skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In all of these posts there is a strong 'what were they thinking' reaction. - remember hindsight. At the time, how were they supposed to know, by looking into their crystal ball? It was a fast, dynamically changing situation, everyone was getting sick, who a the time could say 'yeah, people are dying, but YOLO, no need to sanitize your hands.'
Lot of freaking armchair quarterbacks in the 'lets criticize the medical community' co-hort.
I'm a huge believer in your body, your choice.

I'm also a huge believer in "Your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins."
This says nothing about her stated reasons for not wanting treatment. Is it anti-vax, is it a dislike of medicine, (paranoid) disbelief of the diagnosis, religiously motivated, or something else?

I am glad she is caught, but wondering why this happened at all.
I was reading Weaving the Web, the story of Tim Berners Lee and the creation of the web, there's a section on misunderstanding about links. In 1999. Wish this were still not a misunderstanding today.

Myth Two: "Making a link to an external document makes the first document more valuable, and therefore is something that should be paid for." It is true that a document is made more valuable by links to other relevant, high-quality documents, but this doesn't mean anything is owed to the people who created those documents. If anything, they should be glad that more people are being referred to them. If someone at a meeting recommends me as a good contact, does that person expect me to pay him for making reference to me? Hardly.
ZX-Spectrum clone (8 bit, 4 Mhz CPU) running Art Studio (an early Paint) loaded from floppy drive: https://imgur.com/a/VcaBnmP
A modern day Typhoid Mary! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon
> "Microsoft publicly touts that if you run their software on Azure versus other vendors like AWS and GCP, it's five times cheaper or it's more expensive to run on us, basically because of the tax customers have to pay to Microsoft," Zavery told us.

And how much does it cost to run BigQuery on Google Cloud vs. Microsoft Azure, Mr. Zavery?
Funny, how the knowledge about cathedral building was rather well preserved. After all, all cathedrals still standing have a cadrebof employed masons and other artisans to maintain and renovate them. The actual building is dofferent, I assume an lot of that will be rediscovered during the Notre Dam restauration.
Reminds me of (Typhoid) Mary Mallon [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon
Everyone says "users need to pay" but there's a second alternative that is, imo, much better: technical folk run servers for their friends and families.

This is how the fediverse works, and it's _vastly_ better than any subscription service (not least because it means that anyone, regardless of financial situation, can find a server to be a part of.)

There's a fedi version of Reddit (lemmy) but it seems to have been a bit of a half-cooked design, rather than something that could truly take over for Reddit anytime soon.
In the data sense isn't bias literally just the result of limited/narrow data? So isn't the problem not in how you train models but simply the fact that it's impossible/exceeding difficult to provide omnipotent and universal data?
I thought that it wasn't possible for pathogens to develop resistance to alcohol based sanitizers, but apparently I was wrong.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aar6115

Not the same phenomena as antibiotic resistance, which is a bigger problem, but apparently this is a thing.
hadoop comes to mind.
Ask HN: Best way to get started on a technical paper for a naive idea
I'm not too active on technology forums. I think that Hacker News and Stack Exchange are my only places where I am somewhat active.

As a result, it is quite challenging to write up and present a naive idea to find out if it has any meat. In general, expressing an idea without being clear on the technical history or misusing a technical term is an automatic disqualification of the idea independent of the value of the idea.

I am curious. Is there a recommended approach that more successful folks take when you have a potential solution to a well-known problem that the experts believe cannot be solved by a non-expert.

In my case, I've been thinking a lot of about alternatives to using a private key as the basis of identify for decentralized currencies. I have come up with an approach (that is most likely flawed and may not have any meat) for a decentralized identity service that is not based on private keys (in essence: if the private key is lost, a new one can be used in its place).

