skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As one of the people whose credit card number was stolen from Netcom, I would strongly object to this. I'm not here to speak poorly of the dead, but I'm definitely here to judge those who think too highly of him.
Writing detailed reports from data
Chatbots
Education tools that remove the human element
Workday is not Salesforce. The rest, yes.
There is 'drive down to specified depth', 'drive down until you meet a particular layer' and 'drive down until you have a specified resistance'. All of this depends on the various strata underneath where you want to make your construction. In old days in 'bad ground' (such as pretty much all of NL that doesn't have sand immediately beneath it) those pilings would be made of wood, and if kept properly wet they can last a very long time (100's of years). But if the water table isn't stable they can rot out pretty quickly.
Sorry, no sunlight currently in half the world.

No internet in rural India.

No rainfall in many places in the world.

No aging in HeLa present all over the world.

And it appears the last one is only present in your original comment, eh? Tragic, mate, though a valiant and hence amusing attempt.
He used the CEO’s voice to access AN account, I don’t think it was the CEO’s specifically. But just an account, verified by the CEO’s voice, to his.
He doesn't mention my pet peeve: the use of "So" to start a story or a talk, or to start every (spoken) paragraph.

Other than that, the article was groovy, man. And get off my lawn.
Steel, concrete, wood. If steel they can use hollow tubes and then later fill them with concrete as well, and they can be driven in using vibration.
I was taught to aggressively look for and cut irrelevant facts. Back in the day newspapers and other printed material had space limitations. If your story didn't fit in the allotted column inches, the copy desk would cut it.

I also worked on a copy desk in college. Ideally a story has the most important information up front, in the inverted pyramid style, so that if an editor has to cut it for space, they can just cut from the bottom and not lose the main story. Given the very limited time the copy desk has to look at all the stories before deadline, writers than failed to lead with the key facts would know very quickly that they needed to work on their stories more.
When I look up "axe to grind" I see this definition:

have a private reason for doing or being involved in something.

I have never met Professor Boaler, nor do I have any private/hidden agendas. Do you simply mean "someone who disagrees with" when you say "axe to grind"? If so, it's somewhat of a meaningless epithet. If you mean the normal definition, I'd be curious what evidence you have for that (related to Professor Conrad, or me).
Terrible news, especially at that age. I remember reading "The Art of Deception" in college.

Just out of curiosity, does anyone have anything else corroborating this? Everywhere seems to be sharing the same dignitymemorial.com link.
Ultimately, Marx and Lenin boil down to: "look at the material conditions of society (the actual territory) instead of believing ideology (the map)"

There's nothing unreasonable about that. In fact, it is an extremely rational viewpoint, and pretty bluntly obvious. That's why Marxism-Leninism (aka "scientific socialism") is "materialistic"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
Yeah this is exactly what I’m describing

His parents are “elite” and he’s following in their footsteps - hence the “legacy.”

It’s one of the few generational advantages that I’m generally ok with ethically (passing down a trade), so long as it’s not abused.

In this case that advantage seems to be being used for the greater good which is great!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoomvWXunRc
This is never going to happen given the need to SOTA chase. Need because reviewers care a lot about this (rather, they are looking for any reason to reject and lack of SOTA is a common reason). Fwiw, the checkpoints I release with my works include a substantial about of information, including the random seed and rng_state. My current project tracks a lot more. The reason I do this is both selfish as well as for promoting good science though, because it is not uncommon to forget what arguments or parameters you had in a particular run and the checkpoint serves as a great place to store that information, ensuring it is always tied to the model and can never be lost.

You could also use the deterministic mode in pytorch to create a standard. But I actually don't believe that we should do this. The solution space is quite large and it would be unsurprising that certain seeds make certain models perform really well while it causes others to fail. Ironically a standardization of seeds can increase the noise in our ability to evaluate! Instead I think we should evaluate multiple times and place some standard error (variance) on the results. This depends on the metric of course, but especially metrics that take subsets (such as FID or other sampling based measurements) should have these. Unfortunately, it is not standard to report these and doing so can also result in reviewer critique. It can also be computationally expensive (especially if we're talking about training parameters) so I wouldn't require this but it is definitely helpful. Everyone reports the best result, just like they tend to show off the best samples. I don't think there is inherently a problem showing off the best samples because in practice we would select these, but I think it is problematic that reviewers make substantial evaluations based on these as it is highly biased.

Noise is inherent to ML, and rather than getting rid of it, I'd rather we embrace it. It is good to know how stable your network is to random seeds. It is good to know how good it can get. It is good to have metrics. But all these evaluations are guides, not measures. Evaluation is fucking hard, and there's no way around this. Getting lazy in evaluation just results in reward hacking/Goodhart's Law. The irony is that the laziness is built on the over-reliance of metrics, in an attempt to create meritocratic and less subjective evaluations, but this ends up actually introducing more noise than if we had just used metrics as a guide. There is no absolute metric, all metrics have biases and limitations, and metrics are not always perfectly aligned with our goals.

