skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When the metric is "return on investment" let me assure you that all the PE investors, execs, managers, individuals involved are only looking to eek out more profit - quarter after quarter.

If it ever comes down to helping a patient (or employee) vs a quarter with lower than expected growth, they will predictably not help the patient (or employee) in favor of meeting that quarter's target.
Hunt for Sterile Neutrinos Could Unlock Deep Cosmic Secrets
I value the commit messages in the context where you develop a tool that has to be run widely.

In particular, I had experience with Wine. Having useful commit messages allows you to do bisects and trace down regressions with more ease than cross-checking messages with some external ticket system, and when you have a lot of people contributing to a project it's easier to see what they're doing when they try to do a patch.

I also believe though, that it is good practice to help your colleagues when they do need to find an issue in a project where a lot of different people can work on.
All of these things have been true since the beginning of Walmart. Yet here they are, almost the largest retailer on earth.
> Also how do you prove that GPT is worse at counting?

Back in June 2023 GPT-4 was dramatically worse at counting than a pigeon in the sense that it couldn't accurately tell the difference between sentences with 3 words and sentences with 5 words, whereas pigeons can count almost anything up to about 10. It also routinely failed "pick the shorter sentence" tests which I literally took from a test administered to mice. GPT simply doesn't understand what numbers are, whereas pigeons and mice have an intuitive understanding similar to toddlers. You don't need to teach kids what 3 means, you just need to teach them the human symbol for the concept of 3. GPT only has the human symbol and does not seem capable of understanding the concept.

In my testing GPT-4 consistently failed counting / pattern-recognition tests even if you used "chain-of-thought" prompting. As far as I could tell its only true understanding of numbers was "one, two, many." This seems reflected in real use cases, where GPT routinely (and hilariously) ignores commands to return 50 words/etc of output. GPT doesn't know what fifty means, it just knows what various documents that say "word count: 50" look like, and tries to imitate the tone.

Since transformer neural networks lack recursion I conjecture that GPT will never be able to understand a number larger than 2, even if in specific cases it can solve counting problems up to eleventy billion. This is what I mean by "counting apples, not oranges," its sense of counting is paper-thin and easily fooled by adversarial prompts. It is much harder to fool a mouse or a pigeon.

Many of the tests I ran back in April 2023 no longer work. I strongly suspect this is because OpenAI trained GPT to many of the tests that people were throwing at it, and not because GPT actually became "smarter." I stopped messing around with GPT specifically because OpenAI doesn't issue any release notes, making replicability impossible. Mistrial's 77B model was dramatically worse than even GPT-3 at counting, but I doubt they trained it to count. Not sure about LLaMa/etc.
I've downloaded just the command-line tools before and used 'sdkmanager' to list and download sdk versions and virtual machines, so it is definitely doable without Android Studio, although it isn't obvious (or at least it wasn't to me).
Just watched Trading Places again on Christmas Eve. While I wouldn't say it's aged terribly, I will say this: nobody does blackface like Dan Akroyd.
You don't hear this take often, but I fully agree. I tried the second brain stuff myself. I attempted to create a personal wiki with all the software engineering knowledge I would come across. Knowledge about programming languages, networking, security, hardware... All of it was neatly organized in my wiki with interconnected notes. Whenever I learned something new about a topic, I would go back to that note and add it in.

And then... then what? It turned out that I never reached out to any of these notes. Most of the useful knowledge is already right there, in my brain. I don't need a second brain for that. The knowledge that I used less frequently was easily refreshed by a quick Google search or ChatGPT. I didn't need to keep this knowledge in any form of personal wiki. Turns out that this personal wiki simply added more overhead to my day, since now anything I would learn would have to be written in a note. But what was really the point of this writing if it was never read?

Right now I don't really keep any notes anymore, but I am not sure that this is the solution, either. As with all things, balance is probably the answer to all this note-taking; you probably want to keep notes of _some_ things, but you probably don't need to have a wiki with all of your knowledge, either.
We want governments to prevent dominant players from cornering the market. Android has billions of active devices, the Switch is a tiny system in comparison so it isn't a dominant player.

Or are you trying to say that consoles are a separate category of devices and shouldn't be compared to number of phones? Then why are you even arguing here, they are separate! So either these consoles are too tiny to be dominant players and therefore doesn't need to be regulated like dominant players, or they are a separate category and shouldn't be regulated with the same laws as phones.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
Show HN: I made a GPU VRAM calculator for transformer-based models
> First fossil fuel-free flight

I wish there was a way to find positive stories like this without having to wade through the increasingly negative swamp that is news today.
The challenge with malicious team-members in science is the same one you face in software. As another person in the thread said, how do you safely develop programs when one contributor is adding “Underhanded C contest”-level backdoors to the code? You can architect your development processes to defend against this threat, but in practice very few software development teams do this because it devours limited resources. Resources in science are even more limited than those in for-profit software development firms, and often involve taxpayer funds.

