skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Agile methodologies simply refuse to answer "when will it be done"-related questions. Even with perfect estimators, it's an intractable problem when you can add new features of unknown complexity to the backlog at any time.

I'm unconvinced. If new features of unknown complexity are getting added to your product backlog with the expectation that estimations are done against them and not that exploratory work is planned and undertaken instead, that's a problem with the culture and not with the process.

Scrum in particular (according to Coplien et al. at least) is meant to handle prioritization of work as a conversation between the people who want stuff built and the people actually doing the work to get stuff built. The only thing it recommends—not even prescribes—as it relates to estimation uncertainty is embracing the framework to chart a new course more easily when the facts change.

A big pattern that is prescribed (though perhaps only implicitly via reiterating that the product backlog is strictly in delivery order when work starts) is that the product backlog is append-only when you don't want to trigger more planning and, as a direct consequence, draw up a new refined product backlog for everyone to work from. If you need to reorder your product backlog items to add something in the middle, that's a signal that the facts have changed, and the plan needs to be redone. That isn't prima facie all that different from a more traditional project management method.

Agile only aims to make planning suck a little less to change by baking certain touch-points into the process so that someone can pull the proverbial andon cord unceremoniously.

> Agile is better suited for exploration of a product space

More apropos this, if you've ever heard of a spike solution, that's agile's attempt at controlling for uncertainty when it isn't exactly clear how to do something or how long something will take. It necessarily triggers additional planning, and the product backlog item for it is a clear display of the uncertainty inherent in delivering that helps determine where in the ordering that work should fall.

Likewise, if you generally know what the roadmap looks like and have confidence that it won't change, the uncertainty is still in the humans doing the work. I've always put vacations and bereavements and on call shifts and other kinds of fixed-date "generally not available for product work" things into the product backlog, and having that visible to everyone with stake in the work is always valuable.
There are two guardrails: 0. not being unprofessionally, unnecessarily critical 1. while delivering and receiving necessary constructive feedback about usability. It's a signal suggesting narcissistic tendencies without an ability to cooperate or grow, to be against listening to constructive feedback or complaining about the gift of feedback if it wasn't delivered in precisely your perfectly arranged, expected format and process others aren't aware of.
No, I am very happy with Scala, and intend to use it for many years to come.

JVM tooling IMO is fantastic, it is one of the largest open source communities, and there are many options if you don't like Gradle or Maven. Also, as I understand it, the dependency management systems found in languages like Python and Node are horrible in comparison to the JVM, where it is usually not a problem.
Looks like you did the move. It's really weird because it changed the timestamps on all the comments... They are even different between my "threads" page and what I see when I click through.
Thank you for this – I've been wondering how this would work with inbound roaming phones!

I think visibility of this setting used to be tied to the phone's configured region, but the new behavior makes more sense for inbound roaming users.
I got an email about some kind of generative ai and chat bot that was rolling out in the ads platform, but I still don't see it on any of our accounts.

Responsive search ads are not generative ai
This is the "trust me bro" argument and while trends have shown that Apple supports stuff longer than most other manufacturers, there is no guarantee.
Aces are the low card in the game. You are not the first person to say this! I need to look at the math again to make them high cards...

However in my opinion (at risk of getting everyones ire) - I think the ace is the "1" card.
> if the distribution is significantly unlike the general distribution of the population, see that as an indicator that something is wrong.

most technical roles are >80% men (e.g., google) but companies don't provide breakdowns by functional roles to avoid conversation with people who think like this.

are you ageist if 12% of your talent isn't above the age of 60? once you open a debate about available talent, it ceases to be a useful metric.
Strong static typing is better when used well, but worse when it's used poorly.

That last part is the catch, and I've seen plenty of people think they're using it well when they're actually using it very, very, very poorly.

Dynamic typing isn't just a convenience sometimes, sometimes it helps compensate for poorly planned type structures.

Like a lot of things, there are tradeoffs in terms of what types of errors you want to avoid more.
I don’t know how happy many people would be going from a $900 flagship to a base-tier budget phone.

Granted it might be faster (though looking at Geekbench scores between budget Android phones [0] and the 5-year-old iPhone XS [1] I’m not overly convinced of that either), but the price of manufacturing “nice” doesn’t drop nearly as fast as silicon.

Budget phones often compromise on build and camera and screen quality (even though the latter two often look great on spec sheets) and I think the average person would notice that far more than raw performance.

