skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is great to see -- I used to have an SGI Indy/O2 (I think!)
The last time I looked there were no comment Irix emulators out there. Somewhere I've still got a giant load of CDs of Irix 6.2 and some rather niche scientific software, now perpetually licensed abandonware, mostly related to medical imaging or crystallography. I think it's hard to appreciate just got unique the platform was in its time, and it found lots of high end uses, from video editing and computer graphics to science.

It's also a bit like Mac OS 9 and CDE had a hybrid child. Somewhere there's an alternative timeline in which it took over and the world had OS X about ten years earlier than it actually did.
I think you might be way underestimating number 5.

While on the first hand your point sounds very reasonable, in practice it may have more adverse effects than we may think and make the whole system more unsafe.
They claim PCIe4.0 makes it irrelevant, but that doesn't really make sense and it's most likely the case they want to charge a fortune for their high-memory options.
Definitely right!
Three improvements of 70% quality is much more Outcome as a single improvement with 95% quality in the same time. (Let's be honest, 100% isn't reachable even for the perfect perfectionist).

It even leads to more different changes and more ground to improve upon again.
I also found it looks awful, which made it hard for me to read, but Firefox reader mode did at least change the font.
Above, I suggested pay for Kagi. A search engine is more than just serps:

https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-features

If you prefer LLMs to Googling, then at least consider "phind":

https://www.phind.com/search?home=true
Prescriptivist? Nah. Mandarin blow rid nails for happy deranged elf nestle corruptive hand wither. If it seems I stopped making sense, it's because I was briefly testing where your binary labels lead. Apparently, there are things between descriptivist and prescriptivist and both of us fall within those categories.
Yeah they have different naming conventions on the workstation cards;

Quadro RTX 4000

RTX A4000

RTX 4000 Ada

Unfortunately they’ve had 3 separate naming conventions in 3 successive generations. Those 4000 series cards are in the same position in the lineup for each generation.
Sure, here you go: eating cobalt from the soil wouldn't give you B12, because bacterial fermentation in humans is occurring in the colon, while B12 is absorbed by the ileum.

But actually there's a solution for vegans. As the following paper in Nature eloquently puts it:

"Human faeces contain appreciable quantities of vitamin B12 or vitamin B12-like material presumably produced by bacteria in the colon, but this is unavailable to the non-coprophagic individual."

https://www.nature.com/articles/283781a0
Contrary to the tweet, I would classify "build nuclear" as equivalent to the programmers pulling out the plugs to smother suggestions for obvious progress.

This can be seen most clearly in Australia, where very much despite, not because of the previous government, renewables are toppling records weekly and offering the opportunity of a lifetime to the Australian people.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/21/nuclea...

Meanwhile, News Corp and the ousted government, almost exactly at the time they lost all control pivoted to suddenly advocating nuclear as a tactic to slow the rollout of renewables.
According to Flightradar24, https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1742136715253313938, the Japanese coast guard aircraft was not equipped with a ADS-B transponder. Probably because it's not a requirement for military aircraft. That can explain why the ATC and/or JAL was not aware of the exact location of the plane.
Eh. I watched the video and I hear him when he says it’s a hard problem. But music notation is still so far from ideal:

- Why have a bass and treble cleft be different? We could just standardise one. It wouldn’t matter much for professional musicians but would make a massive difference to people learning music.

- It’s unnecessary to have the second number in a key signature. Just standardise on / 4 - at least for beginners. 2/4. 3/4. 4/4. 6/4. Having different key signatures be denoted using different types of notes confused the hell out of beginners for seemingly no benefit.

- So many music names are stupid. It’s not an “oct”ave. An “octave” has 7 or 12 notes depending on the scale. Seeing +8ve / +15ve drives me nuts. It’s +7/+14. Learn to count.

And so on.

Intel assembler is also a battle tested notation that has stood the test of time. But we don’t use it much. I understand that classical music notation is a good system for professional musicians. But that doesn’t mean it’s good for beginners. We don’t teach rust to high schoolers who’ve never programmed before. We start them off with something easier and they can learn rust later if they want.

Even the video says piano roll notation is useful while composing. Why shouldn’t beginners use that?

