was simply pointing out that's not illegal unless it was obtained or maintained through anticompetitive means. It remains to be seen whether such browser payments will be considered anticompetitive in the eyes of the courts.
I didn't realize this was a thing that could be enabled/disabled per-game. I think all achievements on Steam come with the "x.x% got this" stat.
Which is fine and all, and the national standard was fine, but for some reason, very big houses of teaching material put their dumbest interns on the job and there was A LOT of teaching material that was downright incompetent, and taught nothing. You could see exactly what it was trying to get at but it was obvious the person who wrote that material never understood the underlying concept themselves.
Good catch! Thanks for the feedback.
>There's never really going to be such a thing as a thriving small social network.

You are saying this on Hackernews, out of all places... which is an example of one.
Microbes eat fiber. That's what a prebiotic is.
> Math education in the US is pitiful.

Yeah, no disagreement there.

> The last attempt to fix it (common core) mostly emphasized memorizing arithmetic facts.

In fact, just the opposite. The old math system was rote memorization. Then common core came along and made all those parents and their limited math skills obsolete. It didn't help that teachers who also learned the old math couldn't or didn't understand common core methodology.

BTW, I'm a parent of one those school kids who was trying to learn common core. I got it right away and don't consider myself particularly brilliant. But the grumbling from so many parents who just thought they knew more than the educators was deafening. In the end, the state dropped common core and they are still complaining about it years later. The right made it into a boogeyman and now that and trans kids are all they can fixate on.
The show got better by the end. The show itself-- not the dialogue.

On a similar note: for so much of Night Agent, it felt like they started with competent technical advisors that paid enough attention to detail to make terminals show TUIs/GUIs that actually relate to the current goal, but the writers came along and rewrote every technical explanation with "brb guys, gotta hack the mainframe" garbage.

The wine moms around me love the show though, so maybe it's just catering to the target demographic.
> Definitely the case for me. I am able to help out 10-20 family members across 4 countries,

You're sharing an account with 20 people across 4 countries? It's honestly kind of amazing that they let this level of sharing go on for so long.

It's hard for me to believe that out of 20 different people, every single one of them would decide to boycott Netflix forever because of this. If even 1 of those people decides to re-subscribe, Netflix has lost nothing. If 2 or more subscribe, they win.

Extrapolate this across their userbase and it's not hard to see why they're doing it. Obviously some people will cancel, but I guarantee Netflix has run pilot trials and analyzed the net effect to their bottom line.
Oof that's dumb as hell I didn't realize it was such a recent deal
I was under the assumption that Stripe, PayPal, Square, etc are not payment processors but either payment facilitators or payment gateways (depending on the platform) in that they don't actual process the payments but rather provide a convenient PCI-compliant way of moving the transactions to the actual payment processor (Something like NCR, GlobalPay, Elvaon, etc). In Stripe's case in particular I thought they were a payment facilitator and as a payment facilitator they board you as a sub-merchant which makes the process of getting an MID easier. Is that right or does Stripe actually process payments?
> Homeless individuals already have communication issues because they usually don't have a reliable long term phone or phone number.

And that locks them out of most email providers and online services, especially if their only source of internet access is a public library that "looks like a robot" because a lot of people use it simultaneously.
Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative
I think what is missing from a lot of these conversations, particularly in academia, is the topic of meritocracy.

Does being black make you a measurably worse candidate (in aggregate)? Does being black mean you will have a harder time succeeding in a meritocracy?

If the answer is no, then what we see in terms of results are a matter of personal choice and there is no business in performing interventions.

If the answer is yes, then the follow up question is why?

If the answer is genetics, that is incredibly hazardous with extremely bleak societal consequences.

If the answer is parental wealth, that means as long as black people (in aggregate) are poor, black candidates (in aggregate) are going to be measurably worse.

The obvious conclusion that an academic or DEI executive must reach is that meritocracy promotes systemic "-isms". The obvious conclusion is that the only way to deal with the problem are social programs or reparative efforts (reparations -- such as affirmative action).
> Netflix has been enforcing concurrent streams for a while now, no?

Yes. They've been doing more or less what the parent comment suggested for a very long time.
Unifying Qt:TimeSpec Within QTimeZone
Was it for seeding/hosting torrents or from just downloading them? How long did the whole thing take to play out?

I've always assumed that consuming torrents has been low stakes to the point where its not worth any enforcement
If you’re updating a single entity it doesn’t really matter. An exception is if you’re doing something like select for update in psql where you’re explicitly introducing locks. If you’re performing multiple operations simultaneously and want them all to go or die together, yes.
> Kids from these families can also foresee their career path more clearly

This is very true. However I still think among people I knew, wealth counts for more.

For example when I was in grad school one of the professors in our department liked to proudly remark that he was proof that you could have a viable career even if you change your field substantially in a second post-doc. Eventually I heard someone else explain it as, "Well, if your parents make a large donation to the lab then the PI will accept you as a free (no cost to the lab) post-doc and train you." In contrast, people I knew from academic families but with relatively middle-class financial means still got railroaded / pigeonholed into the areas where they specialized, even though they were much better at navigating academia than I was.

I know, the above is just anecdotes. How could we resolve it? I dunno, run a study? But as you say wealth is much easier to measure than culture, so we may be stuck with our respective perspectives for a while...
Great, a turtle ouroboros.
German parenting is very different from American parenting. Struwwelpeter is an extreme, but it does capture the essence of the tough love approach, emphasis on following rules (or suffer the consequences) etc

Certain elements of German culture did not just develop in the last 150-200 years :)
Reconstructing Images with a Lot of Dots
Amazing piece of data visualization. I work with deck.gl at my day job, and it's really cool to see how far people can push it.

I have a random question - what layer are you using to draw the country borders on the base map? It really stands out, and helps tie the styling together.
qdbp is sort of what would happen if self(which is similar to smalltalk) and ocaml had a kid together :)
> ” You "process" food by cutting and cooking it. Everything is processed”

No one means that cutting a carrot make it into “processed food”. You are changing a mostly commonly understood definition to a new wanna-be-technically-correct one you just made up only to suit your argument.

There is a grey area in the definition of processed foods, but it’s not close as large as your definition maintains.
Semiconductor tooling is of a level of complexity that there's a huge amount of skill, institutional knowledge, process, and some art in getting them doing what you want at yields that pay off and on fast schedules. Lead is maintained by having all of that. They're also extremely expensive ($10b+ to get to leading edge node), which is a huge barrier to entry and just about requires nation-state help, as is the case in Taiwan, Korea, and the US.
Microsoft has a product called SSDT for this. You provide the SQL schema, it compiles a file called a DACPAC, and provides tools for deploying a DACPAC against a database. Where it can figure out the migration (eg. changing column types, adding columns) it does so automatically. Where it can't (dangerous changes, dropping columns) it blocks.

The challenge is that more complicated refactoring like renaming columns has to be done through a weird xml DSL.

It also treats static/initial data as out-of-scope.

And it's a product of the bad old days of clumsy closed-source designers and the like.

I use it extensively... and in general, wish I didn't. Maybe it's "grass is always greener" but I wish I'd just stuck to a stack of migration scripts. The fact is that 99% of the time you're deploying to an existing SQL server, so expressing your schema as a series of sequential changes is the only workflow that makes sense, sadly.
Ok but the lack of underrepresented minorities in the field and the important role people like Gebru played in extending the political and status of minorities is ok to extinguish? We need more than just white male / Chinese male / Indian male monoculture “STEM lords”. This is already recognized in fields like medicine, where minorities treating minorities results in better outcomes and the greater push to open positions of status to minorities.