We should be clear that starting seed isn't related to what I'm talking about in the previous comment. The previous comment was exclusively about sampling and not training.
> They don't know this?

Of course they do, but people pay crazy money for this and it plays the important role in Google's market valuation, so it's in Google's best interests to continue chanting the Big Data Big Money mantra. It doesn't help that the myth/meme is strongly backed by the whole cyberpunk genre, as people love the dystopian themes of "big corporations know everything about you, down to your most secret desires you don't even realize yourself".

And it probably even work by some small but statistically significant margin, compared to some arbitrarily picked baseline, so they can even back this up if necessary.

The king is naked, though.
damn, fuck cancer
> Cloudpunk, an athmospheric, indie, simple driving game in a cyberpunk-ish dystopia.

I liked the game and was looking for exactly that as something to replace post-endgame Death Stranding (I just want to get high, drive around and deliver packages), but did not find Cloudpunk simple-- while it was fun, it was confusing, depressing and unrewarding.

This sounds negative but I can't articulate the "feel" of it any other way-- it's a beautiful-yet-sterile corporate dystopia so soulless (Harry Canyon's cyberpunk future, with none of the edginess and grit), in-game suicide would have been a reward worth grinding for...not because "this game sucks," but because "this character's life sucks." Like living inside Reddit rendered in VRML. As much as I wanted to keep going, I couldn't bring myself to care to progress her in that world anymore. Not even Dark Souls made me feel this much despair.

Atmospheric indeed. The descriptions of it being a desktop wallpaper engine are on point.
"researchers recruited 301 American participants"

come on now, what kind of piddly sample size is that
It isn’t about thinking highly of him. His impact on security is well documented and very extensive. The black banner is used for honoring notable technologists who pass away. Regardless of personal thoughts, he was a very notable technologist and sort of first famous social engineer.

I’m sorry he stole your cc.
I had this same experience. The professor would say just read the book. We would say but we did read it and we are confused. And he would say I don’t understand the issue it’s very clearly stated in the material.

In fairness I actually did have one good experience with this. I had a history professor assign some material he’d written about the civil war and both he and the material were fantastic. Ironically that was at the junior college. Professors become professors by publishing. I’m not sure why someone would think “wrote the course material” would be a feature unique to elite universities.
Sometimes I worry about the job related health problems that come from sitting in a chair all day, but would trade it any day for the horrific injuries that happen every one of these USCSB videos.
Donate plasma, it works reasonably well. If you have antibodies you want to keep it might be bad though because those count as the plasma and get taken out.
At the company I'm working at, we're looking at LLM's to introduce an guided, interrogatory interface for our university students to manage tricky enrolment scenarios. Basically to translate requests from English into formal course combinations, and to translate back to the student issues with clashes and dependencies. An over-simplification but I hope you get the idea.
My team develops our company's own homegrown internal CRM. It manages basically everything about the company, and contacts themselves is a very tiny part: there're marketing campaigns, followups, accounting, incoming/outcoming calls management, our products' entire licensing/subscription system (neatly integrated into everything else), tech support, inbox/outbox, activities, contacts, leads/lead events, analytics, the backend of the shopping cart on the site (products, pricing, discounts), the reseller portal, integrations with various vendors including payment systems, A/B testing etc. -- to name a few, off top of my head.

Before me, there was an attempt to migrate to Dynamics CRM but our current CRM we've being developing for 15 years has so many custom rules/quirks/etc. eventually they abandoned the attempt because of the huge scope and the difficulty to reimplement millions of lines of custom logic in a proprietary CRM.

Before I joined the team, the CRM's development didn't follow best practices and now it's very hard to maintain and update, due to architectural problems aka "big ball of mud". Another issue is that it was not designed to be extendable, every small rule the business comes up with is hardcoded in the code, and so there's no way to configure things somewhere in the UI with least amount code possible.

So if I was to migrate our CRM to an open source engine/core, the following is a list of things I would want to see:

1) good modular internal design/API so that it was possible to easily add custom complex logic/flows

2) design/API which is extendable and doesn't have hardcoded logic/doesn't assume your company's flows

3) allows to configure as much as possible from the UI

4) an ecosystem of plugins/some sort of marketplace, with, again, solid, standardized API
I'm still rocking one on my laptop to this very day.

https://fogbeam.com/free-kevin.jpg
Yes, having done all kinds of styles, I can see wanting to avoid technical writing. It's a highly rigid form, with lots of rules about how to arrange information. Sometimes just the tools are enough to make you want to quit: I'm looking at you (La)TeX.
Those libraries were always somewhat of a hack. Async Rust is an official language-backed syntax.
Because they theoretically worked at some point but now they do not.
Maybe that we should incarcerate chimps?
What a great idea. He was part of the hacker subculture - regardless of what your opinion of him or his abilities is. This made me think of the takedown.com telnet transcripts - what a blast from the past.

