skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Back in Docker's day it was (basically) the only thing out there that let you reliably package up an application in a portable way from any Linux distribution to any Linux distribution - before Docker it was prohibitively difficult to build your application on your Ubuntu desktop and run it on your CentOS servers because you had to wrangle system packaging, library differences, and see the app run in the same way as it would in production. Docker turned the runtime into one consistent thing everywhere (and the ability to ship it to the deployment target).

That's less novel in 2023 but solved serious problems a decade ago. In 2023 reproducible builds are important as reflected by efforts like Debian's reproducible builds or SALSA and nix zooms way beyond that to solve downstream problems, too
Why would they not?
for me both are far better than o365, which even marked legit business mail (o365 invoices :)) from microsoft itsef as spam!

I'm generally content with fastmail, but the webmail would need some polish. (and by polish I do not mean the user hostile react rewrites MS and Google are pushing)
> My prediction is that we are already at the peak of what people want in terms of capturing and sharing their experiences for a long time (the next level will be to add smells, but that likely requires direct brain/computer interfaces which are a looooong way off).

We are very far from the peak, as long as we still have to be concerned with device, network, format, latency.

Imagine one day you can just put on a pair of glasses, not thicker than your standard reading glasses, and say "Capture what I'm seeing with all details, in the most realistic way, and share it with my wife". Nothing further. Then we'd be close to the peak. And may still not be there.
In 2002 my school (Kent State) was in the process of phasing out SSNs as student numbers. I was working as a student IT employee in one of the departments and spent quite a bit of time updating systems to remove the use of SSNs.
I just tried Mistral MoE 8x7B model and it works a bit faster than llama-2-70B but it looks it has almost the same skills. In fact, all latest models of 13B-70B size are quite similar. Could it be large part of their training data is the same?
Link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_3.0
Not really. Though I know these days people use Engineer for all sorts of things
It is technically true that devices with wake words are always listening, but that's not the whole truth. In that idle mode they're only listening for the wake word. Only once you've said the wake word does it start recording. This is evidenced by the fact that you can't set a custom wake word on them (you may only select from a small list on which they were trained).

Nobody has provided evidence that they're always recording and sending (only conspiracy theories). It's possible those theories are true, but there's currently no evidence.
I don't trust security people to do sane things. - Linus Torvalds (2017)

... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
The acronym EHR is not explained in the readme or on the website that it links to, but it's used a million times. Dictionary (merriam webster) doesn't know it either. Great EHR software I'm sure, but what's EHR?

Edit: the username I would have liked to have answered my question while I was typing! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38658021
It seems like this probably isn't enforceable but is used to scare people out of their rights?

It seems like there should be some sort of consumer protection law against companies including clauses that they can't reasonably expect to be enforceable.
I don't think that it's accurate anymore. Democrats don't seem to be stupid, overly trusting, or disunited anymore. I mean, in a 50-50 senate, they've constantly had 49 votes for bills, usually with Manchin and all Republicans dissenting. That's a far cry from the Obama era, where the Democrats had a supermajority but didn't have the votes to pass basic parts of Obama's proposed bills, because the party was disunited.
I missed that, thank you
I think I’ve misinterpreted it in the same way. I guess you’re asking something like: if we can exorcise parts of a model without affecting quality of inferences (in some particular domain), can we do the same with the training step? That is, is it necessary to train a model on a wide variety of topics in order to get high-quality ‘understanding’ for a particular application?

If we don’t need those weights at inference time, why do the computation to train them in the first place?
The Information Theory of Aging
When this game came out I really wanted to play it, but I didn't have the machine to do so.

Now, 33 years later I watch videos of people playing DCS and I'm in the exact same situation. Only before, I had no money, but today I have money, but choose not spend it, because I'm the kind of guy that would drop multiple thousands of dollars on peripherals.

"Wanna play DCS?"
"No. No, man. I'm clean."
I don’t know anything special about it, but I wouldn’t interpret it necessarily as saying anything negative about Fastmail. For example, lots of perfectly nice companies get bough by giant behemoths. For all we know, Fastmail might have perfectly nice management that understands that future owners, rather than them, are the enemy.
I think you misunderstand what I'm saying. Modern browsers try to host their extensions in a special sandboxed subprocess. At the time I was there, the code in Gecko that hosts sandboxed child processes was completely unable to deal with that host process being terminated; ie Gecko could not recover from that. It has nothing to do with Android settings.
I walk my dog in a section of land that is slowly being converted from second (third?) growth forest to a neighborhood.

They are doing the same thing. Cut everything down, reshape the land, build houses, plant a ceremonial sappling.

