skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
this might seem like bikeshedding to many, but titles like these really bother me. The most popular orthography for a language is not the language itself. There are many many ways to write English or other languages outside of the Latin Alphabet and many ways to write their number system outside of our weird number system.

The most important aspect of a number system is just the base, but even that doesn't quite fit. If we look at the names of numbers in English (eleven, twelve, x-teen), there's clear evidence that a dozenol system was more natural. And in fact was probably more popular than base-10 which was only made official after the French revolution when they decided to go standards-crazy and decide a bunch of standards. There's rarely if ever something about a number system that ties it strongly to a "language" per se (let alone a particular orthography!)
Yeah, that’s command injection in mailutils I mentioned, not in fail2ban itself. Did you see how it’s supposed to be exploited? Did you see a real-life exploitation?

While it’s a nice trick, it’s simply not relevant. And the vulnerability before that seems to be 10 years old. I’d say it’s a decent track record.
there are many negative results of his management one can observe without talking to conservatives: pge bills and blatant crimes rise are some of them.
That's fundamentally the issue with git. It's underlying concept is good - probably still a tad bit more convoluted than it needs to be with the benefit of hindsight, but that's fine. It's hard to design software.
But it's overall user experience - the way you interact with it is horrific. It's is so incredibly convoluted. So much inessential complexity. Half of learning to use git is learning to look past the convoluted interface and see/understand the simpler concepts behind it.

It's legitimately one of the largest divergences between simplicity of concepts and complexity of UX/interface of any serious tool I've ever worked with in my career.

Again, it's huge service and absolutely a benefit - but also the amount of collective dev hours wasted on understanding git minutiae is way too high.
Sounds like he wants medical mushrooms via doctors not decriminalize psychedelics

Are there even other ones besides psilocybin that’s used for potential medical stuff? Is it even researched beyond the very early days? Is that even the point of this shift to decrim?

I’m sure if they make a policy to decriminalize it after x months a team of doctors could put together basic safety guidelines for adults
Np. Thanks for the optimizations.

From "PostgresML is 8-40x faster than Python HTTP microservices" (2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33270638 :

> Apache Ballista and Polars do Apache Arrow and SIMD.

> The Polars homepage links to the "Database-like ops benchmark" of {Polars, data.table, DataFrames.jl, ClickHouse, cuDF, spark, (py)datatable, dplyr, pandas, dask, Arrow, DuckDB, Modin,} but not yet PostgresML? https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/ *

LLM -> Vector database: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_database

/? inurl:awesome site:github.com "vector database"
https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%253Aawesome+site%253Ag... : https://github.com/dangkhoasdc/awesome-vector-database , https://github.com/mileszim/awesome-vector-database , https://github.com/currentslab/awesome-vector-search

/? "vector database" "duckdb"
https://www.google.com/search?q=+%22vector+database%22+%22du... ... pgvector

pgvector/pgvector/src/vector.c: vector_spherical_distance https://github.com/pgvector/pgvector/blob/master/src/vector....

postgresml/postgresml: /? distance https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Apostgresml%2Fpostgresml%2...
I get your point that things don't have to go certain ways.

However, there are plenty of systems where the a giant and real pubic good isn't fought for because the "good" is highly distributed and the "bad" which kills it has highly concentrated profits for a few folks.

These are systematic issues because the massive of folks who are passively harmed have a difficult or impossible time "choosing otherwise" or fighting back or whatever because there are som many divergetn bad actors that are operating on them.

The only way to avoid that is to make changes to the underlying system in which it is more difficult to concentrate the outcomes for a few people, but very few people I know are wanting to institute those kinds of changes, as they are correct in understanding that fact as broadly anti-capitalist.

That's neither here nor there- even if you can't accept that political stance, the trope of "incoming disasters [which] are perfectly or mostly preventable but the real problem is that people in power just choose to ignore it for their own short-sighted gain" is literally everywhere.

