skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to start a career in the aerospace industry?
I’ve graduated in EE, and have a MSc+PhD in chip design. I’m comfortable with anything related to computers (from Python/C++ ML down to SoC implementation).

I have a very comfy position at a big tech company, one of the hardest to get into. I’ve finished my PhD a year ago, and overall, I accumulate about 7 years of industry experience in chip design.

Although it sounds like a beautiful career path, I’m deeply bored. I want to do exciting things that will catapult humanity forward, more precisely, I want to work in spaceships, rockets, fusion drives, etc. I want to be an aerospace engineer.

I’m moving to the Seattle area next month. I’m not a permanent resident yet. I assume that process will take at least three more years. Given my lack of experience in the aerospace industry, I thought about pursuing a Master’s degree at UW in aerospace engineering.

I send this message to ask the hacker news hive mind if my plan of pursuing a masters degree in my mid-thirties is reasonable, or maybe there is a better way transition from chip design to aerospace engineering.
If possible I'd suggest working through this with a qualified physician.

(I know this is a cliche response, but it seemed worth mentioning.)
> Unfortunately, it seems the authors threw out the only data that didn't support their hypothesis as GPT-4 did, in fact, outperform the median Mechanical Turk worker, particularly in terms of instruction following.

MTurk, to first approximate, is a marketplace that pays people pennies to fill out web forms. The obvious thing happens. The median Mechanical Turk worker probably either isn't a human, isn't just a (single) human, and/or is a (single) human but is barely paying attention + possibly using macros. Or even just button mashing.

That was true even before GPT-2. Tricks like attention checks and task-specific subtle captcha checks have been around for almost as long as the platform itself. Vaguely psychometric tasks such as ARC are particularly difficult -- designing hardened MTurk protocols in that regime is a fucking nightmare.

The type of study that the authors ran is useful if your goal is to determine whether you should use outputs from a model or deal with MTurk. But results from study designs like the one in the paper rarely generalize beyond the exact type of HIT you're studying and the exact workers you finally identify. And even then you need constant vigilance.

I genuinely have no idea why academics use MTurk for these types of small experiments. For a study of this size, getting human participants that fit some criteria to show up at a physical lab space or login to a zoom call is easier and more robust than getting a sufficiently non-noisy sample from MTurk. The first derivative on your dataset size has to be like an order of magnitude higher than the overall size of the task they're doing for the time investment of hardening an MTurk HIT to even begin make sense.
The assailant, one would hope and expect?
> There's no way to differentiate between the subdomain user being malicious, the domain owner being malicious, or the domain owner getting hacked. The only granularity of data available is that something under the start.page domain was distributing malware, so it makes sense to quarantine the whole domain.

Or, you know, take into account the number of subdomains serving malware relative to the total number of subdomain.

1 out of 1000’s seems unfair reason. If it was 10’s or 100’s of subdomains out of 1000, then it makes more sense to punish the whole domain. But when it’s just a few, blocking the individual subdomains would be the better way.
It was announced a while back but the deadline to migrate to the new billing model is EOY.
I’m guessing a bunch of SWE time has been burnt doing analysis already over at YouTube. I’m also curious.

War of attrition this one is.
oh golly don't get us started on "wrong" denoting morality vs incorrect/inaccurate/imprecise!
You don't have to be dead to have lost a fight with a cat. Who's moving the goal posts. You're trying to make it sound like a fight with a cat is a nothing burger, and you're just trolling at this point.
> If your database supports TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE -- which the "aware" type per the article's terminology -- you should be using it.

NO!!! IT IS NOT THE SAME AT ALL!

I've been burned by that exact misconception. TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE does NOT store a timezone in the database!

It implicitly converts a timestamp you supply into UTC and DISCARDS the associated timezone information you provided. When you read it back, it converts it to LOCAL time unless you explicitly specify a different conversion. This is a recurring source of confusion and bugs. The timezone a timestamp was actually written in is sometimes VERY important -- and I've personally had to deal with data loss on a project caused by this misconception.

Let me repeat: There is NO WAY to read back what timezone a "TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE" was written with later -- unlike an "aware" datetime in Python -- BECAUSE IT DOES NOT ACTUALLY STORE THE TIME ZONE YOU SUPPLIED! This is a data type that DESTROYS INFORMATION YOU PROVIDED TO THE DATABASE assuming it can be clever later.

I fucking hate that data type SO much.

An "aware" datetime in Python actually tracks a timestamp with a specific timezone explicitly attached to it. It is VERY different!

Documentation for Postgres:

> For timestamp with time zone, the internally stored value is always in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time, traditionally known as Greenwich Mean Time, GMT). An input value that has an explicit time zone specified is converted to UTC using the appropriate offset for that time zone. If no time zone is stated in the input string, then it is assumed to be in the time zone indicated by the system's TimeZone parameter, and is converted to UTC using the offset for the timezone zone.

