skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It’s probably a pretty smart idea. The “ideal tax” is probably a wealth indexed income tax. We don’t like the idea of just taxing wealth because you have it. We do tax income but it’s hard to scale it in a way that people perceive as fair. What we want is to make it harder for the rich to get richer without making it harder for the poor to get rich. That is, if you’re a billionaire, every dollar is taxed at 99 cents. If you have no money it’s taxed at 0. And if you’re middle class it’s done at a rate ballpark like today.

But measuring wealth as a pre req to implement a tax is really hard. You can assume that wealthy people own the wealth generating assets though basically by definition. A 0.1% tax on financial transactions would affect very little in the average Americans life. It would matter immensely to people who derive their income largely by sitting back and collecting economic rent.
I have no idea if they do it to for ad reasons, but Google has been creatively interpreting search queries for a long while now. I think it's one of (maybe the primary) the reasons why Google search quality has fallen so much.

It's not a huge stretch to think that while they're at it, they would take into account advertisers. Again, not saying they are -- only that it wouldn't be that shocking.
> That one is from 2020

Then it is outdated.

The new information related to the belt and road project's failures has only started to come up in the last couple years.

I can understand why someone who doesn't have the updated information, based on recent economic data, would have a more nuanced view.

But we have the new information now.
you are right, it was abandoned. I forgot about that.

From my understanding there never was an official successor, that's why I consider VeraCrypt a fork.
Reload with Javascript disabled to remove the distracting fake mouse pointers.
It is much cheaper to offer online courses than to offer in-person courses.

Source: I teach college.

What if state schools offered free online tuition?

Cheating would be an issue, so we make the students take some tests in testing centers (like we did for industry IT certs before the reaction to COVID-19 started.)

We gradually automate as much as we can using tools like AI.
Ha Stable Diffusion is very similar I notice. People understanding and thriving in new techniques and advanced workflows, mixed in with people who want to generate boobies in new ways.
AWS stirs the MadPot – Security exec spills tea on hush-hush threat Intel tool
> 3 billion parameters is a bit large for most smart devices, is it not?

Not really. A 3B model quantized to 4 bits should run in any reasonable smartphone (using around 2GB of memory).
Mayday | Senior backend engineer (Python) | Paris, France | Onsite | Full time

Mayday is an early stage SaaS B2B startup that hosts knowledge bases for customer service professionals. We are well funded and already have many well known domestic customers (both entreprise and medium sized businesses).

We're hiring a python backend engineer at a senior level (with 4-6 years of experience). The position is part of the data science team (1 lead -- me, 1 junior data scientist and 1 data engineer).

The role entails a maintaining microservices written in python (including a search engine that runs on elasticsearch, machine learning models, genAI features), as well as the many asynchronous processes that enrich our clients' documents.

We're looking for someone with a strong experience with asynchronous processes (we use rabbitMQ, redis, sometimes through celery) and interaction with elasticsearch. The candidate will be expected to uphold good coding practices in Python within the team, and maintain microservices (we use fastAPI) and their deployment.

Reach out to me here or directly on the posting:
https://www.welcometothejungle.com/fr/companies/mayday/jobs/...
Just this week:

- Snyk

- Fastly's support site

- background blur on Meet and Zoom
Depends on your definition of edge or smart device.

My phone can run a 7B parameter model at 12 tokens per second, which is probably faster than most humans are comfortable reading, and definitely faster than a virtual assistant would speak.

Out of curiosity, I tested a 3B parameter model, and it runs at about 21 tokens per second on my phone.
It is not a hard thing to villify people who destroy art, or destroy monuments like on Berlin.

If these kind of protest are ok, then I presume that aggression on Jan6 was also justified?

Kind of asking, because the world is crazy and I am not sure what my opinions should be.
Keyboard layouts are such a pet peeve of mine on so many layers. Using custom keyboards and/or layouts is a pain because there is no standard way of defining layout and furthermore most systems do not support arbitrary layers/modifiers/layouts which are critical for reduced key count keyboards. The standard national layouts often being poor fit for technical use only makes the situation more annoying.
Nature abhors a vacuum. If western countries are not setting up credit facilities, someone else will.

It might be predatory private entities looking to get their hands on state assets, or it might be the Saudis or Chinese looking to exert more political power.

If we want to seal ourselves off from most of the world and stop trading or participating in regional security arrangements, then this is a reasonable approach.

I think people underestimate how much of our material wealth in the west is reliant on these trade and security arrangements.

Countries like the United States can pursue a North Korean model and try to produce everything domestically, but the standard of living is going to plummet.
Context,

Critical vulnerabilities in Exim threaten over 250k email servers worldwide (https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/09/critical-vulnerabil...)
I don't see how you can drag someone's credentials to prove he isn't a useful idiot. Malcolm Caldwell, famous for being the very embodiment of a useful idiot was a research fellow at UCL.

