skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Anyone waiting for 10x improvements is likely to be disappointed. I don’t see that happening, except for the occasional unusual program (such as the chess engine case mentioned above).

> The compiler is a large, mature project. It’s well over 10 years old, and hundreds of thousands of lines. Projects like that tend to not get quantum leaps in performance. Many small improvements is more typical.

And

> And it’s hard to radically change the data structures used in a mature compiler.

As the author describes, the compiler is likely fairly well optimized for its existing way of doing things. 10x improvements would come from architectural changes and it sounds like the compiler is so big now that this is difficult. The other piece that makes it difficult is that LLVM is a separate also large project.

An example of an architectural change I think hasn’t been investigated enough is in the space of PGO. While compilers use PGO to choose better heuristics, they don’t use that to control optimization levels applied to various code. Most programs have performance critical compute paths, but the rest of the program is no where near that. I feel like dropping expensive optimization passes for “cold” code would provide significant savings and Rust already lets you annotate cold/hot functions. Would be nice if it combined it with call flow analysis to build something like audio ABR but for optimization.

Anyway, such things are difficult research projects to attempt on existing large codebases. I believe the author that further meaningful performance wins are unlikely without deeper architectural changes. This is very similar to comments that Lemire makes in [1] and is well understood to be the same (often misunderstood) critique as Knuth made many decades ago about premature optimization. Architecture trumps code tuning.

[1] https://lemire.me/blog/2023/04/27/hotspot-performance-engine...
Like Soylent ?
> Weird article, a protest can be peaceful, but dont you need a permission?

The first amendment is quite clear about it

> Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances
To elucidate on this: the LLM can be viewed as a function that takes the context as an attachment and produces a probability distribution for the next token over all known tokens.

Most inference samples from that distribution using a composition of sampling rules or such, but there's nothing stopping you from just always taking the most probable token (temperature = 0) and being fully deterministic. The results are quite bland, but it's perfect for extraction tasks.

(note: GPT-4 is not fully deterministic; there's no details on this but the running theory is it is a mixture of experts model and that their expert routing algorithm is not deterministic/is dependent on the resources available)
Nice images, good quality!

Thanks!

Are all generated images public? or can we control privacy settings?
Won't they? https://theintercept.com/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role/
I expected some kind of "friend or foe" system.

Surveillance continues to improve as number of unsolved (and uninvestigated) crimes goes up. Coincidence?
Personally I think they do
> What do you mean by “Email is already decentralized”?

I can run my own email server in my basement, or on a VPS.

> But as a user of email provider you are a client to a server in a centralized network.

If I use my own email server, the network is only as centralised as the server itself; there's also nothing stopping me from hosting a second server on the other side of the planet, and using e.g. CockroachDB as the storage backend.

> Eppie is “more decentralized” because it is a p2p network, there are no servers.

What do I point my MX records at, then?

> in Eppie you can generate as many addresses as you want.

This strategy comes with its own shortcomings, and while it's a useful feature, it is not a be-all-end-all. There was a blog post which I can't find now, of some guy who had used it for something like a decade, detailing everything that went wrong with it: you need to keep track of which email you used where; people get confused which address to use to write you; once you decide to have a "primary" address, "for humans only", the scheme is more or less defeated as you can no longer afford to throw it away, etc.

Don't get me wrong - it's very useful to have this, and I think it should be a standard offering from any and every provider. Just like GMail made GB+ of storage space the standard, addresses are in fact cheap. But that doesn't end spam.

> And Whitelist is also in our backlog.

I'm actually more interested in the complementary problem. How do you plan to address deliverability from your end? As I said, self-hosting an email server today is trivial, compared to the effort in ensuring your email doesn't get rejected by @gmail.com, @outlook.com, @yahoo.com, etc. Which is the core reason why email tends to be more centralised nowadays (even if the underlying protocol and infrastructure supports and encourages federation/decentralisation).
Say you have a billion records in your table. If you want to filter the records on a column which has values that are on average 30 bytes, then an index on that column would be 30GB (uncompressed). It becomes extremely impractical to hold those indices in memory if you have several / dozens / hundreds.

