skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I think that, for a given amount of effort (hours and study intensity) you’re willing to spend, everybody has a ceiling that they can reach.

I disagree with your disagreement, because simply controlling for total studying time and intensity is too reductionist. Different players have different sticking points when it comes to chess, e.g. weak strategic planning, weak tactics, poor positional understanding, bad endgames, etc. Your implicit assumption is that most players at some playing strength, are at that playing strength in all aspects of their game. In practice, that's simply not the case for many.

To give a concrete example, my classical rating on lichess hovers around 1800, but if you look at my tactics puzzle rating it's well above 2000, suggesting it's the positional and strategic aspects of the game that I'm weak at, which anecdotally feels true based on how I both win and lose most of my games. If I were to get a coach or deliberately work on those weaker aspects of my game myself (something I have not done), so that they're no longer the bottleneck of my performance, I could very well break this rating plateau I've been stuck in for the past half decade or so, and shoot up another 100 or even 200 points. I also have a friend of similar strength level, who has the opposite profile as me: strong positional and strategic understanding, weak tactics. And despite more or less an even record, whenever we play against each other, his wins are almost always grinds, while my wins are usually some tactical shot he missed or blundered into.

The bottom line is, at my strength level, and I'd hypothesize even up to the low to mid-2000s rating levels, these unbalanced types of players are probably more common than balanced players with similar ratings in all aspects of their game to their overall rating. The latter kind, you might be able to argue, have reached their natural ceiling; but even here I'd be surprised if they cannot improve more by deliberately strengthening aspects of their game. Conversely, based on my experience of 10+ years playing chess regularly, the vast majority of players simply don't have a good understanding of their own weaknesses. Many unbalanced players like myself, with the correct type of training and practice, even if total time isn't too much, can absolutely make significant improvements to their overall performance.

>If what you say is true, why hasn’t Magnus Carlsen reached ELO 2900? Lack of deliberate practice? ELO deflation requiring players to get better to keep the same rating?

In the case of top-level IMs, GMs, and certainly super GMs, who don't have glaring weaknesses in any aspects of their game, it's likely the case that they indeed did reach their ceiling. But these are the only people I'd be at all confident in making such claims.
> Well, I certainly don't end up doing that.

How else are you "unit testing every single function and method"?

> it turns out to be very difficult to test a specific behaviour 5-10 layers deep from an external interface.

If you don't test it, how do you know your system works for that specific behaviour? Just because you've tested every single function and method in isolation doesn't mean they actually work with each other, or produce the responses the way you need them to.

> Also, when one of those intermediate layers changes, you tend to have to rewrite many of those tests.

As you should. Otherwise how do you know that your system still works?
> I'll do a test for null, then a separate test for something else _assuming_ not null because I've already written a test for that.

Honestly, this pedantry around "unit tests must only test one thing" is counter-productive. Just test as many things as you can at once; it's fine. Most tests should not be failing. Yes, it's slightly less annoying to get 2 failed tests instead of 1 fail that you fix and then another fail from that same test. But it's way more annoying to have to duplicate entire test setups to have one that checks null and another that checks even numbers and another that checks odd numbers and another that checks near-overflow numbers, etc. The latter will result in people resting writing unit tests at all, which is exactly what you've found.

If people are resisting writing unit tests, make writing unit tests easier. Those silly rules do the opposite.
They should be teaching about algorithmic social media feeds in health class.
> What is not is what is described in the linked issue.

There seems to be a singular issue/ bug, which is that a disabled plugin is being re-enabled after update. This is just a bug, I don't understand why this is HN-worthy.

If the headline were "intellij has a bug where a disabled plugin is being re-enabled" it would be accurate, not-inflammatory, and boring.
Is it? Chatgpt and variants are a great product at least. I use it every day. My wife (nontech) also does it.
What people only use Cash App? I've never come across a member of this group. I'm an American who uses (in declining order of frequency) credit cards, Venmo, cash, PayPal, ACH, debit cards, checks. I don't recall anyone even offering to deal in Cash App, let alone exclusively.
> It's Been 2 Months. Why Can't NASA Open the Asteroid Sample Container?

They are ashamed to admit that they are empty.
Apparently (don't quote me on that, that's something I was told and I am not sure of) someone that designed the Universes Beyond sets was fired.
> Popularity and virality aren’t the only metrics to determine what’s important, but without an understanding of what is happening online, we’re much more likely to let others take advantage of us or to waste precious time thinking about, debunking, and debating issues and controversies that are actually insignificant or have little impact on the world around us.

