skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was a good read. However, it seems like the section on geo engineering does exactly what the rest tries to warn against: predicting behavior using simplified first order models.

I'm biased towards believing the conclusion the author draws, but the reasoning here is suspect.
Main benefit is it does boilerplate really well. You type a few letters and then hit tab, and now your test case is done.

I did this as late as yesterday. Type in a case, type in a variant of the case that is more or less symmetric, it fills in what you would have typed. Or you add a member to your object, thus requiring it to be tested. It figures out that you need to check this new thing in all your tests.

Other thing it does well is syntax. Some weird c++ template parameter thing, it does it for you. Little things like "what's that thing that makes the sort go the other way" it will know, and save you a minute of googling.

What there doesn't seem to be is an interface for that I've found is any kind of refactoring. That's still a form of donkey work that a junior guy can do, but you'd think there would be some way for the AI to suggest DRY candidates and re-orgs.
There are use cases where a 30x increase in surface area would be fine. For example, 10W of heat pulled out of an insulated cooler would do a good job, and you could easily dedicate 100 cm^2 to the device.

Of course it would have to do that at a much larger delta T than "near zero".
Given the rise of free-to-play-pay-to-win games, microtransactions and DLCs, no.
I wonder if all company owners just fire everyone and replace them with AI, who will pay for their products and services?
You could also hand all the invocations of run_intensive_process to at, and let it take care of running them when the load average permits:

https://linux.die.net/man/1/at

I don't think at is very heavily used on modern systems, so it's quite possible that it doesn't actually have very useful behaviour here.
No, the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland (parts) are united.

Wales was conquered in 1284 - the Kingdom of England includes Wales.
https://archive.is/A7vcl
Eh, if i start having symptoms I'm out. I'm not wasting away for decades being a burden to family and society. Rather just get it over with.
No one is talking about 15$ an hour data labeling and I’m pretty sure you know that. Being obtuse on purpose.

If you’re actively replacing people’s jobs rather than helping people… well, you’ve got to look at yourself in the mirror every night.
True, this is why I sometimes prefer not to look too closely at the state of the art when addressing a new system architectural problem.

By trying to solve it from first principles, and making some progress but most likely failing to completely solve it, I get a good sense of that the design forces and challenges are. Then, when I go back to study the state of art, I'm much better placed to understand what I'm studying.

Another good thing about this approach is that I minimize pre-biasing my thinking by what is out there now. Then, when studying existing afterward, solutions, I can more clearly begin to see gaps in them that I can direct my efforts to solving.
I think the issue is that Moderna just doesn’t have much incentive to do it and it’s more a distraction than anything. But yeah it could also just be too late. My dad was recently in a similar position, but by the time he theoretically could get his hands on the drug, he was too weak too handle them.
Seconding Daniel Ingram, my mentor says that Daniel Ingram's book "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha" is a great introduction for a developer-minded person. I haven't actually read it so I can't comment on it, but I learned from someone who gained a lot about Buddhism from that book. Also happy to chat further over email.
> The Spartans were paranoid and insular.

Which also suggests they kind of sucked.
maybe I'm missing a layer of sarcasm or two but that's the joke
I’m not talking about skimming a recipe and wringing it.

Think easting something in a restaurant then replicating something similar at home the next day just based on the flavor. Doing that for a few things is easy, but it takes significant time to get to that level across a wide range regional cuisines.
https://archive.is/Vz9VP
HN for Alfred
Comb through HN on Alfred
The best reason is that Beechcraft Bonanza your dentist wants isn’t going to pay for itself.

For some reason Americans are more enthusiastic about unnecessary medical interventions. The pediatric ear tube surgery is another example.
> Trackpads are disastrous.

Why do you say that? I know quite a few people who use an external trackpad with a desktop setup and they seem to do pretty well with it.
https://english.stackexchange.com/q/371325
That's exactly the point, and it won't get better anytime soon.
This is good for society just like any productivity enhancing invention. You'd think a place like HN would know that the only way the world has ever gotten better has been innovation improving per-human output.
Public pools are also disappearing in my country (Austria).

It's mostly a cost issue. Towns see the huge maintenance bill and decide to close their pool. Half the indoor pools I went to in my childhood are now closed. No new public pools have been built.

When I was a kid, I had swimming classes every other week in school. My kids have swimming classes 4 times a year because the few remaining pools that schools can go to are overbooked.

The completely predictable result is that the number of kids and adults who can't swim is growing every year.
I never said you would see a separate port. But there ARE USB-C ports that do not support Thunderbolt. Therefore I expected TB capability to be called out in the module description for the USB-C ones.
It's just a guess but this sounds like a physical machine with threadripper 3970x (128gb memory is the max it can handle without memory bandwidth contention) though I'm also curious about the details.
This post is full of fancy word nonsense.