> When a timestamp with time zone value is output, it is always converted from UTC to the current timezone zone, and displayed as local time in that zone. To see the time in another time zone, either change timezone or use the AT TIME ZONE construct (see Section 9.9.4).

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype-datetime.ht...

Python:

> Date and time objects may be categorized as “aware” or “naive” depending on whether or not they include timezone information.

> With sufficient knowledge of applicable algorithmic and political time adjustments, such as time zone and daylight saving time information, an aware object can locate itself relative to other aware objects. An aware object represents a specific moment in time that is not open to interpretation.

[...]

> For applications requiring aware objects, datetime and time objects have an optional time zone information attribute, tzinfo, that can be set to an instance of a subclass of the abstract tzinfo class. These tzinfo objects capture information about the offset from UTC time, the time zone name, and whether daylight saving time is in effect.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html
I’ve been in his shoes at a smaller level. Once the company believes they have a stable sellable product they have no interest in any new breakthroughs. His table stakes are gone and Microsoft probably believes gpt4 turbo will be billable for years to come.
Where did you do the genetic test? Is there something else than 23andMe?
That would be gratuitous.

A word that means, both free and unjustified.
My current employer, MongoDB, has unlimited PTO and it's not a scam. I think I'll end up taking about 5-6 weeks this year.

I did ask about this when I interviewed and was told that 5-6 weeks was considered normal. Obviously, it's not really unlimited. If I tried to take 20 weeks off I'm sure that would be a problem.
Ask HN: Why are AI ethics/safety teams being disbanded
Recently heard that Meta and Microsoft are both disbanding their teams which focus on AI safety.

Can’t help but connect dots of recent events at open AI where the board fired Altman for what seems like lack of alignment between profit motives and non profit (safety first) goals.
It appears there is a tension between folks who want to progress AI fast (for profit by capturing more market share) vs folks who want to slow down the rate of progress for safety reasons (let the world be ready regulation and ethicswise for something so powerful )

Ironically seems like the real threat at this time to humans is not AI but Humans’ Greed and or Power.

The core of the question is there such a thing as progress that is too fast for one’s own good? Are there examples in history where this (fast progress) has back fired? Would like to see some comparisons from folks we versed in history
Yes, we work with security analysts and other folks doing data-intensive investigations & analysis in Louie.ai (think being able to use natural language to talk to you Splunk, OpenSearch, Databricks, etc. logs/news/.., and many Python / Pandas viz + wrangling + AI tools, to investigate more easily & further, build autonomous hunts, smarter monitors & detections, etc)... and LLMs work amazingly here.

Blue team is a lot easier than red team, and as part of that, code tasks are easier than social engineering. It rarely comes up in investigations, but you do need to set prompt persona for simulating attacks.

At the same time, fine-tuning a model is a pretty clear way to undo needing to do even that.

We benefit from models having business-neutral alignment by default -- the typical case suffers if the default persona was a racist forum troll with extreme politics. So it's more about when you want to turn that off for specific tasks. It's more work than we'd like, and gotchas like changing when models update.
We use Atlantis [0] for CI/CD automation of Terraform pull requests to a centralized repository. It's pretty good too, especially for a self-hosted solution. I can't see how Terraform Cloud's costs would be justifiable for us without a custom contract.

[0] https://www.runatlantis.io/
oh no not AI art
Depends, if you just need to update position/rotations you can use a TransformAccessArray which is supported with jobs+burst.

When you need to pull data out of a dozen components to keep a renderer in sync, yea that’s not cheap. But there are ways you can flip things around, like have a job that outputs a native array containing condensed info about the entity that will be used for rendering. That avoids non-bursted random data access into the entity, but of course adds some additional complexity.

This approach won’t naively scale to thousands and thousands of GameObjects like all the (boring) “look ECS can do 10000000 entities at once” demos. I get so, so, so tired of “scale” being the only sexy reason why you pick DOTS. Both my games have a resident set of a couple hundred entities at any given time and still, DOTS works great for how we use it.
Some of the jurisdictions I have businesses in require all taxes to be shown on the receipt, and individually. We have to show 4 different taxes for each night of a hotel stay, that is 5 lines of charged breaking down the cost of a hotel room might. A week long stay is a multiple page receipt.

My ATT receipt for my mobile phone shows 8 different state and city and county taxes, from general sales tax to 911 specific ones to mental healthcare tax.

Zero reason for all this to be broken down for the end customer.
Shameless plug: Co-founder of Terrateam[0] here. We have flat rate pricing with unlimited operations and users. Terraform Cloud pricing is absolutely crazy.

[0]: https://terrateam.io
This seems like it would strain a friendship in exchange for no protection gain?
My point is not whether the rationale is valid or invalid: the point is, they're not going to do it. Is that wrong, in the ethical sense? Quite possibly. Do they care? No.