The instinct on HN is to approach this as an angry blame game. But successful industries don’t do this: for example, the aviation industry performs root-cause analysis after each air disaster and then makes intelligent cost/benefit decisions about how to update processes to avoid future occurrences. In science it’s not clear what the right approach is on a cost/benefit level. Should we reduce scientific output by 50% to catch fraud in the first instance, rather than later on when important studies fail to replicate? Is that a good use of society’s limited resources? I don’t know the answer to this, I just want people to behave effectively rather than grinding an axe. We’re not getting out of the messes we’ve made on this planet without a whole lot of science.
Megabot exit scams for almost $750k
Similar regarding Adobe:

https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1680654024578854912?la...
>It required an insane amount of tooling.

The all the extra tooling makes it easier to make Android apps. Nothing is stopping you from downloading the Java JDK and Android SDK and running javac, d8, aapt2, zipalign, and apksigner yourself.
Children in countries with high unemployement and low median salary have completely different motivation to learn math and pursue STEM career than children in countries in which you can do the bare minimum at school and expect a comfy life.

Same reason poor non-feminist countries have more women in STEM than wealthy feminist countries.
There was no partnership as far as I know. Masimo met with Apple's M&A team, they didn't do a deal, then Apple hired Masimo employees to do it themselves.

This complaint of Apple meeting with some company and then stealing their technology is the narrative put forward by every company or VC that meets with Apple and doesn't result in an acquisition. As if it's impossible to know who to hire from LinkedIn, patents, knowledge of the field, etc.
> It does feel like frabricating/buying github activity with money

You can frame plenty github projects with this logic, at the end the community also benefits.
My understanding (I am not an expert) is that tools for dealing with deflation are much less effectively deployable and have ripple effects that can significantly damage the real economy.
Two Truths About Customer Service
Early on at Amazon, Jeff Bezos internalized two truths about customer service:
When a company makes a customer happy, she won't tell a friend or two; she'll tell many, many more.
This is because positive experiences are more likely to be shared than negative ones. When a customer is happy with a product or service, they are more likely to tell their friends and family about it. This word-of-mouth marketing can be very powerful for businesses, as it can lead to new customers and increased sales.
The best customer service is no customer service—because the best experience happens when the customer never has to ask for help at all.
This means that businesses should strive to anticipate and prevent customer problems before they occur. This can be done by designing products and services that are easy to use and understand, providing clear instructions and documentation, and offering proactive support. When customers can solve their problems on their own, they are more likely to be satisfied with the experience.
The nonce isnt random. It's deterministic.
> Private entities need to maintain margins and will cut service to maintain them

This is a false dichotomy. Public v private is so often framed as a political agency versus free-market bonanza. In reality, we have independent agencies and public-private partnerships. But on the private side, we also co-operatives, a model which seems well-suited for community hospitals.
Yeah, this is a very important realization to make in a career of a software engineer.

Other points to internalize:

- in business, software is made to either earn money or pay less money. All other effects are at best secondary

- code is a liability as much (or more) as it is an asset

- programming is the easy 0-20% of the job of the software engineer, the rest is making sure the right thing gets programmed

- no matter what they tell you it’s a people problem

- software is always broken but it keeps running as long as practitioners are keeping it within the operational envelope
Their input search works fine, but clicking through the categories seems to surface all the dogshit Netflix-created content first. It's like digging through trash.

My main issue with the input search is the TV keyboard. There was a Netflix hack day that created a circular keyboard like a dial w/ the selector a joystick in the middle, so pressing up to 12 o'clock was A, 12:05 was B, etc. And the joystick would return to center per selection! It was everything I ever wanted in a thing, and now I can't even find the article on it.
This is what I was taught as well when taking Spanish 30 years ago. Fast forward 20 years and me visiting Mexico City for the first time, and I got some really strange looks using usted
I am not a C++ programmer, but I try and "keep up with all this junk" and also care a lot about how people learn programming.

Programmers like really neat logical explanations for everything, but the real world is much messier. People do not acquire human language skills by learning a formal grammar, learning all the edge cases, and then finally speaking: they attempt to communicate as best they understand, and then refine their knowledge over time.

The same works with computer languages. Not just C++. You don't generally learn every single detail before you do meaningful work. You just kinda try stuff and figure things out. Sure, you may practice specific skills, but that's just not the primary method of learning. And even in those cases, you don't necessarily learn everything before you return to practicing what you've learned: it's a process where the two activities feed into each other.