Really sad day, RIP - will definitely have a drink for him tonight.
> I never understand why people (especially in the US)

You are aware that you are creating a dichotomy right here, no?

You might find this interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_opposition

One way to think about is that given a set of items, you want to understand them by finding both commonality and distinction between them. Partitioning into two sets is the simplest form that accomplishes some of both.

If you lump them all into a single set, you may have a sense of commonality, but you've learned nothing about distinguishing them.

If you put each element into its own set, you have distinguished all of them, but learned nothing about what they have in common.

You could form the elements into pairs, but the it's not clear what to do with the odd one out if there is one.

Given multiple items, you can always split them into two sets and how you choose to do that reflects both what the elements in each set have in common, while also showing how the two sets differ.

I suspect that binary opposition is in some ways fundamental to cognition. It certainly shows up profoundly throughout all cultures across all history: sun and moon, night and day, yin and yang, god and devil, woman and man, earth and sky, etc.
I had a lot of fun doing this, and while doing the arithmetic, figuring out what the shader algorithm is actually doing. Such a great idea, turning internet users into the world's slowest and most inaccurate GPU
The man who put the term "hacker" on the map, for better or for worse.
As the black hats at 2600 would say, "It was just for educational purposes." <wink>
If you're looking for other stories, The Art of Deception (Mitnick specific) and The Art of Intrusion (not all Mitnick) have a ton.
Personally I highly prefer Asciidoc. It’s like md, but is (much) better defined. And it works on GitHub too! https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/asciidoc-vs-mar...
> The added monetary payout creates an incentive to play even more to cover for the losses. In video games, when you make an in-game purchase for instance, the money is gone, so if you do that instead of paying the bills, you know you won't be able to pay the bills, this is usually enough to limit the spending.

I think this point is missing the evolution of virtual clout. As a thirty year old I can agree with your point that these rewards are valueless - but I can also see the younger generation that measures social value through virtual presence where skins and appearance can be vital to self esteem. I don't think it's correct to downplay the value that some people see in the reward of these loot boxes and other chance games.

If you align your identity with your virtual presence then failing to keep up appearances can be extremely dire - that's incredibly unhealthy, but it's the way a fair number of folks operate.
To give a personal account, I grew up in Utah and students at the public schools which I attended knew both wallball and 4 square.
Mitnick was exceptionally gifted at social engineering information out of various company departments over the phone.
Mitnick was not just skilled, he was creative, pushed things too far, and the internet rallied around him nonetheless. He went after corporations that people didn't like, even if he did it for personal gain.

SBF seems like an average white collar criminal next to Mitnick. He wanted to become those big corporations with their names on stadiums.
Do lines of code matter?
Too interesting. I just saw your other comment about the longevity of properly maintained wood pilings. Never would have thought that preventing rot would require them remaining wet.
Upon further reflection, I can see how it is advantageous to the elite if "wealth" and "merit" are seen as interchangeable terms by the public.
Extracting data from raw unstructured text/images and converting them into formatted fields
I used to live in the south 30 years ago. I remember some southern baptist moms that wouldn't say the word "dead" - sometimes they'd spell it out, lol, similar to the way some people consider hell a swear word. This kind of hypersensitivity wasn't common outside of limited circles then, and it's certainly not more common today.

Similarly I wouldn't consider saying hell in public in 2023 to be a social faux pas.
It took us quite a bit of work to reduce the static part of our prompt from ~2300 tokens to ~500 tokens. I wish there was a good playbook for this. I used gpt-4 a bit for some ideas, but almost all of it was just getting extremely creative with terse ways to represent info and cut cruft.

Additionally, we've learned that LLMs lose a lot of context in the middle of a prompt, and so it might also be that a bunch of data not near the beginning or end of a prompt could just get removed entirely, or at least much more tersely summarized.
> AFAIK this happens because addresses are kinda considered observable, and not doing these copies could thus be observable and potentially break some weird code. I don't think Val would have the exact same problem because it doesn't have the concept of addresses/pointers.

I honestly don't understand what you've said here at all. I'm not familiar with what "observable" means in this context, and googling "observable aliases programming languages" didn't help clarify it (two results were articles about C/C++ aliasing, one of which used the term "observable" once but didn't seem to define it at all, and the other which was the Wikipedia article on "Aliasing (computing)" that didn't contain the term at all).

