skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trains are nice because they don’t require massive reconfigurations to hold varying crowds of people and the things they carry. People move furniture on subways all the time. There isn’t really a ‘perfectly sized’ personal vehicle; even now, just the simple bifurcation between a normal and XL taxi leads to longer waits for the latter, and god forbid you need special accommodations like for a wheelchair.

Car-like vehicles have massive inefficiencies, because the act of merging into and out of other lanes is inefficient.

A train line can carry up to 80k people per direction per hour. The FHWA’s estimate of a car lane car capacity is 2k people per direction per hour. And because cars have to eventually dump onto a surface network that requires timed cycles so that pedestrians and cyclists can cross the street, these low capacity segments are actually the bottleneck.
2023 Fintech Onboarding Guide. Made from Reviewing 15+ YC Fintechs
Excited to share my ultimate fintech onboarding guide. Compiled from reviewing some of Y Combinator top fintechs including Yotta, Compound, Puzzle , Bloom and others...

We realized that great onboarding required a few crucial elements:

1. Identifying the one key behavior you want your users to adopt during onboarding
2. Understanding how to leverage cognitive bias' in design
3. Paying immense attention to detail

In the guide, I highlight the most essential and damaging cognitive biases that many companies often overlook. Taking advantage of these biases during onboarding can be game-changing.
I just got one of these: https://magnumbikes.com/collections/commuting-errands/produc..., granted for under $2k due to a sale at a bike shop, and it's great.
By looking at it? Every time I see a screenshot of someone's super fancy color scheme it looks cacophonous.
Rando edits by pedantic a*-hats who don't care about the actual topic but their weird crusade. /s
I mean in London the fastest option is public transit more often than not, and you get pretty close to door to door.
The attention of a captive audience will absolutely be monetized. This could happen any number of ways, but likely that there will be an option (like YouTube) to pay extra for an ad-free experience.
How much did Apple contribute back to the project?
Did computers generate significant new art?
Assuming your team members are actually:

- capable and not just good salesmen that got into their positions due to various factors like resume-driven development, obscene levels of networking or nepotism, being in the right place at the right time — and riding that wave — etc.

- have gotten the junior-level giggles out of them — and understand that the simplest solution is the best solution; rather than something needlessly complex because:

(“it won’t scale” (i.e I’m at best bored and want to try something new, and at worst trying to shoehorn something insane to further my resume) ||

“we have to do it this way” (i.e. I read a blog post last night and want it to seem like I’m knowledgeable and not an imposter with zero critical thinking ability) ||

“this is the correct way to do it” (i.e. I’m stalling again because I cannot think of a way to provide business value other than prostelyzing various opinions and philosophies about software engineering, despite there being zero hard and objective data that what I’m saying is in anyway effective for anything more than making me seem like I know what I’m talking about))

At that point, once you have enough maturity and experience (i.e the knack for being able to adapt to circumstances by your lonesome), you do not need to collaborate. You can almost always figure it out by searching online for what is almost always a trivial, already-been-solved issue, or by going for a few walks and mulling it over in your head. If it’s a truly hard problem, you can even sit down somewhere and work it through inside your head.

The only two types of collaboration I’ve ever seen in the workplace is:

1). Someone less learned on a subject picking the brain of someone more learned (fair if the subject is complex, and not easily accessible through literature; but grating if it’s something puerile like how to use a tool — RTFM)

2). Two people brainstorming something and coming to the wrong conclusion because they’re implicitly more interested in socializing correctly than coming up with the right answer. You see this with whiteboards a lot.

For example, M$’s Roslyn a few noobs were trying to figure out what data structure to use for representing syntax nodes and the solution they come up all these years ago was utterly silly (red and green trees) — solely because they were white boarding the problem out, and trying to come to a consensus (and to keep the vibes good, maaan) rather than to find the best answer.

Both are subpar from an efficiency standpoint, but great from a career standpoint.