Believe that something trending is significant? Fake News because it is overblown and was only chuckled at for five seconds by two million people—most of whom housewives in New England—and then promptly forgotten. Don’t believe that something trending is significant? Same deal.

The “people are saying” headlines are already a thing. The ones where you find out that it’s three tweets with a cumulative like (or retweets? idk) of 57. Of course now they can justify them since it might be hundreds of thousands.

> A shift away from a knowable internet might feel like a return to something smaller and purer. An internet with no discernable monoculture may feel, especially to those who’ve been continuously plugged into trending topics and viral culture, like a relief. But this new era of the internet is also one that entrenches tech giants and any forthcoming emergent platforms as the sole gatekeepers when it comes to tracking the way that information travels. We already know them to be unreliable narrators and poor stewards, but on a fragmented internet, where recommendation algorithms beat out the older follower model, we rely on these corporations to give us a sense of scale. This might sound overdramatic, but without an innate sense of what other people are doing, we might be losing a way to measure and evaluate ourselves. We’re left shadowboxing one another and arguing in the dark about problems, the size of which we can’t identify.

No self-aware closing joke about how a media writer pines for a time when they had a clear role as a meta-commentator? Ugh, too sincere.
Open letter: either marketing stunt, or openai already stiffed them privately.
Nah, it's fine to be nitty. If you glance at my comment again, you'll see my usage devolve from A to amp halfway through, my brain can't help but write what it sounds like to me.

Yes though, ampacity is the correct word (for my home country). "Current" is an instantaneous measurement of current flow. That they use the same unit is pretty convenient for planning circuits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampacity#:~:text=Ampacity%20is....
"The dealer denied knowing that it was so valuable and said he had demonstrated goodwill by offering the couple €300,000, the mask's initial valuation"

It's not being wise-after-the-fact to say they should've obviously taken that deal, which was 'rescinded after they decided to sue'.
Mercedes had COMAND, now MBUX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_COMAND
I know several teachers, a few of them in my family and a few of them in the group of friends I kept in touch with after highschool. Some of them work very hard during the school year, and some of them reuse the same lesson plans for years and say the others are working too hard. All of them don't work for most of the summer break, but they all do some work particularly in the first and last weeks.

Do you know why teachers get paid so little? Because there's a surplus of people who want to be teachers; actually getting a teaching job, let alone one at a good school, is a serious accomplishment. The schools that have a hard time keeping teachers are the ones with shitty students (due to shitty parents) which burn out teachers fast. The ones who can hack it at those schools use their experience to seek employment at better schools (positions at good schools are so competitive that having experience before applying is almost essential.)
Ask HN: What is must-have for a systems programming language?
Obviously, any systems language must have predictable memory layout for at least a subset of its types, including atomic (as in primitive) and composite types -- but probably it's not quite necessary (nor possible) for function types.

What are other language features that are similarly crucial? I'd argue even arrays are kinda optional, since they can be encoded as `Array = exists (n: Size, a: Type); (repeat a > take n > reduce ((x, y) -> (x, y)))`
The only issue with declarative is when declarative is a prison instead of a fantastic and reasonable guideline. One of the very nice things about react is that you can escape pure declarative syntax to use actual javascript/typescript. Every declarative DSL/language/format that I've used has approximations like QML's [`Repeater`](https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qml-qtquick-repeater.html), but eventually you will want and need some weird loop or logic that is most easily and succinctly expressed in a proper programming language -- at that point, you'll need to do some angry hack that unrolls one data structure into another so that you can iterate over that one with the limited logic in the declarative format. And then you'll have to keep the two models in sync.

All doable, just a pain.
Yeah I don't see the problem with that at all. Intellij packages plugins. Plugins run.

The only issue here is that it's being automatically enabled after it is disabled, which I assume is just a simple bug and not at all the big deal this is being made out to be.
I tried this two decades ago. We just had broadband for the first time and I installed some web service application on my Windows PC. My ISP had what appeared to be a static IP so I manually set up a free DNS service with that IP. The experiment didn't last long enough for the IP to change but I did learn it did because long after I took the service down, my domain was pointing to someone else's IP.

It what I now realise was a bad idea, I was writing code by web server code using C with CGI. I was supposed to use Perl, but I didn't want to spend time learning that as I already knew C.
We don't. What we know is that we can't have all of

1. locality (no backwards causation / FTL information transfer)

2. determinism

3. counterfactual definiteness (unperformed measurements still have single definite results: we can talk meaningfully about what we would have seen had we done a different experiment)

4. QM gives correct predictions.

Objective-collapse interpretations (like the version of Copenhagen described in introductory textbooks) reject 2: collapse is fundamentally indeterministic.