Even if I knew what "observable" meant, I think you might be missing a negation (or maybe including one you didn't mean to) somewhere; if addresses are "kinda considered observable", it's not obvious why it would be an issue to omit copies and "be observable". Maybe understanding what's meant by "observable" would shed some light on what you mean here, but naively, I don't understand how code that expects things to "kind of" hold a property would break if that property were somehow more strongly held.
Ten Things I Hate About PostgreSQL
Ugh... I am a very precise communicator, and my wife --- Not so much.

I love her dearly, but I cannot count the number of times I have enraged her by asking her to elaborate or seeking clarification about a pronoun or some other vaguery by asking questions she believes "I should know the answer to because I'm too smart not to know"

We're getting there, though :)
(2014 updated 2021) the original OpenBSD article is (2017) and there's still no good canonical DL instantiation -commonmark goes into "do it in HTML" which is .. FAIL in my book.

So, a "standard" which has been continuously revised since 2014 and doesn't have definition lists except as "use HTML"
On one hand you assert there’s no such thing as moral good, yet you describe him as righteous? That word is a superlative for “good” steeped in religious tones!

Anyway, I suppose you could make the case that Mitnick was taking on “the Man” which is more utilitarian, but that’s a bit anemic imo.
Deepwater Horizon Blowout Animation (2014) [video]
@Dang
Agreed, and all one needs to do is look at the annual revenue of gaming vs. gambling to understand the real issue…
Wow, this comment is the most profound thing I've read in a while on HN. I find myself a) intuitively agreeing and b) trying to pick it apart. Society as a whole seems to have a very complicated love/hate relationship with rebellion and rebels. But with Mitnick it's like he personified Chaos vs law enforcement's Order in an almost mythological, Jungian sense that goes beyond any utilitarian justification.
>> introverts find interactions with other “draining”

> I'm pretty sure this is bullshit.

Both me and my SO are more introvert than not.

We've come to the conclusion that one of the core reasons it's so draining for us is that we puts a lot of thought into interactions and conversations, even superficial small talk ones.

At least in our experience, those who appear more extrovert seem to do less of that. They don't seem to reflect over all our actions, or everything we say. Some of it, or at certain times, sure. But seemingly not to the same degree.

If that is the case, then it is more draining, because we exert more mental effort.

> Level of drain = lack of trust in that person X overall level of anxiety

Speaking for myself at least, anxiety has nothing to do with it, nor lack of trust. I don't feel any anxiety striking a random conversation with someone in a bar or with a family member at home. And when I have a random conversation with someone in a bar, it doesn't matter if I trust them or not, because the topics are almost never intimate. With my family members I know I can trust them, so that's moot as well.

But both conversations can be quite draining, and at least for me, I suspect it has more to do with what I described above.
There's a way to grind mirrors optics for optics with polishing stones that aren't even flat to the naked eye. Basically the system arrives at tiny tolerances via the process of using the system.

And there's way to make three perfectly flat sharpening stones by starting with three raw pieces of natural sharpening stone, just by alternately rubbing the three stones together until they flatten each other out.

Paul Sellers can teach you how to flatten a large board without a planer. He also has videos on how to get a wood plane perfectly flat using a large sharpening stone (which can be made as above or with float glass).

And if memory serves, you to make something perfectly round you first need something perfectly flat. Once you have something perfectly flat and something perfectly round it's off to the races.

Edit: "The Origins of Precision" is a half hour well spent https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58
It can't be repeated enough apparently, because people still whine on about skymesh and "but IFF the robots wake up" when the real risk is what people believe machine derived "facts" are (I quote facts because they are highly conjectural inferences from models, and often diverge from fact pretty rapidly)
As someone too young to have a credit card in 1995, I’m curious: was its theft more of a “big deal” back then?

My Amex account number was stolen a month ago. It took me three minutes on the call with a rep to get it locked + a new card issued. I think I spent more time and effort on the phone with my dentist later that week.
It’s impossible. They’re wasting time and money installing it even if they get it for free. Then once it doesn’t work they’ll have to waste time and money uninstalling it.

It should’ve been tried on one car, not a real part of the fleet. And it should’ve come with some kind of clawback. If it doesn’t work they should have to pay $100,000 or something to make up for all the lost time.
I'm sorry to hear that you suffered from the event, and although I'm sure you're not the only one with a negative experience, I do think the positive experiences people had from interacting/watching/hearing/meeting/reading Mitnick outweigh the negative ones.
Having these skills would give most people an edge in whatever line of work you are in.

Absolutely. In the last few years I’ve moved into a role with a lot more interaction with non-engineers. At minimum, being able to politely re-state somebody else’s point in a concise manner is massively useful. Particularly when two people are talking past each other and I’m pretty sure they actually agree.
They were fat, hollow, metal tubes
This has quickly become my favorite, replacing my previous favorite, Monaco, in the terminal also.
"A gentleman is one who is never unintentionally rude."

(One of several variants: <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/01/21/offense/>)