N.B. If it’s not already apparent, I’ve grown tired of “collaboration.” I’ve grown tired of seeing it create more problems. And I’ve grown tired of the intellectual dishonesty around it.
Glad it’s easy to read! That’s exactly what it’s optimized for. There’s no real structure to the site, hence no menus and nothing really to navigate to.

I agree minimalism for the sake of minimalism is bad design—I don’t advocate for that. What I do advocate for is minimalism for the sake of accessibility, ease of maintenance, improved readability, etc. I'm also not categorically opposed to adding this stuff if needed. What I find is that most of the time its not a great starting point.
Cheating solves a problem for the cheater, but has the side-effect of entrenching the selection criteria for everyone who comes after. If a genuinely good student, who the professors recognize as good, cannot pass a particular criterion, this motivates the professors to eliminate, or at least discount, the criterion. If the student does pass, then the professors see no harm in continuing to use the criterion for all future students at its current grade weighting.

In addition to this, for those students who will not cheat, they are then required to spend their effort developing a skill which they may never use again, at the expense of developing skills they will use again. And also at the expense of their placement in the class. Patrascu may have been a brilliant researcher, but was he as brilliant as the person who didn't make the cut because he made the cut instead?

I think cheating is unhealthy for the system.
Thanks, agreed it will be a challenge.
Do Colonoscopies Save Lives?
Thank you for your detailed response, and for the book suggestion.

(For me personally, part of my challenge is that I want the ideal. I'd like to be loyal and committed to my employer (and I've tried to select employers that make this more possible, such as smaller and privately held companies at which I hopefully report to the CEO) and to have that not be foolish.

I have trouble truly accepting the reality of human nature, including within myself. From the perspective of "traditional" measures of success, I'm certain that I've hamstrung myself. But I'm unsure I could have done differently; my awareness of my naivete seems insufficient for changing my behavior much. It's as if I cannot endure reality and have to pretend I live in an alternative universe. (Not because I'm so admirably committed to such high ideals, but because I am too weak and afraid to endure the guilt and shame of intentionally failing to meet the standards to which I strive.)

Anyway... thanks again for the response. :) )
Yes, this has been a good refresher for me. I think you’re right, I am probably mis-stating some particular nuances.
I dislike the way you communicate. It's wrong. I don't care if a majority of people agree with you. That doesn't matter.

Can't see why anyone would be annoyed.
> it would suffice to execute towards some relatively simplistic goal and not have any regard for (or concept of) humans at all.

The classical example here is the paperclip optimizer AI put in charge of a factory, made to make as many paperclips as possible. Well, it turns out humans have iron in their blood so why keep them alive? Gotta make paperclips.
What is fragile?

Recalculating everyone's score before each new election. (Remember that life expectancy changes constantly, even Covid moved it. Not to mention regional differences that go down to the level of actual neighbourhoods; some racial groups live longer than others, should they wield bigger voting power? Same with richer people. What a can of worms to open.)

Subjecting voters to long quizzes - that alone would filter out a significant proportion of the population that just does not have time for such "fun", probably including the parents of kids that you mention, leading to overrepresentation of bored people at the ballot box.

Uncertain status of kids whose parents are just undergoing divorce or their paternity has been challenged. (Not to mention stuff such as surrogacy, which is legally complicated already and different in each jurisdiction.) What about a kid dying a day before the election?

The entire point system is a micromanagement hell, sorry.
Obviously, it’s a balance.

Because at the same time, ICs working on critical projects shouldn’t be forced to stop every 15 minutes to answer “It’s not working” questions.
This is the way. Building out dedicated bike infrastructure in cities will come at a fraction of the cost of any other investments and provide for a transit mode that suffers from none of these problems.
Battle.net used to have unique usernames. People would just add numbers to their name to make them unique.

