skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't disagree that we live in a relatively good time right now, but I do wonder if this is the best it has ever been in the history of humanity.

We have more pollution (air, water, noise, light), more cancer, more heart disease, more obesity, more addiction, more suicide, much worse environmental impact, and so on (though these are the worst that I can think of off the top of my head).

Your points about safety, violence, money, etc, are all good, and there are many other really positive things about the present, for sure, but it is not clear to me that we are absolutely better off than at any time in the past.

There were some bad times, and there is too much nostalgia by well-off people for past times when they were well-off while most others were not.

I think that things are in general pretty good right now. Modern medicine alone makes me prefer to live now than wish I were some scruffy medieval peasant. We should recognize that we have paid a huge price for how we live now, and that price might not have been worth it. I don't know how we judge one way or the other.

Anyway. I wish I could see the stars. I wish there was still real wilderness. I wish that PFAS weren't almost literally everywhere. I wish farmers selected for flavor rather than size or density. Etc.

Now, the 1990s! That was the best time in human history. ;)
And your employer would be forced to pay your salary indefinitely? No wonder they seek to limit this. In Europe companies only pay for your sick leave for maybe 30 days, after that money start coming from social security fund (.I.e. you are paid by government)
Both methods measure H_0, which is the Hubble parameter today. It's a bit confusing that it's sometimes called the Hubble constant, because it's not really a constant. The expansion rate H changes over time, so we write H(t) and by H_0 we mean H(t_today). It's probably the case that they didn't directly measure H_0 with the early universe probes, so they measured H at that time and then used the standard model to extrapolate this value to H_0, roughly speaking. This means, that if the measurements didn't suffer from some unknown systematic error, that the model is wrong. That's what they call "new physics" and could be the most exciting thing in cosmology since the 90s.
I'm not an expert but my understanding is that MOX reprocessing does produce usable fuel, yes - but the point I was highlighting is that it's ridiculously expensive to do so.
You can't really walk across North American cities, they just don't have the pedestrian infrastructure.
Actually, this is the biggest problem and what government needs to be focussing more on.

If the price drops 50% (or more) then you will have a huge surge in demand for cars. This will cause much more congestion than we currently have which will become completely intolerable.

Really we need to see some tax applied to miles driven by all vehicles which pushes this up and suppress demand - maybe it could only apply to robotaxis at first (would probably be much more palatable politically as well). This could then be used to spend on public transit, so you don't see a huge dropoff in ridership of public transit to robotaxis.
>As a result, we would stop logging progress at ~80% of our goals, which was the threshold to qualify for your bonus

I feel like you're stating this as "Look how silly KPIs are!", but your CEO is correct. The issue isn't the KPIs; it's the team members who are willing to intentionally game a system in conflict with overarching company goals.

There's nothing magical about KPIs. It's data. How you apply it matters. If your team wants to take advantage of it for selfish reasons, there's nothing stopping them.
Show HN: Chrome Extension to filter and review HN comments
My point is that you have to start somehow. The whole reason to explore is that you don't yet know the answer. If you have no idea what matter is, then some magical ideas of the philosopher's stone can get you going.

This kind of paper is very different from ones about already well understood concepts most of us are familiar with as course materials for example. A syllabus on relativity or on information theory will be much more solid and crisp, but that's not a reason to not explore as yet poorly understood phenomena.
Too many pictures, few of which add information. Too few words.
SmartBear Acquires Stoplight
How are they “dismissed”? Are trading volumes or share prices for non crazy or massive companies too low?
Thanks! So the currently accepted model says the acceleration will grow indefinitely but our observations are saying that the acceleration levels out to a non-zero, positive constant?
I don't see why it needs to be on-demand. Why can't it be a Zoox-sized vehicle that simply goes up and down the street and arrives every minute? If there was a tiny bus that came down every street every minute, not only would that amount to almost zero traffic, it would also be the most brilliant transit service ever deployed. You wouldn't need the app, or even route planning. You only need the driving tech.

This applies best to central cities with a grid layout of course, but that describes San Francisco well enough.
An incredibly amount of hype was/is generated in Europe in regards to this term. Not really the good kind, in my opinion, a lot of buzzwords being thrown around in the higher research centres and a lot of public money being spent on not-so-well-defined terms.
Honest question: How do you do discovery on PowerShell objects?

That is, with the Unix approach, when I'm trying to do something ad hoc I can do one step of a pipe, read the results on the terminal, see what the format is, and figure out how I have to set up the next step of the pipe. How do I do that with PowerShell?
I was specifically addressing the argument that driving drunk should automatically result in a permanent ban regardless of frequency.

If it’s happening habitually, the penalties are generally more severe, and that seems reasonable.

If someone reforms themselves, gets sober, stays sober and can prove that, they’re no longer a habitual drunk driver.