What would be the recommended approach for finding mentors, presenting the early draft, and ideally, receiving constructive feedback that will help me understand how to place the approach that I came up with within the context of current efforts.
Jobs report for May 2023: 339,000 jobs added despite high inflation
I saw someone driving alone in their car wearing a mask two days ago. I live in Kansas.
They buy the downside options every day.
Reddit already has an ad-free subscription model.

The problem is that their app is awful. Why would a power user pay Reddit to remove ads when Apollo can remove ads and provide a user experience that doesn't make you want to rip off your own fingernails?
Record level of US support for nuclear energy continues
I would say that 20 trials with a friend is enough to show that changing strategy is superior.
That sounds like what would be called a pipeline today.
These official figures don't account for transients and illegal aliens.
I gave it this prompt, which I didn't spend any time refining, and it came up with a world that does a pretty good job of matching it.

> A world made of very strong rock that has lots of rain. The rain contains acid, which wears the rock down. There is lots of soil, but it s in very thin layers because the world is relatively new.

https://skybox.blockadelabs.com/215b2684ceac6daac1958d020e24...
I see this response every time somebody criticizes reddit, and I think it matters little. Even when you get off the defaults, many of the niche interests are segmented into multiple subreddits due to infighting and conflicts. And beyond that, even if you find a peaceful sub, the whole site is overflowing in bot-driven karma farming that reposts the same things every few months, and of course, my least favorite: armchair experts. I participated in many subreddits on subjects that I'm a professional in and saw repeatedly how often speaking confidently was heralded more than speaking factually.
Netflix Shareholders Vote to Reject Executive Pay Packages
I know the tool companies are experimenting with using "laptop-style" batteries as opposed to the standard round cells: https://toolguyd.com/dewalt-powerstack-battery-comparison/

Of course the dream would be something where you could basically pour "molten battery" into whatever shape you wanted, and then use it - removing all the wasted space.
"Did you say this is using an LLM? SHIP IT!!" is my guess.
These are the kinds of issues I've been working on solving with my code libraries. My JPEG decoder only needs about 22K of RAM and my e-ink code can work incrementally to write the image in strips.

https://github.com/bitbank2/JPEGDEC

https://github.com/bitbank2/OneBitDisplay

Let me know if I can help...
it's not, it's more efficient and thus cheaper
It looks like the final image is rendered as a cubemap in the shader. Cubes are technically 3D.
It is called "skybox" AI, a reference to sky boxes from video games.
https://archive.ph/tfUTz
Roman Roads
So sort of, but let's not look at the past too wistfully. I also remember when moderately long text had to be split across files (even multiple floppies if you were writing a book). I remember having to choose what languages my OS installation was going to be able to display. Farther back I remember not having the spare cash for the expansion card necessary to have lower case letters and typing in program listings out of books because that's how some software was distributed (Apple II). Our current generation of PCs is probably within a factor of two of the minimum spec necessary for robust machine translation and natural language interfaces. I enjoy using the old hardware but it really doesn't do most of the jobs we have now.
There is a classic thereom from computational learning theory that says, if all hypotheses are equally likely, then no generalization can happen. Ie bias is necessary for learning.

To respond to some sibling comments: Yup, this is prejudice. I'll try to analogize the thereom with an example: Without prejudice, you can't recognize a leaf in a figure, because alternate hypotheses (there are an arbitrary number of things in this universe that look like leaves but in fact are not) are equally likely.

My advisor one told me that machine learning is the study of biases.

"Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room." - William Hazlitt
Pointing sides is useless and perpetuating a problem, there is no longer any paragons of objective truth in MSM.
This is list of ways that Pope Francis behaved differently from how a narrow section of catholics would prefer for him to act. Sucks that catholicism seems to be too difficult for people to swallow. There is always a temptation to dumb the message down, but that should be resisted.
We do. And a resilient free society creates agents that it cannot police so that it can achieve its aims. No-ships are necessary for the Secher Nbiw.
Since you’ve adopted the practice, do you notice yourself getting sick less?

