skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" This generalizes. Good luck funding research into a question to which people really don't want an answer to. There's some valid reasons to not want an answer - eugenics was and is a real thing, and its terrifying. For a while we seemed to skate by on a kind of "gentleman's agreement" to not look into it too much. Just like there was a kind of "gentleman's agreement" to not point out the facts of sexual dimorphism in humans, as a paean to feminism. When feminists start claiming superiority of females to males, or extremist egalitarians start claiming we're all the same, I think an argument could be made that they have invalidated the agreement. Unfortunately.
> A lot of people much prefer living in a large space with land than squeezed into a high-rise.

But it doesn't really matter what they want, because their cities have already decided that those large lots are the only thing legally available to them on the vast majority of land and that commercial building can't be built nearby enough to walk to for the most part. There is also definitely a non-zero amount of people who only prefer that style of living because they've never experienced any other kind.

Finally, I will point out that "a large space" vs "squeezed into a high rise" is a false dichotomy for two reasons.

#1 is that apartments can be large, and standalone houses or duplexes can be small.

#2 is that high rises and SFHs aren't the only kinds of homes that are possible. the fact that such an argument is so often made is evidence of how effective the propaganda has been, that most Americans don't even know there are other options they could actually have. (Apologies if you're not American, that's definitely an assumption because this is such a common opinion here)
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36777125 for a breakdown of what it would look like with an example portfolio in Valencia. The tax differs by region and is highly progressive. For a 2M portfolio in Valencia it ends up cutting 0.7% off your safe withdrawal rate after exemptions if you split it between a married couple. It makes it harder to retire early, but don't forget about additional US costs like health insurance, vehicle, etc.
> fed and grown by certain media and social channels specifically to

Ideologues are always saying that anybody who doesn't agree with them must be brainwashed. They can't imagine that could actually choose to hold a different point of view from their own. Well let me tell you it ain't necessarily the case.
I agree those are differences. I don't agree that the source of the valuation of these goods has anything to do with the differences you listed.
Nothing. Pfizer did this, albeit wasn't 50% of the enrollment.

You can see that here: https://kirschsubstack.com/p/pfizer-phase-3-clinical-trial-f...
Regarding Meta’s Release of LLaMA 2
Can I run this on my laptop.
Is there any LLM models that are neatly wrapped as an app I can run on windows ?
Comparing equal- and value-weighted portfolios
How? Both Meta and Microsoft basically invented the idea of an AI runtime with PyTorch and later the ONNX framework, both of which are completely open projects that can run open models. If them join-releasing a model rings antitrust bells for you, I think you're focused on the wrong gatekeepers.
Why is that not scalable? Mapping out two large cities for an experimental project in a few years seems scalable, expand to new cities over time with additional resources.
Or perhaps: Who is Ed?

If you typed Ed, then it's only fair that Llama2 picked one of the famous Eds to describe.
Am I missing something? Llama 2 is not Open Source.

Honestly, I'm not even sure that Open Source applies to an LLM, it seems like it would be better released under an Open database license? That assumes that copyright applies to LLM weights in the first place, which as far as I know has not been tested in a court.

But regardless, Llama 2 is not Libre, it's a proprietary license that happens to allow for commercial work. I'm not sure if the article is just conflating Open Source and source available (which again... doesn't actually seem all that applicable to model weights anyway), or if the article means something else entirely when it uses the term.
> Still, if PPP GDP increases, with all else being equal (eg. stable population) it would imply the standard of living is increasing.

That's not necessarily true, depending on how the PPP is calculated it may not reflect the cost of imported food or energy or other necessities.
AFAIK Plumbing tends to run beneath the floors in either construction model. Electrical in brick buildings is a pain as it runs in conduit behind the plaster but this doesn't compromise the viability of your structure and has a fairly long service life.

HVAC also can generally also be run under floors (and outside of the USA forced air systems are pretty unusual so you're only dealing with pipes).
Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.
About half of the excess (in the US) isn’t attributed to COVID in OECD datasets.

Pink is total; orange is COVID; blue is non-COVID attributed excess.

https://zmichaelgehlke.com/images/mortality/covid-mortality-...
> and a few will flat-out blacklist entire gTLDs known to be heavily used by spammers.

This explains poor delivery for emails from a .xyz domain I have, even hosted with an e-mail provider.
can a calculator do maths if it gets 99% of the answers wrong?
Why Meta is doing this for free?
How could it be "just dumb" when a bunch of educators came up with the policy? There must be some smart justification, even if it's wrong.
I don't care if public funds go to religious schools. I want an educated populous. I could not care less if kids are also taught religion along with philosophy, math, history, physics, science and communication. Actually, I don't even care if schools teach the same subjects. Above a base of knowledge required to achieve a depth of knowledge I would not mind if schools received public funds to start specialization earlier in a child's life if they are capable. The key to this is parents getting to choose where the money goes.