To add to a sibling comment, the level of distracted driving happening right now is insane. I’ve been almost hit as a pedestrian and as a cyclist about a half dozen times in the past year due to drivers looking anywhere but at the road. Something changed during/after lockdowns. I think people got more addicted to their devices, and take that on the road with them.

IMO, DUI needs to roll up to a “driving while dangerously distracted” category. Checking instagram, FaceTiming, etc. while driving is as dangerous as driving drunk, and seems to be happening everywhere.

To be clear, my argument is not that people should be excused for bad behavior. But penalties need to be balanced against basic human rights, and should be applied fairly to bad driving behavior across the board.
I mean not really. I would imagine most public transit journeys are less than a few miles in the most part, so at $.67/mi you are going to see public transit become very poor in comparison to a bus or train fare.
Here’s a start for you

https://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/
I think that the price of those tests was about $70 each, however.
As for practical use cases, one is to find an approximate optimization to a function

- You want to find the min/max of some probability distribution P(x)

- P(x) is too complicated to find a closed-form min, but you can draw samples from it.

- So instead, you carefully construct some OTHER probability distribution Q(x|θ) that you claim is structurally similar "enough" to P(x), parameterized by θ.

- Now you find the theta which minimizes the KL divergence KL(P(x) || Q(x|θ)), which is equivalent to delivering you the parameters of θ to Q(x|θ) that make it [approximately] "most" similar to P(x) without ever having minimized P(x)

It was a trick that came up a lot when AI consisted of giant Bayesian plate models for each specific task that you had to hand-optimize.
it’s probably still more efficient to burn the gas in power plants and use heat pumps for heating.

Also saves us from maintaining a residential gas network.
You have to. Apple software is on it.

But compared to the iOS store it’s kind of a ghost town. Tons of popular software isn’t in it. It’s quite normal to just download software instead of even looking to see if it’s in there.

And if it is, App Store software must be fully and tightly sandboxed. Which prevents a lot of useful software from ever appearing in it.
Well sure, because they're an investment company. They manage people's money. A lot of people seem to talk about BlackRock as if they're investing their own money, which would be similar to pretending your bank owns all the money that you put in it. They have $10Tn under management, but they have a market cap of $100bn. So the vast majority of what they're doing is just brokering deals for their investors. The fact that Blackrock did this deal doesn't tell you anything about who is exposed to the upside or downside.
Yep looks like I was wrong and this is even more disgusting than not calling in sick. I was under the false assumption that every non-exempt employee had 5 days minimum (which isn’t a lot), but restaurants workers have different laws applied to them? Bad look USA.
KPI/OKR stop working once workers starting to optimize for KPIs, ignoring stuff like quality of code or the mood in the team (is it supportive or is it till burnout?). Especially cool when companies put generalised goals, and the product development has different goals. For example, if we wanna improve the loading time of the site overall, we could just completely ban the slowest clients (problem "solved", KPI improved).
IPO stands for "Infusion of Public Overspending". It's an exit strategy for private equity and VC, so more of an ending than anything "initial".
Length of the history has no validity to support any argument.
Nightingale – Open-source alternative to Prometheus&Grafana
I’ve watched this backfire, too.

It works great when everyone is delivering day-long or week-long incremental features that lend themselves to nice screenshots.

But then you slowly start accumulating a backlog of difficult tasks that everyone avoids because they won’t sound good for the week. Technical debt accumulates as people cut corners in the interest of getting their weekly presentations out.

You can theoretically avoid it with enough trust, but the trigger for our collapse was a round of layoffs where the people with the most visible features were spared while people working on important backend work and bug fixes got cut. After that, it was game over.
There is more weirdness here than just SMT.

The full crossbar, allowing each shader to individually issue a fetch from memory. The shared memory space is not like cache but instead is a shader-to-shader communication scratchpad.

Atomics support, coalescing atomics together.

-------

I mean hell: what is a core? Do remember that on SMs, every single shader (not SM) has its own instruction pointer.

Is the shader a core? No, not really. But SMs aren't a core either.

I wouldn't compare GPU and CPU architecture at all. They're just different. What I did above, breaking both down into individual multipliers then counting them seems like the best way forward, especially as we remain multiplier bound in practice.
End of an Era: Legendary Voice Behind Mario Exits After 27 Iconic Years
An absolute must-have for me is an AHK script I use to clear the clipboard 15 seconds after something is copied to it. I developed it after a colleague pasted in chat, "Let's call it $xxxK and call it a fair deal" (with actual numbers) :|

Should be mandatory at law firms, for example.
> The official JSON serializer from every broswer vendor and every Node installation produce invalid JSON.

I don't think I agree with this. `JSON.stringify` isn't producing JSON when it returns `undefined`. Instead...

> I would expect `JSON.stringify` to give an error if trying to serialize something that naturally does not map to JSON, like many other libraries do.