[0] https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/13300565

[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/8426067
I haven't studied antitrust policy in ages, but IIRC one aspect of this in the past has been to forbid the monopolist from peeking at their competitors' prices.
The interpretation of the LLM having a "world model" is a big stretch in terminology. Encoding a coherent or accurate set of spatial coordinates for places is not equivalent to understanding the actuality of world space and the relationship between items in that space. By this definition an accurate spreadsheet of the lat-long of every major city would also constitute a "world model". It shouldn't be surprising to anyone that a model trained on (likely many) such spreadsheets would also encode that coordinate data. What's notable is that it still takes a team of human researchers to plot these raw numbers onto a map and to interpret them as experiential differentiators in physical space.

There's no doubt that an LLM can uncover whatever is structurally included in its training data, even if that encoding is implicit. What's less believable is that the LLM somehow achieves a grounded understanding of physical aspects of experience purely from streams of raw text.

I think the paper engages in some equivocation here, as the abstract differentiates between "an enormous collection of superficial statistics" and "a coherent model of the data generating process", without admitting that the first should well imply the second. But that doesn't then further imply a "world model" in the sense that we understand it as sentient beings. For us, an internal model is useful, but when our model or texts don't agree with the actuality of the world, the actuality of the world takes precedence. For an LLM there is no distinguishing between its trained representations and an actual exterior place, or even any sense that an exterior space exists.
Great so biological neurons can perform feats of intuition, that simulated neurons simply can't. Even theoretically. Gotcha. Thank you very much for the explanation.
Because Amazon is a retail company and the amount that Amazon charges is not much different than the cost overhead of getting any product through the channel.
OK, but at that point we're assuming some or all of the evidence that exists for MKULTRA was fabricated, intentionally declassified and released, while taking for granted that those documents are still accurate except for any part that discredit the program's effectiveness.

That the government wanted the public to know that these heinous experiments were taking place, just to try to convince them they didn't work, when it would have been much easier and more effective to simply never reveal them to begin with if they did work.

And if what the MKULTRA documents themselves say don't matter, then all of this is just a matter of faith. What is there to even discuss if the evidence doesn't matter one way or the other? Anything could be a coverup, false flag or misdirection.
Yes. I've got plans for this - sign up for free credits. lol :-)
You are confusing unrelated things. As used here, "MFN" refers to a common type of term found in standard business contracts that have nothing to do with the WTO or the government. This discussion is about Amazon's use of MFN terms when contracting with ordinary domestic businesses.
Fair point. Thanks for informing me.
This is the sort of position that is baffling to me. Software engineers claim to be very logical, but this boils down to a preference being stated as some kind of objective truth. Show the evidence (not anecdotes) that static typing gives benefits that are worth the cost. My anecdotal evidence is that I rarely come across problems in production code that would be solved by static typing and people make the same sorts of logic mistakes in languages like Java and Typescript.
That same document said their policy is to convert crypto to USD, so presumably they didn't suffer from later crashes.
No I don't.

Now go and rewrite your dynamic language's runtime in a dynamic language.
Awesome thx!
“Blinkist” for Podcasts – short AI summaries of any English podcast
I’m seeking a brief almost hands-on introduction to how probing is done: in earlier papers and here. Suggestions? (Preferably with some photographs of napkin drawings.))
IPs and Enums added.
Dude, Where's My Self-Driving Car?
A look at the state of self driving cars.
They have about a 38% market share of e-commerce in the US, far ahead of any competitors, but also far from 90%.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/274255/market-share-of-t...
It sounds like you have an implicit prejudice against those who do not "keep [their] mind open to situations that [they] have not considered", since the way you phrased your concern is moral in nature. You see it as morally bad not to have an open mind in that way.
Every language will have people who make extreme statements of one kind or another. I wouldn't call that representative of the community in general.
The real elephant in the room is that Google has claimed a commitment to this or that for X number of years so many times and changed their minds it isn't even funny. They just killed a Pixel support program last month before ever fulfilling the commitment they made for it...

Nobody should buy this marketing line unless they have a contract guaranteeing some penalty for Google for failing to uphold this.
What advantage are vector databases providing above using an index in conjunction with a mature database? I’m not sold on this as a separate technology.

Vector search is useful, but I don’t understand why I would go out of my way when I could implement FAISS or HNSWlib as an adjunct to postgres or a document store.
No, this is like a drug dealer that calls the cops to report someone stole $10k of product and exchange the police requires the drug dealer to keep supplying the one with the same product on the ground that product is on of satisfactory quality.

It’s a wrong analogy.
aces low - yes!
An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded.

It is both useful and allowed to have a certain level of belief that won’t be crossed without heavy effort. The OP didn’t even say they were closed to the conversation completely, but that a random person with no pre built trust isn’t going to get the time of day from them to rehash the same settled argument.
>3 different checkers that I found online and if they don't all agree then I don't call it plagiarism

How do you verify these "different checkers" aren't all going to the same api or using the same software? How do you know they aren't using a similar heuristic method? What is the false positive rate of each? Have you seen the research that shows text from non-native speakers are more often falsely detected as being AI[1]?