Dr. Stangelove can be understood this way, though for "MAD" rather than climate change. The "Aliens" films (especially the second one) can be understood that way. Hell, "Who Framed Rodger Rabbit" can be read that way, but for public transportation.

"I just wanna make this cool tech so I will ignore how it impacts other people because I see the short term benefits" is literally everywhere in this culture.

If someone could make $2MM releasing skynet and knew it would end up with the entire plots of the first three Terminator films occurring I have zero doubt someone would do it.

I don't think we, in general, are "ignorant of our own ability to maybe not do something?" I think most of us have a very realistic understanding of how the people who unleash their technology into our shared ecosystem have worked historically.
"Apart from the general ridiculousness of insinuating that of all records someone might adulterate or invent, he would pick a digital copy of a discharge letter sent to an third party whose other baby had died, [..]"

That's what you say. I neither said nor insinuated any of that.

The case is supported by two main pillars. One is the idea that the stats support suspicions clusters of deaths. I expected that to be challenged back in August and we see it happen now.

The second pillar is the "smoking gun" of Child F's raised peptide levels. In my opinion this pillar is far from being strong enough to support this case alone. If we don't see any additional props appear, I expect it to crumble in the appeal.

"your timelines are all wrong."

- August 2015: Child F blood sample [2]

- February 2017: Police investigation launched

"On the night before Valentine’s Day in February 2018, nearly a year after police launched their investigation" [1]

- July 2016: Letby removed from frontline care [1]

- February 2018: Smoking gun found [1]

- May 2017: Letby scheduled to return [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/aug/19/trust-me-im-...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ng-interactive/2023/aug/...
All the recent excitement around things like smartphones as vice dispensary machines, AIs as bullshitters/plagiarists, the crypto scam ecosystem, the incredible scale of the surveillance of citizens that is taking place because of this tech, and to top it all off the fact that the industry just seems to be steered by gamblers chasing positive returns has really made me disillusioned with the entire field and its products.
Good to know. I'll make mine a library and tool, like SQLite.
A talk on “the economics of programming languages” could go a number of different ways. I’d like to see a talk (or maybe a whole book) on how the evolution of programming languages over the last 50 years has made it possible for multiple trillion dollar companies to form and reshaped the whole global economy. Like, these things wouldn’t be possible if we were stuck with Fortran.

I think there’s an interesting discussion to be had about why all these programming tools (languages, frameworks, version control, other infrastructure) have made the job of software engineers so much easier, and many more people have entered the profession as a result, but the wages of software engineers has continued to rise.
First day of a new job, a new commute all have exceedingly high cognitive loads. Come back from that, all you did was just HR stuff and a new commute and are exhausted! After a year, suddenly that commute, the byzantine policy stuff has a cognitive load of, "yeah, this is all super simple."

My point, the unfamiliar might have actually lower cognitive load. Cognitive load is a function of what you know and what you are used to.
'Are You OK?' San Francisco Residents Say They Most Certainly Are
60% is not vastly smaller in the way that I meant - we are talking about differences of three orders of magnitude in this article and that is what I am skeptical of.

Nevertheless, I have not actually seen a model exhibiting high-level LM capabilities (of the GPT-4 level) that was distilled.

Just because a model can match in perplexity with fewer parameters is not the same as matching the performance as subjectively measured by humanity interacting with the model.
I am certain investments into synthetic data will proliferate exponentially. Synthetic data can be more diverse, less toxic, and of higher average quality. But the foremost rationale we require it is to improve models.

You likely recall the reversal curse - if an LLM trains "A is B" it doesn't automatically deduce "B is A". You need to explicitly append the second part to the training set to make it complete. Fragmented or incomplete information in the training set persists fragmented in the trained model. Training is blind, only inference is intelligent.

Similarly, many training examples contain apparent information that conceals implicit deductions, for instance a math problem - the statement is evident and apparent but the chain of thought is implicit, concealed.

