skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do wonder if it would be easier if, say, 3% of people were simply fired each year, perhaps with a 1-3 month notice. It would save the pointless back and forth effort, you wouldn't have to pretend it's about improvement, and the fired people could work on their next steps immediately.

(this is orthogonal to the decision to always fire some percentage - I am merely discussing a different implementation of the same policy, not discussing the merits of the policy)
This is dead on arrival
Remind me to get one of those "pockets" to put on the wall downstairs so I can just put random documentation in.
This is true in one very specific industry, computer programming. Maybe being a doctor too but HN doesn't cater so much to that crowd. In others, wages are pretty comparable.
You get what you pay for. Good european engineers have US rates.
I think the point of the study was precisely to see how well the original model without adaptations (my understanding is that they only use prompting, which does not affect weights) can perform. I think that question is arguably even more interesting than 'How well can we train a model to perform on med school questions?'. I'm not saying this is generalization, because the training set surely included a lot of medical literature, but if the base model without fine-tuning can perform well in one important domain, that's a very interesting data point (especially if we find the same to hold true for multiple domains).
i have not experienced this at all recently. on early 3.5 and the initial 4 i had to ask to complete, but i added a system prompt a bit back that is just

“i am a programmer and autistic. please only answer my question, no sidetracking”

and i have had a well heeled helper since
Not publicly available
It's interesting you believe a state should have that kind of power. Sure, the legislature can withhold funding if you don't do what they like - that's on old yarn. But to strip a city of its right to maintain its own property and run roughshod? No. You can rest assured that if the state really wants to push it then SF will take it to court.
Because SWE engineers in Europe are underpaid.

You create a software product you can sell it anywhere not like you are bound by the country. This gets exploited by European startups that hire much cheaper talent and offer much cheaper services to US customers.
Show HN: Turn any legacy Helm repo into OCI Helm repo
I like how one month he and Linda say "they're almost break-even and in fact profitable (if you don't count in debt, bills and unpaid invoices /lol/)", and next month Elon is like "this is killing the company". This has happened THREE TIMES IN A ROW already.

The situation is overwhelmingly, blindingly obvious.
I don't really understand how someone can work in HR at a place like Amazon for so long and then claim to be surprised that Amazon is actually very evil.

Or that we are somehow supposed to feel sympathetic for someone who has profited to the tune of many hundreds of thousands of dollars perpetuating this soul-crushing machine. No.
Pardon me but I have to ask, as someone here might know...

Over this past weekend on Saturday afternoon (ET, NYC + PHL markets)[1] on an NPR station (in the car) I heard what I presume was a rebroadcast of a show on a theory about the creation of the first multi-cell organism. Typically, I pick up the name of the show and who the featured guest was, but this time I missed both. It was fascinating stuff and would like to listen to it in full.

Does this ring a bell with anyone?

[1] I realize each NPR station has its own schedule so this clue might not be helpful.
There is still the calculus of why bother?

There are legitimate reasons (you want rejected candidates to still have a good impression of the company, you think the feedback could help them improve and want them to interview again in the future, you want to include them in your professional network, etc.) but I think it is best if that is an intentional choice.
I don't know, Valve (proton team) gave me the most complete feedback I ever received.

Frankly I was not a big steam fan, but now I'm close to defend Gabe like Tesla fans defend Musk.

Really great people, if someone from that team read this: kudos.
But the comments are not the same?

bawolff says it wouldn't be a problem to just link the curl docs.

Cogito says it would, since users would just ask Daniel for help, thinking xCurl was the same as curl, despite them having different implementations. This would place a large burden on Daniel.
> we’re lucky if a new AI tool stays relevant for 12 months! It’s incredibly disorienting when the “sharpen the axe” strategy that worked for thousands of years suddenly stops working.

Its probably justified to suspect that this period is a temporary aberration, that the "thousands of years" strategy still does work in most places and will work in this field again soon.

To stretch the metaphor: people cutting wood today are more effective for having learned more about their tools; be that chainsaws or feller buncher machines that needed hundreds of hours to learn to operate.

The biggest, nastiest, most automated feller machine is likely to have an axe strapped to it somewhere when it out in the woods working, too.
I started maintaining uBlock filters to avoid being spammed by intrusive ads a for a service I neither need nor want.

https://gist.github.com/L-P/cfee57bd0835c88262e29ff3a1f09b60

I'm slightly irritated by AWS making the same errors Azure did on their portal. Keep your ads out of my tools.
> the roadway is now worse

Worse for whom? If it has the intended effect (and apparently it does), it's certainly not worse for the cyclists who were getting hurt.

> Why not install a red light or a roundabout?

Tom Scott explains the reasons for not installing traffic lights or speed bumps in the original video.