[1] https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1705057915625697712
> every crypto company and plenty of scamsters of all sorts seem to be located in Dubai

This is largely because of the Russia-Ukraine war/escalation in 2022.

Before that, Russia was a major FDI player in the Baltic states, but after 2022 Russian citizens were largely cut off.
Automating the generation of this beast from the test runnners output was fun. It's an essential part of the qualification documents.
Arguably, nullability and mutability are issues that cause far, far more issues than dynamic typing.
You are touching on a point that Benedict Evans has made quite eloquently in the past:

>There was a joke a few years ago that rent is the new [Customer Acquisition Cost], and that now applies to everything. The [Total Addressable Market] for search ads is not ‘advertising’ (let alone online advertising) but everything that is spent to reach and serve a customer, starting with retail rents. This applies to Amazon, but even more to Google - you can ask whether Google’s ads are ‘advertising’ or ‘marketing’, but also ask whether the TAM for buying placement in Google search results is ‘advertising’, ‘marketing’ or just its customers’ operating margins. How do you reach a consumer? Do you spend your budget on TV ads or search ads, or on retail rents, or on giving retailers a margin versus selling direct, or giving the retailer a better price for better placement, or free shipping, or a better returns policy? Everything below P&G’s COGS line is up for grabs.

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/3/6/ways-to-thi...

There will be no site that does not offer advertising, because advertising allows the site to determine which sellers can afford to pay more while still being profitable. It's a scaled version of the same way a landlord will raise rents on a profitable storefront.
> Problems can be: your idea is bad, your architecture doesn't fit together, your performance is bad, your calculations are wrong, etc. Static typing, when done well, can help prevent many more of these issues than that narrow definition of "bug".

I don't see how static typing helps with "solving the wrong problem" kind of issues at all. That's what asking deep questions about the business is for. Maaaaybe DDD can do something here, but that's hardly "static typing".

> I directly addressed the subject of testing in my original post. Static typing allows me to write many fewer tests than dynamic typing.

I noticed here that you didn't make any difference between testing, PBT, MT and proof systems. That's pretty bad. I won't conflate Haskell-style good type systems with C-style horrible type systems, so you shouldn't do the same with testing.
the easiest would be to add to ~/.ssh/config:

host *.*.*.*

hostname 64:ff9:%h

(without the empty line)

Also work with scp, rsync,
I think the author is just rally feed up by people not searching closed issues, opening duplicates and being annoying about the same already discussed issues again and again.

That doesn't make it good, but understandable.

Not reading or looking into the context is also a common HN I mean how many people commenting did look up the context?

And why is a small open source crate for a minor annoying design aspect even on hacker news just because it's called base64????????
Figma bought [Diagram](https://diagram.com) this year, so this is inevitable and unsurprising
Brian is also the author of the Atlantic article (OP).
Aces are low :-)
I think you're being a bit too sensitive, and it's not personal. Someone is espousing a (bad) technical opinion about their field of work, it's not unreasonable to say you respect them less in their field of work. That's not personal.

It's like if you met a builder who refused to use a hammer and insisted on bashing nails in with the back of their drill. It's not "personal" to say you'd respect that person less as a builder, regardless of how much you'd enjoy having a drink with them.
She does not want to pay. It’s not a case of a financial hardship.
Plot twist: the government already does, it's even more costly than the private sector, it's still ineffective, and you get to pay for it!
Hopefully the work on Ferrocene can contribute to the standardization of the Rust language.

Tracking issue: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/113527
Aces low ;-)
I'm not questioning the numbers but still find them absurd. How can it be a full time (or maybe 70%) job to take care of the plants of a single unit?
I think the conversation becomes a lot easier once you recognize that there is no such thing as untyped data.

There's only explicit typing and implicit typing.

So the only real argument you're having with someone is when writing a piece of code, do they want the caller of the code or the input of the code's data type to be known or they want the data type to be a mystery to be figured out, occasionally in production when shit hits the fan.
I think everytjing is one ppint except that this page doesnt mention Go(lang) anywhere.
Splitting off AWS wouldn't be enough on its own, but I think the argument would be that Amazon makes a substantial amount of its operating income from AWS (70% in the latest quarter: https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-release/news-release-details...), which allows it to fund anti-competitive marketplace practices like undercutting competitors at a loss to force them out of business. It would be more difficult to sustain such practices without AWS income.
Is there anything like this for the Python/Django world?
>They didn’t document this (!)

