skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is going to sound lame to most of the folks here, but I just finished a college algebra class. I’ve been doing database/software development/IT work for more than a decade but I have virtually no math background besides what I picked up my freshman year of high school.

I recently started working at a university so I’m taking advantage of the tuition reimbursement to build up my math knowledge. It’s a long-term project because I can only take one class a semester, but I’ll probably stay here until retirement (wife is tenure-track faculty at same university), so I’m in no rush.
eslint and typescript are the de-facto static analysis tools for JavaScript. TypeScript isn't extensible. So if you want to do any custom static analysis, you're doing it as a custom eslint plugin.

It might be better to have some other tool to do pluggable static analysis, but the fact is that there isn't one. And eschewing project-specific static analysis entirely would be giving up far too much.
What luxury! I’d kill for a copy-pasted error message! Usually I just get “it didn’t work.”
I hate it, my brain wants to interpret it as a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_breve
The SAG-AFTA and WGA strikes should be a signal to knowledge workers that not everything has to look like what they think a union contract is. Competitive pay and benefits can be individually negotiated while unions can represent their interests in the industry at large instead of just looking at compensation.
I cant actually think of any website thats gone the way the parent describes. Most website that have both do fine having both and its always corporate puritan ethics that causes porn to become its own separate site.
This made me laugh hard. When I worked at Oracle they’d do this in internal meetings if it was outside your immediate team! A dozen people saying “I am a System Analyst II for Managed Services” like goddamn who fucking cares
> You can't unionize your way to a better economy, that's not how that works

The Nordic model begs to differ.
I swear I've seen that one, but can't find it now. It may have taken down by a claim?
FTA:

> When we try and decrypt the on and off packets we get:

> 05 54 55 52 4E 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

> 05 54 55 52 4E 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

> 05 54 55 52 4E 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

> 05 54 55 52 4E 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

> 05 54 55 52 4E 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

> 05 54 55 52 4E 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

> Success! This is a lot more sensible. A fixed header, byte 5 switching between a 1 and a 0 for on and off, and a bunch of zeros.

I would guess that’s not a ‘fixed header’, but a length byte (“command is 5 bytes long”), a command (“TURN”) and an argument (zero or one), padded with zeroes to 16 bytes.
A sort of Chesterton's fence of morality, if you will.
`for await` and the battle of buffered streams
Your genetic influence will probably dilute over the generations and in response to environmental and cultural factors. Also, with randomness at play it may not make much of a difference after all. Properly assessing this empirically seems like a statistical nightmare.
People notify you that something didn't work? What a treat! For me the work just doesn't get done, and you have to ask why before you get an explanation that there is some technical blocker.
Show HN: This JSON Blob returns '402 Payment Required'
Hey Hacker News,

I’m proud to share my project, HighContext.ai, which lets developers charge pay-per-view access to their JSON data using the Bitcoin Lightning network.

Here’s an example JSON blob:

https://api.highcontext.ai/v1/blobs/Tg6tS6PhRufCLy7gbkl3E/r/2KsYLoAEdh4ImJUWjzHEQA/payme

Why use HighContext to charge for your data?

Today, millions of developers are building new AI models and agents that are eager to incorporate incremental training data in order to produce more accurate and reliable results. You can now let those developers—and their AI agents—quickly and easily transact with you using Lightning micropayments. Added benefits such as no chargeback risk, flexible pricing per API call, and an open payment system mean you’ll be exposing yourself to more potential customers and earning higher margin over time.

Interested to give it a try?

Visit https://highcontext.ai and upload your first JSON blob.

Let me know what you think!

John
With zig I think you can avoid libc deps on Linux, at least, by statically linking musl instead.

Not sure SQLite is tested in this configuration, for the fans of “this didn't pass TH3 so we can't trust it at all.”
>But for things like chatgpt the use cases are way more diverse and you can’t keep high performance for everything when you prune that many of the weights.