Every time they expand the area that houses are built on, the amount of runoff increases massively. It's very clear that most of the water is coming only from the areas that have been "developed". The unmolested land is very capable of absorbing the amount of water that comes down. This year they had to completely redo their flood/runoff drainage area and ditch system after they cleared another bunch of land and filled it in with a bunch of sandy fill. Must have cost 6-7 figures. No idea why they can't selectively harvest, and work with the existing topsoil.
Difficult to have "rational and informed discussion" when one side's guy says he'll be "dictator for a day" and gets a pass. Hard to imagine that there's a middle ground waiting to be uncovered by open-minded investigation.

I'm reminded of that quote by Satre.
I see flashes of images. I’m so jealous of people that can perfectly replicate 3D images in their head. What a superpower that would be.
Have you not seen the coordinated layoffs in tech the last 1.5 years? How is that not collective bargaining against tech talent?

They all used every excuse they have: overhiring, wars, inflation (which they partially helped create) to flood the market TOGETHER, thereby reducing the price of our labor. All while racking in record profits. All that perfectly legal, all that a form of them collectively bargaining to lower our labor value.
Already mentioned above before I saw this comment but I'll pile on. Firefox on Linux workstation is really bad. Chromium much better but the scrolljacking is still really bad
In Javascript yes, in Wasm no: https://webassembly.org/roadmap/
So,

1. The word crisis implies some sort of immediate existential threat. Even the extremely biased people at the IPCC have to admit that their actual worst case scenario predictions are things like GDP being a bit lower than it otherwise would have been, 100 years from now (but still much higher than today). A lower rate of economic growth over the long term is not a crisis.

2. It's actually not clear by how much the temperature has been increasing, if at all. The error bars on climate data are enormous, which is why they don't show them, and the way the data is collected and aggregated violates many fundamental rules of good scientific practice. Having dug in deeply I concluded we actually have no real idea of what global temperatures have done over the past 100 years, because the people charged with figuring that out break the rules with wild abandon and no penalties.

3. Even as recently as 25 years ago it was widely accepted that there have been warm and colder periods in humanities recent history, with temperature ranging over very wide ranges and today's climate being nothing particularly special. All that is now verboten (for ideological reasons, pretty much) but given that, it's totally possible that the tiny temperature changes we see today will go into reverse in future. Scientists were freaking out about global cooling in the 60s and 70s for a reason: temperatures were falling (modern graphs don't show that because that history has been edited out).
> Checks where I am often clear in a day. Rarely longer than two days.

That's extremely slow. Electronic transfers are basically instant these days.

> I stated that replacing checks with computers adds more points of failure.

It literally doesn't. A cheque is one big point of failure that doesn't exist with electronic transfers.

> Or do you somehow not notice the litany of things that go wrong with computers every single day right on the front page of HN.

"Computers" aren't a single thing. Bank transfers are ridiculously reliable. Far more reliable than cheques. And as I've already explained, cheques are processed by computers too so you aren't somehow skipping the possibility of programming bugs by using them.
Commonly US workers form local branches of existing unions. Federal law mandated local branches to limit union power.
There's a process you have to go through for a union to gain collective bargaining rights, I can go and join a union today, but they won't have the legal right to bargain between me and my employer unless they've gone through the process to become recognized. (Companies can voluntarily recognize a union but they are legally not required to, so they don't)

Also usually when you hear that some group has 'formed their own union' they're still affiliating with an existing Union take the recently formed VFX Union, they're affiliated with IATSE.
I’m not sure why you say this. Maybe I don’t understand what you mean.

I have Delta Dental through my employer’s benefits and it covers all the types of operations that I’d expect: preventive, endodontic, periodontic, orthodontic, prosthodontic, etc.

If I need a root canal, it’s covered by Delta Dental (up to a point, given the deductible). If I chip a tooth, and get an inlay or onlay, that is covered. Is this not insurance? Why not?
I'm convinced this is happening. I notice it regularly. Here's one:

I dramatically extolled the virtues of "Corinthian leather" during a dnd campaign and started getting advertisements within 24 hours about Corinthian college. I don't need another degree, I graduated 10 years ago. I'm thousands of miles away from their campus, I live in a cabin in the woods.
That's how unions work by default everywhere else too. It's just more common for entire industries to be unionized (through momentum, not outright obligation) outside the US.
Classic confirmation bias.
> a Viterbi decoder is computationally expensive, but can correct higher error rates than other constructions.

Higher than others at the time, or higher than turbo codes or low-density parity checks?
Unions in the US are a much different beast.

Counterintuitively, Unions in the US have much more legal power in some ways than international counterparts - if they get officially recognized.

But official recognition is only workplace-to-workplace and has an election process to follow:

https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/what-we-do/conduct-elections

Since it's more all-or-nothing per workplace, your membership is basically tied to the shop. And for some of these newer workplaces, they might not want the baggage that comes with some of the older unions.