I get that it’s a hard problem. I know I don’t have all the answers. But surely there is room for improvement here. There’s no way this is the best music notation humanity will ever invent. We should celebrate the explorers, not demonise them. If they come up with something good, we all benefit.
Agreed, I've now got a sizable project going that I would probably procrastinate on attempting for years without GPT 4 laying the initial groundwork, along with informing me of a few libraries I had never heard of that reduced wheel reinventing quite a bit.
Exactly, thought exercise == nice theory, but irrelevant for any practice right now.
I have found only a few cases where ChatGPT has been very useful to me. e.g. writing long SQL queries and certain mathematical functions like finding the area of intersection of two rectangles. And it hallucinates enough that a lot of the time I can't use it because I know it would take more time to check it for correctness and edge cases than it would to just write it in the first place. Maybe I am using it wrong, but so far the results for me have been extremely impressive, but not yet very useful.
I feel the same way, I'm not going to count my searches, and I don't want to start guessing whether this search is important enough to use Kagi for.
Yeah, I'd imagine you'd always split this into two separate problems of pathfinding and crowd simulation. Making thousands of separate calls to a pathfinding algorithm that returns the same path (or very close to it) would be mayhem for a game like Total War. Would be super interesting to read through some of the original source for that from Total War.

Short video on a basic sort of crowd simulation would work in Unity: https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/moving-as-one
Absolutely not everyone is doing their best, and not everyone's best effort is in the common best interest. Healthcare works in Scandinavia, Germany, France and some other places. It doesn't in the US. That's not a law of nature.

There are shades of grey between no coordination and perfect coordination, and every step in the right direction makes things better. Care, make changes locally, vote accordingly, and you will move the needle.
I guess the question is if you think the current system is good enough.

The next big crash will change people’s minds on this.
Posting something you think is cringe seems like bad advice. My un-asked for idea is if you want to write something, write opinions or tutorial/expositions about something you find interesting in the field of your business. Don't try and make it an ad, don't have a lame tie-in to your company's product at the end, just write something purely interesting. You can sign it with your name and title, and share on social media, and send it to prospects as a conversation starter. The point is to write something good and interesting and not "cringe" ads for you company.
Treating illnesses, diseases and injuries should have higher priority, as they impact QOL and mortality much more. Once almost everyone gets to age 80 in health, then we can tackle extending the life span.
I really like the argument about misinformation vs testing. I'm not totally sold on "you can just see it", but I do think something like TDD could suddenly be really productive in this world.

I've found autocomplete via these systems to be improving rapidly. For some work, it's already a big boost, and it's close to a difference in kind from the original IntelliSense. Amusingly though, I primarily write in an editor without any autocomplete, so I don't experience this often. But I do, precisely for the throwaway code and lower-value changes.

Finally, it's not clear to me that the distinction is between systems programming and scripting. My sense is that Chat GPT and similar are (a) heavily influenced by the large corpus of Python, so it's better at it than C and (b) the examples here involved more clever bit manipulation than most software engineers ever interact with.
My resolution is to learn & reflect before executing.

For the past 3 years, I was the kind of "it has to be done in a weekend", now I am trying to focus on getting it right, explore possibilities, reflect, and then execute.

I also set longer deadlines for myself now (3-6 months instead of a week or two).
Not unknown to see people sat at the bottom of stairs with a “homeless and hungry” signs
spend no money on things i want but don't really need. the amount of money i did spent in 2023 on stuff i barely use is not something i'm proud of. so starting 2024 i only buy what i absolutely need, and nothing else. and start reselling most things i don't need at home.
If we're being pedantic, you'd need to eat 500 extra calories over your what your body burns daily.

But over a 6 year period, you would definitely accumulate 300 pounds of extra weight this way.
The compiler is still not part of the picture, when LLMs start being able to produce binaries straight out of prompts, then programmers will indeed be obsolete.

This is the holy grail of low-code products.
The Tyranny of Possibilities in the Design of Task-Oriented LLM Systems
Full Title:
The Tyranny of Possibilities in the Design of Task-Oriented LLM Systems: A Scoping Survey

Description:
It is a survey that tries to identify our current progress in designing task-oriented LLM systems - how informed we are when we make decisions about prompting, augmentation, etc. It lists several such design parameters, describes them, and explores varying these parameters through a thought experiment (!). Then we select three parameters (prompting, augmentation, and uncertainty estimation), try to define them, and organize select available research on these topics. Our definition and organization differ slightly from what you'd expect as we try to avoid overlap in each parameter.

Later, we discuss what we find, defining "linear and non-linear contexts", and using it to show how all (?) prompting techniques can be viewed as multi-agent systems, and speak about the implications of that - one of which is on synthetic data generation which the HN community might be interested in. In all, the paper shares seven conjectures to help guide future research efforts.

I will list these conjectures in a comment for those short on time.

Thank you for reading!
I once heard a wise doctor say that even if the chance of survival for a medical operation is either 10% or 90%, the practical chance the patient is battling is always 50% because he either lives or dies from that operation.

Likewise, the chance of someone being in an aviation accident is close to nil (you're more likely to be in a car accident), but you are either going to be in an aviation accident or not (a 50% chance) and you're going to be either dead or alive from it (a 50% chance).

