skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now this, I entirely agree with.

On the one hand, it's a perfectly reasonable (and interesting) question (IMO). On the other hand, as you are pointing out - Banks appears to be writing quite explicitly from the perspective that "genius" and "productivity" (in the sense of creative, scientific, technological, etc. advances) are obviously GOOD and IMPORTANT. And, there seems to be a strong current of "if we knew what served as the 'fertile silt' for these ... 'Cambrian explosions' of creativity / science / tech... we could use this knowledge to foster the appropriate conditions and better harness our magnificent human potential."

Now, granted, I'm obviously purposefully cherry picking (to a degree) from a large enough essay AND "putting words in his mouth" (hyperbolic, comparatively) to a degree that I'm almost certainly glossing over language that's more nuanced and judicious, say. Nevertheless, I'm somewhat surprised at ... his surprise, the rosy cast of the whole thing, and, I think the quite incomplete nature of his analysis of the data and information that IS available.

Further, I outright disagree with any premise that "genius" is straightforwardly or simply "net positive". I don't think there's a need to bring the subjective into it, per se. And, much like discoveries and advances in "nuclear chemistry / physics" (providing a particularly stark example, IMO - nuclear/radiological weapons / nuclear energy of various types, medicine, etc.), most of this is "neutral", at best. I used to be far more "pro-advances", and I'm still no Luddite etc., but, really ... the continuous barrage of, in some sense, "f'ing around and finding out" (esp. when it comes to technologies enabled by all of the work of geniuses) really ought to make more people question assumptions about what is seemingly so often taken for granted as being "good".

(Apologies for likely excessive verbosity - it's way too late...)
What are you, a bootlicker?
I don't quite get what is the deal with sugar. Those 17 teaspoon are around 50-100g, making around 10-20% of an adults daily caloric intake.
That doesn't sound too crazy. Can't you just eat less starchy stuff, after all, that gets broken down to sugar anyway. Or is it that food gets so tasty that people generally eat too much?

I know the statistics point to sugar as being evil incarnate, but I feel there's more wrong with the American cuisine and now sugar gets the blame for all of it.

Personally I eat around 5 teaspoons of sugar a day, mostly in the form of marmalade and ketchup and don't seam to have any adverse effects.
Also I guess you'd have to drink sweetened beverages to get to 17 teaspoons, cause at 10 teaspoons a day all my food would be unbearably sweet.
Also, in case anyone is interested, the uninformative Jeffreys prior for this in Bayesian statistics (meaning it does not assume anything and is invariant to certain transformations of the inputs) is Beta(0.5, 0.5). Thus the initial guess is 0.5, and it evolves from there from the data.
I think you're right. There's a lot of comments I've responded to and the alignment isn't always clear who's responding to what, so I use context to fill in the gap. My bad. You are totally right about your comment making more sense haha. (I'm known to be an idiot, so people should question if you really want me reviewing your papers lol) But as your last line is suggesting, I think this is just a human thing and when a comment gets a lot of attention and someone tries to respond to a lot of different people. Too many trains of thought to juggle around in a format that isn't super explicit. It's why I like my code to have colors and group chats to have colored bubbles for identification. I need the aid lol.

> In reality the real peer review is in the back and forth discussions within the community, spread out over many papers, and sometimes even over generations.

This is 100% what I believe and I'm surprised others don't. Like how arxiv exists because people were already sharing papers outside the walls of journals. For some reason people are acting like this sharing means these are drafts rather than the actual publications themselves. As if arxiv and what's published are different versions. Maybe a lot of non researchers are participating in these discussions and assuming things?

I'm sure you know this, but others might not. Newton is the perfect example here because many of the works at these times were "published" years or even decades after the original work was done. Which is the whole Leibniz and Newton debate thing. I'd also highly recommend the podcast "Opinionated History of Mathematics". It's hilarious and well done. By a mathematician but for the general nerdy public

https://intellectualmathematics.com/opinionated-history-of-m...
What do you think listing exceptions proves?

When someone says X has Y property they don't normally mean it has Y property by definition or law of physics, they mean that almost all instances of X have Y property, to the point that you can effectively treat Xs as all being Ys and you're unlikely to run in to something in your life that contradicts this.

It's like saying "trans peoples aren't mass murderers". Yes, there may be an exception, but for pretty much all practical purposes it's true.
Low Latency Logging
> Putting error nil checks into a function is an anti-pattern in Go.

What should you do instead?
At least this person gave a reason for their bad rating. Most just leave 1 star with no comment...
If they looked the other way while fellow cops violated peoples’ rights then they’re still a piece of shit, even if they also did their job and saved a kidnapped kid.
Those taxes you pay are entirely about encouraging you and everyone else to smoke less, and it's one of a few interventions that supported by evidence.
fonts? real programmers use paper and pencil
In mathematics (and in programming) it is essential to use non-ambiguous names, i.e. names whose meaning is certain when you see them independently of any context, without having to add an explanation of what is meant by them.

