skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* human capital would improve as the most skilled wouldn't become feeble and die, and would instead see their skills continue to improve

* quality of life would massively improve as far fewer people would suffer the tragedy of permanently losing loved ones, and would be saved from the ravages of aging and the anguish of an impending death. Saying nothing about the vastly deeper and greater experiences that much longer lifespans would impart.

By world, you mean the environment, due to population growth? By that logic, we should reduce healthcare spending to reduce life expectancy, and with it, the human population.

I am pro-humanity, so I want to end death for all people. The problems of overpopulation can be addressed through other means.
It was my main motivation for running pihole, killing off more adverts across everything, not just in browser.
Ok, when adding a new extension to the store. But “recommended extensions” get manually reviewed whenever they update.
Am I reading it correctly that the maximum delay observed is ~5% across all the groups?
Most of which we were going to decommission anyway which would have cost us money. (With the patriot missile battery being a notable exception)
The best Counterpoint is that the average time of a company being part of the Fortune 500 is declining over time. This means that there's greater turnover and disruption. a Fortune 500 company today is less likely to still be a Fortune 500 company tomorrow then most of the history of the Fortune 500.

This tells a different story than the article which focuses on the average age of companies including time not part of the Fortune 500.

It would be interesting to run the same analysis for the Fortune 100 and the fortune 500 to 400 companies

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/only-52-us-companies-have-bee...
You can beat them on customer experience but I have yet to see a company successfully scale it in the tech space (aside from possibly Apple). Everyone hates the incumbent, loves the personalized support, lack of ads, and breadth of features of the challenger, then enshitification happens as the challenger starts scaling.
Many of them are good ideas which are not actually implemented very well, and instead they tend to make the design worse in many ways, and also too complicated (although sometimes they are partially a little bit good).
Had the US not helped prop them up, and SK was conquered by North Korea and Taiwan conquered by China, I think they would have been doomed to remain autocracies indefinitely.
Android is not easy to use by any stretch of imagination.
yeah, that is part of the trade off. Using an ephemeral SSD (for a database) means the database needs to have another means of making the data durable (replication, storing data in S3, etc.).

There are AWS instance types (I3en) with large and very fast SSDs (many times higher IOPS then EBS).
Amazon had fewer items back then and the bar and complexity was lower too.
At age 1 though?
Trust isn't binary, there are several dimensions and varying levels of trust along those.
It’s a device used for conveying dramatic feelings in storytelling. You’d never use it in formal communication or technical documents, but there’s no reason to get worked up about it either.
> Us steel had a 120 year run without being toppled.

Um, no? It didn't magically go from 67% to 8% in the year 2001. It had already declined. In fact, it started to decline quickly: "Because of heavy debts taken on at the company's formation—Carnegie insisted on being paid in gold bonds for his stake—and fears of antitrust litigation, U.S. Steel moved cautiously. Competitors often innovated faster, especially Bethlehem Steel, run by Charles Schwab, U.S. Steel's former president. U.S. Steel's share of the expanding market slipped to 50 percent by 1911."
Am I getting old if for me Trillian is an instant-messaging app? 0o
Now I kind of want a CIS email address just to be ironic, but it needs to be in the original PDP/TOPS format 12345,123.

Am I remembering it correctly? It was TOPS, right?
Young people can create their own spaces, where old people can't exert influence. No need to murder old people, or deny them lifesaving technologies, just to get your experimental spaces.

Also, plenty of old people want to explore new ideas and join these experiments, and if they knew they had more time, possibly many more would too.

It's the people who don't believe in the potential of humanity, and thus want to keep human life limited, who seem to lack vision and be stuck in their cynical, rigid mindsets.
> Think Walmart vs Amazon. Online shopping is actually a completely different product.

This is actually a great example, but not the way you intended it.

Amazon isn't beating Walmart. They haven't even dented Walmart's revenue[1]. They're just killing everyone other than Walmart.

Walmart is now unbeatable because they're so big, they can demand wholesale prices that no one else can. If Walmart wants to buy 100M tomatoes from you, you'd sell them barely above cost because otherwise you're stuck with more tomatoes than you could ever sell.

To put it another way: you can't compete with these companies because they abuse their market power (either directly or through regulatory capture), not because they're actually that good at anything.

1. https://fourweekmba.com/amazon-vs-walmart/
In my own experience, I've seen them as distinct groups from customer support both at the companies I've worked for and companies I've worked with. I view it more as an alias to account rep, but sometimes people account reps will delegate to.