Try googling the "Golden Rule" and you'll find a version that says "they who have the gold make the rules".
Honest question. If you need to pump data into datadog from your cloud, why not just stop doing that, and use the cloud tools? Datadog isnt' creating metrics. The metrics are already on your cloud provider (gcp,aws,etc) -- AND all these providers have ways to view metrics. Why do people pay 20k per month for data dog? They dont' want to use GCP metrics explorer? Same with TF cloud. You can just setup a jenkins job and do all the features TF cloud has in a few hours. Why pay TF cloud? Are people confused? I must be missing something. I worked at startups that thought all metrics need to be in datadog, but they didnt' understand they can just use metrics explorer. You can't even use sql to create graphs in datadog, it's awful.

IMHO If you are serious, dump the metrics into bigquery/redshift and start doing sql like an adult.
Airlines will book you together if seats still remain together...They're not gonna split you up just for the fun of it.

Only way to guarantee seats remain together is to select seats ahead of time. People complain about "junk fees" because they're mandatory parts of the cost. If a website is upfront about a benefit you're losing, it's not a junk fee.

Lastly, these basic fares are really designed for single travelers on a tight budget with fixed plans. Delta's website makes this clear, and websites that don't make it clear really should.
100 years after 'Nazi Olympics': Should Berlin host in 2036?
Would you mind making your point in civilized language?

Apart from that, I think everyone has heard your argument as well as the one you are responding to very often by now.
Why is there the unrealistic belief in this thread that to lose to a cat means you're dead?
Search for the writings of Dan North, and don't forget that in the English alphabet, "Behaviour" is spelled with a "U".

Very roughly, Cucumber framework appears in late 2008? Whereas BDD first appears in the TDD community no later than December 2005.

Ex: here Dave Astels references a BDD talk he presented in 2005-09: https://web.archive.org/web/20051212160347/http://blog.davea...
These two sentences inspired me to comment: “I actually saw it coming when Replit began receiving massive funding by major investors, who are likely pressuring the company to reduce costs and turn profits. Still, this left a sour taste as it felt like a bait and switch.”

I don’t see how it’s a bait and switch to increase prices to a sustainable level if it wasn’t previously there. If you like a SaaS product you should hope their business model is aligned for durability exclusive of burning VC cash in my view.

If the product doesn’t meet your needs, fair game. Complain away it’s good feedback the vendor needs to hear to improve. Vote with your dollars like this author did.
> Sales tax exclusive is a common complaint from visiting Europeans. It is seldom an issue for Americans because most aren’t paying with exact change or calculating budgets to the penny.

I know it's true -- when I loved in SF the fact that I couldn't tell what things cost just made me give up looking at the price altogether :)

I just picked things in safeway and payed without even listening to what the amount charged was...

But it's probably a bad idea to encourage this kind of behavior.

If you want the free market to work, you'll need engaged customers who at-least reads the price tag.
Seems really nice, and I was about to order, but then I looked at how the trial version renders the word "Berkeley". On my screen it looks like "Be r ke ley".
> The only way to prevent that

You mean a complete hypothetical outside of scifi? Lets start worrying about alien invasions too?

Our planet is actually, not hypothetically, becoming uninhabitable due to pollutiom. I am so tired of ML people thinking they are god and have created something of infinite power. The hubris.

The birds eye view is that we need tons of major breakthroughs to allow us to overcome this climate disaster while also figuring out how to make 8 Billion+ comfortable and happy without turning the earth into a toxic waste dump, and we need this ASAP. This nonsense about AI safety is going to have a negative net affect on the lives of Billions of people, by slowing down the progress thay could be made.

AI X-risk is a complete sham being used to try and control a new, powerful tool. Science requires the scientific method, which requires physical embodiment, trial and error, and disciplined observation and measurment. AI has 0 ability to do any of that, we don't even have online learning(I think that's the term, where the model learns from its usage) in any of these large models.
I think that's the situation at many places. They've had three years of hiring and organizational changes where, by and large, they didn't really pay a lot of attention outside of gross timezone or language factors to where people physically lived. So now they're in a place where they really can't just undo those three years and move back to teams being mostly colocated. At least without a lot of organizational turmoil and at least some cost.
It has been crowned best water in the country. Yes it tastes good, I'm quite happy to put it in my Laphroiag.
Not exactly. Ilya allegedly disliked Sam fundraising side hustles off his profile at OpenAI. It sounds like a confluence of factors precipitated the ousting.
Maybe? I guess you could "calibrate" it with GPS. I don't know how consistent the phase at a specific location really is in practice on long timescales.
OpenTofu is a superset of Terraform. They maintain complete compatibility with Terraform while adding additional features on top of it. They have more dedicated developers on the project than Hashicorp does, and they are building out a fairly robust RFC process for the additional features.