You mostly just go "damn I wish there was a better way to do X" and then find out there's a paper someone wrote, and then you pay attention to its progress. Or you just keep doing what you're doing, and at some point, a blog post comes out that's a summary of what's new, and you go "ooh that sounds interesting, I should look into that." But for every feature like that, there's also features which you go "ehh I don't need to care." And that's generally fine.

> having the syntax change more often than a toddler's favorite color

No real syntax is different here, this is a function call like any other. And C++ changes on a three year timescale. Many scripting languages release new versions far faster. It's just stuff that's less familiar to you, and so it seems harder, but it's learnable.

> It's hard enough to learn the machine stuff and manual memory management

This is the bigger struggle with learning, moreso than "syntax changes." If you haven't done lower level stuff before, you also have to recon with that while learning. That does make things harder the first time you learn a new paradigm, just like if you'd never used a functional language before, you'd be learning about those concepts as well as the syntax and specific language semantics.
Really great to see progress on a malaria vaccine. Will be interesting to see if malaria can be eradicated in the coming decades.
Not even monopolies, literally no market forces. If you have a heart attack or a stroke, it doesn't matter what the prices listed for care are or customer reviews. You get to a hospital as fast as you fucking can. There are literally no market forces in play a lot of the time. Also, if you don't live in a big city, there may only be a single hospital by you that provides the treatment you need. Again, no market forces.
Many if not most ecom sites will be using a vendor for search (e.g. Bloomreach) so they're sending a feed of product data to their vendor, just a subset of their product data (which may not have enough metadata for some facets people might reasonably expect). That means there's lag, and also that the integration is stiff and brittle, hard to change without time and money. Even then, whether they're rolling their own search or using a 3rd party, nine times out of ten their search will be ONLY for products, good luck if you wanted to search for a phrase from their privacy policy; for that or any sort of other non-product content you're forced to use Google/Bing/ddg etc.
>boring and unimaginative to police language

Like what you’re doing right now?
Cummins agrees to pay nearly $1.7B to settle federal Clean Air Act investigation
I will. Customers benefit from features. In this case the feature is using light to measure blood oxygen, which has been done for close to a century, and was invented before the company trolling Apple was even formed. Unfortunately our broken patent system issues this troll a patent for technology that already existed, but they claim it is novel because they are permanently affixing the device to a person and adding a touchscreen. None of that is inventing anything, and preventing others from doing it directly harms competition and end users.
I half agree, and half disagree. I agree that users need some kind of management tools to deal with public key crypto, shouldn't be copying private keys into apps, and there needs to be recovery from lost keys. It is a hard problem and nostr has a long ways to go.

I disagree that you need a "reliable way to know other peoples public keys." I think this puts the cart before the horse. And doing it that way, public certification authorities who say "I certify this key belongs to this person" can't be trusted anyways, so it doesn't really work (and as people do trust them for practical reasons, but shouldn't, they have enabled widespread TLS MitM by governments). It is rarely the case that you know someone and then you discover someone claiming to be them and you need them to prove their identity (which is BTW totally possible in nostr already). What usually happens is you learn the key first, and over time learn who that person is and develop intuition and trust about them through experiences that occurred via that key.
> After a hospital

*A* hospital. Single. I'm certainly not going to defend private equity. But if we're going to do a takedown, let's do it correctly. Cherry picking what is likely an outlier is not doing it correctly.
You say Smalltalk encouraged "a tangled mess of code" when we can all see that Smalltalk encouraged code sharing in external files:

"Within each project, a set of changes you make to class descriptions is maintained. … Using a browser view of this set of changes, you can find out what you have been doing. Also, you can use the set of changes to create an external file containing descriptions of the modifications you have made to the system so that you can share your work with other users."

1984 Smalltalk-80 The Interactive Programming Environment page 46

https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/FreeBooks/TheInteractivePr...
Have you considering learning a new trade that pays better, or moving to a more prosperous area of the world as an alternative to razing the entire social order to the ground and installing genocidal despots in place of our leaders?

It just sounds like it might be simpler.
It’s more like asking the clerk where to find the fruit salad and him giving you directions to strawberry ice cream.
Grew up in India. As the sibling commenter notes, this is likely an older British expression that has survived in Indian English.

It's hard to remember now, but I think the way I thought about it when I was taught is that "3 × 4" is combining 3 and 4 into a larger number 12. The "3 ÷ 4" was not special, and "by" there was just an abbreviation of "divided by" like you say.