Customer support will file a ticket for me when something isn't working. Maybe help if something on their script matches existing known issues. Customer success will proactively see that I'm not getting the expected value from my already committed spending and utilization and reach out to make sure everything is configured right so that I renew next year.
Charging capacitors from thermal fluctuations using diodes
Rats in NYC are mostly because they haven't invented "having trash cans" technology yet.
I agree with what you said about the birth rate. That's a legitimate concern. A society that can't sustain itself over time is not a successful society.

But maybe weed/booze/porn/etc are symptoms of a problem, and not root causes. Fighting the symptoms might not help the problem.

For example, compared to several generations ago modern life is alienating in many ways. We have many new conveniences, but also many new things to stress about. The typical adult today, especially those of child bearing age, may have moved for work, doesn't spend much time with their neighbors, is consuming internet and mass media all day, might not have a best friend, lives paycheck to paycheck, might have a lot of student loan debt, kids are expensive, houses and cars and food are expensive, divorce is expensive, the American Dream ain't what it used to be, etc.

Drugs are an escape for many people, something to ease their suffering, boredom, or stress. Not the cause.

If the economic and social milieu that is modern life are the problem no amount of prudence when it comes to marijuana will fix the birth rate.
Is there a different product that can not be cloned? Meta produced threads in what, a month? How long would it take your start up to get the users they did by turning it on?

The point being, a FAANG can start from zero and beat you to 1 MM users even if they only noticed your product idea once you launched.

I would love for that not to be the case, but we see it everywhere. At least for things that are competitive to them.
I doubt that was at age 1 though. The effects they're describing sounds like they're limit the ability to do what you're describing later on.
These are different kinds of problems.

JSON is (arguably) too strict. YAML is (arguably) too loose. One is better for machines, the other is (usually) better for writing by humans by hand. There's no perfect compromise for every use case.
The fact of the matter is that Elon has a lot of leeway to do whatever he wants with Twitter because people are so invested in it. Depending on when you joined, your entire social media history is on the platform, including followers, goodwill, and for many - instant exposure/attention.

At this point, Elon could redesign Twitter in the style of Hacker News (although, it would be funny to use HN without headlines, would make for a nice April's Fools for sure) and people would still find ways to justify using the platform. In this context, I'm not sure the transition from Twitter to another platform is going to happen that fast, if at all.
Right. Amazon couldn’t have beaten Walmart at its own game, so it played a different game and won that instead.
Well they are getting paid 13 cents an hour, so I guess they aren’t literally slaves.

Or something.
Relax guy, it was a cutesy reference to the "Good bot" meme and your username.
Huh? You're right. Why is this the same site? What's going on here? Is there a relationship between these two (defunct) sites?
...? podman has been around for years and has been slowly increasing users for years. it is the exact opposite of a flash in the pan.
Data Clocks
> That's what ultimately depresses me about AI. It's still just a parlor trick. We haven't actually taught computers to think, to reason, to be innovative.

And what do you feel when we make these parlor tricks more capable than us at the majority of tasks?

And what do you feel when we understand it well enough to realize we're the same type of parlor tricks?

To me it seems like you're most interested in a magic 'aha' moment and will miss or not be prepared for how the road in front of us likely unfolds.
Yes, in 1980 or 2000 or 2010 or even maybe 2015 it would have been a fabulous idea to start a whole bunch more nuclear plants. But in 2023 we have better options.
But Australia has private grids too, so everything you say about utilities would also be true there. No?
My only wish is to access RTX card from by FreeBSD or Ubuntu VirtualBox VM for ML/DL stuff on my windows 11 laptop.
The most unremarkable death of academic curiosity.
What about my right not to be murdered by a habitual drunk driver?
That may very well be. Probably related to ADHD and traumatic lack of agency for much of life
I used to believe in the fancies of the communities I was apart of I thought they represented reality. Everyone talked up small iPhones, Linux on the Desktop, People paying/donating for FOSS, etc. But actually my community really just reflected a small sliver of reality. Even at that, more than a few folks were just talking about topics they wish were true, or they wish that they had done.
your article consists of hard data. Seems to refute the article pretty well
I think the grandparent means it offers a way to bind a function `a -> m b` to an expression of type `m a`, to make an expression of type `m b`, but they left out the important part, which is the types!

After all, a functor is just a way to "bind a continuation to an expression", but this time the function you're binding is of type `a -> b`.

A better way to characterize monads is that they're generic types such that you can compose functions `A -> M[B]` with functions `B -> M[C]`. On first glance, the types don't work for basic function composition. Monads are more-or-less types `M` where a reasonable compose operation exists (for all A,B,C).