Everett (the badly misnamed "many-worlds" interpretation) rejects 3: "measurement" is just what unitary evolution looks like from the inside, and from that perspective always has multiple outcomes.

Superdeterminism rejects 4: QM is wrong, but the initial conditions of the universe were for some reason set up in such a way as to prevent us from carrying out any experiments that would demonstrate that.
> Or maybe artificial intelligence is flooding the internet with synthetic information and killing the old web.

Relevant: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

> The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity.[1][2][3][4] Proponents of the theory believe these bots are created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers.[5]

This is not a new thing. SEO types have been running 'spinner' tools for a long time. A spinner is a tool/technique to make copied content look fresh and new, and non-verbatim. Then we have the advent of LLMs which I have no doubt is being leveraged right now to spam the web with synthetic content.
People discuss lots of things that are pretty well solved; i wouldn't equate "open question" with "lots of discussion".

I guess in this context I mean that the question of static vs. dynamic in unit testing turns out to not be that hard, but the questions like "what is a unit test" and "should we unit test at all" are much muddier. Because people are confused or argumentative about the latter, they tend to pull the former into discussions that don't really have much to do with static vs. dynamic.
It might be. But it's also a great place to find extremely niche audio content.
Well, that does seem like the best advice. I don't see why people drink or drive, much less drink and drive.
You are one very enlightened individual; Joe Rogan must really be rubbing off on you.
> The problem is that with a shared X11, sandboxing is pointless.

You're not hearing me. For most desktop users, there was never a need to sandbox applications. It's simply not a threat vector 99% of desktop linux users have ever dealt with. It's certainly not a big enough problem to break the screen / input recording and sharing of tons of applications. Again, if you need to do that, the correct way is to PROMPT the user, not invisibly disable it entirely.
RecreAIting DemocrAIcy
"Twitter Has Complied With Almost Every Government Request For Censorship Since Musk Took Over, Report Finds" - https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...
It’s called QuickCharge and was a standardized version of Apple’s fast charging or USB C PD many years before USB C was a thing. Samsung was a key player.

The charger emits 5V unless the device supports higher voltage and negotiates it.
It wasn't a typo. I was making a joke.
U of Waterloo is a gem of a school. It's one of the few schools that when I see it on a resume it actually moves the needle for me. Their co-op program deserves every bit of the praise it gets.
My mental model for this is to consider boiling water in a pot. You can make easy statements over how long it will take for all of the water to evaporate. It is, to my understanding, impossible to discuss any particular molecule or atom.

That is to say, the closer you get to the atomic behavior of atoms, the harder it is to make "deterministic" descriptions of what is going to happen.

We often describe this in terms of "coin flips" as you can make a decent discussion over what you will see on 1000 coin flips, but you cannot make such a statement over what you will see over 1.
n=1, and I can't comment on your stove obviously, but I hated mine with such a passion that I will never get anything like this ever again if I have any say in the matter.

One of the difficulties of these sort of things is that it's really hard to know if something is any good unless you've actually used it in real-world conditions a few times.
You can create a marble run and have marbles more or less follow the exact same path every time. However, on some scale there is an unpredictable nature to things like Brownian motion which affect the run in subtle ways. Perhaps you could get closer if you could account for the physical properties of every particle in the system beforehand, but a some scale these interactions are driven by quantum mechanical processes that aren't predictable even with perfect information (as far as we know).

To look at it another way, the entropy of a system is always increasing, so you don't have enough information when the marble is at the top of the hill to know the exact outcome when it's at the bottom (on a quantum scale, or over a long enough period of time).
It's not one or the other. We need both supervised pre-training and reinforcement learning. The first part represents past human experiences encoded as language. They can bring a model to human level on most tasks, but not make it smarter.

The second approach, with RL, is based on immediate feedback and could make a model smarter than us. Just think of AlphaZero or AlphaTensor. But this requires deploying a wide search over possible solutions and using a mechanism to rank or filter the bad ideas out (code execution, running a simulation or a game, optimizing some metric)

So models need both past experience and new experience to advance. They can use organic text initially, but later need to develop their own training examples. The feedback they get will be on topic, both with the human user and with the model mistakes. That's very valuable. Feedback learning is what could make LLMs finally graduate from mediocre results.

DeepMind is saying they are using both, and feedback learning is dialed up.
This is the channel coding and synchronization specification that is used on DSOC.
https://public.ccsds.org/Pubs/142x0b1.pdf
Further discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38681672
Regarding "Is that trend really viral?", I also think some people have stopped assigning value to things that go viral. It's not just a question of whether or not something went viral, but whether or not I should care even if it did.