The problem with row based database structures is that the data between any two rows can vary in length, so if scanning across rows on disk for a column's value, you need metadata that points at the start of each column. That means the process of scanning across the data on disk involves a _lot_ of jumping around; less of a problem on SSDs than it was on spinning platters, but still work.

The alternate approach is to store columns together on disk. That means that when performing a query that filters based on values in a given column, you can scan sequential areas on disk, which is much much faster. Of course, if you now want to assemble rows based on your filter, you need to use the metadata about where related values are in each other column in order to assemble those rows, but hopefully you have a much smaller set of records that you need to do this over. (It's cheaper to assemble 10k matching rows across a set of columns than it is to jump across a billion unaligned columns to filter them in the first place.)
We have PBS here in Denmark too, which sounds very much like PayTo. However, what you'll quickly find is, unless it's rolled into Stripe etc., that international businesses are not going to pay the premium of using PayTo on a subset of their userbase. Both implementation and billing through such a system is typically higher than continuing to bill debit cards directly.
It is possible for high voltage DC to be made safe. Currently, techniques to do so are neither cheap nor off-the-shelf.

For example, imagine I want a 3000 volt DC wire to power a portable air conditioner. The air conditioner will be 10 kilowatts, so 3.3 amps. The wire can be thinner than headphone cables (two 0.3mm conductors, +-1500 volts, 150um PTFE coating) if desired.

Obviously, with such a thin insulation, the system needs to be human safe when chewed through by a baby. To ensure that, the current flow through the baby must be under 1 milliamp, or 10 milliJoules through the baby's heart. That can be ensured by tracking the current through each conductor, accurate to 1 milliamp, and shutting off the supply if there is ever more than 1 milliamp unaccounted for (either to earth, or to the other conductor). When the shutoff occurs, it must therefore happen within 1 microsecond (assuming the worst case fault, that is all three amps direct to the baby's heart). That in turn puts capacitance and therefore length limits on the cable - it wouldn't be possible for this cable to be safe longer than ~1000 feet.

TL;DR: It is very possible, with today's technology, to design very high voltage DC systems safe enough for use within a home. However, no hardware available off-the-shelf yet can do this, due to no demand.
How can research predict this wave is coming to an end, when research also didn't think this wave would happen either. It seems like there are always people saying 'it can't be done'. Then it happens. If there was a way to predict the future, then wouldn't that research need to know how something would be implemented, in order to know it can't be?
A lot of us realized over the years that compilation time was a productivity killer.

The workflow can be adapted to slow compilation, obviously, with some discipline and a less iterative process.

But the ideal "flow" for many coders is attained with zero interruptions and being able to write-compile-test in a seamless fashion.

I think that the success of interpreters in many fields is related to this.

Modern compilers should maybe be split in two, a fast compile/slowish code/loose tests version and a "checks+release" one.

We have incredibly fast computers, instant compilation is feasible.
> quickly exhaust all the known accessible uranium deposits

The key thing here is "known". In order to "know" of the economic viability of a mining source you need to invest serious money. Mining companies have serious money, and they invest them to "prove" new reserves, because that's how they can get loans from banks. But once the reserves exceed whatever demand there is in the world for more than a hundred years, there's absolutely no incentive to keep exploring further. That's where we are now: there are about 8 million tons of proven uranium reserves [1]. The annual production fluctuates very slightly around 50,000 tons [2]. At the current production levels we have more than 150 years of proven reserves.

But if we were to suddenly double the number of reactors, we would very quickly double the proven reserves. If we were to multiply 100-fold the number of reactors, we'd multiply the proven reserves by 100, or more likely more than that.

