skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's less like "you're holding it wrong" and more like "look, when you hold it like this the waves are different!" .. you can be pretty successful with basic language prompts but you can also be deliberate in the way you give instruction.

Much like you can achieve different results with real people if you present your statements with some attention to the intended audience.
The Fastmail workers formed a local branch of the Communications Workers of America.
You don't need to get good performance on everything with a single model—Mixture of Experts models can outperform equivalently sized monolithic models. My understanding is that GPT-4 is structured this way.

If we can trim a model in different ways to get different specializations, that could be really effective.
LinkedIn says Fastmail has 116 U.S. based employees. I may be completely off base here, but if you're that small an org and employees feel the need to form a union, wouldn't that indicate a significant problem with company culture?
Getting Started with the OpenAI SDK for Deno
I have corrected the comment.
Seems overly cynical to me.
And VSCode is just one of many that run on Linux. This feels like some sort of a unwritten rule that if you are making a new DE you also have to make a new text editor (ElementaryOS makes Code, KDE makes Kate, Gnome makes Gnome Text Editor) which honestly is a bit ridiculous to me.
The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum comes to mind
This doubles as a perfection explanation of why the web is such a terrible technical platform for rich client applications. All of the assumptions baked into the foundational design of HTML & CSS were based around the idea these would be used for creating lightly styled documents.
Yeah, I remember none of the big news sites were staying up. BBC was mostly down, CNN was mostly down, etc. Slashdot stayed up. I think at one point CNN switched to a static minimal text-only format to try to stay up.
Most of these strategies will get better results when working with other humans as well!
Can you provide some more details?
> Management wants to pay as little as possible for the most work and labor wants to get paid as much as possible for the least amount of work?

Well for example, at Netflix, management specifically paid extra for good labor and offered interesting problems, and in return we did extra work because we were motivated by the interesting problems and the great co-workers.

And at Google back in the day, they gave significantly more benefits than necessary to attract great talent.

So no, I'd say it's possible to create a non-adversarial workplace. The trick is keeping it that way as it grows, which is usually when unions come in.
That is a pretty old rant, at this point. Amusingly, google+ doesn't event exist anymore. :D
Enjoyed reading it! Great overview of different concepts involved while building DB's. From mentioning SIMD to squeeze out performance on a single machine all the way to consensus algorithms.

While on the topic of DB's, reliability and distributed systems. Formal methods and how they can be applied in these situations and formally apply to Database internals for anyone else wishing to read up on as another concept.

Interesting paper on the S3 team using TLA+ to model.

[0] Use of Formal Methods at Amazon Web Services
https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/formal-methods-amazon....

[1] How Amazon Web Services uses formal methods
https://www.amazon.science/publications/how-amazon-web-servi...
What’s unreasonable in thinking that a plane that has hit a building at the top of it shouldn’t make the whole building collapse in just a matter of tens of minutes? If anything, this war in Ukraine has proved that buildings can sustain a lot and lot of damage until structurally collapsing.
If it happens, and someone doesn't name it Snow Crash, it's a missed opportunity.
You can unionize your way to a bigger share of the profits, and better working conditions.
I know for mass adoption LLMs need to support natural language input. But we've done a reasonably good job (note: source for endless arguments here ;) over the past ~80 years of developing a very precise system for inputting exactly what we want a system to do in the form of programming languages.

I'm curious whether any of the leading models - LLMs, image generation models, etc. have taken this into consideration. Particularly in more precise I/O domains (image generation comes to mind), it seems like a structured input format where we remove the entire problem space of natural language prompt -> user intent would make things dramatically easier to get the output we want.
This is how I think of Dhall as well, which I highly recommend.

https://dhall-lang.org/
Well into the 2000s it was routine to find unredacted SSNs in public Federal bankruptcy filings. Likewise, the old Congressional Records contain thousands of SSNs of newly promoted military officers. Librarians have spent a lot of time tracking these down in their archives to redact them.
Discord became a perfect conduit for a leak of government secrets
Unions don't always indicate there is a problem in need of solving. It's just a group of employees agreeing to bargain collectively with their employer, which helps balance out the negotiation power between employees and the employer and creates a stable, well-defined employment relationship.
Internet Archive Files Appeal Brief Defending Libraries and Digital Lending
Further research is needed
Prompt engineering exists because a) LLMs are trained to optimize for statistically average accommodation of the dataset and b) Sturgeon's law: "ninety percent of everything is crap". Therefore, LLMs out-of-the-box will give worse-than-ideal results by design.

The initial proof that prompt engineering worked was around the VQGAN + CLIP days, where simply adding "world-famous" or "trending on ArtStation" was more than enough to objectively improve generated image quality.