People are starting to understand that engagement for the sake of it isn't necessarily desirable. The virality of something doesn't indicate its importance, just that it went viral. In some cases, it's a negative signal.

Over the last 1.5 years, I've intentionally reduced my interaction with social media significantly. I've become less and less aware of the viral trends of the week. I've stopped going to most of the content aggregators (HN is one of the last holdouts), and I've spent more time reading books and doing things in person.

My life is much better for it, and as someone who found tremendous value in Internet communities and credit them for helping me navigate a tumultuous childhood in the 90s, it now feels like the time to leave it mostly behind.

Not just because the Internet has changed, but because it is changing the people who use it. For all the good in the beginning, it was changing me in ways that I did not like. I was becoming more reactionary, less tolerant, and more pessimistic about other humans.

It seems to me that we're just not mentally equipped (or at least I'm not) to handle the Internet in its current form in the long run. It's fine for awhile, but degrades rapidly. I hope the next generation of web technology and communities will find ways to solve this, but I'm starting to think that part of the solution is to stop using it for the important stuff.

It turns out to be very possible, and very pleasant.
Please post your Emacs config if you do make that change.
Firstbase.io not issuing refunds?
Has anyone else had issues with refund requests at Firstbase.io? We recently purchased a $399 package, realized it was a mistake and requested a cancellation promptly. It took them a month to process cancellation, however without a refund. Today we received e-mail that they do not issue refunds because it goes against their ToS which says:

• We are not able to process a refund once the company formation process is complete.
• We are not able to process a refund while any government agency (e.g., Secretary of State, IRS, or other agency) is reviewing the documents.
• We are not able to process a refund if you are not satisfied with the services provided outside of our website (e.g., by third-party service providers such as Agent or Mailroom).

They highlighted the last bullet point as a reason of not being able to refund, however as we request cancellation immediately after making a purchase, nothing was yet put in motion except agent filing change (which I assume is automatic by the system) and was cited as $10 on their website.
The Case for the Fediverse
test clusters to the rescue!

of course it's more work than simply applying the new charts, but the nice thing about k8s is that you can dump out the stuff from the working one, use k3s/kind/minikube, try the upgrade, and you are as good to go as with a dist-upgrade or similar.
This one is for real.
And it is superconductive. And charged by a fusion reactor (with continous ignition). /s
Crossovers are part hatchback and part minivan.
> it gave almost no guidance about how to actually use them in the real world

This is funny, because an old buddy of mine who did a brief stint at the NSA let slip that they almost never compromise the algorithm, it's virtually always the implementation where the weakness lies.
In astronomy we use the term "occulted" when one body passes in front of another and blocks its light.
You can not predict the future state from the current state, not even in principle.

Measure the spin of an electron along two different axis, to the best of our knowledge - or maybe just my - the result of the second measurement is not predictable by anything. Of course only until it turns out that hidden variables is the correct interpretation and that the hidden variables can be measured, then this also becomes the other kind of randomness.
Musk said a couple weeks back that the loss of advertisers will “kill” Twitter, but it’s ok because “the world will judge them” (the advertisers)

But maybe he was joking. Sure didn’t seem to be, but who knows. Or he’s wrong.
Writing tests, making configurations, CI/CD setup, DevOps (Docker, Kubernates), Systems Admin, Designing schemas, debugging.

Anything that doesn't have anything todo solving the core problem.

I suspect this is why NoSql & serverless platforms have become so popular.

The fact that I don't have to think about schemas & systems admin so much made them so attractive to me.
HORG: The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group: A Database of Synthetic Taxonomy
CS Lewis wrote a letter to Arthur C Clarke in which he said:

I don't of course think that at any moment many scientists are hidding Westons: but I do think (hang it all, I live among scientists!) that a point of view not unlike Weston's is on the way. Look at Stapledon (Star gazer ends in sheer devil worship), Haldane's Rosetta Worlds and Waddington's Science & Ethics. I agree Technology is per se neutral: but a race devoted to the increase of it own forces & technology with complete indifference to either does seem to me a cancer in the universe.
People have been telling sci-fi stories about society evolving/devolving into people locked into their individual pleasure boxes for decades, friend.
Do you think it is more or less censored than before?
On this note, the invention of the printing press led to The Reformation with the first printing of the Bible, which up until that point had been duplicated by monks by hand, and The Word controlled and interpreted by the Church, who wielded their power like modern governments and institutions deciding what is or is not mis- or disinformation.
Does anybody have the stats for the metro area rather than just the city?