“Distributions are sampled from distributions” is meaningless because you cannot define the meta distribution. But more importantly, the Drake equation is not a RANDOM SAMPLE from a population of distributions. So the idea of sampling distributions is irrelevant even if true. The naive math of multiplying them together is invalid.
Thanks HTMLRewriter actually fits my use case perfectly. I don't need canvas and complicated stuff like that. Just the ability to parse some html and strip out certain things.
Dick Garwin: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/24/science/who-built-the-h-b...

https://rlg.fas.org/2020.htm
It would be great if everyone made personal financial sacrifices for the things we thought were important right? The world would be a much better place in my estimation.
Easy enough to implement on top of a token bucket filter - just adjust the rate at which tokens are added.
HOME # the user's position

FD 100

ST # show turtle, whose name happens to be joke

RT 90

PD # pen down

FD 10000000
In academia, work means teaching and other less pleasant duties. Vacation means working only on research for maybe only 8 hours per day.
Turns out the real force behind German engineering was cheap gas after all
Most requests are very routine and are basic exchanges of information. Think "how do I reset my password?".

Don't see why those can't be automated.

Eventually I don't see why an AI shouldn't process refunds. Its an infinitely measurable process and you always know the risk involved (the amount). So it's trivial to decide if you think the AI should handle it or send it off to a human for approval. I would not be surprised if there were already companies experimenting with stuff like this. Widespread adoption will probably take time.
I like some form of “work” but I like to work on my own terms. The more money I have up to a certain amount, the less I have to worry about taking a job I don’t want.

I’m currently in academia, so I don’t make that much money but fortunately do make enough. And I get to work on stuff which isn’t quite what I’d like, but close enough; and the job isn’t very demanding and I have free time, so I can also do the kind of work that I want. I do want more stability though, better income means I can save money and academia is opaque and uncertain
There is a billboard on the 101 southbound from SF I drove past last night that said “An AI bot trained on the entirety of human knowledge wants a job on your support team.”

Amusingly, this is the sort of filter you want to push management through to determine levels of both competency and empathy (“what is the true practicality of this?” and “should we do this?”).

Edit: found someone’s photo of it: https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/150vold/does_anyon... | https://i.redd.it/kgu48tgk09cb1.jpg
On the flip side, the unnecessary AWS complexity is a great make work program for developers. You now need an army of developers (and AWS "architects") to make a truly complex behemoth that fully replicates the insanity of a 50 year old enterprise system. A system of such complexity no single person can understand it all, all changes take days to weeks to make, and its behind black boxes everywhere. That's progress.
I've had pretty bad spinal issues for the last 19 years, starting with my neck, but more recently with my lower back. Both have caused excruciating pain, with the neck being chronic mid-level, and the lower back putting me in bed for weeks and unable to walk for over a month.

I've dialed down the pain to background through several activities. First I went through physical therapy for both the neck and back issues, and did the prescribed exercises religiously. Finding a good therapist is crucial - some just give you pre-packaged sets of exercises, but good ones will be constantly evaluating and customizing your exercises and movements.

For my daily routine, I do 1 hour of Mysore Ashtanga yoga. It has dozens of cobra poses (urdva muka svanasana) to reverse the stress on your neck.

I also do the 12 minute Foundation Training routine, which strengthens the lower back. [1]

For ergonomics, I'm using a standing desk all day. It only takes a couple weeks to get used to, so you might need to take breaks while getting adjusted. Make sure to not lock the knees, or you can alternate which knee is locked. I like to stand in tree pose, alternating legs every once in a while. Make sure to have a standing pad to prevent leg issues.

I've also got a mini treadmill under the desk. I try to walk for 5-7 miles a day. It's not as hard as it sounds to get used to, and I'm actually able to code while doing this. Precise mouse movements can be difficult, but luckily my setup is Neovim + SwayWM + Vimium on the browser.

If i absolutely must sit, I use an exercise ball on top of a foam swimming noodle that has been glued with epoxy into a circle to keep it stable. The exercise ball keeps the spine in a good poster. It's difficult and painful to slouch on an exercise ball.

For my keyboard, I use a Glove80 split ergo. It's a brilliant setup that has gone through tons of a/b testing to fit most hands without needing to move your hands and wrists into awkward positions.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BOTvaRaDjI
>As I write, the Russian military is escalating its attacks on Ukraine.

It is kind of funny. When war started, some commentators said Russians should bore Americans to death with war. No major attacks, just slow grind. If Americans got used to COVID regime over two years, they may get used to losing world hegemony over similar period.