> You have to provide a manual override for those situations.

... `undefined` is an error. As in, there's no meaningful difference between catching an exception and providing "a manual override" for `undefined`, is there?

> But JavaScript and ECMA (`JSON.stringify` is defined in the standard) decided that no, they can ignore the specs for some reason.

What part of what spec is being ignored? `JSON.stringify` conforms to its own spec, as you say; and when it returns JSON, the JSON is valid. Meanwhile the JSON spec itself is very explicit about not declaring rules for serialisation/deserialisation:

The goal of this specification is only to define the syntax of valid JSON texts. Its intent is not to provide any semantics or interpretation of text conforming to that syntax. It also intentionally does not define how a valid JSON text might be internalized into the data structures of a programming language. There are many possible semantics that could be applied to the JSON syntax and many ways that a JSON text can be processed or mapped by a programming language. Meaningful interchange of information using JSON requires agreement among the involved parties on the specific semantics to be applied. Defining specific semantic interpretations of JSON is potentially a topic for other specifications.
If you think about it, should any of the major players buy ARM and shut it down to the competition, the other players would be in deep trouble (Samsung, Apple, AWS, Google all depend fairly deeply on ARM). That has the potential to drive valuation up a bit, no?
I have worked in ~21 different positions around industries, with about half in the software world.

I have seen this over and over again - a company made up of good engineers without focus doesn't do very well, unless its has accidentally fallen in a market where they have few to no competitors and this circumstance encourages even more lack of focus, because who are you even competing against?.

Even companies that have bad practices and processes, their eng isn't that great, and often putrid management behavior, the focus on a specific goal that customers want made MONEY and sold companies.

In my experience almost all of that came down to the CEO wanting to hold the line and do the thing that we needed.
Spent my weekend wrestling with opengraph image generation. Was fun
Would weekend again.
I really want to see the shitshows of TF environments that inspire needless solutions like this.
Alas pjc50 specified living British technologists.

I mean, Britain has many great technologists if you're willing to count the likes of Arkwright (died 1792), Babbage (died 1871), Watt (died 1819), Faraday (died 1867), Randall (died 1984), Bell (died 1922), Harrison (died 1776), Logie Baird (died 1946), Stephenson (died 1848) etc

But some would say if a country's list of technology greats has so many dead people on it, perhaps that country's glory days are over.
>The book was written before I was born

Oh my god I'm so fucking old.
One intuition is that KL-divergence represents a sort of “distance” between probability distributions. However, this isn’t quite right as it doesn’t satisfy some basic properties a real distance (a norm) would satisfy, including the fact that it isn’t symmetric: KL(Q, P) != KL(P,Q), and it does not satisfy the triangle inequality. Nonetheless, KL(P,Q) gives you a good idea of how “far” is P is from Q: in the context of encoding, if you wanted to come up with an ideal encoding of symbols coming from P, but you guessed Q as the distribution of these symbols, then KL(P, Q) is the extra number of bits you’d have to use. One nice property is that in the case that KL(P,Q) = 0, P and Q are equal (almost everywhere, which for most applications is irrelevant). This makes it useful in the ML context as you can minimize KL divergence and know that the resulting “guessed” distribution is getting closer to the data distribution you’re trying to guess using some parametrized function (an NN).
Emergent abilities of LLMs
I wonder if it would have been better for Nvidia to have bought ARM. Nvidia's cards might have been sufficient influence.
Show HN: vasco: discover hidden correlations in your Postgres data
vasco is a Postgres extension that helps you discover hidden correlations in your data. It is based on the MIC and MINE family of statistics.
People parrot this, but do they? Or is it just the case that they are one of the largest ETF issuers in the world, and it is through those vehicles that they are “invested”?
Would’ve been nice if your comment had any specific argument except a verbose take on “you’re wrong, because reasons”.
With respect, your comparison of Hitler and a cop is totally invalid.

A cop who's acting in accordance with the law will only shoot someone if he perceives an imminent danger to himself or someone else. The danger justifies the act.

Hitler prosecuted a war of aggression. Nobody was brandishing a knife at him when he decided to kill millions. This is why Hitler's acts were unjustified.

In both cases we trace the morality of the act back to fundamental precepts- e.g. your right to life liberty etc.
It’s even funnier when it’s apparent that company isn’t really doing OKR. First of all, the Os are supposed to be somewhat resistant to change in direction. Second of all, you shouldn’t be doing KPI on top of OKR. If you set the OKRs right, you’ll set stretch goals so ambitious, even if you game the completion percentage, the simple answer to whether you are doing the right things or performing should still be immediately answerable.
Cool. I'd not seen that one before. I was going to link to Goodhart's Law, but the McNamara fallacy seems broader and more interesting. Thanks.
What does an obfuscate output look like
I live in an old well established rural area - a great many farmers here lease land to farm, depending on crops, seasons, all manner of things.