The workaround to prompt engineering is RLHF/alignment of the LLM, but everyone who has played around with ChatGPT knows that isn't sufficient.
Microsoft Open Source Ecosystem
Somewhat, but you get the same with animals we've used as "tools" for a long time (horses, donkeys and cows spring to mind).

There are plenty of things that can kill or hurt us that we've made that have no active operator either (I mentioned buildings and roads/bridges collapsing, and one could even place a shovel on a pile that slips or falls off a truck and hurts you; or using a wire gauge that's too thin for electric current it carries; or...). Lack of care (or expertise) in whatever humans construct or build can harm you without having an operator or any automation.
You actually can!

If the government doesn't protect your wages, you are left at the mercy and greed of capital. I can guarantee you that means you will be thrown under the bus the first opportunity they see fit, as soon as it makes a financial sense.

Look at the avalanche of layoffs that started with Twitter. Now the market is flooded with engineers, which makes our individual bargaining position worse. Employers notice this, and decide to stagnate your wages, saying: "well, there are many unemployed people that will be glad to be hired, just be happy you still have a job".

All of this is happening in the background of them racking in record profits and awarding their c-suite tremendous bonuses. And you are supposed to be grateful for the scraps. Does that seem fair? The government is too slow and pressured by lobbyists to act, and you are on your own.

By the way, the current cost of living crisis and the insane levels of inflation were both caused by the corporations' greed and the government's inability (or incentives to turn a blind eye) to curb them.

The mega corps used every excuse under the sun to increase their prices AND to fire people: bad macroeconomic situations, the wars in Ukraine/Palestine, high price of energy, and in that way they drove inflation up and unemployment up (thereby reducing the cost of labor). But when it comes to your salary, they don't care, as if you yourself are not impacted by inflation or layoffs.

Luckily, with unions, together, we are strong, and can at least partially retaliate to corporate greed. If anything, it's the unions that can bring the economy back, by allowing a reasonable salary for their middle class members. Thereby they are keeping funds within the country and not allowing the funds to be diverted towards the 1%'s offshore accounts.
This is why, contrary to what you claimed, you can unionize to a fairer, better economy, and this is EXACTLY how it works.

Great for Fastmail employees!
Personally it's harder to reason about systems where you define the desired state and it magically happens, this includes functional languages.

I have no idea why people think that is better. I always want to command the system and be able to understand the processes it will undergo to implement that change. Even if it is reliable, it's difficult to understand or be confident in a system whose inner workings feel like a black-box.
The Moral Decline of Elite Universities
The interesting part is that as soon as ChatGPT came out and people realized it was filtering out or just refusing to answer questions, hackers got to work and got around the restrictions. Its not hard to find queries on how to dupe AI in order to give you nefarious responses like how to code up a ransomware script or how to code up a virus to create a DDoS bot army.

I remember reading books about the history of computer hacking and they started with stories of the phreakers and people who believed that all information should be free regardless of what humanity did with it. They always had stories about how they would pick the locks on the doors the labs that held the earliest computers. When staff found out and changed the locks, they simply scoffed and learned how to pick those locks instead. It wasn't until the school threatened them with expulsion did they finally relent.

In this day and age, as soon as you start putting up fencing around something, there's scores of people who just as anxious to find a way around it.
Ad Company Claims 'It's True. Your Devices Are Listening to You'
> Please avoid using distributed systems when non distributed solutions suffice.

I would give the opposite advice.

Every non-trivial production system is a distributed system. At the very least your database is a replica set and therefore a distributed system. So avoid learning distributed systems at your own peril.

Check out https://jepsen.io/ and https://raft.github.io/
Anyone else tired of this Machiavellian approach that gives up on trying to persuade through rational and informed discussion?
IBM was essential to every aspect of the Nazi war machine
Ah, I did have a typo. But you also copied it wrong. I wrote this

labels:
- mylabel
- {{ extraLabels | indent 4 }} # toJson doesn't work here.

Which has an extra `-` and as you pointed out would produce a nested list.

But I meant this which would merge the lists.

labels:
- mylabel
{{ extraLabels | indent 4 }} # toJson doesn't work here.
Thanks for this. I’ve been thinking about “lightspeed leapfrog” for many years but never searched it up!
It doesn't sound like you observed gender disparity in education... Did you? If so, you should say so, because that's what the GP was commenting on. Do you have other thoughts regarding their fertility rate?
There is no such thing as prompt "engineering". It's basically just trying different approaches until you come up with something that subjectively seems good enough. Nothing wrong with that, but let's not confuse the issue by labeling it as engineering.
What we need are Unions Squared. It’s a union for the union. If the first level union isn’t fighting for the workers they lose their membership. But… what if the second level union fails…
'Fond' memories for monstrosities like Websphere or MQ servers. Take trivial JMS or less-trivial-but-grokkable J2EE spec, add 10x more ultra-proprietary stuff that is very complex to grok compared to original spec, solves little on top in real world, makes you utterly vendor-locked in for every app until complete rewrite. You need additional Eclipse-based apps to work with it at all, and IIRC they were costly as hell too. Rinse and repeat.