The concept of a special kind of mapping between two sets, where to any element of the first set corresponds a unique element of the second set is very important and it needs a special name.

The choice of the names is arbitrary and one could use for instance the term "univocal function" to mean a mapping like described above and "function" for any mapping between two sets.

Nevertheless, by far the most widespread convention in mathematics is to use the term "relation" for any mapping between two sets and the term "function" only for those relations where to any element of the first set corresponds a unique element of the second set.

There exists no reason for not following this convention, from which it also results that an invertible function is a function where for any element of the second set corresponds a unique element of the first set, so this convention also provides a simple meaningful name for another important concept that needs a special name.

The functions in programming languages that return multiple values, unless they return partially or totally random values (in which case they are not functions of only the input arguments, but also of an internal state or of time), are just functions that return values which belong to the set that is the Cartesian product of the types of the individual values. So the name "function" is usually correct in the mathematical sense even for such functions. If they had not been functions, the programmer would not have known what values to return, when writing them.

Moreover, I disagree that in most contexts when you want to invert a function "it isn't actually important that functions yield a single value".

In the overwhelming majority of the cases that appear in engineering and science when you want to solve equations a.k.a. to invert functions, you want to obtain a unique solution that can be directly implemented in practice. Whenever you cannot obtain a unique solution, you need to add extra criteria that allow the selection of a unique solution that is usable. Those extra criteria are actually equivalent with transforming the original non-invertible function into a function that can be inverted.
"Just" don't connect from an IP that can be tied back to you, use black market sim in a separate phone, connect from places you don't go, turn it off when not in use... It gets expensive fast...
I have to disagree: crypto let me send money to my acquaintances in less lucky in their birth place then me while enabling scams, Facebook lets my company advertise while manipulating people brains; I don't see why one is more intrinsically ill than the other.
Will it be possible to get a DIY kit for the outdoor monitor? I would be interested in 3D printing my own case at home.
There is always room for improvement, but there is a generally good culture and processes with no obvious low hanging fruit for improvement.
Yes

Because Preview works, KPDF works and Gview behaved weird or in the wrong way most of the time

Apple builds the automatic car by removing the gear shift, Gnome builds it by removing the gas pedal and just having a button called "Go" which makes you go at 10mph
The Soundstage of TV and cinema 20+years ago was better. Today's Soundstage doesn't favour voice, instead we are aurally assaulted by staged, sfx, background noises to lend some semblance of reality. It's god awful.
I've stopped torturing my aural processor and reparsing mumbled phrases to make sense of the dialog. I've unplugged the bass, I don't want to be shaken off the sofa.
AND best of all it's subtitles all the way. Easy ro read, comprehend and no more " WTF did she just say?"
I grew up eating the Rhubarb plant by tipping the root side (stem?) In sugar and just eating it like that. It's very sour like that, which as a kid I loved.
You may have misread this. The OP means "extracting error nil checks into a function is an anti-pattern", not "your functions should not contain error handling".
> shaped like calamari rings

... but why calamari rings specifically?
These are not valid comparisons. The concern is lack of socialization not behavior of some selectively chosen public school kids.

With your selection, it is inherently showing a disgusting bias.
Yeah, I think I can say we were/are intensely jealous of that interstate infrastructure. And yet you don’t see the same amount of people poring over all the minutae details that you see with trains - just funny how that works isn’t it?
If an attempt at a counterexample has to go back 18 years then for all practical purposes we can round that to fine.
Nor Linux.
> Why the fox?

Perhaps because Firefox, and the Mozilla foundation as a whole, are one of the few projects not trying to milk you for data nor money? Might be a good enough reason in my book.
I was confused because there is https://github.com/ddollar/foreman and https://github.com/theforeman/foreman
I went to check that book out and noticed that the Amazon product page lists the publisher as "Tordotcom".

By contrast, The Eye of the World is published by "Tor Books".

Tor Books' web site, tor.com, definitely endorses the idea that they are responsible for Battle of the Linguist Mages, but they also note that that book is coming out of "Tordotcom Publishing", not Tor Books.

These all seem to be a part of the umbrella "Tor Publishing Group", but... what's the difference? I stopped reading self-published books because the quality was so, so low. Is that a risk with Tordotcom books?