Is the fourth line of the article linked.
The problems with JS go far beyond its dynamic typing.
I mentioned it; it is a very nice safety feature, we tried to use it (we were on the public beta) but it doesn't quite fit our use case, where instead we want something completely unattended, whereas Check In is more intentional, like you plan to do something ahead and set up a dead man switch that will notify people if something looks off.

Interestingly enough when one of us sent messages like "is everything alright?" the recipient got a prompt in Messages to try out the Check In feature.
Crazy gloms onto these things - both inside and outside the gov’t, and confusion is often used as a tool by ‘friends’ and adversaries.

ARTICHOKE was the predecessor program to MKULTRA, and was explicitly to figure out how to trigger a cut-out to assassinate someone (especially high profile politicians). Here is the memo - https://nsarchive.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/project-artich...

(Copies of course, that I found googling around).

These were real and dangerous programs. The CIA director explicitly ordered the destruction of all MKULTRA documents 2 years before Congress started to investigate it, after a suspicious and rather public death of one of the major Directors of the program. The only reason we have much documentation at all related to it is because several reports got misfiled and were missed during the shredder party, but were found later when the investigation got started. Unfortunately they were mainly financial overviews, not useful program documents.

We know something very similar happened when Congress started looking into the CIA’s ‘extraordinary rendition’/torture programs. Along with active interference in the investigation. And no consequences for anyone involved.

So take that as you will.
Seems related to “infinite context” by adding attention sinks. This seems to be the same mechanism at play.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.17453.pdf
By the author's criteria,

> A critical element of puzzle languages is providing an escape, a way to admit that the pretty solution is elusive, and it's time to get working code regardless of aesthetics. It's interesting that these escapes tend to have a stigma; they induce a feeling of doing something wrong; they're guaranteed to result in pedantic lecturing if mentioned in a forum.

I immediately think of the borrow checker, and its escape called "unsafe" directly induces a feeling of doing something wrong. Yes, rust would be a puzzle language by this criteria.
iPhone 15 Pro Max Camera Review: Depth and Reach
This warms my heart - thank you :-)
Evaluating LLMs Is a Minefield
Ask HN: Strategies for customizing third party libraries?
If you're using third party libraries in your project and you need to customize one of them to meet your needs, how do you handle this from an architectural and updating perspective? For example, if the core library gets updated, how would you manage porting your customizations in the new version?
Seychelles had some legal changes in recent years that has made it much less attractive for such activity.

Strange as it may seem, the US is now one of the best countries for money laundering, particularly a few states that are very business-friendly, like Delaware.
It just might fit into my garage, too ...

But I wonder how much it costs to maintain this mecha. Doubt I can do it with the tools that I have lying around.
The only thing that really frustrates me in this discussion is that it's all about how people "feel" and without empiric evidence.

The research out there found no meaningful difference between both styles (unless there's newer research I haven't seen?) and people keep taunting around how their preferred side is undoubtedly the right one.

That's just like, your opinion man.

Personally I like typed languages but the type systems in languages like TypeScript are simply insufficient. You still end up with runtime bugs because you can't actually use those types at runtime. You can't encode a lot of the runtime logic into the type system so you're still manually checking impossibilities everywhere. I find myself even having to create local variables just to make typescript detect an obvious condition.

If a type system could basically remove the need for me to think about runtime bugs, then that's an absolute killer feature that I doubt anyone would argue against. But most languages don't provide that, so you're stuck in this halfway point where you have all this overhead, some benefits, but you still can't 100% trust your types.

As for why there are no meaningful differences in bugs, speed, etc my guess is that it all evens out. Without the type system safety net you are much more likely to test your code and as a result less bugs go in. On the other side people rely too much on the type system that's not good enough and then still end up with the same amount of runtime bugs. On one side you write code faster, but you have to test more, so it also evens out with writing more boilerplate, but with less tests.

I really wanted some hard research on this, but I know it's a hard one.
Perhaps the most important public discussion, at least among technical people, is making sure we really understand the experimental setup.

(I admit I could be projecting my lack of understanding; I’m not rock-solid on the experimental setup yet.)

Still to me, it matters if the linearity been described can be observed directly _in_ the model. My understanding is that it is not; rather, it is tested with an additional model. The term probing can be misunderstood; it isn’t -just- an internal probe. There are ‘derivative’ models as well.

This raises questions about what we mean when we we are talking about internal representations! In my view, a derivative of an internal representation is not the same thing.

(I welcome people who can educate, correct me, or even reframe the topics. The above thoughts are subject to change.)
Why would anyone want to paint that kind of target on their own back?