Covariant functors in programming are basically producers (I don't know of any counterexamples), so monads are essentially producers where production composes.
I'm going to study this project in great detail—it's something I'm very interested in contributing to, or at least building with. I've been hoping for something along these lines since around 2014 and have failed to make sufficient progress with my own attempts, so I'm really happy to see this kind of thing catching on.

A licensing question that pertains to adoption: your license is AGPL, which I'm a fan of except for the practical matter of deploying on Apple's iOS App Store, where Apple's distribution mechanism would make an otherwise well-meaning open source app run afoul of your license.

Do you plan to grant a special license to people building open-source iOS apps?

[edit: typo/clarity]
Cats and rabbits get along well because cats think grooming someone is dominant, but rabbits think being groomed is dominant, so they both think they're on top.

(Domestic rabbits have surprisingly big egos.)
If you make it polished, it will be usable to more people. More users equal more of their favorite apps being made for linux.
Tangential story time on how I "accidentally" got out of numerous parking tickets that would have prevented me from graduating university.

I went to school in a state that required both rear and front license plates.
My car, however, was registered in my home state...one that only required a rear license plate. So, I affixed a vanity plate to the front of my Jeep.

Our University also had some requirement that you pay all parking tickets in order to be eligible to walk at graduation.

Well I found out pretty quickly that the parking authority mainly only checked the front license plate when writing parking tickets. And as it turns out, I was fortunate enough to receive three (3) parking tickets my senior year, ALL ticketed against the front vanity plate (two for exceeding time limits, one for parking in reserved parking that ironically my actual plate granted me access to). They never recorded my actual, rear license plate. Never recorded my VIN. Just the front vanity plate.

Some 10+ years later, to this day, if anyone in North Carolina has a legitimate Colorado license plate with the tag "VAIL" on it...well, my bad...hope you aren't trying to graduate!

EDIT: turns out, NC does NOT require front plates...so maybe the parking authority people were just cutting me slack. Or lazy. Probably lazy. Either way, I appreciate it!
A lot of this is not inherent to building nuclear reactors. We've regulated nuclear power to the point where it's cost prohibitive. If we required every solar panel installer to have a phd, and only let them work 1 hr per day solar would be incredibly expensive too.

Imagine we were willing to accept the same death rate as natural gas. Reducing regulations to the point of having 100x more nuclear incidents. How much cheaper would they be to build?
You are quite right, there is hairline receding and diffuse thinning (DUPA). I am working on incorporating diffuse thinning detection. Thanks for the feedback !
People who think they hate maths will always try to get rid of the maths and tell themselves that that makes the maths way better.
Also not an expert, but I believe it is a little bit of both for inference.

If you are generating token-by-token naively, you do need to pay the n^2 cost since every token must attend to all other tokens. Generating a sequence of 5 tokens starting from 2 (infer 3rd, infer 4th, infer 5th...) will be much faster than starting from 1024 (infer 1025th, infer 1026th, ...) since your n is smaller. But each time time it is n^2.

However that is a naive approach. There is a common optimization, KV caching[1], (on by default for HuggingFace models) that caches all the work from the prior step so you only have to compute the attention for the new token. So you get something like (infer 1025th, cache 1025 attend new 1 token over the other 1025, cache 1026 attend 1 new token over the other 1026, ...). Not quite constant time but much better than n^2.

I would imagine there are other optimizations too, but this is the one I've heard of.

[1] fairly code-y, but links to some other posts at the start: https://www.dipkumar.dev/becoming-the-unbeatable/posts/gpt-k...
As an SF resident, I’m not at all excited about riding in them as they seem to drive annoyingly, especially right turns. They are slow and position weirdly for turns.

I have contemplated that if a person from 1995 woke up from a coma and saw one they would freak out and then think they are living in sci fi future.

But nope, the cars are mundane and boring. It’s just as google intended in order to be unthreatening. But it also makes them boring so that was a double edged sword
Another factor is increased regulation: Big companies have an advantage that they can afford the lawyers to navigate the laws, often written by them via lobbyists.
I have explored this but selling hairloss products is quite hard because most of them needs a medical license to sell. Thanks for the idea !
Yup, I cited that Unix vs Google video in my post The Internet Was Designed With a Narrow Waist

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/02/diagrams.html

A narrow waist is an idea or interface that gives you O(M x N) functionality for O(M + N) code. It's a way to reuse code and data by interoperating.

If you can't interoperate, you end up writing bad versions of the same application code, over and over again.

More concretely, I remember there was this whole "re-architect google3" idea >10 years ago, which seemed to get brushed aside for the cloud. I think they were trying to have more of a narrow waist, not 10 different distributed databases made by 10 competing teams, 10 different auth libraries, etc.