I don’t use sanitizer especially often, but I’ve definitely noticed a general, society-wide uptick in being cognizant of germs and cleanliness. I don’t have any figures to back it up, though I’d be curious to see them if they exist, but I definitely notice myself getting sick (cold or flu) _way_ less often, in fact, I think it’s just been once since the pandemic began. Maybe I’m just being optimistic, but I think a lot of the habits we picked up during Covid will serve us positively in the future as well.
My prompt was simpler and the results are pretty cool. It didn't get "sky as the ground", though.

https://skybox.blockadelabs.com/c0e1e883df8d91a50f8e30180d73...
Once I learned how simple monads really are I found them a lot less scary, and something I could apply wherever I'm programming, not just in Haskell or another big-brain programming language. And no, not in the "a monad is just a monoid in a category of endofunctors, what's the big deal?" sense.

Monads are a design pattern. Period. You have an object, it has at least two methods: return and bind. Using these two methods together must produce results that follow the monadic laws. Okay, now go nuts with that, because you have a generalized way to sequence operations expressed as combinators with controlled "side effects". The monad encapsulates both the value transformations and the side effects. It's a neat pattern, but just another tool in the programmer's toolkit. Big brain come up with it, but no need big brain to use it. Now grug brain use monad too, trap complexity demon in crystal of monadic type.

I think the more we lose our fear of these cool concepts and treat them like ordinary programmers' tools, the more we might see Haskell used for grug brain stuff.

But really, Rust have enough big brain concepts for everyday use, close enough to Haskell without garbage collector complexity demon. Now where grug put programming socks?
What I want is to write less code. I'd like automated analysis help with finding better more concise ways to render the logic. More code != better.
You're not wrong but... If you can get a 400:8 (50:1) returns, then betting on 176 recessions and winning 8 puts you well ahead of other traders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym
Fortunately or not, history has shown time and time again that Parkinson's law still holds - work will always fill the allotted time. Pretty much the only way to decrease it is to mandate fewer working hours, like is starting to be done in Europe, for example.
Taleb explained both phenomena and many others in "Antifragility" and "Skin in the game". Worth reading.
Oh that's daily around here still. Absolutely baffling to me, I could handle wearing a mask when I needed to but you bet your ass I was removing it as soon as I got outside because it's really quite unpleasant.

I've got a neighbor who wears a mask to move his trash can the 20 feet from the inside of his garage to the pavement just outside. He also wears the mask when driving alone in his car.

COVID definitely broke some brains.
For a while, and maybe still now, you could buy Motorola phones on Amazon for a lower price, but with the lock-screen ads that the Kindle Fire range uses. No thank you!
It's not obviously true that the weight and bulk of the batteries necessarily means that production will be localized. After all, the input materials are just as heavy and bulky if not more so before refinement.

And many of those inputs are mined from only a handful of concentrated places on Earth, and so need to be shipped long distances regardless in order to disperse to where humans actually live and demand the end products.

A better argument for localization might be that the dangerous and explosive nature of battery cells makes shipping the finished product longer distances more risky (and therefore more costly) than shipping the non volatile inputs long distances. So the extra cost of shipping cells drives localization of production.
The unsterilized masses, they cannot make the judgement call.
I still use them (and masks). I haven't had a cold, the flu or any of the usual seasonal sicknesses in 3 years, and this spring my pollen allergy was nowhere to be seen. My quality of life is significantly better ever since I started using them. Washing my hands for 30 seconds at least also helps.
Identifying Causal Mechansims in Alpaca and Other LLMs
I read this as "untreated terabyte" and was horribly confused for a moment.
There are enough phone projects, and they are hard. I much rather have a laptop project and that's what they are working on.
Well written article, but this is HN so naturally I have a, "Why don't you just..." You know your situation better than anyone else, so take it with a grain of salt.

But, why don't you just not use a general-purpose language? No really. Hear me out.