So you might as well at least not have your epitaph be "Killed by some bozo in the aisle TikToking" if you do end up dying.
DevOps: What are the most common requests or questions you get from developers?
Here are some of the most common requests/questions that I receive:

- Deploy a new service on K8S, sometimes there is a need to expose this service to the Internet (I need to update multiple config files and sometimes create a new DNS record)

- Add or update new environment variables or secrets for a specific service in a specific environment (I’m using ArgoCD and HashiCorp Vault)

- Which version of my app is running in staging/production? (using ArgoCD helped a lot here, now they can simply go to Github and check)

Curious to hear yours! Thanks!
People not “used” to music don’t realize that for any particular segment, there’s really not an infinite number of possible “next notes” - just like when reading English and you see a three letter word starting “ca” it’s only got a few options to finish it up: b,d,m,n,p,r,t,w kinda thing.
The seven conjectures the paper presents are as listed below. If you find yourself intuitively agreeing with the conjectures, you might find the arguments and the limited support the paper presents helpful in reinforcing your intuition; and if you disagree intuitively with these you might have interesting comments to share once you read the arguments in the paper.

1. Autonomous, multi-agent collaboration allows less capable tool-augmented language models to surpass more capable tool-augmented language models, as the number of collaborating agents increases; given these less capable tool-augmented LMs have a threshold level of capabilities.

2. Multiple LLM-based agents working together should be more capable than current research suggests, and their relative lack of success warrants investigation.

3. Even if we never discover an architecture better than current LLMs, or better training algorithms, or it turns out that scaling up LLMs and their training data does not lead to any new emergent abilities; we can still be able to achieve useful autonomous AI agents through -
(a) larger context sizes and better context utilization.
(b) ensuring extensive collaboration between LLM agents and extensive tool-use is "in-distribution", i.e., well represented in its training data.
(c) sampling/decoding strategies that work well for large context lengths.

4. Results from prompting techniques involving non-sequential context, can predict similar results from multi-agent systems designed to replicate the same behavior.

5. Any result that utilizes multi-agent systems can predict similar results using prompting techniques (such as self-collaboration) designed to replicate the multi-agent interaction pattern within a sequential context.

6. Synthetically generated "self-collaboration" traces or transcripts from successful attempts at solving tasks using prompting techniques involving non-sequential context or multi-agent collaboration, is high-quality training data for LLMs, especially for downstream use in multi-LLM agent systems and with prompting techniques involving non-linear context.

7. Taking existing problems and associated real-world deliverables (intermediate and final) and interpolating interaction artifacts between collaborators as a transcript or trace can create high-quality synthetic training data, specifically for downstream use in multi-LLM agent systems.

We try to define terms such as "extensive tool-use and collaboration", "linear and non-linear context" in the paper. The current version is our first draft, and we're hoping to gather feedback for a final version that is hopefully comprehensive, includes taxonomy charts, discusses more design parameters and gives special attention to the task-decomposition and planning.
>>>uses the world's most notorious domain extension doesn't inspire confidence, to put it mildly.

What does this mean? Why or how is this TLD the world’s most notorious?
It’s just like quitting smoking. I don’t really care to scorn the 9/10ths (or whatever the number is) who fail. I care to celebrate the 1/10th that succeeds.

It’s more a confession to the mindset of these people who fixate on the pessimistic side of a pitched battle.
> We're trying to appeal to a wider audience, such as aerospace grads, most of which use MacBooks.

Is this actually the case? MacOS is in a distinct minority position in desktop/laptop usage as well as areas where people (erroneously) assume it has a significant market share, such as for developers.
Around 2005, I ordered Death Rally. I still have the CD. It came out in 1996, so I think it still counts :D
I've continually been dragged back into the operational weeds of the business over the last few years (by which I mean things like running a team day-to-day, working through risk analyses on a project, etc.). This is (a) not something I enjoy; and (b) not the thing I'm best at (although I am quite good at it for short periods). I'd really like to be spending my time on things I get satisfaction from beyond "you're making your company work so that should be satisfying in itself", so this year one of my goals (sooner rather than later) is to actually make myself as operationally redundant as possible so I can have higher leverage and enjoy it at the same time.
> Or, in other words, let's assume that I want to solve homelessness. What do I have to do for that?

Build housing would be a great start! Markets don't care about low-profit cheap small apartments, so there's no supply and the demand isn't being met, so it's the mission of the state to step up and compensate this market failure.

Then you can also tax properties based on their occupied land area, which incentives the private sector to build higher density, which is much cheaper in terms of infrastructure cost and cost of living as well.

Then you'll stay with homeless junkies and vets, for which you'll need social workers and dedicated structures, but you could also try fixing your social issues and wage less wars and the number of people to take care of will plummet and become more similar to what you can find in other developed countries.
Ubisoft used to use ScaleForm, the alternative Flash runtime for games, for a lot of the Assassin's Creed games.