Other defenders of the Red Khmers had even more impressive credentials. Need I remind you who was the writer of "Distortions at Fourth Hand" and "Manufacturing Consent"?

By definition, all useful idiots have impressive credentials. Without credentials, they are not useful.
I think several of us in here were responding to @yndoendo's view of economics. The "coffee shop" was just their chosen example and we were not trying for an exhaustive treaty on economics.

I don't have statistics on how much money is "under the mattress". I expect little enough that I don't need it. All the more so when our oh-so diligent govt mostly doesn't care either and navigates based on "money supply" actually in circulation. Happy to be corrected if someone has data.
Because public uni income now is obscene (IMHO) and under our broken two party system, funding would likely be much less as the parties squabble over funding and making compromises.

It would also be interesting to see how the government deals with the often-immense income from college athletics programs (football, basketball, etc).
2015-2019 average baseline.

It can be debated what model should be used and governments don't always have consistent methods of baselining. With different models you can compute some excess mortality in Sweden but those have their own flaws.

But it's worth calling out here that the reason you have to dive into the details of what precise baseline model you use is because the number of deaths was so very tiny on the scale of a country. A simple graph showing the absolute numbers puts it in perspective:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...

Alternatively, a graph of deaths per 100k people shows how surprisingly normal 2020 was in Sweden:

https://i0.wp.com/swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/swede...

It looks initially dramatic but that's only due to the massive drop in 2019. In reality 2020 had the same number of deaths per pop as in 2015! Nothing special happened in 2015.

Given that 2019 was an abnormally low year, 2020 would have been a bit higher than normal anyway even with no pandemic. But we're still looking at numbers pretty much within the realm of normal variance. If somehow you'd never heard of COVID, then someone had shown you that graph and asked "did something catastrophic happen in this decade" you'd probably have said no. Although 2020 is a bit higher, it's on the order of a few thousands of people, not something you could have noticed in a country of millions short of saturation-level media coverage.

That's why it's hard to say but important to hear: these levels of death simply do not matter. How do we know? Because some countries have had high and persistent levels of excess death since the end of the pandemic, but as COVID isn't the explanation hardly anyone cares. There's just no link between levels of death and severity of reaction, in our society.
Sure, there are some beneficial things that the government does. Like roads, police, fire, regulatory agencies; all the usual things that are cited as "We live in a society" line items. But those things are a tiny minority of government spending.

The VAST majority of the federal budget goes to entitlements. Another massive chunk goes to paying interest on debt because we spent money we didn't have on entitlements. An similarly large chunk goes to defense (Which you could make an argument for, except the VAST majority of which is not actually used for defense, but intervening in far away conflicts)

So going back to all the "society" items, well, the roads, infrastructure electricity, basic services, police, clean water, airports; all the stuff you really need for a society: They're a tiny, minute sliver of the money the government takes from us on a regular basis. You could reduce taxes by 90% and still provide everything you need from a functional society without the parasitic drain on the economy.
You jest but I’ve lately been wondering if the current optimal strategy is to wait out the seemingly 10ish or fewer years to human-supplanting AI living on a tropical island and partying it up, since all the possible outcomes post singularity are extreme (extinction, dystopia, utopia).
The Creative Brainstorming System of Eric Berne (2019) [pdf]
I'll concede this point - it is primarily about communication.

In theory you can resolve this (I'm at a remote company now and think gathertown is a great tool for this), but the lift is high and I suspect the majority of remote companies are operating at a net negative vs. colocation because of this.

Even with these tools, some natural amount of human communication/interaction is lost. It mostly hurts spontaneous collaboration and junior engineers - the threshold for these (comms/collab) is higher than in the office even in ideal remote conditions. Normal human team bonding/relationship building stuff is also lost (and useful for building a high performance culture).

This is also assuming you're at least within mostly the same or close timezones, add that into the mix and it gets even worse.

Other people replying don't understand what I mean by the market solving this. If remote is truly advantageous then startups that are remote first should out compete those that aren't. Empirically this appears to not be true and at least in SF and AI (the sector with the largest return likely in the next decade) people are going back to being colocated because of its advantages (primarily around communication and cycle times).

Mostly I see motivated reasoning primarily as the argument in favor of remote being better. I get it, I work remotely - there are nice quality of life advantages, but I still think it's competitively worse for companies in almost all cases.
Notes from the Git Contributor's Summit, 2023
It seems hard to imagine, if its training has been on small chunks of text, that the model has a way of understanding a large codebase.

