skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be honest, there’s always been a tension in machine learning between the: “we won’t do it unless the theory is complete and sound” versus the “we don’t understand this but it works much better consistently so we do it” crowd.

In the 90s and even 00s, the theory first crowd was mainstream and the empirical first crowd was considered fringe. Very fringe.

Personally I appreciated it when LeCun was like: “you can’t find the solution if you only search where the lamplight is shining.” Or other early deep learning practitioners note that ML theory is usually so far disconnected from practice in terms of tightness and bounds that you might as well ignore pure theory completely.

Anyway, it wasn’t until deep learning methods really smashed benchmarks across the board did people give in to the black magic / alchemy driven approaches of empiricism based upon intuition and bias developed through long-held experience.
This tool doesn’t benchmark based on how a model actually responds to the generated prompts. Instead, it trusts GPT4 to rank prompts simply in terms of how well it imagines they will perform head-to-head. Thus, there’s no way to tell if the chosen ‘best prompt’ actually is the best, because there’s no ground truth against actual responses.

Why is this so popular, then (more popular than promptfoo, which I think is a much better tool in the same vein)? AI devs seem enamored with the idea of LLMs evaluating LLMs —everything is ‘auto-‘ this and that. They’re in for a rude awakening. The truth is, there are no shortcuts to evaluating performance in real world applications.
Cue the Canadian classic, "The Log Driver's Waltz":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upsZZ2s3xv8

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Log_Driver%27s_Waltz

* https://www.nfb.ca/film/log_drivers_waltz/
https://github.com/vusec/floatzone
Amtrak is the least subsidies mode of Transportation. It has to compete with road transport and the subsidies given to highways, roads and parking is orders of magnitude larger then what Amtrak gets.

Amtrak gets surprisingly small amount of money.
I was talking about about the problem of having to package software per distro.

Regarding audio, if you decide to target several audio stack yes indeed. I hope this get eliminated by Pipewire really soon. It's already the case as a end user (Pipewire replaces Pulseaudio, Jack and the userland part of Alsa) but I don't know if all use cases are covered yet.
If I'm not mistaken Pipewire started from the need to be able sandbox multimedia streams in Flatpak , so I guess Flatpak might be indirectly helping here :)

Regarding hardware it's the same problem for any operating system though, testing with all hardware can be tricky for a small company.
I'm not sure if this is true, at least for corporate law firms.

1. Selling the world: Kind of depends what is meant by selling the world. It is very difficult for a single law firm to provide local legal advice in many jurisdictions. A small number of law firms have global reach, but many of those operate franchise models and none of them, to my knowledge, are truly global (operating in every jurisdiction or even the large majority of jurisdictions). On the other hand, if we are talking about, for example, an English law firm providing English legal advice to clients throughout the world, then yes, that is possible.

3. Minimal labour requirements: I don't think this applies to corporate law firms. Transactional and litigation work is labour-intensive. Advisory work too, to a lesser extent. You can see that play out the last few years where the large corporate firms in New York and London are paying huge salaries to get bodies in the door, while associates were getting burned out from the insane hours demanded of them.

4. Low overhead: This specifically includes "high-priced employees" as an example and I think that would include lawyers.

7. Cash billings: In theory this should apply to law firms. In practice, in my experience, it is more complicated, with lawyers often getting paid only at the end of big deals or cases or offering contingent fees, etc.