I know some games use a specialised version of WebKit, for example Sea of Thieves uses Coherent UI[1]. There's also Ultralight[2] (ex Awesomium) which is similar.

Games using vanilla Unreal Engine can use what they call UMG, but otherwise there's plugins for most frameworks.

Some other games have completely custom frameworks of course.

[1] https://coherent-labs.com/Documentation/cpp/
[2] https://ultralig.ht/
> not destroying our biosphere

Not sure that having people live longer helps with that.
Yes but they historically do not put the architecture name in the product name like that. They also never use the naming scheme of their consumer graphics cards on their workstation line. They've always had a different system. This card breaks both of those conventions. Workstation cards are supposed to be Quadro. But it looks like they've rebranded the line as "Nvidia RTX". I can only assume that was an intentional move to make their lineup more confusing.
What Happens in 2024
First section on startups & investing notable
The thinking that goes into things like new years resolutions is also part of a greater ideology though. That in itself dismisses fundamental changes for unrealistic scenarios. That you don't need good housing, working conditions or health care because with this one business, diet or lifestyle trick you will beat the odds. In many countries the majority now are overweight or obese in their sixties. Despite more knowledge, method and products than ever. And that is counting all the outliers who just don't eat much or are very active.

There is nothing wrong with a new years resolution but you have to take it for what it is. Actually getting fitter, eating better and losing weight is a multiple year commitment at least. If it is hard for any extended period of time the likelihood of success is low.
There are feedback mechanisms so that if you consume extra, you will want to move extra to compensate, and your basal metabolism might even rise to burn a few more. They aren’t perfect though, and something seems to have broken them on a really large scale the last 50 years or so. At least that’s my current thinking.
Just wanted to say, love the art style and the mechanics. Will be following!
You didn't learn musical notation in school in the US in the 80s? I started kindergarten in '91 and we did a bit on this every year started in 1st grade I think.

But not enough to become truly literate I'd say. But still, it was definitely part of the curriculum.
We are doing that with fiber in Poland. Just got mine in on christmas in small town, construction was subsidized by EU.
If a totalitarian state that doesn't care about its people at all and cannot even manage to properly feed its population can do it, then surely the biggest economy in the world can do it too.
"Calorie surplus" could mean two different things (keeping in mind that I'm not a trained physiologist):

1. Over the course of a week, you eat X calories and burn Y calories, where X < Y

2. At any given point in time, is your body burning glycogen or fat?

If you stop eating Sunday after dinner, then by Monday noon your body is out of glycogen and starts burning fat until Tuesday morning after you've had breakfast. If you simply listen to your body and eat until you're sated rather than full, you'll naturally have a slightly larger breakfast on Tuesday, but by lunchtime you'll have your full complement of glycogen again. Then work out and eat like normal.

> If nothing else youd be binge eating to catchup, which has its own drawbacks

The vast majority of animals on this planet go through "boom / bust" cycles: periods where there's lots of food and periods where there's less. The same was true for the vast majority of humans until a century or two ago. Obviously repeatedly losing and gaining 100 pounds is problematic, but losing and gaining 10 pounds over the course of a year, or 1 pound over the course of a week, is perfectly normal from a historical perspective.

What's very unusual from an evolutionary perspective is never going through the "bust" cycle where we live off our fat reserves. That's why intentional fasting is both easier and healthier than you'd think -- because just like exercising, our bodies are actually designed for it, and suffer when we don't get it.
And more practically speaking the relationship is assymetric. It's significantly more practical to restrict calorie consumption than to burn the equivalent level of calories through exercise (even without considering the impact it has on appetite and on the mind, where you think you deserve to eat more as a result).
You're making my point for me, as your gibberish is not in use so is unintelligible.

The person you replied to used perfectly common and comprehensible English, so much so that you knew exactly how to "correct" them.

So the comment was grand and your prescriptivist response adds nothing of value. Hopefully you can see why this is true and reflect on why you felt the need to "correct" it.
> My company has approved copilot but Copilot autocomplete has been an awful experience

I had the same experience, I feel like I must be crazy because so many of my colleagues have been singing its praises. I found it immensely distracting and disabled it again after a couple of days.

It was like having someone trying to finish my sentence while I was still speaking; even when they were right, it was still annoying and knocked me out of my flow (and very often, it wasn’t right).
I did have "Music" as school subject in both primary and middle school in Poland in 90s/00s. Cannot sight read but I can transcribe music sheet onto piano roll in DAW with some patience due to those lessons.
> From my experience, having done my bachelor's and master's in this topic, I met no one that used the term AI for anything machine learning.

I'm extremely surprised by this because it's been a very common term for a very long time. You can look back at papers over the last 50+ years and see this. My degree was literally called "Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science" almost 20 years ago, and as far as I can tell it's still called that.