(If you are interested in linguistics yourself, Katharine Kerr's Deverry series makes the author's interest in linguistics plain, though it's not plot-relevant or anything.)
This is great advice! Instead of expecting non-techies to handle the migration to more ethical platforms by themselves or leaving them in the control of large corporations, us techies have an obligation to help them with such tasks.
The issue is creating and maintaining critical mass for the superorganism of people, opportunity, money, and ideas. One such example is Stanford University and Palo Alto, arguably a mini "Venice" of our times by the deliberate sowing of the seeds by the Stanford family post 1884. Interestingly, A. Leland Stanford became something of a socialist in his later years. Jane Stanford either crossed paths with a sociopath or was detested enough to be murdered by one of her employees in Hawaii after a failed attempt in California.
Yep. Recently superglued a temp ensor straight onto the back of an ESP32. Seemed like it would be ok given two pcbs with low thermal conductivity in between.

...5 degrees diff. Damnit.
just from the top of my head:

- transport electricity from anywhere without losses
- handheld tomography devices
- super powerful small/light electric motors
- light electric motors means: electric planes
- cheap maglev trains
- rail guns
- possibly faster computer chips using josephson junctions
Apple was also the first to ship attestations in Safari.
Because Apple has already shipped[1] the (functional equivalent of) evil web-breaking thing that the author is depicting the fight against.

[1] https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-att..., discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36862494
> Basically, if you look somewhat rich (e.g. in a suit) or in trades clothings, and your car isn't too shabby you won't get stopped randomly.

Might this make sense if what they're looking for are outstanding warrants or drugs?

I could see those two groups having a lower likelihood of those two things.
Dogs must have a very different base line. They don't think "ew mold", they think "aw yes, mold" because it's normal to them.
People tend to be afraid of things that can blow up and make the surrounding area uninhabitable.
Citation needed that those things were, in fact, common sense. The earth being the center of the universe comes from ancient philosophers, not commoners (there's a reason the geocentric model is also called the Ptolemaic model). Those same philosophers also usually said the earth was round, not flat.
Mmmm, maybe because the last version of Safari that could be installed on Windows was from 2012 and Windows is still the most used computer OS at home and at work?

And when was the last version of Safari on Linux?

And using Firefox on iOS or Android allows you to sync your settings and history etc and send tabs between devices (and you should be happy, it uses Webkit on iOS -at least for now- because Apple won't have it any other way).
After humanity dies off or is moribund from the catastrophic effects of global warming, Earth, and its various remaining flora/fauna will revert back to a more natural state, until, after a millennia of healing, it gets unperverted by humanity's touch, and grain and fruit is once again, terrible for human consumption. Which would matter, if there were humans left.
That just sounds like busses with extra steps :)
I use Hugo on AWS Amplify. Very convenient. I’m just push to a private repo on Github, Amplify takes care of the rest. No server maintenance to worry about.
This has to be one of the most confusing documentation sites I have ever seen. Maybe I just don't get it, since I never edited Wikipedia.

Opening some of the pages at random, like

https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z828

https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z110

There's a "try this function" section, which I couldn't get to take any sort of input on a few tries. It always ended up with a field that said "no results found" on typing things in it.

There's a "current object" section, displaying some kind of alien script. Like, what is this? Is it supposed to tell me something?

"Z1K1": "Z2",
"Z2K1": {
"Z1K1": "Z6",
"Z6K1": "Z110"
},
"Z2K2": {
"Z1K1": "Z8",
this goes on for quite a while

Clearly I am not part of the target audience here. But who is?
My guess is that they want to stop bots from creating Google accounts once and for all. I don’t see them putting DRM on YouTube. That would break every app everywhere, and many of them can never be updated. Most could never be updated to this scheme.
> no one can quit to get away from you

can't help but think this is an essential part; if everybody is kindof stuck with each other, there is an incentive to make it work, somehow.

if leaders can make a whishlist and then pick and choose, why would anyone invest more than to keep the apperance.
> Yea, it was like this too when I was in grade school in the '80s, but it seems much worse today.

This is largely a legacy of state testing and “accountability” regimes which were accelerated by national policy like NCLB and focus intense pressure on minimizing the number of students testing below grade level.
I also do that. I even help people move away from windows to Linux. I don't force them I just explain how it works and what the differences are. And if they have issues they can always contact me. Not everyone goes for Linux some people require applications that don't work on Linux or have less good alternatives.
But Firefox is an easy step.
> It's called the next grade!

Eh, there are a lot of different things you learn in school. For example, I was doing algebra at home with my mom (which I would ultimately do in school in 6th grade) in 2nd grade when I was still having trouble putting spaces in between my words with my handwriting. LikeIwouldwriteallmyhandwrittenwordslikethis. It was a big struggle for me to start adding spaces between words. and don't even start on my spelling. I was not ready to skip a grade level in every subject. But yes, I needed advanced math.
Also it's much easier to appear as a "genius" when a profession (philosopher, inventor etc.) is first conceived.