For what it's worth, I think times usually should work in Indian English as well, as in "3 times 4" for 3 × 4.
This is my ancedata as well. It’s usually used as a proxy to prevent divorce. Those who are actually poly it’s a lot of over communication and a lot of syncing of calendars.
And therein lies the most significant problem with unbounded capitalism. Capitalism is a very, very powerful tool, because it redefines everything in terms of money. This enables the magic of specialization and trade, but it also causes situations like this where greedy and/or thoughtless people chip away at the margins of things like safety and let other people suffer the consequences.
Vanessa, it has always amazed me how you managed to square the circle and pull a rabbit out of a hat by the way you got garbage collection to work efficiently in SqueakJS, making Smalltalk and JavaScript cooperate without ending up with two competing garbage collectors battling it out. (Since you can't enumerate "pointers" with JavaScript references by just incrementing them.)

https://freudenbergs.de/bert/publications/Freudenberg-2014-S...

>The fact that SqueakJS represents Squeak objects as plain
JavaScript objects and integrates with the JavaScript garbage collection (GC) allows existing JavaScript code to interact with Squeak objects. [...]

>• a hybrid garbage collection scheme to allow Squeak object
enumeration without a dedicated object table, while delegating
as much work as possible to the JavaScript GC,

Have you ever thought about implementing a Smalltalk VM in WebAssembly, and how you could use the new reference types for that?

https://bytecodealliance.org/articles/reference-types-in-was...
> These cases are obvious to us because the brain has access to much fancier causal reasoning than what we can currently express in human language. For now, human language is stuck with "If a then not b" stuff.

I don't follow this. Didn't you just express these cases in human language? I understand that in reality we can "grasp" the meaning of a problem of not being able to open the door without expressing or thinking about it verbally, which would be redundant as there would be a lot to say (the key may be broken, the door may be held by someone on the other side, even if the key works we might be trying to push instead of pull, etc, etc.) and any person who has opened doors with keys would likely understand all of this. The problem is not that those things can't be expressed in human language, but the lack of ability to build good conceptual models of the world that encompasses all such knowledge and allows reasoning on it quickly.
Is it so hard to stick to the truth when promoting nuclear power?

They unexpectedly found corrosion cracks and immediately shut down the plant. Based on this they precautionar shut down several plants. Then as fast as possible they inspected the rest of the fleet and shut down the offending reactors.

They did not plan it.
LBOs should probably be illegal. They seem to ruin everything they touch. Also, we should probably nationalize a lot of the entities PE has taken control of. Might be a nice way to back into nationalizing a lot of industries that have no business being private.
If you read a scientific paper that talks about causation, you will see things like confidence intervals and assumptions. That’s what causality means, causal with some confidence under some set of circumstances and preconditions. That’s what science is.
I'm trying to take this comment as an honest question in good faith and not as political bait or "rich ppl bad."

Some random PE investor or analyst isn't the one putting needles in people's arms or writing prescriptions, so does it make sense to send the analyst to jail when someone dies from negligent causes in a hospital? I don't think it does. It probably doesn't make sense to send anyone to jail unless there's actual malice involved but if you're looking to punish someone for something it probably makes sense to look first at the person actually pushing the drug or doing the procedure.
Israel grants Intel $3.2B for new $25B chip plant
Sure but as a profitable
company not accountable to customers, what stops them from giving poor service at a premium?
I think their point was that the title on HN and the blog was inaccurate based on the content of the post itself
The name is off to me. More natural:

- whaaatabout

- whatabooout
I'm keeping an eye on it but it's not there yet e.g. https://github.com/koverstreet/bcachefs/issues/619#issuecomm...
To establish IP theft wouldn't one have to establish the existence of physical evidence (aka Hard Discs, emails, or any other data/documents transfers)?

Brain transfers do not suffice to make the case.
Ah, replace furry with any sexuality and that's basically the same homophobic rhetoric repeated today. Guess HN is not immune to completely outdated views on sexuality and psychology.

Funny thing is, you're validating the ones you are calling self-ostracising by spreading misinformation and claiming harm done by their identity. Your comment and how upvoted it is are exactly the reasons why these communities seek safe platforms.
I am not anti-nuclear. I am anti-1970s-era-nuclear because I see no path by which large bespoke concrete reactors with enormous containment vessels are going to achieve the grid transformation we need on the timescales we need it by. At least not without a WWII level of government involvement, which doesn’t seem politically practical (not even in China, which is doing better than most.)

Modular reactors are at least theoretically feasible. The only question right now is whether they’ll make it from theory to multi-TW deployment before battery storage eats their economic lunch. Over a 20-30 year timeframe that’s not an easy call, though I would personally bet on batteries.
Apple can attack the patent as being invalid (and go for an IPR), they can argue that they are not infringing, or they can pay a license fee. My guess is that Apple was too cheap to pay an acceptable license fee, so they figured they could strongarm this company in court.