This also has become increasingly obvious from recent developments in the field. Today, we regulalry see new models that come at a fraction of the size of GPT-3 and yet easily outperform it, especially on certain downstream tasks when fine-tuned correctly. These small models also retain some generality, but not as much as the really high end really large models like GPT-4. I'd say a sub 10B parameter model equal or better than GPT-3 overall is achievable, but not for GPT-4. At least not with current technology. However, that would still imply that it's possible to reduce parameter counts in common approaches by 95%. I'm pretty sure in a few years people will look back and smirk at the crude methods we used to train LLMs today.
Ask HN: Which "enterprise" dev practices are you using on your small team (2-4)?
I've been solo coding a project for a while. We're adding two junior developers to the effort, both who have cut their teeth in enterprise/startup type environments for the last 5 years or so. One of the things that appealed to both of them, was being part of a smaller, less constrained/bureaucratic effort. And for me, I've hit that point of "go alone go fast, go together go far", so I'm excited too. I've been part of different teams in the past, and was a big advocate of XP back in the early days of Agile movements.

Somewhere between my disciplined cowboy crusade, and the ticket driven cube farm experience these devs have had, is a happy medium, more regulated than what I've been doing, and less regulated than what they've been experiencing. I'm soliciting recommendations from others in 2-4 person teams of best developer practices. Which practices do you do the same as big efforts? And which ones do you do less of?
I think it makes sense to want a study that controls for gun training and intelligence, I don't think it makes sense to reject data based conclusions due to anecdotal disagreement. My understanding is that a lot of those self-inflicted wounds are suicide attempts, which one would not expect to be influenced by firearm proficiency (except perhaps in success rate).
Monte Carlo Casino
Because we have easily observed societal norms that have to account for some percentage of the difference, without measuring differences absent those norms we have no conceivable way to know that hereditary traits contribute to any percentage of the differences.
GPTs Can't Count
For me Gmail takes way too much legitimate email and sends it to spam. Fastmail strikes a better balance by sending little ham into the spam box, but letting a little bit of spam into the inbox.
Never used it, it's been a bit since I used nixos.

Still I'm sure there's a lot of warts.
Box model + flex box + the display modes + "positioning" (stacking contexts) are typically the most confusing parts of CSS, I feel.

Add maybe margin and padding, and how they interact (margin collapse, no margin collapse in flex or grid context, box model again, auto values).

But then, that's basically all the hard conceptual parts. But they are mostly intuitive and well-designed! I know I'm alone with this opinion.

Naming + global scope is the rest of the problem, but even without this, here is where the problem of creating design system shows up, too. Harder than CSS probably :)
https://youtu.be/spUNpyF58BY?si=dM8J8Df5U7DTV9ls

This is the definitive, the last Fourier transform guide you’ll ever need. It’s so intuitive and simple to understand. I watched this video *once* six years ago, and I can still rebuild the Fourier formula from memory.

If only this had been around during my digital signal processing coursework in undergrad.
Another story for that same project: this was a program where being two weeks behind schedule resulted in theatrics. Think English Parliament in period pieces, but toned down and with more ties.

That same other lead and I had figured out that IBM was perpetually 5 weeks behind, and always fishing for problems on other teams they could use to invoke day-for-day schedule slippage.

And the reason we knew it was five weeks is this: they would not take patches or hot fixes from us. Because doing so would indicate that we hadn’t fulfilled out contract to deliver on X date. So I’d give them version 1.0.4 (had to be exactly 1.0.4, if the CI/CD pipeline glitched and I gave them 1.0.5 they would demand an explanation, fuckers). And then I’d go off working on catching up with automating functional testing that we were still figuring out, trying to get it to run faster on one particular underpowered destination system, or get feedback from other teams about how some feature in the release was fundamentally broken, and I’d fix those problems and issue 1.0.5-7.