In the end there is absolutely no limit. The current market price of uranium is about $130 per kg. It is estimated that it can economically be extracted from seawater for $1000/kg, so less than a factor of 10. Such a cost would not increase the cost of electricity by even one cent per kWh ( see the math in the notes).

As for breeder reactors or other designs. The current generation reactors produce about 40 to 60 GWday of energy from 1 ton of uranium fuel (which is generally enriched to close to 5% U-235). New designs will increase this number (called burnup) to 100 [3] and some even to 180, but generally not because they are more efficient, just because they'll use fuel enriched to up to 20% U-235. There are 2 designs that will exceed that, but they are supposed to burn thorium rather than uranium. We have easily 100 times less experience with thorium than uranium, so I wouldn't hold my breath that it's a piece of cake to achieve higher burnup with it. In theory we could, but practice finds ways to disagree with theory.

Notes: the math of 1 cent per kWh: you need about 10 tons of natural uranium to produce one ton of fuel-grade uranium, and with that you get about 50 GWd, or 50 x 24 = 1200 GWh = 1.2 billion kWh of electricity. 10,000 kg at $1000/kg is $10 MM for 1.2 billion kWh, or 0.83 cents/kWh.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...

[2] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/facts-and-figu...

[3] https://aris.iaea.org/sites/burnup.html
We usually just remark 'from the NASA', is not even needed to put "American". NASA it's worldwide known.
This is a very solid counterpoint to my argument. The no throw in a lambda is a fairly nasty wart and should have been handled in a more conformant way.
Thanks. What's the Ruby example? It's the one I'm most familiar in.
Groups that do those things have political clout. The average homeowner does not.
I haven't read the article (like many here) and I don't get why the writer would write this. LLMs/AI are not a stage where they can replace people or their jobs (broadly speaking), they still have to be taught and engineered to solve your problems. For example, if I enter a prompt "Write a Javascript function that does XYZ for me.", and don't get a desired result, it's unfair for me to say "ChatGPT bad, AI bad".

At this moment, you have to work with the limits, use better prompts, use ChatGPT as a guide and not as your personal robot. With that approach, I feel lots of revolutionary content is incoming in products. Use the tool better to get the most out of it.
Wallabag New Release 2.6.4
If it can generate enough energy to be dangerous then it probably has an economic use if enough of it can be gathered in one place Like the sun - as I recall per-m3 it isn't all that energetic but there is enough sun that it provided the energy for ~99% of all life on earth. Lots of not-quite-enough energy is enough energy.

That is part of why this "no human should set foot for 100,000 years" is silly. We only have recorded history going back a few thousand years, and all of civilisation was invented in that time. If humans are exist in 100,000 years we'll be using that century-long half life material for something important.
- Herman, J. R. "The response of stratospheric constituents to a solar eclipse, sunrise, and sunset." Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans 84.C7 (1979): 3701-3710.

- Sparavigna, Amelia Carolina. "Roman towns oriented to sunrise and sunset on solstices." Available at SSRN 2777118 (2016).

- Woolf, Harold M. On the computation of solar elevation angles and the determination of sunrise and sunset times. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1968.

- Teets, Donald A. "Predicting sunrise and sunset times." The College Mathematics Journal 34.4 (2003): 317-321.

- Greenwood, Margaret Stautberg. "Using rotation matrices to calculate the locations of sunrise and sunset, the hours of daylight, observed path of the Sun, and its elevation angle for any latitude." American Journal of Physics 91.7 (2023): 519-519.

- Muheim, Rachel, Susanne Åkesson, and John B. Phillips. "Magnetic compass of migratory Savannah sparrows is calibrated by skylight polarization at sunrise and sunset." Journal of Ornithology 148 (2007): 485-494.

- Verhulst, Tobias GW, and Stanimir M. Stankov. "Height-dependent sunrise and sunset: Effects and implications of the varying times of occurrence for local ionospheric processes and modelling." Advances in space research 60.8 (2017): 1797-1806.
My main takeaway from this was not actually from the posted article, but from this person's technique of publishing (unfinished?) draft articles on their blog [0] with a prefix of "[draft]".