Then for starcraft2 they added a 3 digit number - basically same system Discord uses - to differentiate usernames. But why? How is that any different than a unique username except it's now more restricting and confusing to boot.

Just have unique usernames and/or a display name.
I use the API for anything I can't do with Bing Chat, but I've found Bing Chat to be quite useful.

For code, I use phind.com.

https://www.phind.com/tutorial
I assume the following quote was not meant to be precise:

> The students didn’t even distribute the keys among themselves in a plausible manner. Each student chose an easy key to practice, so there were a lot of F majors and E minors, but no B flat minors or B majors.

but B major is pretty much the easiest scale to play on the piano there is!
That’s great example! That post is an unserious riff as a response to another post that meant to assert the correctness an individual’s personal definition of a term on what I found to be tenuous pedantic grounds.
Something like the accountability interpretation has been championed by David Deutsch, who bases a lot of his thought on Karl Popper.

So voters kicking out an incumbent is seen as analogous to scientists abandoning a hypothesis after falsification by an experiment.
Ask HN: Why is the HN upvote button a GIF?
If words don't matter, then ignore the edits. People tend to copy what they see. If they see it written with the original definition, maybe that's what the hivemind will adopt. I don't see a problem with that and I don't see the point in attacking people that care. I'm sure you have things in your life you care about.
Hahahaha! So good of you to call that out because I had never seen the word written out before either and literally tried every form you suggested and more (you-ie, u-ee, uy, etc). To be honest I settled on 'youey' not because it was the one I thought was correct, rather it was the one I thought most people would understand.

I also toyed with just putting "flip a bitch" but figured some might find that problematic as I'm not entirely sure of it's etymology...
Intel OEM Private Key Leak: A Blow to UEFI Secure Boot Security
Static typing can guarantee that if you design your static typing system to allow it. Take a look at Rust's NonZero types for example.

Languages with dependent types can do even more. Of course that is much more complicated and at some point you can only check the type at runtime.

But the idea that static type checking is worse than runtime type checking because it can't do all the checks is idiotic. You're throwing out the static benefits for no reason.

You should use static types as much as possible, and runtime checking where that isn't enough.
For reasons I’ve never really understood the UK (or at least the UK parliament) is wildly opposed to ID cards. There’s been a few attempts to introduce them which got massive pushback and were eventually aborted.

Personally I think it would be quite a bit easier than the current mish-mash of identification documents for different purposes, everyone in practice carries some form of ID if only so they can show it when buying age restricted products on the odd occasion someone asks for verification.
It's not an IQ test.
In terms of monetization I think content creators are better served focusing on leveraging their reach to build up a community to support them instead of optimizing primarily for ad revenue. Platforms like YouTube have continuously shown that relying on automated ad systems is unreliable and puts your ability to monetize subject to the whims of the advertisers. Many established creators have wrongfully received demonetization strikes against their channels threatening their livelihood.

It seems like the biggest asset that creators are creating are the communities that form around them and their niche. The people who consume content within a niche tend to be very likeminded and often times quite willing to rally behind and support the bastions propelling the niches that they identify with. Even for smaller creators, I've seen time and time again that all you need is one or two highly dedicated and engaged fans to make being a creator an extremely lucrative endeavour.

I've been working on a platform to help content creators diversify their revenue streams and offer their communities as one of their product offerings in addition to their content. The hope is to allow creators to better capture their community and monetize from their niche.

https://sociables.com/creators
We already know how humans will act. Maybe they can be deterred with MAD, but I wouldn't count on it if doing serious damage is too easy for too many people (we should do something about that). On the other hand, we have very little knowledge of how AGI will act aside from book-based fantasies that some people choose to take as reality (these books were based on the symbolic AIs of yore).

>Alignment just means "getting AI to have any concept of 'the thing we told it to do'.

That's a requirement for AGI anyway, and not what Alignment means. Alignment means aligning the AGIs values with the values of the trainers.
Congrats to all the folks on the sel4 project
Can't a doctor issue a prescription for you to bring to a pharmacy?