It seems the main problem is the proverbial impedance mismatch between SQL and say, Perl or Python or whatever. Ok. One way to remove that mismatch is to remove the boundary altogether. Remove the general-purpose language and really embrace the "just use SQL" path. That may have drawbacks and we can talk about those or we could not, but one thing it certainly would do is remove the problem of the impedance mismatch.
another aside: the nsfw subreddits that I enjoyed have all been recently banned
It is her body and her choice until it infringes on other people's bodies and choices.

The people she's exposing to TB have no way to choose to avoid her. She's forcing a dangerous illness on them without their knowledge or consent.

She was given a choice to stay at home and she decided to go out and endanger others instead.
... is not marketed for ...
Training new talent requires a lot of time and resources, and, of course, some "old" talent with those time and resources on hands, except if you plan to outsource the training part.
> the trope is that you get an even bigger job after you get fired for losing a huge amount of money in an "unforeseen event".

Levine talks about this in Money Stuff in the sense of 'oh, they trusted you to lose a quadrillion dollars? You must be good'.
A classic backronym.
Yeah, I agree! I think it really shows what the priorities of the people in power are. It's not about making the world a better place for the masses, since clearly they're not doing that. It's about maintaining power structures and a status quo that concentrates wealth (and thus power, and thus more wealth, and thus more power) in the hands of a few.
> Because they were deceived by Apple's quality promises?

The point being, with Kaspersky as security experts, it really does call into question their judgement and expertise.
Then we will soon see what we really are.
If you want to work less you can do that. Many professional writers aren't regular W-2 employees but rather independent contractors paid on a piecework basis. They can use any writing tools, including ChatGPT, and can work as few hours as they like. Of course, prices will continue to fall for low-effort writing that doesn't involve any unique insight or original research. That was already happening with offshore outsourcing before ChatGPT was released.
> SQL is bad, for two reasons:

> 1. The syntax is bad.

In this context, "bad" means "hard for a computer to parse." And this statement is 100% true.

Though from a human perspective, the syntax is relatively fluent.

Which would would you (as a human) prefer for writing raw ad-hoc queries? SQL or MongoDB? For me, it's no contest the former.

> 2. Type checking is absent.

?

PostgreSQL complains at me if my types are wrong.

E.g. if I try to sum two strings.
Well, we have to work with what we have :-) It would be highly unlikely that something new violates the established trends over thousands of years.

It's not surprising that the human race has survived for this long - we always find ways to adapt, no matter what challenges history throws at us. This is what distinguishes us (and I suspect will always do) from the machines.
The problem with simulation is that it might produce artifacts that a user might exploit ("hey, this is cool!") and then finds out that it only exists in the simulation, not in the real world.
Amazon acquired Ring in 2018, the fine is for bad internal controls before 2018.
That's a classic false dilemma. While the US government is not perfect by far and has MANY flaws, the Russian government is an entirely different level of corrupt.
Allemansrätten is the name IKEA gave to its sauce/gravy mix, perhaps to bring awareness?. https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/allemansraetten-mix-for-cream-s...
It's cool, but I think if it accepts image prompts it would be 1000x more useful.

In other words, I'd like to turn my existing images into 3D skyboxes.
I gave up after 7 minutes.
I agree that we should be better off in a world where people paid for things with money and not their privacy. But paying with privacy happens even for paid-for products, e.g. "smart TVs" and phones, Windows, internet connections, driving your car in public, digital cable.

First they said no one had to pay, and they subjected us to ads... Then, they said, well, you'll have to pay, if you don't want to see our increasingly annoying ads... Then, they got our money. Then, they decided to subject us to ads, again...
The rebuilding is apparently going well, but this is hiding the fact that nobody seems to be doing any inquiry about why the fire wasn't stopped in time.

As far as we know, the fire was an accident (not foul play) -- but an extremely preventable one. There were works in progress on the roof of the cathedral, so people were coming and going, some of them possibly smoking, electrical devices were being used, etc.