8. Free of regulation: Definitely not true for law firms.

9. Portable or easily moveable: Also not true.
I used to live near a dump. Went over the fence as a kid and broke things. It is strangely satisfying.
Interestingly, I had the exact opposite reaction. I found the second function harder to reason about because it heavily relies on mutation and the fact that individual loop iterations commute with respect to one another. (To understand what the final value of `min_value` is, you first have to understand that `<` being transitive means that the iteration order doesn't matter)

The first function, on the other hand, has only static assignments (one name is only ever bound to a single "definition" at any one time). In terms of working memory, that means that each variable in the first function only occupies a single "slot". In the second function, the mutable `min_value` variable necessarily occupies multiple "slots", one for each point in the program where the variable could change. So you'd have to keep track of a "min_value[0] = 9999", a "min_value[1] = number (if number odd && < min_value)" and _maybe_ a "min_value[2] = min_value (if number even || > min_value)".
That would indeed be neat, no idea if that is possible safely. Blockchain technology sure looks like a good fit for the organization of such a decentralized model. The reaction of the people of hn to 'blockchain-ai', probably won't be kind though, lol.
> But what is the definition of a public good?

Whatever the populus via government decides that to be.
Didn't InstantPot just go bust for the same reason? Somebody decided to lend them too.
Free markets work for a lot of things, but they aren't the best for providing services that are needed by everyone. If there is something that everyone in the country needs, like clean water, electricity, roads, law enforcement and health care, then it's most efficient to collectively buy and provide these services. We appoint a couple of people to organise this for us. We call these people 'the government'.
> I believe the best way to make this work is by keeping the network itself in public hands and then having a competition of contributors to the network - e.g. electricity providers that add energy to the grid.

Even in that configuration, companies often have trouble fronting the money required to build a sizeable power production infrastructure. It can be seen in renewables, where investors build a lot of renewables production, but don't really care about what will happen once these renewables produce a large share of the network's power, and don't research and develop the missing pieces or the expertise to maintain.

You could argue that the public market regulator needs to better incentivize private companies to build the right thing, but at this point, the real value is the regulator's planification, not private companies buying and installing Chinese PV. So you have a capital-intensive private industry with little value-add.
You should see Audi.
It's like their design team left and never looked back.
I still don't really understand why being RHEL-compatible as opposed to CentOS Stream-compatible is so important (except in the specific case where you're running RHEL in production, e.g. on desktops, and need bug-compatible pre-production boxes).

Is the documentation for CentOS Stream that much worse? What does being RHEL-compatible get you over and above being CentOS Stream-compatible?
I've worked for an automotive company that calculates with 1 Million euros per hour. But that's for a just-in-time assembly line.
Even down to the blind faith that there was an accurate calculation performed, which ultimately justified the planet-computer.
By "perverse incentives", do you mean something like: "it appears the cryptographic research department has hit a brick wall in terms of useful advancements, so we're reducing the budget and the department head will be taking a 75% pay cut"?
is there a tool to scan the code and output the working memory metrics for a given cognitive context such as line, etc.?
I'm still left wondering whether the code is correct, in that an employee that is paid weekly does not require passing probation to get paid. Is that the correct logic, or is it the (very common) error of forgetting an extra set of parentheses when using OR?

Given that there would probably be more complexity in the real code I would create separate functions expressing the rules for each employee type.
That flies in the face of so much evidence. People don't want new flavors? Every snack food in the store is all about the new flavor. Every restaurant that opens downtown is about new recipes, new fusions and on and on.

You can get people to eat delicious things pretty easily. The fewer that eat pork the more expensive it becomes. Luring them to the cheaper, tastier alternative is an obvious ploy. Better than disappointing folks again and again with false claims of 'tastes just like pork' or whatever.
Linux (especially Ubuntu and Kubuntu) nowadays is so much more user friendly than it was 5 years ago. Before, you couldn't do anything without bringing up the terminal. As a developer, I'm a big fan of Kubuntu. I use an Apple laptop during my day job and my productivity is way lower on MacOS. I need Kubuntu's workspaces feature to quickly switch between console, browser and IDE - With MacOS workspaces, I need to keep tapping on the arrow key until I see the window I want and then I need to release the keys; by that time, I've already lost my train of thought. I need workspace switching to rely on my muscle memory to switch to any workspace with a single set of hotkeys.