It seems to be working, Syria does not even make the news.
As a middle aged man, I was constantly telling my wife that the team responsible for the game have done something truly amazing. Or at least that's how it seems to me with my personality and preferences.

The game design is top tier. And so are the graphics. Very few bugs, and most that I encountered were fixed during the patch cycles.

They deserved my $30. In the same way others have remarked about different games here, the thought of playing it for the first time with no memory of the first run... really resonates.
It's a common joke in situations like this. The form I'm familiar with is "the beatings will continue until morale improves". The saying is used to call out self-defeating treatment of a company's employees: that beatings hurt rather than help morale is the point.

https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/c4tu06/origin_of...
I'm not familiar with that incident. I'd be interested to read about it if you have a link.
From the article: "What causes such a rise when other languages decline? The methodology of the TIOBE index means that it is based simply on the volume of search on the name of the language. So there must have been more chatter about JavaScript and Cobol relative to other languages since April and your guess on this is as good as mine!"

TIOBE data is noisy. Small fluctuations in it don't mean much.
The older folks typically also benefited from getting into housing when it was less scarce, riding one or more waves of progress, at a time where healthcare ROI was much higher.

My generation faces a different economic situation. I know people in academia that love what they do and dreamed of living a life like Rudy's. In practice, they're stuck - huge debts, dismally low post-grad wages, stuck renting, just hoping for a stable position (luck over merit). K-12 teachers, lifetime musicians, social services, even nurses in similar positions.

Is meaning worth that kind of struggle?

Not for me. I want to bake as a craft in an owned place of business, then go home to sleep in a bedroom I own. Big Tech is the means to that end. Wake up, Clock in, autopilot, clock out, live. Within ethical reason, I will take any boring meaningless job if it pays well enough.

Locals complain about Big Tech killing the quirky unique culture my city used to have... and I agree! But what was the alternative? Pursuing the baking craft on debt and leases, paycheck to paycheck, barely treading water without any savings? That sounds like living a dream, getting sucked dry by parasites. There are public policies that could bring back the vibrancy, but no one wants density or lower property values (a prerequisite for housing the people that seed a vibrant culture)...
You should read it again, or at least read the wikipedia entry to remind yourself of the plot. There is a blind librarian and he's very hard to miss :)

I don't think the book has anything to do with Borges. I think you're alluding to The Library of Babel. An altogehter very different kind of book (a short story, but it's not the form that makes the difference).
Debian 12.1 Released
in theory: customer support automation frees up support workers from focusing on repetetive customer issues to being able to devote more time to those difficult issues, providing better service at lower cost

in practise: have you ever used any automated customer support for anything? it speaks for itself - it's literally worse than nothing.
That is not what I'm saying at all.

I'm saying that if you think something is crap and doesn't meet customer needs, at least propose a concrete alternative you believe is better so someone can respond meaningfully! Or concretely what concrete needs are not being met!

Currently, we have one example of something that all evidence leads us to believe fits the universe as it exists, at least in that specific niche.

If you think it doesn't, how doesn't it? Or if you're saying there is something better, are you saying that is hand written assembly? Or TurboPascal? Or ADA? Or some as yet not designed system?

I'm not asking for an alternative universe. I'm asking you to support your statement with enough details it can be assessed in the current universe.
> built for learning purposes and not a serious implementation

This is a typical way to present a project that ends up replacing the established/existing implementation.
I think they mean a desktop GUI application on top of git like GitKraken or SourceTree. These sometimes allow you to perform actions like creating a PR (which is not done via git itself, of course).
It's a riff on the old joke, 'the beatings will continue until morale improves.' It suggests that the problems are caused by poor management practices and has no deeper meaning.
> significant power over the system they operated

that's such a great observation. Nowadays, when emailing support for a company like Ryobi or Breville, the human's response (through a Salesforce queue, no doubt) is always so helpless. They literally have no ability (nor knowledge?) to deviate from the corporate prescribed path and actually solve the problem.

Same goes for a large car dealer's service dept. There's just no incentive to take the most direct route to solve the problem, even if it ends up costing the dealership thousands more in the process.

On the flip side, it's really satisfying engaging with the remaining few businesses and small makers who have the power to offer excellent, direct support.
Grocery stores and others absolutely still need cashier checkout. If I have a handful of items I can barcode swipe and even a couple pieces of produce that's fine. But they simply aren't designed for a full shopping cart which includes a ton of non-barcoded items.

Ditto with home repair stores. Scan a new smoke detector? Sure. Check out a bunch of lumber etc. That would be no.

In my experience, most stores are finding a reasonable balance. And one of my cheaper grocery stores doesn't use self-checkout at all for now. Which is just fine.
> A simple way to stem most snake oil is to put all payments for snake oil treatments into escrow till the treatment is approved.