There is a first amendment case to be made about withholding education funds from religious schools. By withholding funds from schools that are deemed to be "religious" the government is creating a preference for schools that are not on the list of religions but may be every bit as ideological. The government cannot prefer one ideology or religion over another. It is required to be agnostic.
They were not messing around with the analog wizardry back in the day!

Before even the first microcontroller they were doing this!
"What I got right...Using capitalization for the public/private distinction in functions, methods, variables, and fields"

I disagree with this strongly. Due to this when you need to change one of these things to the opposite it involves changing every use site as well. This has far reaching implications for refactoring, wrapping external code when you really do need to expose its guts, etc. Any time you need to do this in a non-manual fashion you're required to parse all of the code exactly perfectly (ASTs and such). Even go itself has not figured out how to do this, rf is still experimental and not complete: https://pkg.go.dev/rsc.io/rf.

Example use case: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/46792

I much prefer the non-viral public/private attributes other languages use.
Example:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

#define strlcpy(dst, src, size) ((size_t) snprintf(dst, size, "%s", src))

size_t (strlcpy)(char *dst, const char *src, size_t size)
{
return strlcpy(dst, src, size);
}

int main(void)
{
char littlebuf[8];
strlcpy(littlebuf, "Supercalifragilisticexpealidocious", sizeof littlebuf);
return 0;
}

strlcpy.c: In function ‘main’:
strlcpy.c:4:63: warning: ‘%s’ directive output truncated writing 34 bytes into a region of size 8 [-Wformat-truncation=]
#define strlcpy(dst, src, size) ((size_t) snprintf(dst, size, "%s", src))
^
strlcpy.c:14:22:
strlcpy(littlebuf, "Supercalifragilisticexpealidocious", sizeof littlebuf);
~
strlcpy.c:14:3: note: in expansion of macro ‘strlcpy’
strlcpy(littlebuf, "Supercalifragilisticexpealidocious", sizeof littlebuf);
^~~~~~~
strlcpy.c:4:34: note: ‘snprintf’ output 35 bytes into a destination of size 8
#define strlcpy(dst, src, size) ((size_t) snprintf(dst, size, "%s", src))
~^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
strlcpy.c:14:3: note: in expansion of macro ‘strlcpy’
strlcpy(littlebuf, "Supercalifragilisticexpealidocious", sizeof littlebuf);
^~~~~~~

If glibc doesn't do something in the header file such that we get similar diagnostics for its strlcpy, we can make the argument that this is detrimental to the program.
I'm not a lawyer, but why do all the other big companies filter their LLMs then?

I really think that people would use it for bad, and people would at least try to take legal action against those creating/hosting the model.

Not that they would lose, but it seems like there would be legal annoyances to deal with at the very least if they don't filter their outputs.
not really, it's not something Golang really cares a lot to say the least, to become 'mainstream', Golang actually has to embrace more use cases.

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/47788
It's definitely not showing the effect of memory fetch prediction, as the entire benchmark should fit in L1 cache.

The point of the benchmark was to show how much overhead there is for using the method. It doesn't do any memory traversal at all - it's the iterator equivalent of:

long long benchmark_for_loop(int w, int h, int bad_i, int bad_j) {
long long count = 0;
for (int i=0; i<w; i++) {
for (int j=0; j<h; j++) {
if (i == bad_i || j == bad_j) {
return INVALID;
}
count++;
}
}
return count;
}

What the zigzag benchmark shows is the overhead for the few additional operations needed to figure out if it's traversing left or right; more specifically the "if (row % 2 == 0)" test and the else clause of the following:

*i = row = local.pos / local.h;
col = local.pos % local.h;
if (row % 2 == 0) {
*j = col;
} else {
*j = local.h - col - 1;
}

The factor of 4 performance difference between the for-loop and the row iterator is all due to function call overhead for the iterator API.
All those go through JS as far as I'm aware. Emscripten bridges everything for you, but technically it goes through JS so SDL's calls also go through JS.
There is also https://www.python-mip.com/ which claims to be more efficient, but it supports fewer solvers than pulp, and I have not had opportunity to test it. Would anyone here have experience on how well their efficiency claims hold in practice?
Lol google saying they have better models in private is like that one kid that insists he has an awesome girlfriend, but 'she goes to another school, you wouldn't know her'.