What I am getting at is a general principle - LLMs need to "study" the original training data and make it comprehensive, elicit those implicit deductions, and enable LLMs to traverse the conceptual space in all directions.

Study, then train.

In other words, to study is to digest the raw data, to reconnect fragmented information, to generate insight, to execute the instructions and see the result, generally to unfold what is hidden.

It's a matter of utilizing LLMs in generative mode to prepare the dataset before training. Microsoft has generated a 150B token synthetic dataset for Phi-1.5 and it demonstrated 5x efficiency gains. They will likely increase 100x. The promise of faster, cheaper inference and fewer errors is very alluring.
There's a small, but important ego boost that comes along with thinking one has access to a clearer[1] view of reality. The LessWrong community gets this by way of "Bayesian thinking" and trying to subvert their own expectations.

For the general population though, you have the Freakanomics effect.

1. The intellectual mind's biggest motivator is certainty. This isn't necessarily a bad thing when certainty aligns with objective reality whatever that means, but then these folks get quite certain about how uncertain they are.
> Which I get but how would a well intentioned politician avoid this suspicion of corruption?

By thoroughly explaining the actions. I think this decision feels under justified
The Inevitable Decline of WeWork [video]
Not to mention how incredibly challenging it is to build an organization that is highly functioning. I've had the pleasure of working at a few different companies and I feel the most internally mature were the companies that had been around the longest. Sure, they had issues, but fundamentally they had insulated themselves from a large class of problems that the startups were constantly fighting through.
We were specifically talking about comp sci, not software engineering [sic]. Yes, software engineering is way less rigorous. It is hardly is maths—or comp sci for that matter.
No, ground effect is (AFAIK) when the depth of the wing (fore-aft) is greater than the distance above the surface it is flying over. The leading edge of the wing creates a pressure wave that reflects back from the surface and provides lift to the whole wing. You can see it with birds like pelicans which skim the water for a long way without needing to flap at all. I don't know if this would enhance the speed at all though, there are presumably other effects involved with going faster.
> 240 is a highly divisible number

Which nobody considered for a single seconds. Nobody was counting the number of pences in a pound at the time, these were not sensible scalings of values. Instead you had what was essentially 2 different scales: the pence scale (which topped out to the shillings) and the pounds scale (which bottomed out at the shilling)

> You said it yourself, 60 pence to a crown

I also said that it had no actual relevance.

> Decimalization was probably the right call in an age of calculators and computers, same with the metric system, but the old LSD system and imperial units existed for a reason, which is easy divisibility into convenient fractions.

They mostly existed because they were direct offshoots of the carolingian currency system. After all Roman currency had been decimal (or a mix of decimal and binary) before it devolved, and Russia began the movement of re-decimalising currencies.
Absolutely no chance that AI is able to do that. Investing decisions are too subjective for the current state of AI. A good value investor knows this… and also knows that you don’t need a bull market to make decent returns.
If I can run Steam and play games packaged with Flatpak, hopefully my machines can handle a terminal emulator too.
Precisely. And those houses may be in areas that have relatively more confounding factors (eg gas generator use will be higher).
The explanation you got above is sound but slightly misleading. Let me explain. Typical neurons in a neural network are actually simpler that a quadratic equation. They are actually a linear function y = ax + b, where a and b are vectors. So, y = a_1 * x_1 + a_2 * x_2 + ... a_n * x_n + b.

Here, (a_1, a_2, ..., a_n, b) are trainable, i.e. adjustable, parameters. (x_1, x_2, ..., x_n) are the inputs to the neuron. y is its output. Because linear functions are inflexible, neurons typically pass the output y to a non-linear function. The classical non-linear function is a sigmoid, but there are many choices. So you have z = sigmoid(y) = sigmoid(ax + b) = sigmoid(a_1 * x_1 + a_2 * x_2 + ... a_n * x_n + b). These non-linear functions usually have no trainable parameters.