I doubt any company anywhere (legitimate or not) would provide drugs under such conditions. It would make much more sense to just focus on getting approval instead.
It was also my first serious Linux distro. I started using it around Slackware 9.0 (wow, it's twenty years already). It was the PERFECT distro for learning because it was simple (as in uncomplicated) yet workable. I learned a ton about bash scripting, kernel compiling etc. I remember I even "ported" Reiser4 filesystem into the Slackware installer (who remembers that FS today LOL). Slackware did not have ANY dependency mechanism for packages, so often installing them was a lottery. Oh the long hours spent running ldd and strace to find out what's missing.

I switched to Gentoo after Slackware because everything was working just fine and I got bored. After that I learned that my free time is better spent on gaming and I switched to Windows 7. I came back to Linux after few years and damn - systemd took me by surprise. I never learned to use it properly because it's so much more complicated than my beloved Slackware SysV Init.

Congratulations to Patrick Volkerding - managing distro for 30 years is no small feat. Happy hacking.
Your guilty conscience will undoubtedly destroy you from within. If you do not repent and request mercy from the great beyonder then surely your next life will be lived in misery as some sort of atomic particle with human awareness and deep dread of your current circumstances.
Will the AIs be allowed to work remotely or will they have to be in office as well?
One of the things this does well is it remarks on expectations versus what was learned in the process of compiling the information. “I expected x because y but actually it’s a because b!” Clearing up misconceptions is often one of the key steps in new knowledge formation, and it’s helpful for writers to acknowledge that people often need to overcome their misconceptions as they process the information in the writing. It’s a much more reader-friendly approach than just being like, “Well, this is correct, and if you thought something else you’re a dummy.”
Springboard: The First Real Smartphone
“[some harmful shit] will continue until morale improves” is a meme.
Sites with paywalls that can't be bypassed are already banned.
I feel we are legitimately getting to the point where SoTA language models could be as/more helpful than the "tired human juggling many different customers" baseline, if the implementation is done well.

Would definitely depend what you're phoning in for, though. Going through some common process, digging up information, or needing a special exception to be made?
That's on top of what they already have.
Yes, very true. Beyond just access to clinical data there are often major differences between how the same conditions are recorded between different provider organizations based on EHR data models and local practices. Researchers who want to use data from multiple organizations typically have to put a huge amount of work into their data pipelines for cleansing and normalization. Some standards development organizations such as HL7 (including their various FHIR accelerators) are now writing more detailed and specific implementation guides to improve data quality and consistency so I would encourage technologists to contribute to those projects.
Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid
He’s likely more productive than most of us.
Looks like this should say (2017)
"it allows easy/cheap write combining" is not "completely unnecessary". What the heck, at least be consistent.

And it's not shenanigans! You could shard based on the first bytes of a key, or you could shard based on the last bytes of the key. Neither one should be harder. Neither one is shenanigans.

> It's square peg, round hole.

Going entirely random is an even worse peg.
>This is contradictory. Most drugs fail, how do we identify the efficacious ones other than through trials?

One idea is to make trials somewhat less costly by relying more on post-approval monitoring, but there are more subtle critiques of the processes that try to address perceived inefficiencies at the organisation/bureaucratic level rather than just adjusting a single big strict/lenient dial.

Some drugs do not make it to trial at all due to the overwhelming cost of the process. We would identify a larger number of efficacious ones if there were less costly, wider trials. A very expensive approval process results in delays for drugs that do make it to trials, but also causes many candidates to never reach trials.

>Depending on the anticipated efficacy from early trials as compared to existing ones it will get fast-tracked before the phase II is completed.

Part of the argument is that this is good, and we should consider going further in that direction

>Where is the evidence that we’re delaying efficacious therapies where there is no good alternative?

Unfortunately, the best I can point to is a series of blog posts and informal discussions, I'm not aware of any formal published evidence. I remember a blog post on ACX post aducanumab (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducan...). The "FDA delenda est" catchprase leads to several more posts.

I'll admit this is not very compelling. I believe it's worth having that argument, and I'd be happy to be wrong on that one, but all of this is hard to quantify.

(I also want to reaffirm that there are good alternatives, it's a question of whether we could be losing less people than we are losing under the current process, not that there are no current alternatives)

>I sound like a broken record right now but this blog post is suggesting we jump to experimental therapies (which would be off label for the author as he does not meet inclusion criteria) before we even have phase I data let alone efficacy, when good validated treatment options exists.

I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself as well or failing to make a good argument. I think your position is very reasonable. It's a complicated topic and I might not be doing it justice.
it's A play on beatings will continue until morale improves. I'm pretty sure nobody likes beatings either.
If they can give you the service you need and you can afford them, go for it.
Thank you for your well thought out advice.