I'm pretty sure if google had something much better, the board and C-suite execs would have at least ensured we saw previews of it by now...
If you look at the individualized risk for childhood vaccines and flu vaccines, there's effectively zero benefit if you live in a 1st world country, and possibly a great risk of neurological or immunological side effects.
Google's Bing? I musta missed a big news story..
And a good shorthand for that is whether the is a propaganda site with a history of carefully worded deceptions...
They're going to license it to cloud providers and make money from that. This lets them avoid all the other headaches associated with becoming a cloud services provider while still getting some income to pay for this work.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/07/18/microsoft-and-me...
Traffic light indication in Apple Maps is a good solution in many ways, and you can't miss the instruction "at the light." Meanwhile, Google Maps does have a tiny traffic light indication that barely does anything but gets the UI even messier.
Yes and:

It's wicked hard just to get reproducible results (one facet of the replication crisis). Much less the challenges you list.

Confusion and miscommunication is the norm. Rising above that takes Real Effort™.

One of my formative experiences was on a team trying to adopt the processes from the book Applying Use Cases. So simple. Like a recipe. Really, what could be more simple?

We had shared purpose. We all read the book (among others). We discussed. We all thought we were good to go.

And then the wheels fell off once real work started. Turns out we didn't agree. On anything. What is "the system"? What level of abstraction are we working at? What does this line (points at diagram) here mean?

Writing this now, experiencing PTSD flashbacks, I can confidently say I would have never succeeded as a scientist.
>It’s not just farmers. You also need drivers, clerks, mechanics, accountants, etc.

Also the regulatory apparatus which does a pretty good job of ensuring that food doesn't have dangerous chemicals or pathogens in it, and the law enforcement without which the regulatory apparatus would be toothless, and the people who maintain the communications infrastructure that the regulatory apparatus and the law enforcement rely on to be effective, and so on.
"Well-engineered systems have "noise immunity" meaning that the thresholds are well above the noise floor, making the likelihood of an error negligible."

Well-engineered systems also expect noise and compensate with error detection/correction.
They've studied it extensively already. Twin adoption studies have conclusively proven that intelligence is mostly genetic with environment playing a small role.
Nope, that's another misconception about how T&M billing works:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3421770

You're metering, but at a lower level of granularity. You don't care about squeezing the maximum customer value out of ever hour, or maximizing hours you bill but don't do work in, because you're just not tracking hours. You work at an ordinary pace. Some days you're going to give your client 9 hours worth of productivity because you're in flow; sometimes they're going to get 7. It doesn't matter.

The only really important thing about your interval is that you can't book two clients on the same staffing in the same interval. If you bill daily, you as a general rule don't book two customers on the same day (really, I wouldn't do it in the same week).
Asking someone to beta test your product is more like asking them for a favor than the other way around. Finding a sympathetic person to try out your stuff and provide intelligent, relevant feedback in a timely fashion is not that easy.
Also reading Crafting Interpreters[1] is a great intro to language implementation.

[1]https://craftinginterpreters.com
For the mathematically-minded, it is worth noting that the Asian flu had an R naught of 1.7 while Covid had an R naught of a bit more than 2.

Keeping in mind these are fat-tailed distributions. So an R naught of 2 is a estimate of a true R naught, and because using sample averages to estimate means (true R naught is a mean) is unstable (the fatter the tail, the less moments of the distribution there are), once the reported number starts getting upwards of 2, the less confidence you can have that that reported number represents the true R naught. You have know idea if the superspreaders are infecting 50 or 500 people.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we were seeing R naughts estimates at 2.5. That's shockingly high. People were right to take extreme members in the face of that kind of uncertainty.

These people enforcing their values with 20-20 hindsight when the decisions were made given limited data at the time are causing harm to our collective ability to make decisions in emergencies.
> I'd like to add that those teams could have always been playing equally-well.

Depending on how you count things, the Yankees were founded in either 1901 or 1903, while the Expos were created in the 1968 baseball expansion and started playing in 1969.

Without reseting the score for every game, there is simply no way for the Expos (now called the Washington Nationals) to ever have equality with the Yankees. (well, ok, it is possible but is just plain never going to happen).

At the end of the last (American) football season, the Green Bay Packers beat the Chicago Bears, and in doing so passed the Bears for the most all-time wins in professional (American) football, which is the first time ever that the Bears did not have the most all-time wins. The Bears are one of the founding teams, and the Packers joined the league in the second season. If the Bears and Packers both won 0 games for 4 straight years, the New York Giants would catch up with both of them. But only if they won all 16 games every year. Then again, the Giants joined the league in its 5th year. Is there any reasonable situation in which a non-first-decade team manages to catch up? No: it would take a generation of spectacularly bad performance by all the old clubs while at the same time a newer club needs to be spectacularly good the entire time!