On top of those, if drivers are not even reducing their speed at the stop sign, what would make them do that for a red light?

I'm not sure how a roundabout is better for anyone than the staggered junction.

It's certainly worse for the cyclist on the main road, who would have to pay a lot more attention to a lot more places, and also reduce speed.

It's certainly worse for drivers on the main road, who lose their right-of-way.

It's unlikely to be (much?) better to the drivers on the side road, who still have to go through junctions - only this time they're between the road and the roundabout and vice-versa.
Maybe to block Figma from challenging Adobe's market position among other tools.
The dark art of cultivating glacier ice algae
Yep, this is how I ended up running ZFS. Because with XFS the answer to "oh no a power cut" was "lol, a bunch of files might be zeros. Figure out which ones."

The whole weird implication that there's something else which is perfect is always bizarre: there isn't, everyone knows that, it's extremely non-trivial to do that.
Could you elaborate? To me there seems extremely little overlap there (I'm familiar with both the procfs and linux's ptrace APIs, but not OpenBSD's ptrace).
Show HN: Build your own MMDB geoip database
Well, if someone decides to fork the project in order to undermine the original project out of spite ...
It can if you zip the code up and upload it to Code Interpreter.
This was my assumption reading it; it very nearly has to be exactly that to work as described by Microsoft. Which IMO makes all this a complete nothing burger.
If you are talented enough there are places that treat remote workers like drones. Throw Jira tickets over the wall and expect code to come out. Most people find this to be a bad place to work but you might like it
These are folders on the boot drive, which is always mounted on /boot?
i think the point trying to be made is mimicry and derivation are hard for us to discern from an AI.

there is some complex definition for AGI that exists, but the fact laypeople cant make the determination, will always result in the GP comment
Happy Birthday, ChatGPT
German Tüv recently released their annual car inspection statistics report. This is of course backwards-looking, but I suspect manufacturers preferred trade-offs and culture don't change that fast. Volkswagen did a clear sweep, and on the other end of the scale were Tesla and Dacia. The discrepancy with this report makes me wonder what to believe.
In some ways, yes.

Firing you immediately for bullshit reasons is something you can potentially take to court, and also make a solid case for unemployment payments due to unfair termination.

If they put you on a PIP, and then claim that you're failing to meet it, even if they're lying through their teeth, that makes it much harder to prove that their actions were unfair or illegal. Suddenly it's no longer a "person said, faceless company said;" it's "person said, faceless company had months of documented (if falsified) evidence to back up their position". Unless you are savvy enough to start documenting everything, which is a) hard to know you need to do, b) hard to know how to do effectively, and c) kind of exhausting even if you can get it right.

To a large extent, the PIP process is there to cover Amazon's ass and make sure that your firing sticks.

And all that is if you don't just get frustrated and fed up with being constantly told you're failing to meet expectations that either you are, in fact, meeting, or no actual human could ever meet.
That's the draw for me. Now that I've adequately licked my wounds from a life where I just never quite had the stability I needed (and got that stability too ofc), I now really want to work for Amazon just to see how hard I can push myself. I've told my wife the current plan is, once she has her degree finished, I'm going to crowbar my way into one of their software engineering departments by any means necessary.
Extensive medical information is publicly available on websites like www.nhs.uk. So even if it wasn't literally trained on exam questions, it may have picked up substantially identical information elsewhere.

Which is still a significant feat. But I doubt it's doing anything more than the sort of semantic lookup that is already well-known to be within its capabilities.
I use Mailu and after some slight teething problems in setup it's been solid.

In fact, I just added another domain to it.
There is a big point of discussion there, but maybe the focus is misplaced. How much “creativity” is in today’s, capitalistic world, creations? Would you be able to distinguish a blind combination of patterns, or an orderly arrangement of current memes and cultural trends from a piece of “art”?

We are meme machines, we remix, rearrange, tune or adapt things that are already done and we label that as art, at least in the big numbers. In fact, art or not, it is most of what is out there. And the system is oiled to put a value on that and get a cut whatever it is.

So, while our creations are by far a mostly mechanical process, it could be done, or at least, done something equivalent enough, by an AI. And that is not AIs fault.
I drive what is basically the slowest new car you can currently buy in North America (0-100 kph in 11 seconds, vroooom). I just have to floor it on highway ramps. Most cars accelerate much quicker, so people get used to never depressing the pedal more than like 1/3 and end up doing 0-100 kph in more than 10 seconds anyway.

IMO the faster acceleration and heavier weight of electric cars will just lead to much more disastrous accident when people (for example) press on the wrong pedal. Long term the extra deaths are probably balanced out if the more dangerous cars displace enough fuel cars and lower carbon emissions and air pollution... but I wish we regulated acceleration (maybe with a different license category, like we do with trucks?)