I would not recommend using OpenTofu in production until they've had their first official release though. They currently have some alpha releases out that you can experiment with.
Apologies for the dumb question but what exactly are "vitamin D-based dietary supplements"?

You have vitamina D rich food and you have actual vitamine D droplets for children. Is dietary supplements in this case meant to have some specific meaning?
I preferred to think of it as funemployment
Most if not all hotel/casinos I've stayed at in Vegas and Atlantic city have added a mandatory "resort fee" for many years, and will happily tell you to go pound sound if you try to argue about it!
The thing about volunteer sites, the first one you visit can be impractical or worse, especially if it was placed in front of you.

If I search for->thru a half doz volunteer sites, I tend to find usable opportunities.

Case in point: americorps.gov. Enter zip code; go to the results page. Distance is 20mi. Results: 1-4 are four states away, 5-6 are virtual, 6 is seven states away. 8-9 duplicate Exchange Student hosting. 10-11 are nearby and look like what I'd expect.

Volunteerism is trust-based and confusing me at step 1 isn't the best way there.

habitat.org. My zipcode yields HFH offices (not build locations). None in my county. I imagine there's an (reasonable!) onboarding process beyond a background check. There are HFH stores that are closer; they prob have volunteers. It's not obvious on this page that there's somewhere I can click to find a FAQ or a splainer about different opportunities.

volunteermatch.org. This seems more inviting+useful. My zipcode gets me 2 dozen nearby opportunities with locations, informative headlines and brief descriptions. All right on the results page.

These were from the top results of a Kagi search. There are quite a few beyond that that look worth clicking into.
To me by far the best thing is to have an enduring, joyful, worthwhile, good purpose in life, that drives everything else (including maintaining one's health, proper balance etc), about which I have written a lot at my simple site (no JS etc; in profile; for example one can click on "Things I want to say", then "Life Lessons", then "Everyone needs a direction in life. Centering on pleasure, possessions, power, or attention, harms us, others & the earth, & cannot bring lasting happiness."

Also, some related prior discussions. Note that this is an attempt at collecting useful comments that could relate, NOT at an insinuation that the OP is lazy, a procrastinator, or other. But some comments were good, like finding balance, direction, etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23550758 ("How do you develop internal motivation")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23072333 ("Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help (gist.github.com)")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22919697 ("ask hn: how do i overcome mental laziness?")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22124489 ("Procrastination is about managing emotions, not time (bbc.com")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22096571 ("Ask HN: I don't want to be a worker any more I want to be a professional")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20930439 ("how do you keep your programming motivation up?")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18903886 "Ask HN: How do you motivate yourself to keep working on a project? "

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19777976 "ask hn: how do you stay disciplined in the long run?"

For what it may be worth.
I have made many life long friends at work, who I am still friends with to this day, many years after we left the companies we both worked at. I'm sure many other people have too.

You need some kind of social bond with the people you work with. What are you going to do instead? Treat the people you work with like robots where every interaction is a barter or request of some kind like "Hi, can you review this please. Thanks." every single day for the entirety of your employment at this company?
I mean that software, in it's written form, is the documentation of knowledge from software development, a service. I view sciencing as another service that produces knowledge. Knowledge has zero cost of duplication and, as such, cannot be considered a product. Artifacts that are produced by the application of knowledge are products because they have a non-zero cost of duplication. Computer hardware is an example of a product. I don't view intellectual property as property either. Software, in my opinion, isn't a product. Software is knowledge. I don't claim to be correct. I'm attempting to share my point of view. Anything with zero cost of duplication isn't a product in my mind because these things are infinitely copyable once created. Once a mathematician discovers a math they don't retain rights to it. Charging money for software is, in my view, no different than trying to make people pay for secret knowledge. You might be able to keep the secret locked down for a while, but it will get out eventually. Knowledge is the closest thing we have to magic, and if we choose to view it through the zero sum lens of capitalism, I think that does society a disservice in the long run. If I were a wizard I would share the magic, not try to charge money to teach people a spell or two. It might be the case that all products are knowledge given form, but keep in mind that knowledge exists before and after discovery and its fruits/artifacts must be created with work.
Ideally they would use the same prompt for LLMs as they use for Humans; and judge them in exactly the same manner. Only then is it a fair comparison.
I go here because this is the defacto board "dialed in" to the sf tech scene. If somewhere else were the defacto I would go there. Knowing it is and that I am seeing the same things people in tech are seeing serves my needs sufficiently.
Agreeed! Commute is rough also.
Another space to look at is 'computing within limits' : https://computingwithinlimits.org/
Ok, that makes more sense, but if people haven't migrated away by now... the odds seem increasingly likely that they won't migrate in time to avoid that deadline.