Such a structure, a linear function composed with a non-linear function is the cornerstone of modern statistics, where it is called a generalized linear model (GLM). Hence, neural networks are just many GLMs or neurons grouped into layers, with layers connected to each other.
No. I'll be using SQLite and weave files in order to handle massive amounts of data (terabytes or more) while having full transactions.
A pipe dream, or a shroom trip
That doesn’t mean that a much larger with high quality training data and new training techniques won’t be more powerful than a smaller model. We have incredible efficiencies in modern computers in addition to immense resources. They both are needed for the best performance. I suspect it’s the same for LLM. Superior data, superior techniques, and superior scale will yield superior models.
Given that I have yearly subscription for trains they are essentially free per use for me. Hard to beat.
> watch out for invisible cows!

Um, can you explain this bit?
Terry Bisson's History of the Future
https://archive.ph/k0RRI
I always wonder: At those speeds, the occupants risk life and limb. In the videos everything is fine, of course; they don't usually show the failures. But if you're an occupant, how do you know whether to trust the machine?

It is new technology without a track record, on a bespoke machine without a track record. It's safety is unregulated and unresearched. The builder doesn't have the resources to do anything like the safety engineering, prototyping, testing, etc. that someone like Toyota or Airbus does. Even if the design is safe, the construction also lacks those resources.

I can imagine taking the risk if I knew the risk. I could imagine doing it if someone else I relied on knew the risk (e.g., as a test pilot for a major company or military air force). I'm not risk-averse; I've taken more than my share, including risking life and limb. How does someone decide to ride one of these?
So why do you smell them at street level if the smoke is blown into the sky.
That’s really fascinating! Thank you for sharing.

If you are interested in internal visions, try flickering lights with closed eyes. Around 10hz they create strong internal visuals after about a minute. There are several apps that can do this— luminate is one, but there are free ones, too.

(Usual warnings about photosensitive epilepsy apply)
Good question! Part of code are generated using `MethodHandle` such as some field getters, or constructor. But the overall code are generated as source code first at runtime instead of bytecode. This is because binary protocol are very complicated. Generated the bytecode directly will make the troubleshooting more difficult. but it's possible to generated the bytecode techniquely. We have an IR abstraction, it's possible to change it to generate the bytecode
Back then, when I had only subversion experience, I tried both git and mercurial, and found mercurial really confusing. Ended up using git for everything, the way it worked just made sense to me.

Unfortunately it's been long enough that I don't remember any details about why I found mercurial confusing.
So true!

The question at the top is a power play, a sales pitch, an ego boost that fakes reciprocity but keeps all the cards.

Notice how the vulnerability is kept in the past. "I used to be lonely, but now I'm fine! I don't need anything from you, but I bet you need something from me!"
I’m aware of the circumstances of his death. That doesn’t say anything about his trajectory since leaving Debian.
Extreme parkour with legged robots
What is “the markets” for you? If you mean the stocks in in indexes you’re right, but that’s not the whole market.
The Language Server Protocol is a newish thing that allowed some languages to gain more tooling for cheaper. I have a ton of respect for MS for doing this. They didn't need to do it that way. Tooling is still a ton of work and the protocol seems to have issue but looking the adoption it seems that a lot of project are finding value in it both on editors and language sides.
As a student I used the Interrail ticket to travel all over europe on a shoestring budget.

Also there are plenty of offerings, which let you travel larger distances for a low price (e.g., ÖBB Sparschiene 29 eur vienna to amsterdam), you have to book it some time in advance though, similarly to flying...
The Era of Startups Is Over
> and fortunately or unfortunately, for many, work provides that function.