MacOS has so many annoying things which drive me nuts; like it doesn't show the full path in finder (and can't easily manipulate it), deleting files feels like a hassle. I hate that screenshots go to my Desktop and I can't quickly tell it where to go. The experience overall feels restrictive, obscures what's really going on and prioritizes the wrong things. I already tweaked my settings to fix some of these things but it's still not as good as Kubuntu... The main positive thing I have to say about MacOS is it's better than Windows.
Discussed recently, with lots of comments¹.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36643278
Why not run the "baseload" yourself and then top up using taxis? If usage varies between 15 and 30 drivers at and one moment, and 10 of those are for medical appointments then you run your own fleet of 10-20 drivers and supplement with taxis when demand gets high.
Then if the taxi company goes bust you've got your essentials covered.
There is a paper on arxiv saying that GPT4 correlation with human evaluators on a variety of tasks with strongly positive. I am also uncomfortable with it, but using GPT4 as a grader is not as bad as you think.
I wouldn’t be so certain. Oracle has been doing this for years with Oracle Linux.
Acerage Burned Plummets This Summer
It feels like their calculation missed 2 crucial confounders, stack depth and type tracking.

1) Stack depth. In their refactored example if I truly want to understand the code I need to now store everything I was thinking about in the current function and jump to their new `is_paid_today` function, then into each of the 3 dependent functions, I'd say as finger in the air type estimates each stack frame should add 2 * depth and then some multiplier for breadth or something. This is why I prefer big functions like the initial state read from top to bottom with no indirection, abstraction or surprises where reasonable. (curly braces wouldn't go amiss to give visual indicators of scope...) This is completely counter to 'clean code' dogma but clean code dogma is... bad.

2) Type tracking. To reignite this holy war if I have to track the type information mentally then I'd say every parameter and variable has an additional +1 working memory overhead. What is employee, what is employee_database, what is `is_end_of_month` and where on earth is it coming from? Try as I might I just cannot understand people who onboard to big codebases without type hints at least, y'all are a different breed, you should work as like super-rememberers.
Nonetheless, ZFS definitely gets "angsty" under certain workloads, owing to it being a garbage-collected file system. It's the wrong choice for workloads such as databases which expect the filesystem to essentially "pass through" the performance characteristics of the underlying block device.
> So why are AMD, Intel, and Nvidia shipping improperly designed DLLs as part of their drivers?

It's part of their "value add" I guess. Nvidia drivers will literally patch video games behind the scenes. It's so insane I can't believe it even works.
Outside?

Sorry, couldn't resist!
Not sure what you are saying here. Perhaps an analogy helps.

Psychology is a science. You can make falsifiable statements about the human brain. You will need experiments to build and test theories. It's the same with deep learning.

With computer "science" (and math) it's not the same. You can reason completely about your subjects, i.e. you can determine if something will or will not work just by reasoning, no experiments needed.

For more information on the differences between math and science I recommend reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#Relationship...
Yeah, that's one of Yudkowsky's fears.

I'm not going to take his fears as gospel, as he's spent so long focussing on his fear there's a danger of availability heuristic/attention biases having him take the worst case for everything.

I'm still going to promote caution, as the more potent a tech the greater the downside of being wrong, but it currently looks like we can cooperate with each other in this IRL iterated prisoner's dilemma.
Loads of commentary on the original source from a day or so ago¹.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36659859
If America used metric paper, all these jokes could never have existed. The unexpected benefits of the traditional system.

PC_LOAD_A4 just isn't confusing enough.

LOAD_A4_PAPER or INSERT_A4_PAPER etc also fit within the limited length of the message.
It's really cool, I love it!

If it sticks, maybe it could even be adopted as a variant in Lichess?
Everything you need to know about generating Rails migrations
strange to me that people spend $1000+ on a phone when you can get another one that does 95% the same for $200-300.

is that 5% really worth an extra $800+...

the only big difference is if you care about resale value. trying to sell a used android/windows vs a used apple product is definitely an eye-opening experience.
Sure. I'll check. I'm not sure how long a discussion like this can go on HN.