I’d tell them they needed the patch and they would say no. Then eight weeks after we gave it to them they’d complain it was broken, they are blocked, and the schedule will slip “day for day” until we fix the bugs - often bugs they should have seen week one if they were actually using the deliverables we gave them.

In one case it took me about 14 clock hours to fix their problem, but in all other cases I had already fixed that bug almost exactly six weeks before they found it. I just informed them that 1.0.7 already fixes that, upgrade. They were hoping for a week and every time they got less than a day, and only then if the meeting schedule aligned so the could stall for half a day. That was honestly one of the more satisfying aspects of that job.

Ten times they came at us with that schtick, and it worked once. Barely.

Near as I can tell they were spending a month at the beginning of each milestone cleaning up tech debt from stapling together the feature set for the previous milestone, and not getting around to our stuff until much later than they wanted the company to know.
Of course you didnt suggest it, that is the logical conclusion of the government getting involved in custody.
That's a really good point, it had crossed my mind.
I do wonder if at some point Lego will change to some sort of subscriber model to keep shareholders happy. The Lego company seems to be one of the last "good" companies to not want to fleece customers, and that would be down to their part family ownership I suppose. Pessimistically I think "all good things...".
Suspects can refuse to provide phone passcodes to police, court rules
Do we understand why prompt engineering is still necessary? Why it is unable to correctly determine ("understand") what output the user wants from unstructured input?
Very good point!

Edit: In fact, one of their engineers states as such here: https://old.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/18ike40/december_up...
I'm still waiting for my Saturn V Gantry.
https://ideas.lego.com/projects/a88109ec-9970-4fe1-98b4-9bd5...
I've built email notifications into the major stuff, so on failure, my bot sends them an email with the error message. I've got my address in the reply-to. So they reply "please advise" and hit send.

For the minor stuff... a copy-pasted error message from the UI is luxury, you're right.
I haven’t tried any fine tuning so I can’t help there, sorry. Though I will say that neural chat has been pretty good to me, even though I have definitely observed it ignoring instructions at times, like a “here’s your json:” preamble in response to a query that specifically requests only json.
Ask HN: Does Cloudflare Support need a Code Orange more than Engineering?
Cloudflare recently declared a Code Orange to improve their service quality. What I really want to see is a Code Orange for their Support org.
US and China race to shield secrets from quantum computers
Will a future nvidia-powered LLM help replace CUDA function by function?
These examples are for more simple prompt engineering demos. With the ChatGPT system prompt, you can give the model a large and complex set of rules to account for and recent models of ChatGPT do a good job of accommodating them. Some of my best system prompts are >20 lines of text, and all of them are necessary to get the model to behave.

The examples are also too polite and conversational: you can give more strict commands and in my experience it works better.

There's also function calling/structured data support which is technically prompt engineering and requires similar skills, but is substantially more powerful than using the system prompt alone (I'm working on a blog post on it now and it unfortunately it is going to be a long post to address all of its power). Here's a fun demo example which compares system prompts and structured data results: https://github.com/minimaxir/simpleaichat/blob/main/examples...
Not totally sure how that applies here, since I don’t think anyone would argue that having a few extra warnings is somehow slowing down progress.

I also disagree with the article for other reasons. The idea that something being the first priority means it’s the only priority is nonsense. Safety can be weighted the highest out of all the priorities while still being balanced with the other priorities.
This puritanism is neither so greatly long lived, nor globally distributed
Bazel is not usable with Firebase as a non Googler. How is this statement incorrect?

Cocoapods and SPM has nothing to do with it. You can’t blame packaging ecosystems for Bazel’s inability to consume a dynamic iOS framework properly.

Yes, I’m aware it’s possible, as explained in that thread. The problem is that it’s only possible for people like you!
You realize how collective bargaining breaks down when you aren’t a united front right?
For the sake of discussion I’ll grant you porn is a vice but that is definitely just your opinion.