I've got a chunk of land so I could build the house and sheds I wanted with the views I wanted and lease out the bulk of the land to cover rates, costs and turn a small profit - I'm on good tems with the leasee who has their own land they own (and farm) and other leases.
But then no language is one language in that sense. For example Hungarian is a mix of Uralic, Turkic, Slavic, Germanic etc. vocabulary. This doesn't make English unique. The somewhat unique aspect is then reluctancy to respell loanwords according to their pronunciation.
KPIs are such an incredible waste of time. At my last job out team was tasked with coming up with 5 KPIs, that alone took many hours of discussion (times 6+ people) and then to implement the KPI reporting we would have to start logging/recording a ton more data (manually, in JIRA). On top of that we had to write code to pull that data from JIRA so it could spit out the KPI number.

After all of this I once again pointed out how useless and stupid the whole process was and how easy to game it was. We could easily lie in our scripts if we wanted to, it wasn't like management was capable of checking, and it was going to encourage reclassifying/hiding certain bugs (hard issues) and pretending other things were bugs (small changes/minor feature requests) to juice the numbers.

The whole processes took a _ton_ of time and in the end I never heard another department's KPI numbers (we were told every dept was doing it and we would all report monthly for the whole company to see) and I'm fairly certain it fizzled out though I left shortly after that.
Back when Lenovo ran their outlet for refurbished laptops on very database heavy oracle backend (2011?), our little computer shop would buy stuff from them. If you added an item to your cart, it would hold it for 10 min and prevent others from purchasing.

I used AHK to script a process that would automatically add laptops to our cart based on certain search criteria. Then we could sift through their inventory and release what we didn't want.

It was running great until one day it went rouge (okay, was prob human error) and it added EVERY item to our cart and crashed their website. Database error came up, I called them and told them what I did and they were happy to know why it went down.
"The users seem to believe that they are connected to some vast treasure trove — all the knowledge of our times, an endless digitized compendium, some electronic library of Alexandria..."

Personally, I feel that this is one thing that worked out about as well as could reasonably be expected (it would be unreasonable to expect that the benefits of this could be reaped without effort...)
In Kentucky, the old, pressed metal plates were made by prisoners at the state pen. A combination of COVID shutting down the prison along with running out of number-letter combinations forced the state to switch to printed license plates. The new "flat" plates are made by the same company that makes every other states' flat plates. No more prisoner labor for plates in KY.
Legibility even at the cost of the things you want!
Someone gamed a system created to be gamed? :pikachu_face:
I'm pretty sure it's going to be one of these companies that I don't invest in for reasons that sound logical to me (a big part of the company just splitting in China basically rogue + my personal view that RISC-V will gain traction due to the licencing policies of ARM) that will do very well :D
Are icons or any part of a UI copyrightable?

If not, then if e.g. my grandmother is used to MacOS, then why can't I make a Linux-y OS that looks like it so my grandmother is immediately familiar with the UI?

If early cars copyrighted the round steering wheel, then we would sort of be in an impossible situation right now.
Language has relatively little to do with genetics in Europe. Even amongst Basques pre Indo European DNA was mostly replaced on the paternal line. The survival of their language has probably more to due with their subsequent isolation than with anything else.

Even the Etruscans (who somehow managed to survive while being surrounded by Indo European cultures on all sides) have about the same proportion of steppe DNA as other Italians.
Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
I don't think it's so much about the timidity of the driver, it's the effect on driving slow has on people behind you. Driving below the speed limit increases the amount of drivers who need to do overtaking, which are moments substantially more dangerous than just driving straight. If it weren't for forcing other people to overtake I don't think we'd really care, even if it was a sign of timidity.

Very common to see older people drive slow on the highway because going 100KM/h seems scary to them. This is, of course, absurd, since driving 80KM/hs on a 100KM/h road causes way more moments for bad things to happen because you're forcing everyone to merge into the speed lane, including trucks with bigger blind spots, rather then only the drivers choosing to go above the speed limit. If you do this you should absolutely be fined, and that's not because it's a good metric for timidity (which I agree can be bad for drivers in general), but rather that the action itself causes harm.
Is making that button clickable the solution here? Presumably the text is there to inform the user that they proceed by clicking on the arrow in the corner. Letting them proceed by clicking the arrow would just mean they didn't know what to do next, wouldn't it?

I did the same, tried to click it, and had to look around to find what I was actually supposed to click on. Maybe the better solution would be to make it clearer where to find the correct button?
English and French are the two main well known exceptions. Basically all other languages of Europe are mostly written letter for letter as pronounced.
Let me tell you a secret…

That’s the majority of all art.
Verified by a doctor? Why would you waste a doctor's time for a cold? That sounds horribly inefficient. They don't have time for that