And understand, in the last post, those are just some examples. Like recently, 'gay' is no longer the hot topic it was 10 years ago, now Transphobia has taken its place to fire up the religious base. So not sure the bible quotes apply. (It can get confusing, there are legit genetic disorders why victimize them?, and if a woman is infertile, is she still a woman? The religious split hairs in each case and get backed into a corner)

Not to open a whole new line, but the intersection of Religion and Technology(not science) is maybe problem. Like Blood Transfusions, some sects say the bible doesn't allow them. Or invitro fertilization is not allowed. The bible doesn't really have specific opinions on these new things, they are just shoe-horned in.

Don't know. Every Christian Sect has some interpretation.
Really, on both sides here, my side too, the arguments are old. Really hundreds of years old, with many notable names.

I do say and mean this, if Religion helped you, then good, if it is something that helps you get through the day and cope with the world, then good. I'm all for people finding some solace. Just keep it private. It's only a problem when someone has a meaningful experience, then gets fired up to make everyone else see it too.
There's occasionally a weird undercurrent on this site which flirts with alt-right conspiracy theories. Partly because Hacker News attracts the kind of person who wants to show off how intelligent he* is, and those people easily fall prey to this kind of nonsense.

(I try to remind myself that I'm not immune to many of the same thought traps, though I'm unlikely to ever go alt right. As I age, I move ever more leftwards.)

* Usually.
XMPlay is an audio player for Windows, supporting many different formats
Hey HN, I recently put together a handy reference for generating migrations in my Ruby on Rails apps, and I thought i'd share it here in case anyone finds it useful.

Let me know what you think!
According to Hacker News Evernote is dead since a long time ago. I use it daily and there is no other app that can fully substitute it. I guess in ten years I'll still be using it.
I’m not sure about copyright infringed media but they are scanning for CSAM now.

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-communication-safety-nude-...
> one bad HTTP GET from becoming a botnet node or ransomware victim

Just like in Windows 10 and 11.
A cynic would say Congress's actions, loading the USPS with costs while denying it control over prices, is so that people ask "Why is a government alternative better?"
theres little reason to transcode a bluray. an 8TB disk can hold 200+ 1:1 bluray images. it costs ~$100ish on the low end for a usb drive (i.e. very minor price relative to cost of buying all the discs originally). therefore its just an issue of time. If one can decrypt 1 a day (say overnight to not waste ones time babysitting it) thats a few hundred a year (not a small collection imo). and if one can do more (say kick off one before going to work, kick off one when come home before eating dinner + the one overnight) one has now passed 1K discs a year (+a few hundred in hard drive storage needs)
If it wasn't obvious before its becoming more and more obvious the last 2 years.
My personal server is a 9900K with 64GB ram and normally around 35 various docker containers running on it. It's very rare to see it ever above 10% CPU utilization.

For example, I host between 5-10 minecraft servers for my kids, but they sleep while the kids aren't playing on them and only spool up when a link is requested.

A properly configured Linux box would barely need a trickle of energy when nothing is demanding its resources, so I'd guess that the estimates are likely a bit on the high side.
I do not know what “same reason” means here.

Instant Brands went bankrupt because it could not pay its debts in a timely manner, so lenders decided to take the collateral.

It is possible lenders did not do sufficient due diligence, or maybe they got unlucky, but they did not lend Instant Brands money specifically so Instant Brands’ owners could pay themselves (maybe they did if there was corruption in this case, but it is not the norm otherwise why would anyone lend to anyone?).

And of course, Instant Brands’ owners will lose equity and credibility in the bankruptcy, so it is not like any dividends made possible due to the financing were “free money”.
For specific product lines, yes. There's a list of those parts DoD keeps. Anything off that list we have to get either the vendor's guarantee to keep making them or the supplier's attestation that they have N of them on hand.