But this stuff keeps on surprising me.
Haha fair, sorry to hijack. I do think strategic buying can be super advantageous, but it's hard to do that when you're also laboring under the mental load of being poor. But, yeah clear guides or maybe just less opportunity to buy junk (better regulations) would probably bear a lot of fruit here.
I agree totally. It makes having conversation between multiple people very awkward with many pauses, then suddenly people all talking over each other, then again awkward pauses. It feels like online meetings are way more "centralized" in the sense that only a couple of people speak, and most other people remain silent. There are other technical problems to video conferencing, but lag is one of the biggest.
I don't believe they're acting in bad faith either, and certainly nothing is being removed it from the system as the clickbait title implies. The user has the option to stop if from being removed, and the team recommends "adding Tor to Microsoft’s protection software exclusion list and restoring “tor.exe” from quarantine if Defender affected Tor’s operation". Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Go work with James. Verified awesome leadership.
> Unfortunately, there is a class of people that work in tech that will bear the brunt of the ensuing corporate abuse: H-1B visa employees, whose immigration status is predicated on their ongoing employment. Their ability to hop from abusive companies onto lifeboats is, on the best of days, limited.

This comes up a lot around here in discussions about uncomfortable employer decisions.

The H-1B visa is certainly restrictive, but it is by no means the indentured-servitude visa that people make it out to be.

I’ve hired a fantastic employee who was at the time in the US on an H-1B visa. The process was straightforward. I was at a small startup at the time, so we didn’t have a big hiring team to lean on or anything. There was some friction — we needed to do more paperwork, and that pushed things out by maybe a week or two. And we had to pay lawyers and some filing fees — perhaps $10-15k. Which isn’t nothing, but also is fine if you get a great employee out of the deal.

My understanding of the H-1B visa is that it requires that the visa holder maintains a job matching there description that the visa was issued for, and in the case of a job loss, the visa holder has a (painfully short) 6 weeks to find new employment. So, stressful for sure, but workable, especially with a little planning, as this article suggested in any case.

The L-1, in contrast is (mostly) non-transferable, and the limited transfer options require the original employer to initiate.

I bring this up not to dismiss the stress imposed by the 6-week H-1B unemployment scramble, but rather to remind everyone here (employers and employees alike) that H-1B status doesn’t impose all that much of a hurdle. If you are in the US on one, don’t hold back from applying for new jobs! If you’re hiring, don’t be afraid if you see that a candidate is in the US on a H-1B!
Adding attention cache memory is an extremely interesting solution to this problem.

If anyone is curious, there was another paper [0] that came out a few days ago that made a related observation in Vision Transformers. Transformer models appear to pick tokens to store global information in - they need tokens to "think". You can eek some performance improvements (and cool explanation images) by providing the model with specific tokens for this purpose.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.16588.pdf
Which led to this classic exchange: https://twitter.com/stillreezy/status/1507445282778206209
> and their voicework is owned by their clients who may not be as incentivised in protecting the VO.

The work product produced by their voice for fulfilling the contract is owned. No corp owns someone else's voice.
Wilhelm Reich on pleasure and the genesis of anxiety (2021)
Meh, still the same software. Still the same screen reader that's not gotten a substantial update in like 3 or so years, and even on my Acer Spin 713 with 16 GB RAM, even Emacs, Emacspeak, and IBM TTS under Crostini is more responsive than local Google TTS models. So nah I'm just not the target audience. At least Orca can run properly on Crostini, unlike WSL, and Linux windows don't just... vanish when plugging in my dock connected to a monitor and Ethernet. But not even Crostini makes me want to pull out the Chromebook, ever. I update the thing, look in ChromeVox options and what's new page to see if anything has improved, and then put it away. It's a great piece of hardware, a high end model, just with very lackluster accessibility.
> and continue pocketing record profits–which drive inflation–while their workers’ wages stagnate

Inflation does not work that way!
NeoHaskell
How much does starlink cost? Can you really afford to be without internet for that long?
South Asians Are Divided over a Pending Ban on Caste Discrimination
the SEO folks are starting to pollute reddit threads, too.
> Everyone commutes through traffic/crowded public transport and risk catching the latest novel virus, to arrive at work at the same time. Everyone has lunch at the same time so it’s crowded as heck and we get even more mortal danger.

Apropos username.
I would suggest setting up a 'forward proxy' on localhost with a piece of software such as nginx. With a sufficiently large hard disk or SSD, you can set the cache lifetime to be something very long like a month or two. Ideally, you'll be able to have your most frequented Web pages available offline. In practice, I've found DNS to be the biggest challenge, as browsers like to check the domain name too frequently; you'll probably need to cache that as well. I can share a prototype nginx configuration that I have been trying, if you like.

