skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Couldn't disagree more strongly. Saying "The best way to do a layoff is to never have one" is really saying that you want to hire so cautiously that you will prevent people from getting the opportunity to have a job in the first place.

Look, so much of layoffs from the past 1.5 years or so are the result of massive overhiring during the pandemic. Sure, it's easy to argue companies were short sighted, but even if they hadn't been, why would it be better to never have hired all those people to begin with? That is, even if a company had thought "the pandemic has really just pulled demand forward - we need a lot more workers now that we won' need when the pandemic ends", why shouldn't they hire workers for that period? Yes, I totally agree this is bad form to disrupt someone's career tenure if it's for a very short period, but a lot of these pandemic hires lasted several years. All those people got great experience and salaries, and I don't think the better thing would have been to never have hired them in the first place.

I wish people would move away from the mindset that a layoff is the most awful thing possible, as long as people are treated respectfully and with adequate severance. When a company hires me, I don't expect to work there for life, nor do I expect them to have an obligation to keep me employed for life. As long as we give each other enough heads up if we decide to separate (and folks can have an honest debate over how long "enough" is), I don't see the problem.
Climate change causing larger fires hurt bird sanctuaries like this one that happened in my backyard

https://phys.org/news/2017-12-scientists-survivors-thomas-co...
Gah, that dresser isn't even brown!

I do kind of want to buy one though just to see what happens. I really need a wealthy patron to sponsor my gentleman science
I've heard a similar thing said about drivers. Those who drive more respectfully and thoughtfully end up in more crashes because the rest is less respectful of them in traffic (and of them crashing). It's an anecdote I just heard from a friend.

Maybe there's something similar in the job market where smart people are more self aware that they may take someone elses spot and more respectful and less good self promoters. Because the other set of people don't even think about that they end up getting the spots.
The executives who committed the vulture-capital mergers and bridge-burning outsourcing of the late '90s and early '00s were much worse.
Why not? IRC's a great protocol with both client and server implementations for every taste.
It looks like this announcement was timed for the end of citi's Q4 today.
This seems like the direction lots of companies are taking. Engineer roles are expanded more and more. From a certain perspective I see that because engineers have the expertise they can better organize and communicate development milestones, coordinate between designers and product owners, and test the product before also rolling it out (not to mention telemetry). So adding on top of this a little more management is probably not a huge change, that said it doesn't come for free, and I'm not sure companies that move in this direction are aware of what the trade-off really is.

It would be like taking a soccer/football team and having all players expand their roles such that every player has to be a goalie, a defense, and an offense player that scores goals. When everybody has all the roles, it may work out but it is not as efficient as the assigned roles with clear boundaries that create the best teams. From this angle it is very important to have the different roles in the team, and for each person to optimize their role and learn to work smoothly with others.
Many many more people want / need to use something than want / need to tinker.
This is likely a reference to GitHub, which was DoSed by the Chinese government for hosting a repository that was mirroring uncensored Western media on a domain that could not be blocked by the Great Firewall without hobbling the Chinese software industry.

The attribution wasn't subtle - a substantial fraction of Baidu's ads/analytics traffic served to domestic Chinese users was rewritten to hammer that specific repository directly.

NYT coverage at the time: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/31/technology/china-appears-...
You've convinced me: we should replace all cats in the US with wind turbines.
No. Random employees have a well-understood distribution of mostly normal human errors of certain types and estimated severity, relative to unattended LLM which has a poorly-understood distribution of errors in both type and severity. (“SolidGoldMagikarp”.)
Ah, FOPEAS, that distinguished brand of kitchen counter drawers renowned throughout the world.
But at time of release, Civ 1 and 2 had best-in-class graphics.
That should have been done years ago, with the first 737-MAX problems.
You're thinking of one specific kind of "water pump", a small device with a simple microcontroller. But a "water pump" could mean many things, and it could be a larger system that is run by a computer running windows, with functionality that is essentially "a water pump" but it may be doing far more than only pumping water. Often the details are lost when journalists try to dumb down a subject so an average luddite can read it. The actual equipment may be a large box that has a water input and water output, but contain many other functions within - and the article does not describe any of this, it simply says "water pump", so of course some people are going to construe that as simply a motor, an H-bridge, and a microcontroller. But the reality is that it could be a far more complex device than that. The "water pump" designation could come from nothing more than the "telephone game" where information gets diluted as it gets told to successive people in the chain until it gets written in an article simply as "water pump" when it could be a far more sophisticated piece of equipment than that.
Social engineeering for medical treatment
RIP Racing's First AI Influencer, Who Lived for 34 Dumb Days
So why do you think some individuals should have their rights prioritized over others? Twitter, Meta, and Google are owned by people who want to do specific things with those companies, and you want to ignore their rights entirely. Why do you think ownership isn’t meaningful?
go to JustWatch.com. They'll tell you where to stream or rent/buy any movie/show you want
yup, it didn't take long before my kids friends all knew the code to our home.
> What the fuck have we been doing for the last quarter century?