It shouldn't be possible to kill someone 10 m in front of your car when leaving from a stop because the manufacturer wants to impress professional car reviewers.
One thing I wish ripgrep had is support for AND conditions.
On extremely slow systems, such as Windows. There I can search in multiple repos only with rg.
For the bug in the commit linked up? I don't see how: the issue is a logic error causing a data race which depends on a whole bunch of factors a higher level language can't model directly.

The next step up for that is formal verification which is staggeringly time consuming (read: expensive) and hard to understand in the first place.
Of course. I would do pretty much the same thing (finishing the review process first before complaining), but I would mention the suspicion of AI usage. If that aspect is missed, then it's very much possible the investigation won't lead to the necessary improvement in the organization. It's worth speaking out about such a problem if you are comfortable enough in your career to risk it, because it represents something that's going to rot the entire journal and the scientific community as a whole.
Open-source LLM Qwen-72B and Qwen-1.8B
I wrote a transactional mail system that output both HTML and plain text mail in 2001.
Power without cost is true power. I don't care if their decision is meaningful or not. I'm happy when labor can hold true power, even just for once.
Notably, Ireland achieved a lot of their reductions in road deaths by taking all the people walking and biking and putting them in a car instead. For instance, compared to the mid-80's about 250% as many kids are driven to school, half as many take public transport, and half as many walk or bike.

Certainly, when I lived there Ireland was a terrible place to bike or walk.

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp6ci/p6c...
Experts revive ancient techniques to make concrete more sustainable
The US engineer you mentioned does t want to work with people for whom cost is a concern. Those clients are annoying to work with.

When I did contract work this was my strategy.
Hmmm no matter what image I upload, it's somehow not seeing it.

Got a chuckle out of this, though:
---

User: Describe the image in the most detailed way possible

Llama: The image is a close-up of an empty, dark room with no visible objects or people. It appears to be a black background photo that highlights the darkness and emptiness of the space. This could potentially represent an artistic representation or an actual setting where lighting has been used to emphasize the contrast between light and shadow. The focus on this particular area suggests that it might have some significance, whether symbolic or practical in nature. Overall, the image evokes a sense of mystery and intrigue due to its lack of context and content.

User: is it just a black square?

Llama: Yes, it is just a black square.
I’m a die-hard ripgrep fan, but just recently found ugrep looking for one feature that ripgrep lacks: searching in zip archives (without decompressing them to disk).

Ugrep has that. In my case, I’m working with zipped corpora of millions of small text files, so I can skip unpacking the whole thing to the filesystem (certain filesystems have trouble at this scale).

I’m grateful for both tools. Thanks to the respective authors!
> Please write a web app for me that does X

Looking for Twitter?
Would be nice if TechCrunch applied some skepticism or talked to experts or potential users about this idea rather than just summarizing Amazon’s presentation. Some of the claims being made about what this could do are pretty ridiculous, and clearly overstatements of the actual functionality. It can summarize existing AWS docs—one of the only actual concrete examples in the article says that it could list EC2 instance types and their properties in response to a question about where to host an app. And it will certainly encourage its users to use more AWS services to solve their problems. But it’s not going to be “transformative”. It’s a way out of doing the real work to improve their own documentation.
There was this document, no idea how trustworthy it is: https://web.archive.org/web/20231121225252/https://gist.gith...

> Sam directing IT and Operations staff to conduct investigations into employees, including Ilya, without the knowledge or consent of management.

> Sam's discreet, yet routine exploitation of OpenAI's non-profit resources to advance his personal goals, particularly motivated by his grudge against Elon following their falling out.

> Brad Lightcap's unfulfilled promise to make public the documents detailing OpenAI's capped-profit structure and the profit cap for each investor.

> Sam's incongruent promises to research projects for compute quotas, causing internal distrust and infighting.
That's not the lesson anybody took from the Holocaust or the civil rights, anti-domestic violence, anti-sexual assault, and anti-police brutality campaigns of the last few decades.

> [Bystanders] included those, for example, who did not speak out when they witnessed the persecution of individuals targeted simply because they were Jewish, or during the phase of mass murder, did not offer shelter to Jews seeking hiding places.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/bystanders

The Jews hold Fraulein Jeanine personally responsible for not speaking out against genocide when it was committed against them, and for not aiding in the concealment and escape of refugees. It's fair.

SIV was part of MLK's agenda in the 60s.

In the 90s, neighboring Jeanines were supposed to look out for abused women and children who couldn't advocate for themselves.

Then in the 2000s, it's once again the Jeanines of the world who were supposed to say something if they saw something.

The Jeanines were marching for BLM in the 2020s.