Some US unions work on a "hiring hall" model where your membership is not tied to a workplace. This includes electricians and plumbers and other tradespeople. And also actors and writers. But you cannot just join them if you want to. Generally you have to follow a several-year application or apprenticeship system.
I'm amazed I've never played any version of this AFAICT. (Maybe I played something before Falcon 3.0 in the 80s at someone's house or I'm just forgetting)

I loved the flight sim games of that era. I haven't played one in a long time. Of course one of the issues was I had taken some flying lessons in high school but couldn't really afford it. I told myself I was going to get my license after I got out of college. Then I played a lot of flight sims while I was still a student.

When I got out of college I took a bunch more flying lessons and eventually decided I didn't actually like it... and never played any more flight sims again.

At some point it seemed like just work... and when these sims get too complex they also seem like work.
This is great, maybe I'll try to improve bashdb
It's been around for at least 2000 years.
This is not uncommon in "new" industries. You see the same effect in cars and planes - in the early years the companies had to "do everything". Once scale is reached then companies appear that do "just on task", which then "take over" that task for the parent.

This plays out at the small scale as well. When I started out writing commercial software it was very common to either sell a PC with it, or at least sell the concept of computerisation. For lots of companies this was their first computer. We were their defects IT department.

10 years goes past, and customers now already have computers. 10 more years and they have IT either on staff, or on contract.

We got to go back to writing software.

In the same way, yes, IBM needed to do everything. There was no off-the-shelf anything. So try make hardware, wrote software, sold services.

And this is the point. IBM always existed to sell services. Everything else was to get them there. Other people made hardware. Others made software. They are left to focus on their services.

This is likely revisionist history because I'm sure along the way lots of IBMers saw themselves as a hardware or software company. But I'm not sure that was ever the "core" idea. Those were just necessary to sell services, and were off-loaded along the way.
My employer (Irish company) states in the employment contract they only recognise one union here in Ireland. I'm not familiar with Irish (or EU) law on unions but it did surprise me they were so specific.

Edit: although I'm in tech I understand it covers everyone regardless of role
I feel this.

I ~empathize with people who wish it were simpler, and agree there are too many sharp corners. (For example, the traditional CLI certainly left a lot of room for improvement.)

I can vaguely imagine the prospect that something new gets this more-right than Nix, but on some level I also suspect most ~complainers aren't appreciating the scale of the domain complexity Nix closes over in order to forge The Nix Way and square decades of contrary software development/packaging/deployment practices with it.
> Back then it was common to use 50+ steps for many of the common samplers. Current methods use a few steps like 1.

The "look how fast we can go" method (turbo model with 1 step and without CFG) is blindingly fast, but the quality is...nothing close to what was being done in normal 50+ steps with normal setitngs gens.

Realistically, even with Turbo+LCM, you're still going to 4+ steps (often 8+), with CFG, for reasonable one-generation quality anywhere close to the images people generated at 50+ steps without Turbo/LCM.

Which is still a big improvement in speed.
It put the decision in the hands of the people instead of 9 justices.

We can now elect the people who will implement our preference, allowing it to evolve in multiple places in parallel.

It also has a second order effect of depoliticizing SCOTUS, in theory, it will take time for this to wind down
Yeah, that also supports how the iPads don't have OLED yet.
Unions almost never negotiate in the long-term interest of a business, they're collectively overly-short-term-focused cash/productivity drags on a business. If unions were truly long-term focused they'd be negotiating things like employee equity, but you almost never see that. Ceteris paribus non union shops are more long-term focused and trend towards better long-term outcomes.
The same can be said of any system. Look at the Internet itself, marriage, every online game, every company.

Once people stop respecting something they coexist with, they start looking for ways to exploit it.
> I feel like being able to at least affordably rent time on the high end GPUs is another alternative to buying them.

There are two problems with this.

The first is high demand. GPU time on a lot of cloud providers is sold out.

The second is that this costs money at all, vs. using the GPU you already have. "Need for credit card" is a barrier to hobbyists and you want hobbyists, because they become contributors or get introduced to the technology and then go on to buy one of your more expensive GPUs.

You want the barrier to adoption to be level with the ground.
And maybe that's just as well. The value of IBM hardware was not in the screws or the paint.
Our language is already shaped by how others perceive you when you speak. This just makes it clearer to the speaker. It doesn't change what you say without your consent.
You don't need a union to go after a company in violation of the NRLA ...
Hopefully, they make the same call and say "It's not for us to decide, each state can make their own call, or the federal gov't can pass a law"
Reminds me of in the beginning was the command line.

Powerful tools, but they’ll rip your arm off.