Then there was Weblogic, that worked as well and mostly by standards. Devs I met everywhere loved it.
My biggest frustration with Nix is the lack of typing. Writing anything more than the basics, I feel like I quickly run into an issue of not being able to reason easily about what structures I'm manipulating, and I haven't gotten very far by trying to lean on the editor I'm using either.
If you're running UniFi on FreeBSD/OpenBSD it won't even allow cloud access because their Java websocket library for it doesn't include support for anything but Mac/Win/Linux
This is like one of those "horror stories in 2 sentences" type things.
They are going down?
Ok, we'll switch to that github link from https://pypi.org/project/snowjob/ above. Thanks!
SCStory: Self-Supervised and Continual Online Story Discovery
Sometimes employers use that money and expertise for good by figuring out ways to get employees extra benefits, for example inventing the 10 year option, which costs the company more but is better for the employee.

When two people who get along negotiate a contract they don't need lawyers if they aren't trying to take advantage of the other party.
What LLMs are really good at is guessing from fuzziness which is something formal languages are usually bad at. I can often ask for things I don't know much about in the wrong way and it gets to a response that shows where I was wrong and what may have misled me.
I had the opposite experience. Gmail's filter was useless, letting in tons of spam, and then putting normal emails from family members, also using gmail, and who I have emailed many times in the past, into spam. Fastmail's is drastically better for me.
Prince's other writings have been outstanding. Based on the relative opacity of Bishop's venerable PRML, I'd turn to Prince's book before I would Bishop's newest.
I think the eventual steady state future is going to be something between natural language plus (aka prompt engineering) and SQL. A structured query but doesn't need 100% syntactical accuracy+ theres a high likelihood UX will evolve to come with filters/options/radio boxes as default similar to most search these days
A person is able to get whole college degrees in communication. Sure everyone has a basic understanding of their native language, but everyone can use some help now and then learning to communicate better. An LLM is an audience like any other.
Taking money out of the C-Suite and putting it in the pockets of workers is better for the economy.
Maybe the morals our societies have held for hundreds/thousands of years around moral decency and civility had a point. But I guess I'm glad you're wiser than all the generations that came before you, and you know better than all of them.
It's not quite the same, but Home Manager feels a little like what you're describing.
There's power in bargaining as a collective, whether you're a collective of ten or ten thousand. Either way, it helps with the power imbalance between employees and management.
the OP says "Delta Dental of California", for one thing. I imagine that means that I'm safe.

California is not the entire world, believe it or not.
I mean, you can be certain the big heads of companies are unionizing / conspiring against you (meeting behind closed doors to keep wages down, not poach, fix prices / rent, etc.).

It's fascinating how the lower class has been indoctrinated against them.
One could argue that distributing more money to workers would stimulate the economy more than aggregating it at the top.
And in the case of Fastmail, it’s already an employee-owned business (not sure on the AU/US split from the Fastmail/Pobox merge, but I believe that all shareholders are employees except one who is a brother of an employee). As a former employee of Fastmail (AU, 2017–2020), I’m a bit puzzled by this, and curious about it.
One problem with WASM is that, at this point (2023), the only easy way of building that, is to statically link everything C into one WASM blob (so you can't use my blob).

But you can try to use my build scripts, and tweak my code, to build SQLite+sqlite-vss+Faiss into one large WASM. If you use my patches/imports/exports/config for SQLite, my binding will gladly take your WASM blob, without modification to the Go code.

All you need to do is set this global variable (and not import package embed, which embeds my WASM and sets this variable for you at init):
https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3#pkg-variabl...

Ping me on GitHub if you need help.

Vector search is on my meters long todo list, but I'd rather do it in Go if at all possible.
As long as there's an option to not be in the union, it's completely fine IMO.

In a free market, the best option will win. When non-union jobs are better than union jobs the need for the union should vanish (in theory).
U.S. economy will pull off soft landing in 2024, CBO projects
There's a very strong, anti-union sentiment in HN IMO as it's contrary to the "bootstrapping" image venture capitalist that drives so much here. But if fellow readers put aside any resentment and look at it objectively: we prosper in ways due to past unions, and hopefully see it as a tool to push back on broken hiring/firing processes, at the least.

Low hanging fruit: We all think we are strong or can bounce back to a new job easily. What happens when we cross that line of ageism we hear about often? Not everyone is going to be able to retire in their 40s/50s. A union can push back in this practice.