More immediately, Kiwix is fantastic for this. I have the entirety of Wiktionary downloaded - the complete "English to X dictionary" where X is about 50 languages - and it only takes up 8GiB. Install at least two different Kiwix client applications; there are occasionally glitches that make one unable to show a certain page. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow might be good Kiwix libraries for your use-case.
This is google trying to get people more interested in Chromebooks and ChromeOS. ChromeOS device sales have dropped faster and farther than any other compute device in the past year.
As someone getting paid twice that, I don't like being in the office 3 days a week especially because it's mandatory and there's also sorts of tracking going on.
Yeah, one of the "worst" (good for metrics, bad for legibility) parts of the trend of moving to discord for any sort of online community is that you have to "join" the community to even view any of the resources ensconced within. Meaning it's poorly indexed (discord search is okay, but not great) and not available at all to external crawlers.
I think the covert strategy here on the part of companies is to reduce staffing cost. The author alludes to the fact that H-1B visa employees will bear the brunt of these policies; the top performers (i.e. the expensive ones) will quit because they have other opportunities.

And I suspect this is exactly what the managers want: Decrease headcount and decrease average salaries to make the company look good next quarter. That's what they get rewarded for. They don't get penalized for decreasing the collective talent or productivity of the company in the long term; they get rewarded for decreasing costs in the short term. So that's what they're going to do in the guise of an RTO policy.
Is it so hard to ask the user to put instructions at the beginning? Claude 100K asks users to put instructions at the end.

Or you just use a quick model to check if there area instructions at the end and bring it to the beginning.
One option would be similar to function calling, give the llm an output it can make that changes how the context is parsed. That's a layer on top rather than changing how the llm itself works.
How do you guarantee there isn't some logic flashed onto the chip that overrides the bootloader sequence?

btw, I asked about this 5 months ago [0] and got some interesting replies. I ended up purchasing a PCEngines board (just before they went out of business)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35568984
Also that pound of oil gets shipped around the world (or pipelined across half the continent), refined, and then trucked some more.

I could never get the exact numbers but wouldn't be surprised if takes 3+ pounds of oil to get that 1 lb into the car's tank.
Not to say companies should or shouldn't RTO etc, but the shocking freedom and flexibility of remote work in tech is such a gigantic class marker and insane lifestyle luxury that I'm surprised it's not more often identified a such.

How few people in history have been able to travel to exotic places or visit far-off friends and family, while still making decent money, and do this almost as much as they want (supposing lifestyle and relationships that allow this, which is true for many people). I mean, people in tech who vacation in tropical climes then spend cherished time with parents and siblings and friends living thousands of miles away, and don't worry about running out their vacation time: dozens of weeks of cherished traveling, if that's what you want! Along the way developing fundamentally different types of family relationships or accruing worldly sophistication.

Forget about little medical or technological things that mark a break from the past: lots of people can afford tylenol and iPhones and Spotify. This is a class marker of epic proportion. This is a way of life that Tolstoy ascribed to the very wealthiest of Moscow's aristocratic families and bachelors (most certainly not even all of the aristocratic class).
Looks like it. Not quite as consumer grade as I expected; "contact us for a quote" = $$$.
What tools were used to create the audio? For example, the exact patterns of dither-based noise shaping[1] may reveal insight, but are by definition inaudible. Or perhaps there's an ultrasound source - something recorded near old-school CRT monitors may have a 15.75kHz tone, ordinarily outside the threshold of hearing but shows up as a clear peak on a spectrogram.

[1]: https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/hear-effects-dithering/
That's good to hear it still worked OK.

I recommend Chromebooks to lots of people who have trouble using Windows and end up calling me when their storage is entirely filled with malware. The issue I had was the really short support/EOL for these things. They finally just switched it up -- I think they now receive 10 years of support, which is even better than Apple's great 7 years. Another reason to use them.
I've recently rode through a Belt&Road project: The Lao high-speed train. In my opinion, it shows the complete failure of the Chinese government. The high-speed train is a reasonably great train that goes through dozens (hundreds?) of mountains and rivers (through tunnels and bridges). It does that while enabling you to work from the comfort of your chair. And while it's not high-speed (as in 300Km/h), it is reasonably fast.

The train station locations, however, are just non-sense. This is because they are too far, and for many stations, there is no "road" to connect to the city. Couple that with the retarded system they have to check-in which requires you to be in the station one hour before your train departs and suddenly a 40 minutes ride becomes a 2.5 hours ride. Might as well just use a regular bus?

In my opinion, the Chinese government is still living in the 80s (along with 80s technology). The Chinese economy (or parts of China) is living in a parallel reality with companies that are quite developed if not world-class. This means the Chinese government can "execute" quite advanced projects while being a peasant itself.

It's not clear what's sustaining the central government in China, or what's the level of discontent in the productive provinces.
The combination of beer and nobody talking doesn't exist.