The management's perception then was that product dev was extremely slow, and had poor quality results

That video is about the application side of Google (e.g. docs and maps), but the internal side had similar architectural problems.

---

As another example, it seems like the dev tools group at Google wanted this article to be published, and I have no idea why:

Google Is 2 Billion Lines of Code—And It's All in One Place

https://www.wired.com/2015/09/google-2-billion-lines-codeand...

It's saying Microsoft Windows has 50 M lines of code, while Google has 2 B lines of code.

There are all sorts of problems with those numbers, but in any case, it's not a flattering comparison -- not something you want to brag about

I think they wanted to emphasize the scalability of the source control system, and ended up saying that Google has a lot of bad code that doesn't work well
Sounds like many didn't read the article at all.

> It’s like people feel the need to defend their own beliefs

I think so, and not only their beliefs but also their own addictions to screens. It's like every time something comes up about alcohol use. Same thing.
I love comments like this because it shows me how diverse this field is, and how different everyone's experience and expectations are.

As a counterpoint to your comment, I make a living writing high-quality libraries. Everything I make is "in the box", but its not hard to improve on that.

My most popular tools are around string functions, json and xml readers/writers and network functionality.

So, on one hand I'm selling ice-cream in Alaska, on the other hand, it's good ice-cream.

It's a small market, a pimple on a niche, but its big enough to keep me going and that's big enough for me.
> Why did Firefox add that?

They didn't, Google did. It is part of MV3 specs, afaik.
This is why they've called it AI winter the past three times.

It's a season.

Like the seasons, the cycle repeats.
A vacuum cleaner would be a great housewarming gift, for example.
> What on earth makes you convinced that a monad can be implemented in Excel

True monads can't even be implemented in Haskell. But if we're being practical, you can totally implement monad-like things in Excel. It's almost impossible not to implement monad-like things when building anything non-trivial.
Reflections on “Making the Atomic Bomb”
More dangerous for whom?
There's a disturbing amount of conspiracy mindedness on HN, pretty much always has been.
Both CIS (CompuServe Information Service) and Netscape were purchased by AOL.
Obligatory Oatmeal comic: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill
I was talking more about company lifespan given that US steel is up for sale.

If you want to talk specifically about average company time in the Fortune 500, that has been going down
That's supported in WSL, why not use that?
They are quite often better than free, blocking unwanted content that would consume more memory and CPU time than the filter itself.
France going nuclear [1]: "France’s championing of nuclear power as a way of ensuring its energy sovereignty sounds great. But a group of researchers says it's a red herring given France imports all its uranium."

The push for nuclear in the US is a strategic maneuver to increase our position in Africa. It is not about increasing "clean" energy production. What else can you make with uranium and plutonium?? Hmm...

Further, France is slowing nuclear power generation due to heat waves [2]. Further evidence that the nuclear path is not a scalable, viable solution. Meaning, it's a bad idea to invest nuclear energy, let alone for the purpose of transitioning off fossil fuels.

[1]https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20220223-does-nuclear-power-gua....

[2]https://efe.com/en/economia/2023-08-17/france-to-reduce-nucl...
Here’s a high quality channel https://youtu.be/m3g6AOPvuPs
We need to shift from thinking of solar/wind as "electricity sources" to thinking of them as "fuel sources". The marginal cost of producing a transferrable fuel from solar/wind is already lower than current electricity prices. The challenge is the capital expenses on equipment (hydrolyzers, fuel cell etc.)
Until recently they had some of the cheapest electricity in western Europe. But they haven't been building new plants for a while and it's gotten more expensive.
I cannot take you seriously with that poor grammar.
Yes they do, they're called 'Nurse Practicioners' and have become the primary prescription interface for most group practices in the last few years.

https://www.rcn.org.uk/about-us/our-influencing-work/policy-...
In English, you can say "I'm going to Budapest tonight" or "Tonight, I'm going to Budapest" and it means almost the exact same thing. In Hungarian, you can say "Ma este Budapestre megyek", "Budapestre megyek ma este" or "Megyek Budapestre ma este" and each one carries a different meaning, while the English translation remains the same.

In this case, the grammar is conveying information that we don't usually think about conveying in English.

"Ma este Budapestre megyek" implies "I'm going to Budapest tonight, and not tomorrow night", "Budapestre megyek ma este" implies "I'm going to Budapest tonight, and not to Vienna" and "Megyek Budapestre ma este" might be a bit more neutral or might imply "I'm going to Budapest tonight, while you are doing something different.