Isn’t this bill supposed to “protect children”? Accessing porn isn’t illegal for adults. If the debate is about restricting access to a legal “vice” then opinions will likely shift even farther to the “no” side. I agree imposing puritanical beliefs is the actual motivation but that’s not a great slogan.
Somewhat related to OP, but today I came across the one of the most impressive context-free prompts & responses that I have seen from OpenAI's LLM to date.

It was some overworked parent's pocket dial to ChatGPT, and it shocked me a bit with the apparent understanding of a very random series of prompts, with no context:

https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/18j2k3s/funny_pocke...
Twitch rescinds its artistic nudity policy
Our closest relatives Chimpanzees are not particularly close relatives. Most human societies tend to be patriarchal, but some have not been.

And who tends to hold positions of power isn't necessarily 1:1 with who tends to take the most risks, in fact, most of our leaders are usually prone to putting themselves in less danger than those they govern.
I mean, we invented the term Promotion Oriented Architecture for a reason.

It’s like politics; the best person for the job is a sufficiently experienced person who does not want it.
This is exactly the goal behind NixOS the Linux distro (the worst part about Nix is the naming!).

The distro itself and module authors give you high-level building blocks that allow you to configure the system declaratively (e.g., create users) as well as install & configure software.

Of course, you still need to write Nix to use these options and modules. But if you take a NixOS configuration and apply it on a different machine, it should do exactly the same thing (modulo hardware-specific config options).

I am a relatively recent NixOS convert and I quickly decided that I will be using it exclusively on my personal servers going forward. I even wrote a tool that simplifies migrating Docker Compose stacks to NixOS: https://github.com/aksiksi/compose2nix
Consider how this works with humans. Often you don't have enough input, context, or information to provide the desired answer or outcome.

Humans typically realize this and ask questions, we do this so much you typically don't take note of it. LLMs have yet to do this in my experience.
This is a great article!

But fsyncgate makes me cry inside. It sounds like PostgreSQL made the decision to crash instead of retry forever upon fsync errors (which is the wrong way to do it). But it wasn't their fault, because OSs and filesystems don't always perform correctly when they run out of disk space. And they were able to avoid data loss by continuing from the last point in the log before the crash (and maybe have a supervisor process relaunch the database) so in the end, it may not matter.

The 2010s were a strange time. People went to great lengths to work around perceived limitations in the tooling. Stuff like, MongoDB would sometimes lose data, even when it claimed that a write completed. And people were ok with that, because they wanted the speed and freedom in order to iterate quickly and make money.

When we really should have been formally addressing problems from first principles. Because if our OS can't recover gracefully when the disk fills up, then we don't really have anything. And so many OSs (including our desktops) panic when the disk fills up, that we don't really have anything. At a low enough level, all of the tools we rely upon are trash.

But the point I wanted to make is: there's no such thing as exceptional behavior, there's only how many edge cases have been handled. Programs can be converted from imperative to functional by replacing exceptions with blocking (or spin-locking) retries so that their logic eventually finishes executing. In this case, by letting programs wait until the user has cleared off disk space, rather than forcing the user to orchestrate relaunching processes. In other words, synchronous blocking logic can be converted to a spreadsheet (flowchart) and reasoned about. But asynchronous nonblocking logic allows state explosion by forcing the user to deal with meta eventualities outside the core business logic.

So it's understandable how PostgreSQL made the decision to go with a nonblocking fault instead of blocking in 2018. But in 2023, a better approach might be to write something like a container with proper fsync behavior to protect PostgreSQL from immature filesystems.
Agreed. This is really about defining a command and query language that's much more like the commands in a terminal or a cli. I think the fact that we're moving to this verbose approach is a sort of anti pattern and we'll see levels of abstraction or different methods to reduce it down once again.
I've known and know a not insignificant number of IBMers who were there on the order of 30 years. I've tended to stay in most jobs a fairly long time (decade plus or minus) but nothing like that.