And to monitor all this activity, there was only one guy, who had started on the job a couple of weeks earlier, who had received little to no training, and who didn't even know where the alarm was.

The point was to "save on costs", that is, in order to save maybe 1,300 euros / month over three months, the people in charge caused 1 billion euros of damage and lost irreparable historical artefacts.

There is a whole administrative department in France, whose sole responsibility is to make sure this kind of catastrophe never happens. At the very least, people should have been fired, from the site manager to the culture minister. Yet nobody's being investigated, let alone prosecuted or punished. Incredible.
I’ve been there many times too.

My conclusion in former years was that I had won, as I’d been right. But my conclusion now is that the other employee won, as they get to deliver the software, increase their “power” as they now know about one more piece of software or feature (on account of having written it). The overrun will be forgotten, but “this person delivered the feature” will be remembered.
> Yud is a doomsday cult leader (https://archive.is/YTqlI) who has publicly advocated using mass murder in the form of nuclear weapons to forestall his predicted apocalypse. Although they call themselves "rationalists"

Have you even read the article?
Not sure what the Bay Area has to do with this. I never considered doing that kind of thing but I am still masking when around other people. I'm currently traveling and still see plenty of others doing the same.
What do you mean? India? Most people here are US based.
i think you're extrapolating a bit too much from that tweet from more than 3 years ago considering they resumed buying them ~6 months later.

https://twitter.com/Zerodium/status/1326498688621948928

now did they have too many? maybe. but maybe also because they were expecting apple to announce a new ios at the wwdc that was happening in june.. or maybe lots of 0-day exploiters suddenly wanted to dump their exploits knowing that apple was probably going to be patching them soon. oddly enough that tweet about resuming payment coincided with the release timeline of ios 14.

most of this is irrelevant though because we lack any information. what is, "too many"? 10? 100? 1000? it could be that just like any other middleman they sometimes need to sit on "inventory" and they can't just buy up that many at one time in case apple fixes them all in an update.
A lot of the responses are inverting my point by assuming I don't like modern art or that I'm making a judgement on its value. What I'm pointing out is the condescending narrow-mindedness of the comment I was responding to. The commenter is seemingly unable to imagine that others could honestly not like it and is speculating instead that a psychological character flaw is their reason for not liking it.
>Human-caused climate change means the once-bountiful snowpack that feeds the river has dwindled.

Really? "human caused"? Let me remind the author (if he reads these comments) the Earth's climate it changing all the time. Also the whole topic is a magnet for disinformation by ruthless interest groups (nation states trying to protect themselves and harm their enemies, political organisations, financial lobbies). So sorry, but I'll not believe any research in the field that isn't personally verifiable (all data and code open) also even without all the meddling interest groups do climate research/simulation is hard. Wake me up when we have some concrete results we can predict (for example drought/flood patterns), then I'll consider it more seriously.

For anyone quick to label me an" anthropomorphic climate change denier" let me say I don't deny greenhouse gases cause warming, but there are two important unknowns. First how much of current climate change is caused by anthropogenic co2/methane and how much is caused by natural processes? What positive and negative feedback loops are at play planet wide? We are very far from being able to answer it with any certainty.

So, an argument someone could make, until we know the impact for sure isn't it prudent to limit our greenhouse gases emissions just in case? To which I say yes, it is. And I'm all for it (nuclear and hydro power, electrification etc), but we can't shoot ourselves in the foot to scratch an itch. Yes, we should endeavour to limit greenhouse gas emissions, but when other countries (China) are emitting more and more are we to voluntarily deindustrialise ourselves in the name of being green? No way.
Why a hotspot instead of a USB 4g modem? Concerned about 4g hardware/driver vulns but not WiFi hardware/driver vulns?

Edit: yes, I guess you're concerned about sim-resident malware exploiting the modem, exploiting the rest of the machine via USB.

Also, if you're that paranoid, you should probably be running something seL4-based to better compartmentalize compromises.
I'd hope it would be harder than that, but... probably not much.