For someone who struggles to finish blog articles, this seems to be a stroke of genius. I might have to try it. I can't help thinking that once you've published something, the impetus to complete or polish it may be higher too.

[0] https://vincelwt.com
Sending it into the sun could be a solution for a lot of our waste. But I wonder if the energy we need to produce/spend to first launch all of it into our orbit won't create more problems than what we're trying to get rid of.
SREcon23 – Making of a Low Latency Trading System with Go and Java at Coinbase [video]
Hah, cryptocurrency still desperately hoping to identify a problem it can solve. No thank you.
Can you (or someone else) write more about the advantages of DC/DC voltage conversion? If I understand correctly this was the main advantage of AC, and the reason why was it chosen.
Well yes, but then I’d have to pay for it. That ain’t happening.
Strange I had to scroll this far down to read what seems obvious on the face of it.
One of those major differences would be that each ‘process’ is incredibly lightweight, and a memory model that allows you to spawn millions of them without having to think about memory allocation or cpu contention
Letting anything access your production servers from outside is not amazing. There are multiple ways to do an append-only backup instead. Borg has a special mode for that, with the docs: https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/notes.html...
try refact.ai they have plugin for JetBrains IDEs and support for local LLMs https://github.com/smallcloudai/refact/
what does 52 mean when used as a verb, like in your comment?
You want to put a large amount of highly radioactive waste on top of a couple of tons of highly explosive rocket fuel? What could possibly go wrong?

Putting it deep underground is the safer option.
Just for this ship, essentially? No.

Fuel consumption of ships is relatively modest compared to the load carried.

Those other factors like time schedules would weigh heavier. But from between the lines, it reads like they'll work things out with some more training & paperwork.
One of the fascinating challenges with HVDC is that a circuit breaker - an off switch! - is a surprisingly complex and expensive piece of engineering. If the poles aren’t separated quickly enough, an arc can form and current continues to flow. This is usually undesirable.

(Technically AC has the same problem, but the problem is much more acute for DC at the same voltage.)

You know the joke/story about how nasa spent millions of dollars developing a pen that can write in space, and the soviets used a pencil? Well, the circuit breaker version of this is that the west built crazy complex huge high voltage circuit breakers, and the Soviets just built, uh, “single use” circuit breakers. With explosives.

(I don’t know if this is true, I have never found a source, but it feels true, it should be true, I so desperately want it to be true.)
> they don’t use that to control optimization levels applied to various code.

GCC does. I think LLVM does to some extent too.
>As long as more of the gross profit goes to workers, that's a step in the right direction.

That's now how the lesser paid workers will see it, unfortunately.

>Though I would say the linear solution is paying everyone $6k more, which is much better!

That would be flat (Y = 6000 vs Y = 1.X%). Perhaps better, but I'm not sure if that's been done outside of stimulus checks.

I think what the person up chain was alluding to was to increase minimum wage or similar initiatives. Doesn't help the higher end of the working class but helps out the lower end immensely, and indirectly helps out the middle as well.
Microsoft Still Prohibits Google or Alibaba from Running O365 Windows Apps
Hmm

class PlaceOrder

Verb classes always give me the willies, all a bit ... Javaey?
I have pre-processed the dataset in a generic conversational format. It's not just raw scraped QnA from Wiki or FAQ's. For few questions which seemed sensitive, I added recommendations to consult a professional mental health care. Transcripts of therapy won't be reliable here because they might contain PII's, unwanted dialogues etc.
So I freely admit to not being a mathematician, however, I am a person who used to jump off swings a LOT, and indeed used to have informal contests with my friends about who could make the most reckless and dangerously long jumps from a swing with little thought to life or limb (we were teenage boys).