In terms of stability, as others have pointed out all that means is "the vendor won't change it and will keep providing it"
Some stats about that for Linux 6.4:

https://lwn.net/Articles/936113/
> Every listener has 2 ears. Using headphones and 2 tracks (stereo) you can control precisely what sound is heard by each ear. You can replicate anything a human can hear, which includes direction in all 3 dimensions of space.

This is simply not true
We need a way to filter out the low utility or information sites that are only there for SEO, marketing or even misinformation. And we need to do so without censoring. This is a wicked problem[0] to solve, but one worth tackling explicitly as a society. Otherwise, the first mover gets to decide what deserves censorship and gets to control public speech.

My modest proposal: an internet constitution or bill of rights that solidify the right to free speech online as well as a court system to enforce and disambiguate the rules. Following this you have laws against fake reviews (basically fraud), and allow court cases when harm is caused by knowingly false information. Then, for the blogspam and AI generated stuff, you let jurisprudence and representative democracy decide how to tackle this.

What about all the cost of this? Honestly, it might be worth it considering the importance of the internet today.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
A neat feature would be able to switch between autoranking and manual ranking.
You can say the same with any business. No party is truly ever happy in business. Everyone wants more. Everyone has greed.

But people are still ordering. Drivers are still driving. Restaurants are still on the apps.

So clearly, some people still find value in all of this.
Yup. I use d to search Onelook Dictionary.
Exactly! Thanks for the kind words
None of the competitors offer a similar service to USPS.

Among other core competencies, USPS has nationwide daily coverage of the entire United States and centuries(?) of experience interoperating the the respective mail services of every country in the world and then some.

Amazon wont even take MY package one town over.
GPT-4's Details Leak: Breaking Down the Key Findings
I would be much more sympathetic to this stance if you weren’t implicitly endorsing the rights of companies like Meta/Alphabet/OpenAI to profit from the disruption of copyright law. If we’re talking ordinary people being able to breach copyright, then yeah seems potentially interesting. But let’s remember that these companies aren’t acting altruistically. They’re not giving away Silverman’s work - they’re repackaging it for their own profit. That’s not fair to the artist and in fact does not help the children.
I was working for a small IT company in 1999 when Office Space came out, and remember vividly when that scene came on. We were so hyped up! Printers were our nemesis, and this really captured the emotions we all had around them.
Ask HN: Existing tools to automate permission giving process to new employees?
Hi, any tools your company uses or know of, which can automate the permission( GitHub, jira etc) giving process?
My company uses a manual system to send mails to manager and then IT support approves it manually.
If you know of such tools, is it homegrown or third party tools?
In parallel, there is a quite different point of view and after the last two dramas (Safe Harbor, Privacy Shield), the outcome is quite predictable in my opinion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36677578

Edit: of course for the next 1-3 years, compliance departments in the EU can declare themselves not guilty and business will continue as usual.
Pixel 6 Pro does not charge in hot weather
"there is no evidence"

As quoted above, "Ithaka's total revenue was $105 million in 2019, most of it ($79 million) from JSTOR service fees". All those $79 million and more JSTOR has stolen from the authors. Although JSTOR should have been dissolved long before this for effectively killing Aaron Swartz. But yes, there is no justice in this world. I suppose that's my main contention, why pretend anymore, we live in a society, yada yada.
> the way we are supposed to tie the math to physical observations

Again, that's a matter of interpretation. The different quantum interpretations say different things here.

> No, you can't.

Yes, you can. Look up Quantum Darwinism.

PS. throwing "nuh uhs" back to a professional in the field is not appropriate. Get your respect in order.
The team at PyChess.org would probably be happy for you to host your variant there.

They are a lichess fork focused on variants.
SWIFT, which is a Belgian co-op.

I'm actually kind of surprised that this rhetoric hasn't been picked up by the Fox News crowd yet. "A group of Belgian communists holds the key to all international banking transactions made by Americans! Where is my liberty"