Learning nix, slowly, really enjoying it though.
Why is this comment getting so much heat for being confirmation bias? If anything, we should all rally around trying to guess the name in question. Did you name your kid Butter? Bananas? Campbell's CHUNKY Savory Pot Roast?
> Video codecs like h264 or VP9 are the opposite: Decoding is just following an algorithm, but an encoder can save bits by spending more effort searching for patterns in the data.

This is a more general point about the duality of compact encoding (compressing data to the lowest number of bits e.g. for storage) and redundant encoding (expanding data to allow error detection when transmitted across a noisy medium.)
Apple sauce tastes sweet as well though so I am not following the logic here.
It's always possible this is intentional, but it's more likely this kind of statement is a tactic to distract from the widespread minor lead contamination in these kinds of things and make people not question what the FDA or corporations are doing about lead contamination.

Plastic and glass recycling is also a source of lead contamination! You are starting to take materials of unknown origin in a way where it is really difficult to assume any consistency from testing. If they are turned into a glass or plastic bottle and in particular if someone puts acid in them you have lead leeching.

Plastic recycling is mostly a fantasy anyways. Much of the plastic that goes into a recycling stream is just thrown away. If it is recycled that's only at most for one more use.

We could be making returnable, washable jars, but probably someone will say we can't because it's not safe because someone could have intentionally poisoned a jar with lead before they returned it!
That's a fair point, but where does it stop? There are some classic real-world examples, but they're pretty hot areas so I'll make up a contrived example.

What about pen companies? If somebody buys a Bic pen and writes a racist or hate-speech filled letter to somebody, should Bic be required to design a pen that censors or restricts hate speech? What's the underlying principle behind expecting a company to re-engineer their product to prevent any misuse?

I think most people agree that basic safety rails are desirable, such as child-resistant lids on medicine bottles, or guards on razor blades, but who's opinion is most relevant when it comes to where to draw the line?

A real-world case might be Plex. How much responsiblity does Plex have to ensure that users aren't using it to self-host pirated material? or CSAM? With engineering effort they could pretty easily collect data on everything everybody is watching, including fingerprinting and stuff. Should they be expected or required to do that?
I mean I definitely see flashes of images of a dog. Isn’t one of the tests to see if you can seamlessly rotate a yellow star in your head? I can do it in flashes but I know people that can pause it midway through a rotation and draw the exact image they are seeing.
I tend to agree.

I am comfortable with writing functional programs, but I have tried and failed multiple times to grok the Nix documentation. The complexity is not because "functional programming is hard", but because the documentation is terrible.

To get me started with Nix, the documentation needs just a few things:

1. Internal consistency: A large fraction of the documentation is spent talking about how great flakes are, with a (last time I checked) big disclaimer at the top saying that flakes are experimental. Another fraction of the documentation talks about how great declarative installations are, while the third happily uses nix-env which, on the surface, seems no different from [apt / dnf] install.

2. How to use the package manager, for dummies. The last time I tried to install NixOS, I tried to install Z3 and its Java bindings, but got completely lost with the "also install the Java bindings" part. I'd rather just spin up a Docker container with my favorite distribution, and put my trusty magic installations there.

3. How to use Nix the language, for dummies. For people wanting to understand the system better than the dummies from part 2. I remember some magic ellipsis, and remaining confused about what they're about.

4. Really what Nix the language is about, for non-dummies.

The documentation currently conflates the last three points, and is internally inconsistent. It is also not clear where users can turn to for help. And then, I install Silverblue on my machine, and for the most part it is rock solid and easy-to-use. Sure, there are some installation commands that I need to run at the beginning of time, but I can put those in a script, and there's my nearly declarative install.
I have it on good authority they’re trying a lift and shift too and it’s not going well, at least as of ~9mo ago.
> The Nordic model begs to differ.

Can you expand on that? Because as an outside observer it seems that the Nordic model is primarily propped up by public-owned natural resource extraction enabling near-endless funding for universally available services and industry-wide (rather than company-wide) guarantees enforced by the unions, but nothing about the unions or their economic model drives their way to a better economy, rather they have the advantage of an external economic input unaffected by unions propping it all up.
Seeing layoffs as a coordinated effort by companies to reduce labor value across the entire industry is so incredibly disconnected from reality I'm not even sure it's worth responding to.
I agree with you. When the secret is always collected side-by-side with the number it seems little comfort that only one part is “supposed to be stored”.
The union/management relationship is maybe inherently adversarial in the sense that they represent different interests, but this doesn’t need to be hostile. The idea is that the unionized employees have the ability to threaten collective action, if they need to.

Maybe neither side is planning on doing anything hostile, and they are all happy to have things clearly defined.