Your experience sounds wild because that's how things are done in Serbia for ages: getting a doctor's visit is usually a wait, but once medicines are prescribed, you walk into any pharmacy with a paper prescription, and walk out in five minutes.
> The latter scenario is far more likely than the former.

Is it?

I think nobody really knows enough at this point to even create a good approximation of a probability distribution yet.
It's just not happening near your home (probably intentionally). Go down to the Mojave desert between Barstow and Vegas and there are massive solar farms built over the last decade. Same with the California mountain passes and wind energy - there are large wind farms on the Altamont, Pacheco, Tehachapi, and San Gorgonio passes. Many of these are also getting large upgrades with more energy-efficient turbines, eg. the Pacheco Pass windfarm (18 MW, 162 turbines, built in the early 1980s) is getting upgraded in 2023 to 147.5 MW and 200 MWh of battery storage with fewer turbines.

Also I think that workplace charging is the future of EVs. With the peak of the duck curve at mid-day, the obvious way to match that up to battery demand is to provide incentives for ubiquitous EV chargers in office parking lots, as well as charging the consumer for electricity consumed by their car.
Likely cos it was easier to make than decipher SVG, or figure out the UTF-8 up arrow code.

Also, don't look at HN's HTML source too long, you'll go mad :D
Yes, unless the data has been doctored or outright fabricated to present a dismal picture that has the effect of coercing society to adopt globalist elitist agendas that rob the populations of their rights and power "for the greater good". We can no longer "trust the science". There are too many examples of it being utterly corrupted to substantiate narrow and extremist political goals.
Yes? He's invested in GPT-4 which just came out. He needs to retrain a new model with higher context limit as well as build out memory systems probably with vector databases. OpenAI needs to continuously raise money and buy more hardware. I'm not sure what OpenAI is doing but they're obviously resource constrained, else they wouldn't be outpaced by competitors in text2img.

He probably doesn't want to give away more of his company since it's such an obvious winner.
They have a checkered history in certain contexts. What's wrong with asking people simple stuff that is published beforehand like "Who was our first president?".
Wouldn't this argument cut both ways? Presumably the people that started using the phrase incorrectly were bucking the trend.
The company I work for manages those demand response programs. Many of them now also support smart L2 chargers that can also be controlled similar to the thermostat you mention.

We also still, at the end of the day have a greed problem. My local utility, for example (smaller, very monopolized one in the socal mountains) has halted being able to get credits from feeding solar back into the grid. They've all but made getting home solar irrelevant unless you have an expensive battery system like a Tesla powerwall or similar. I live in an area at altitude where it's sunny for much more than average and we are prime candidates to have solar on every home - but a greedy local utility has halted nearly all progress that the last decade has seen.
I have fiber 1g up and down. Should that be ok?

1200 mbps down and 1100 up.
AI runs a million microbial experiments per year
I don't know if I found them useful, but the program my parents put me in forced me to learn them.

Overall, I was pretty indifferent about my music education, it was just something my parents sort of made me do and I had to spend a few hours every week on, but I wasn't very enthusiastic about.
That's the period where teachers tell millions of students that "can I" is wrong, you should say "may I".

The teachers lost that battle, like they'll lose all the similar battles to come, because they were trying to enforce communicating like old people.
The phenomena of inner experience (2007) [pdf]
The lifecycle cost of nuclear is still higher than solar PV even with storage and we have low-risk, low-tech solar-with-storage options such as molten-salt concentrated solar, which, while not as efficient as solar PV, is very simple technology.