A former manager at another fairly old-line company, it will presumably be the only company he will have ever worked for--albeit through a couple acquisitions and some stuff during dot-bomb.
(I assume this question is about whether models need all those layers during training, even if they don't need them during inference)

Yes. There's the so called "lottery ticket hypothesis". Essentially the idea is that large models start with many randomly initialized subnetworks ("lottery tickets"0 and that training finds which ones work best. Then it's only natural that during inference we can prune all the "losing tickets" away, even though we need them during training.

It's kind of an open question how large this effect is though. As the article mentions, if you can prune a lot away, this could also just mean that the network isn't optimally trained.
Discussion on ultrafast ethernet and partners at AMD's December presentation. https://youtu.be/tfSZqjxsr0M?t=5198
Thoughts on Threads and ActivityPub
Many mammals are matriarchal. Far more don't exhibit much in terms of gendered differences in leadership whatsoever.
Oh my. I remember those sets! They were glorious indeed.

Do you have the lego number of those sets? Or the name?

Ps: I’m now taking a picture of every lego box I buy for my kids. That way I have an archive with all the numbers. That way we can always download the booklets years later, or catalogue the collection with rebrickable
People tell you that something did not work, after you ask them?
I need to manage an email sequence with 8 follow ups to get explanations.
> A lot of this mentality has to do with wanting a throat to choke if something goes south.

You're absolutely right about this on many levels. I also heard that quite a few times from my CEO, even though we often went with single smaller providers for things because he also wanted to cut corners.

In this case though, I'd say it was more about nepotism. The CEO wanted the deal with his old pals in exchange for access to the IBM sales pipeline so that we could sell their customers on storage deals on our hardware deployment. The only way to get access to the deals was to buy IBM hardware that was extremely over priced and far more "capable" than what we actually needed.

The fact that their sales teams outright lied about things they didn't even fully understand, was sickening for me. Thankfully other people on my team stepped up and helped prevent anything from moving forward.

I agree with you, automation is key.
And no problem / you’re welcome, thanks for the thank you, but this problem is so bad that we left Google.

So while I appreciate the thank you, as a user, id appreciate a fix a lot more.
We’ve trained a whole generation of people to “prompt” Google to get what they need from the internet with a few keywords (often autocompleted before you’re done typing), so asking them to now start writing elaborate prose to get what they want is just going to take a lot of time. I also think this is a temporary phase where we’ll converge back to keyword autocompletion soon (or other more efficient ways of interaction).
It's a lot easier to go distributed if you're append-only, that's for sure.
For the same reasons communication between people is hard.
Might be this - https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/07/business/personal-data-fo...

First result for "experian ups truck stolen"
> where the Union negotiated pay/benefits they got was less (before and after union dues) than the surrounding non-union competition.

Yeah, that's a common anti-union tactic. Another one is passing on any better terms negotiated with a union to non-union workers to make it look like union membership gains you nothing.

Of course, when the union is gone, the largesse tends to end.
TikTok requires users to "forever waive" rights to sue over past harms
That could be a long play from the employer side to disincentivize the workers from joining forming/joining a union.
I would probably start by opening the browser dev tools on web pages and use inspect element to see how an element in the page has been made to look the way it is. You can edit properties to see what effect they have when changed.

The domain of styling html is so large that there's no chance of learning everything in theory then applying it, I think it's best to learn by doing.
It's better than that - more like, "Desktop environment for Linux distro with a bizarre name gets improved support for features that have worked out of the box in other Linux DEs for decades". Which, granted, is the cost of making a new DE yourself, but still funny.
> They have, but they still have problems with sets that have large chunks of the same color, especially when it comes to stuff like tiling or greebling, like the UCS Batman Tumbler.

the batcave shadow box definitely suffered with it a bit, but at least it was an interesting and challenging build. unlike the new orient express train, which was ... not what I'd expect from lego.