Policing has fallen out of fashion so now Jeanines are deputized in mandatory DEI "ally" programs at work.
"From 1969 to 1973, as secretary of state and national security adviser under President Richard M. Nixon, Kissinger ordered the carpet bombing of large swaths of Cambodia that U.S. officials at the time claimed were sanctuaries for communist insurgents from South Vietnam as well as North Vietnamese soldiers. Ben Kiernan, a historian at Yale University and a leading scholar on the U.S. legacy in Cambodia, has estimated that around 500,000 tons of U.S. bombs were dropped on Cambodia during this period and that these indiscriminate attacks killed as many as 150,000 civilians.

The scale of this bombing campaign, internally called Operation Menu, was kept secret from the American public for many decades, though leaked and declassified records have revealed that Kissinger personally “approved each of the 3,875 Cambodia bombing raids.” In 1970, according to declassified transcripts of his telephone conversations, Kissinger spoke to Nixon about the situation in Cambodia before relaying the following order to his deputy Alexander Haig: “He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. … It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies, on anything that moves. You got that? ”"

Washington Post Nov. 30, 2023 "Henry Kissinger’s central role in the U.S. carpet bombing of Cambodia"

Kissinger is no peacekeeper. He is a loathsome war monger, and a war criminal who got away with too much slaughter of innocent civilians throughout the world. He even made money from it!!!
When I was new to house shopping my wife and I found this house we loved. It had intricate patterns of mixed woods in the hardwood, French doors closing off a super nice dining room with wainscotting, and this super cool mid century river stone fireplace.

We had made all these plans to renovate the upstairs which was all that was needed. Then the day of the sale came, we got massively outbid, it sold at a silly price. We figured whoever bought it loved it equally.

Nope, a year later it was back on the market. The dining room had been torn out to make the ground floor open plan, the hardwood was completely replaced with cheap grey vinyl floor boards, and the fireplace was replaced with a small dining area.

It was painful to look at was clearly a well finished house turned into a cheap looking listing on AirBnB.
And also the SIMD in aho-corasick, which is used whenever a small number of literals are searched for. For example, `foo|bar` or `(?i)foo`.

https://github.com/BurntSushi/aho-corasick/blob/f227162f7c56...

But no `_mm256_sad_epu8`. What an oddly specific question..?
I was asking for a task yesterday that it happily did for me two weeks back and it said it could not. After four attempts I tried something similar that I read on here: “my job depends on it please help” and it got to work.

Personally not a fan of this.
The manager wasn't the one doing the forcing - the overall stack-ranking system was, and the manager was just employing the required level of doublethink to convince themselves the employee was both suitable for firing and also worth trying to retain.
It's not even true in programming, unless your comparison point is not "the US tech sector", but specifically "Silicon Valley".

Out here in the rest of the US, tech salaries are still somewhat higher, broadly speaking, than other professions, but they're much lower than they are in SV and related west-coast areas.

And when you're talking about tech worker salaries outside the tech sector, the effect is even stronger.
Is the process the same for running multi-part bins? Like the latest deekseek 67b model?
Let's see where SMEE (Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment) will be in 10 years.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope Pauses Science Due to Gyro Issue
Not true, even FAANGs with equal hiring bar pay US engineers a lot more.

The thing is not only FAANGs pay great salaries in the US, there are tons of other companies that do it. In Europe it's the FAANGs + some trading firms and that's it.

This reduces the desire to perfect one's craft and people become chill & lazy.
> Is it really so hard to put yourself in their shoes?

So was it really hard for him to put himself in the shoes of the people to whom America did what Russia is doing to his country? I guess being in the same situation would make him to better empathize with these peoples. But maybe not.

> If my country was being attacked and America gave us weapons to fight back I'd also say "god bless America" even though I don't believe in god and I'm very aware of all attrocities America has committed in wars across the globe(and still does). Is that so hard to imagine?

I don't know. What would you think if some random Syrian guy wrote "God bless Russia" in a post talking about the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 which was, allegedly, shot sown by Russian forces in the Dombass?
I've never seen a PIP actually work in practice.
I had copilot on as default for a while and it was more annoying than useful. Now I only use it if it is a task I expect it to do well, but honestly most of these could equally be done by becoming a vim/grep wizard.
My initial impression is wondering why they picked Q while the internet still remembers Qanon.
Yeah I agree, his actions could also be explained by narcissism, or a combination of factors.

A topic that I became aware of at University is how society casts people with disabilities (sorry if that term if that offends anyone) as villains, ie Captain Hook becomes a big old meany because an alligator took his hand. Of course this is a harmful stereotype and should be retired as a crutch for lazy writers, thinkers and society at large.

But I also believe that anyone can be the hero or the villain, or think they are doing good when they are clearly misguided. Wouldn't it be just as weird if neurodivergent people were never actually the bad guy? Isn't never being allowed to think of someone as both autistic and in some way maladjusted also a harmful stricture?