So having said that, I’m not sure how the OP calculated the results but 2m is far too small for a max distance. When we used to jump from the swing our goal was to always jump so far we made it out of the “swing area” where there was wood chippings on the ground and onto the grass beyond. Making to the grass was our bare minimum for a “good jump”

So I would say the minimum for a “good jump” us would be 3 meters, and anything above that would be reaching the standards of recklessness which got us a good teenage buzz going on.
Looks like a cell phone recording of a monitor. It's also slightly askew, you can tell the horizontal lines are not quite horizontal. The bright explosion likely confused the autofocus, or maybe the person holding the camera jumped.
Makes sense. No sense getting (pre-approved for) a mortgage if there's not enough inventory. Also, I would imagine banks have to be more conservative as prices have yet to full correct (i.e., fall). They don't a loan that the asset can't cover.
Why We Don't Shoot Nuclear Waste into Space [video]
German businesses’ confidence falls as economy stagnates
My CSP won’t be happy to include unsafe-inline. Inline styles are hard to override. Not overthinking but I try to put some consideration for the folks using userStyles for their accessibility.

Naming things is often hard, but at least with UI you’re usually building something concrete so there should be some name—if not a wrapper that holds more loose parts you can’t easily control (like a #Content element around some reStructuredText output).

The cascading part is a double-edged sword tho. It can be used to great effect for good, but it can be unweildy with a disparate or undisciplined team. But it’s often better to work with it rather than fight uphill against the only style engine we have in browsers (if feasible)—the output will generally be smaller & easier to follow with less to know or maintain.
Some parts are okay. It's one of the books that hasn't aged very well though, similar to JavaScript: The Good Parts.

A lot of it tackles flaws in Java itself, and assumes that OO in geeral has the same problems. For example passing an object instead of multiple parameters into a function. It's one of the suggestions that our team just agreed to reject for Kotlin/Dart because we could set default values.

Uncle Bob is generally one of the best in explaining why problems happen, though you have to step aside and think whether the solution he proposes is the best.
Yes, I know this is mostly a +1 comment, but this is a huge differentiator from other systems I have worked in where "oh I need concurrency..." becomes a question of what libs, styles, where are the gremlins in the library, where are the state gremlins in our code, etc etc. Vs with Elixir you just sort of go "actually I need two of these. actually I need 200 of these. actually..." and it "just works".

Not that there isn't any stuff to learn there, you have to understand how actors pass messages, how you can unintentionally bottle neck via call (caller waits for a reply) vs cast (caller keeps going), etc but its very surprise-free because, surprise surprise, Erlang has been built from the ground up for concurrency and generally worked out how it should work 30 years ago instead of bolting some keywords in.
https://archive.ph/Ubchq
Yes, this about turn is clearly a result of deciding the the bill is likely to actually pass and therefore they should get on board and steer it in the direction that they want.
I guess the image above the article is also AI-generated - at first glance it looks like a compass lying in a grassy field, but if you take a closer look, it becomes deeply unsettling: you realize that's not grass, it looks more like coarse, monstrous hair, and it's not a compass either, it's the misshapen child of a pocket watch that had sex with a compass, useless because of a complete lack of hands or a compass needle, begging you to put it out of its misery, and the lid, if you tried to close it, wouldn't even fit over the lower part, this is wrong in so many many ways, aaaaargh...
You're pointing out the best that humanity is capable of. He's pointing out that people judge LLMs by their worst performances. You're not disagreeing with the parent comment.
> it’s difficult to ensure consistency from repair to repair,

Car companies will argue that all third party car mechanic shops should close down because its difficult to ensure consistency.
New Swiss Data Privacy Law from First September
Switzerland is the latest European/EU-adjacent country to align their data privacy framework with GDPR. You've got to wonder why it took so long to update their Federal Data Protection Act, which dates back to 1992.
Or just use thicker insulation? Not aware of any AC unit that uses such a thin power cord.