Being first allows for much wider and thus more impressive output, though in hindsight, not all of it might be of good quality. E.g. the ancient Greek philosophers made tons of bizarre assumptions about the physical world that they could have disproved empirically even back then. No one would go out on thin ice like that nowadays, and rightly so.
Don't look at Wikidata then
As long as FF takes Google money, it’s tarnished.
Just another copy of Instagram... I undertook this project mainly to enhance my knowledge in Swift and SwiftUI. Nothing more... I'm sharing it in case anyone might find it interesting.
He just pointed out that their demonstration video can be easily explained without any superconduction. I don't see why you need to be a professional physicist for that.

Do you also need to be a physicist to point out that their "levitating" sample is in fact still touching the magnet?

Or that the "0 resistance" is actually 1000x more resistive than copper.
Serous question: I don't get why so much steam goes towards Chrome which can be basically open source (Chromium) and the same folks accept Microsoft Windows perfectly well (which is closed source and has much bigger impact on our privacy IMHO)
Edit: same with MacOs?
This raised all sorts of questions I was going to ask about the Physics, but I found this OpenAccess paper I’ll go through:

“Physics of laser-driven tin plasma sources of EUV radiation for nanolithography” (2019)
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6595/ab3302
IANAL, but I don't think there's nearly enough insulation here.

I don't think there's much distinction between selling someone a device and then giving them free software that they need to install, and just giving them the device with the software installed.

Imo as long as they intend for the customers to install the software they're responsible, so I don't know if there's anyway in my mind for them to make both the software (or have an active role in developing it) and the device and not be liable.
Interesting perspective from the author. Insightful to note that VCs perhaps are not as smart as they would like investors and the public to believe (which I totally agree with, they only human...at least for now) or simply leveraging hype with these recent high profile AI investments.

But I think there are some assumptions within the article worth looking into to better explain why these ventures raised as much as they did.

First of all there is a difference between a "deep-tech" startup trying to develop a better foundation model vs startups trying to build applications (usually a thin wrapper application). The former are the ones raising tens to hundred of millions (apparently as billion dollar valuation or more).

No thin wrapper startups, afaik have raised at the same amount and valuation. These startups on the other hand are actually raising at pretty typical amounts and valuation.

An explanation for this dichotomy is perhaps because there is actually a need for a large upfront investment to get the business of building foundation models off the ground. This by itself of course does not justify giving these startups such high upfront valuation. What may in part justify the valuation is perhaps their moat. The moat which funny enough comes in the form of the high upfront investment required for infrastructure, and perhaps the providing the financial incentives to attract the limited number of star researchers every VC perceive as essential to the success of creating new foundation models. (I assume they are well compensated for taking the leap from top companies already known for top of the market compensation). There are only so many of these star researchers that can raise such monies, which imposes a ceiling on the number of such startups in the near future.

Of course a moat alone is little reason to assign value to a venture. There may be a moat, but is the moat protecting gold or coal? And how much gold justifies a 10x, 20x or even higher multiples? I believe the 10x multiple is simply a rule of thumb based on perceived growth potential and comparison against mature peers in the same segment. Rules of thumb can and should be ignored sometimes, and this may be one of those times. Growth potential looks unprecedentedly good given how fast ChatGPT gained users, and their rumoured revenue growth from 28m in 2022, to a projection of 200m in 2023 and 1B by end of 2024. For reference, a 40% yoy growth counts as hyper-growth and have in the past been used to justify a greater than 20x multiple. The lack of any commonly accepted mature peers based around LLMs, GAI probably only served in these companies' favour given the above results. I am also on the fence as to whether the LLM/model as a service market will be a winner take all or perhaps some kind of competitive oligopoly like we see with cloud computing.
> However, most do pattern matching according to what they’ve been trained as "indicators of criminality", and most of those patterns have their basis in systemic racism that have no connection to real criminality.

Somewhat going off topic here but I'm curious: do you think in the USA African Americans have the same real rate of serious criminality (such as murder, not speeding) as other groups once you adjust for poverty?
> The detachment from reality I see in some HN readers is really mind boggling sometimes.

I try to balance it out by flagging unconstructive comments, leaving it alone, and participating in more constructive threads instead. For reference, take the classic "don't feed the trolls" advice, in combination with Lobster's flag types:

> For comments, these are: "Off-topic" for drifting into meta or topics that aren't related to the story; "Me-too" when a comment doesn't add new information, typically a single sentence of appreciation, agreement, or humor; "Troll" for derailing conversations into classic arguments, well-intentioned or not; "Unkind" when uncharitable, insulting, or dismissive; and "Spam" for promoting commercial services.
Are they legal to use in the UK?
> use black market sim in a separate phone

In most countries this takes you from “may have committed a crime” to “have actually committed a crime”