What about not being granted lengthy paternal leave to spend with new family members and the state you reside in doesn't offer assurances?

What about the lengthy contracts we all fool ourselves into signing, thinking the companies won't come after us as long as we treat and be treated as "part of the family" and we leave it to luck and withstand unfair practices to not rock the boat?

We even tell ourselves "HR is not our friend, they are there to protect the company" and in the same breath say "unions are useless"

Like I've been hearing: It's better to start and be in a union when you don't need one.
IBM used to sell computers directly to consumers.

For a brief, maybe fifteen year period out of their 100 year history. And even those weren't big sellers. Point being, I don't know that it was ever reasonable to ask the "man on the street" what IBM does, and expect anything but a vague answer.

Hell, my mother used to program their 370s and System/38s (precursor to the AS400). I haven't asked, but if asked the same question, I wouldn't be shocked if her answer were, "wait, they're still in business?"
The writers' and UPS strikes were a good juxtaposition of where (private sector) unions work and when they don't. The writers got, approximately, squat. Most of them got laid off. The pay raises don't compensate for the months of lost work. The advantages of hedging with foreign content was laid bare. They struck when they had no leverage and it showed.

The UPS strike, on the other hand, was a resounding success. Swiftly resolved. Material pay and safety improvements. And a stable workforce for UPS in the midst of a broader labor shortage. Win win. (Yellow got fucked, but that's a different story.)
Users flagged it. We sometimes turn off flags, but I didn't do so in this case for multiple reasons. The primary reason is that HN just had two enormous threads about this topic:

'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616550 - Dec 2023 (1266 comments)

The pro-Israel information war - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38572675 - Dec 2023 (1669 comments)

There are other reasons why we didn't turn off flags in this case. I'll describe two.

(1) The votes and comments on this thread didn't look organic to our software, nor to me. My guess is that someone was trying to promote this article on HN. If so, I'm sure it was for deeply felt reasons, but it's still not a good thing to do (not to mention against HN's rules, both in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) and in practice it leads to a lesser quality of discussion.

(2) If we're going to have further threads about this painful and divisive topic, it's better that the foundation not be an outright advocacy piece. This is not a criticism of the article, nor of the intention behind the article—it's a question of the impact on the thread. You can already see, in some of the angriest comments in this thread, what sort of hell the entire discussion would likely have turned into (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38645665 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38646617). That is not what this site is for, it destroys what it is for, and I don't see how it helps anyone.

Those who feel strongly in favor of a piece like this need to understand that there are also many users on whom it would have the opposite intense effect. It gets harder to communicate under such conditions, and HN threads are supposed to be meaningful communication, not battle.

All of this was happening in two recent threads I linked to—including controversies about article choice. That is inevitable, but it's also a matter of degree.
That's annoying about wazero function not allowing reentrant calls. The docs do say it's not goroutine safe, which is easy to miss on its own, but nothing about this.
There's a whole societal level aspect too, most Unions are net positive imo (better wages and conditions is better for everyone), but some definitely aren't. The FOP is the absolute epitome of this, if you've ever wonder how we ended up where we are in the US with our cops, look into what their Union does for them.
Still going through it but Swifty Stacks: https://www.swiftystack.com/ has been such an eye opening for a hobby iOS engineer like myself. I've enjoyed all the content and coming from a web dev background its a breath of fresh air to see a different development style and how to make things performant / make DevEx easy on yourself and your project.
Me in Brazil letting it snow on my terminal while it's currently 100°F
> maybe the thumbnails are scaled at different quality levels???

Agreed, the WebP lossless version looks pretty bad when scaled by the browser. And since virtually no website/device shows images at their native resolution these days, that's something to consider.

On the other hand, most people these days view websites on their phones, so those artifacts will be harder to see.
"test" is a generous description of a single-trial anecdote from Reddit, substantiated by a screenshot of some text.
There is more on the wikipedia page [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melrose_Place#GALA_Committee
There's also cost in coordination and agility--this is fundamentally true of any new bureaucracy, company, system or process.

I'm reading this as a sign of cultural stress unless we have evidence to the contrary. (EDIT: I didn't realise Fastmail has almost 1,000 employees, with many remote. That comes closer to where structure is merited, though I'd still argue that this points to dysfunction in the U.S.-HQ bridge given only the Americans are unionizing.)
Non-issue.
I'm not sure if that gives me an intuition on the title of the article: "Do large language models need all those layers"

Am I interpreting you correctly if I say: "Finding the slope (training) may require those extra layers but finding a particular y value given an known x coordinate (inference) may not require those extra layers".

What I mean is, does the answer to the article's question change if one is considering training vs. inference?