That original analogy was so good :)
The Linux moment of LLMs?
Shoot ’em up in style: the making of Gun Trails on Playdate
This test seems to be testing the ability of it to accurately convey fine details about the world.

If that's what you're looking for it's a useful test, but if you're looking for a language model and not a general knowledge model I'm not sure it's super relevant. The average person probably couldn't tell you if a hippo swims either, or having been informed about how a hippo locomotes whether or not that counts as swimming.
You're just being overly pedantic. They hold their breath, fully submerge, control their buoyancy, and propel themselves through water. Also known as swimming.
Wouldn't that apply to epidemiologists as well?
The parent comment linked an article. In that article is an embedded video. It’s one of the first few things thiel says after thanking the interviewer.
It's gonna be really funny if we've looped all the way back to the Yahoo Directory circa 1998.

It's hard to argue against the basic idea of human curation as a necessary component. I'm envisioning something like a search engine on top of a community-curated, categorized list of sites. I'd prefer something that works like Wikipedia, rather than a service controlled by a private company.
> I don't disagree with anything here except the idea that (for most cities, at least) cheap housing creates growth. Especially after reading Alain Bertaud (who I would strongly recommend on this topic).

What would recommend as a starting point for Bertaud?

I think Rust Belt/NE US cities have a huge weather disadvantage that makes it hard for a place like Detroit to attract people back once they lose them; I don't think SF has that same problem. I see it as the difference between "affordable because of low demand" (where they're also competing with the literal middle of nowhere) and "affordable because of adequate supply". Once you jump-start the demand (with the jobs and all - another thing the Sun Belt cities and states did very deliberately) the cities in the latter situation that keep building so they stay "affordable-ish" will never be as affordable as the ones that simply aren't desirable, but they can also avoid being so fragile as modern SF. You gotta jump-start it first, but then the presence of continual new, affordable-ish housing becomes a factor that draws more business due to lower COL (like any of a number of relocation announcements from CA to TX).

(I would, though probably-controversially, claim that the biggest problem of SF in the last 20 years was not solely "didn't build enough housing" but "allowed way too much office space for the amount of residential they wanted" - I think they could've done slower residential demand growth in a more sustainable way if they'd better balanced what they wanted early on. The lack of balance meant the proceeds of the industry they did have couldn't be re-invested into other jobs and industries in the city, it was all just going to stupid high rent and property prices.)
Over the span of 3 years. To put this in perspective a typical flu year claims ~40K people each year. So Covid over this time span killed about 10X as many people as a typical flu year.

If you told people "hey, this year the flu is going to be very bad, probably killing 10 times as many people" would the average response be to close schools and many businesses for over a year? Or would the response be to limit lockdowns to vulnerable populations, rather than blanket lockdowns on most of society?
And you're absolutely right about that - But it's a great OS for devices that you don't own. Leaving aside the (frequent, ugly, and probably illegal) times that school districts require parents to purchase children chromeOS devices that get joined to the school's domain, it's a very common problem to want to have devices that are locked down according to organization policy. When you are giving a device you own to someone else to physically control, the ChromeOS Straight Jacket is a great tool.

There's a distinct problem with it being the only tool around, though.
True, and Go has a much better story in some other areas, but “…if you needed to make a highly concurrent network app you had to get into asynchronous programming that generally makes code looks shit” is inaccurate.
There's been a trend in secondary and higher education for the past ~5 years or so in favor of removing more rigorous classes (advanced math) and more objective evaluation* (standardized testing) in the name of equity.

Proponents argue that it advances equity and removes stigma. Opponents argue that equity is a bad goal and even if you thought it was a good goal, this perversely accomplishes the opposite.

You're starting to see articles like this one or this one https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/07/14/metro/cambridge-schoo... because well, the worm turns.

*While standardized testing is not truly objective it is dramatically more so than grades.
> If, on the Llama 2 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users (...)

I suggest we start doing a similar thing for FOSS projects. I.e., it's open source unless you are MegaCorp with profit > $1B, then you have to pay. Sounds fair to me, and might help FOSS to get some better funding.
"Just stop buying their products" is silly answer when those products are epitome of corporate IT offerings. Especially where people doing "the buying" are completely different than people doing the support.

On the contrary - criticism should be loud, clear and persistent. Being private company does not make you immune to criticism.
Ask HN: What are the good books on filesystems or storage?
Hi HN!

I've been nurturing an interest in storage and filesystems, but have been running into a real drought of high-quality books on the topic. On the database side of the world, we have things like Database Internals, Database Management Systems, or even DDIA. Filesystems, however, don't seem to get as much coverage.

So... yeah. If someone asked you what book to read to really grok filesystems, what would you suggest? Thanks!