Solar PV and wind are cheap enough that overbuilding is easy. One might wonder what we can do with surplus power during times of day when we have too much solar (middle of the day) or too much wind (middle of the night) -- we can do desalination with the surplus solar (matches the demand curve of water use across the day and across the year) and convert wind to nitrogen:

https://wcroc.cfans.umn.edu/research/renewable-energy/wind-f...
The youtube channel LEMMiNO did a great video on this case!
"Tech bro" is just an insult created purely from sour grapes. The people that use the term "tech bro" are the same people that describe things as "gross". These are the people that will be automated out of jobs first.
I think that depends on the specific antibiotics used. Not all antibiotics will eliminate all bacteria.

Actually, it may be possible to argue that antibiotics make this worse if the antibiotics kill more of other competing bacteria.
I think it feels that way because people just drive much faster. If you forced people to slow down, I don't think the avg quality of driver is worse.
It’s not a technology problem. I expect to see grid failures in some areas for a while because of general NIMBY opposition and bureaucratic inertia preventing expansion from occurring until it’s an acute problem.
Batch processing scales quadratically with the context size (assuming OpenAI is still using standard transformer architecture) but the batch processing of the prompt is also fast compared to generating tokens because it's batched (parallel). So I wouldn't expect effective response times to go up quadratically. At most linearly, depending on the details of how they implement inference.
How Menopause Reshapes the Brain
Very niche, but my least favorite web re-design was the used camera retailer KEH.com (this was probably at least a decade ago). They went from a craigslist style listing (text dense, easy to drill down to any level from one page: Nikon Manual Focus ->Fixed length lenses->Nikon Brand || other brand. I think it was one or two clicks to get to a list of stock for a given category) to a regular e-commerce style page. Takes much longer to get to a nice looking page with less info and products displayed.

FWIW I haven't bought any gear from them since that happened, and they used to be my first stop for used equipment.

I think when you are selling to a buyer that knows what they want, its best to stick to a simpler information dense interface (Digikey, McMaster-Carr, etc.). I think a lot of websites try to "chase the trend" and look like Amazon, or whatever, without realizing that it is much harder to get that right than it is to get an ugly page right.
I was downvoted into oblivion for suggesting part of the EV solution will be to force people out of driving and into using a Waymo-like service.

Seems pretty obvious to me. I also don't drive and don't use public transportation or cabs. I walk and get stared at awkwardly for it.

I personally cannot wait for a time when a traffic light doesn't result in me almost dying because people can't follow basic rules of the road.

I just got back from a 10min walk where I was able to kick(and damage) the bumper of a SUV after I had to dodge their left hand turn when I had a walk clearance and witnessed a car blow a completely red (for 30seconds...) red light and nearly collided with a thankfully aware driver making a left hand turn during an advance.

Edit: My city is considered a dream compared to the close by moronic drivers of Toronto Ontario.
"probable cause" means the same thing as "associated with", but establishes a specific hypothesis and stresses the fact that it is yet to be verified.
Seems like if it can eventually test that the output meets the criteria then it will excel.
I downloaded a version of that openassistant model for llama.cpp and it’s at least on par with GPT-3 or a little beyond. It’s to the level of being generally useful.
No, the point is words do matter, and they mean what people think they mean. Not people from 100 years ago from a prestige university who wrote a dictionary. Languages are fluid, they change and when they do change the present reality is the way the language is spoken.
A whole-brain model of the neural entropy increase elicited by psychedelic drugs
I literally lolled.
wieghting in at 1.5TB, it should take a while for first seeds to appear.
Show HN: Low-Distraction Wikipedia Mirror
THIS IS PRIMARILY A DESKTOP EXPERIENCE. It kinda works on mobile, but it's not nearly as thought through.

https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/article/Hacker_News

This is a re-implementation of a thing I was experimenting with a few years ago earlier. I find the blue links of Wikipedia very distracting, and my attention starts skipping around when I read text that is busy like that.

Gone are inline links, footnotes, most references, many tables, all images.

I removed all the distractions on a what-if basis. I've also experimented with designing the encyclopedia around offering other forms of exploration than using inline links.

Search is implemented through grievous abuse of a PATRICIA Trie.