I agree with this, but the problem is that there is no guarantee of work being available to everyone. With the rise of AI and hyper-specialization of work, that problem is only going to get worse.
> e.g. rewriting history, as is necessary for kernel-scale projects, is an unwavering absolute no-no in fossil

We could go further, but yeah, this is basically the biggest problem. I know this is a fundamental attribute of Fossil and that's fine, but to me it makes Fossil unusable as a VC system for most serious projects. I don't think of VC as an immutable record, I think of it as a tool for organization and collaboration that also allows me to have documentation around repository history, and I don't think that immutable history helps with either documentation or collaboration.

Obviously some people disagree with me on that, but the really short answer is that I think the way Fossil defines version control is misguided, so it's unlikely I would ever make the switch over.
> (Also Stackoverflow helped a lot. There isn’t a day I won’t Google how to do basic things in Git.)

Back in 2011 or 2012 i once had one of the libgit developers sitting at my workstation for a full hour trying un-hose my local checkout after i'd made the mistake of following git instructions from SO.

SO git advice: 0 of 5 stars. Cannot recommend.
>On exactly 1 platform out of 15 though

Given the relative frequencies of domestic trains vs. international sleeper trains I'm not sure this is a problem.
> Zero copy state transfer is a viable and high performance alternative.

Completely agreed, but also, adding my own emphasis there.

The technique has has enough gotchas, edge cases, and additional security considerations that it should really be an alternative that people can opt for when they need it, and never be the default approach.
git gained popularity way before github/gitlab. Its popularity stemmed from the features that CVS and SVN were severely lacking. Github just made it easier to share and discover projects, and it happened to use git. It also helps that github was not a target for foss, instead it was started as a business. Before then, git, cvs, svn, were all foss projects and hosted (usually mostly) by the project owners.
Sam Altman – The Joe Rogan Experience
> Why does your identifier need to be cryptographically secure?

There are many use cases where people are using the hash to guarantee no actor has inserted different code than they expect in a dependency, so the dependency is pinned to a hash. Not being secure, would be catastrophic for some use cases that people are currently using if widespread.

We could make a claim this is a misuse, but this is what people are doing.
The technology exists to monitor and/or block phones in prisons. It's trivial.

The authorities in most countries prefer to monitor, rather than ban or block. Presumably the intelligence gain is worth it, or the risk of riot is not worth it.
You can do it as long as your changes are only to files that are otherwise identical on both ends of the checkout (meaning there's 0 possibility of conflict).
Agree with you 100%.

Modern shrooms are stronger than they were in the past due to selective breeding and growing. Around 4x stronger. Educating the consumer on this will be difficult, the "I usually eat an 8th" crowd will be who is going to be helped more. Their are commercial tests for this very thing, to the point where once you know how strong a strain is you will be able to dose it according to volume of ground product. Complicating this is the fact that if you eat an orange then it makes the product even stronger. No clue how to solve all this, just know it is a real issue.

Other side of this is that ketamine therapies are being ran out of old dentist offices with zero therapeutic guidelines TODAY. They are selling snake oil and letting folks not get the break throughs they deserve.
1. No proper citing.

2. The site looks like a hot mess because of their use of Taboola links.
This is mostly why I have stopped reporting bugs. A good bug report takes a lot of effort to write. Seeing it automatically closed after a few months due to lack of interest is a waste of my precious time.
> His personal life is a potential liability, though. He’s a pretty well-known philanderer and that’s exactly how the right knows how to attack opponents.

nah, it's the cali is a shithole thing.
> It increases the SLOC by 30% and reduces code coherence just so that a test can run in 20 milliseconds instead of 2.1 seconds.

There are people who cargo cult and people who do things for a reason. It may not always be obvious which category a developer was in just by talking to them or looking at their work.

Imagine the following scenario: you have two projects each having the same functionality and the same level of test coverage. Project A is 30% longer than project B but project A's test suite runs in 1 second while project B's runs in 2 minutes. Personally, I am taking project A every time (but I'm also probably trying to figure out how to get that 30% down to 0.1-2%).

The path to project B is paved with 50 decisions to do the thing that took 2.1 seconds rather than 20ms.