Mostly looking for ways to keep selling people the same product over and over again.
Layoffs?

Does the company have 10x the amount of people being laid off?

Did it happen after performance evaluations?

Yes, yes and yes? You got ranked and yanked.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve

Brought to you courtesy of MBA programs and their pseudoscience. Make MBAs illegal.
Did you buy any devices via?

https://www.wirepas.com/partner-products/?
Comprehensive Survey on Vector Database-Storage and Retrieval Techs/Challenges
Possibly more general than you’re looking for but Marshall Kirkpatrick (ex–techcrunch, readwriteweb, sprinklr, others) has started a curated newsletter on AI: https://aitimetoimpact.com/p/about
https://archive.ph/MXDBz
Sometimes it "apologizes" rather than saying "sorry", you could build a fairly solid heuristic but I'm not sure you can catch every possible phrasing.

OpenAI could presumably add a "did the safety net kick in?" boolean to API responses, and, also presumably, they don't want to do that because it would make it easier to systematically bypass.
Amorphous Silicon Carbide Is Ten Times Stronger Than Kevlar
This has the obvious issue that it assumes no entry has a newline character, but also POSIX recommends against use of `echo`, use `print -- '%s\n' "$foo"` instead

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/e...

But, it's good to see people writing libraries for shell!
It's a shibboleth for the Rationalist community, that's why.
My knee-jerk reaction would be to agree with that. But every single vulnerability I remember being announced for Keycloak was due to some footgun for the authentication protocol.

So, I do assess the risk of a less tested but simpler implementation being way higher than of a well tested complex one.

What leads to the obvious conclusion that it's best to avoid the protocol completely. But if you don't do that, I'd recommend using the mainstream software.
> My complaint about the system being broken is more about the incentive structures and metrics that are used within the academic setting.

We have to keep in mind that those incentives, targets, and metrics were set up by the academics themselves. It is the same in funding agencies and departments.
The FAA / Aircraft Manufacturer relationship has been oft criticized in the past several decades as being a canonical example of 'regulatory capture.'¹ This incident is just more grist for the mill.

¹–https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture?wprov=sfla1
>Like, who the hell targets a "company" because of an employee who works there you don't like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donglegate
Three interesting (I hope) comments:

1) There is so much cultural baggage around psychedelics at this point. We're still talking about the Marsh Chapel experiment? We're still writing articles that MUST include a Leary reference? There is a HUGE wave of psychedelic research coming to fruition now and in the coming 2 - 3 years that will hopefully help change the conversation from hippies, the 1960s, and even religious/spiritual metaphor.

2) Without a more concrete understanding of consciousness (and the 'hard problem' of it), our understanding of psychedelics is built on shaky foundations. Sure, psychedelic research may help us discover new insights that help solve the consciousness crisis... but that seems like a very speculative hope.

3) I'm curious why N,N-DMT isn't being studied as much as psilocybin in this current wave of research. Much of the challenge with contemporary psychedelic therapy has to do with logistics - trips take too long to fit a clinical setting. DMT is over in 20 minutes, and while (I've heard) extremely intense, people seem to anecdotally benefit in similar ways to longer-acting psychedelics.
Like IVF, Annoy partitions the entire embedding space into high-dimensional polygons. The difference is how the two algorithms do it - IVF (https://zilliz.com/learn/vector-index) uses centroids, while Annoy (https://zilliz.com/learn/approximate-nearest-neighbor-oh-yea...) is basically just one big binary tree.
The fact that sourcehut is under such a vicious attack makes me even more certain I did the right thing switching to it from github for my repositories. If "entities" are trying to shut them down or hurt their business using such underhanded means, they must be doing something right.

Don't worry about me Drew, just do your thing. Hopefully this serves to make sourcehut even stronger.
Who does the categorizing? Sounds like unnecessary complication, Reddit already handles this niche.
There's also room for mains powered ultra low cost wifi appliances. Think about fans or air humidifiers.
People on this forum often "joke" about dropping the production database as a rite of passage for noobs
What certainly died during the last years has been some of the last Fortran compiler companies:

Absoft: https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/absoft-ceases-operati...

Lahey: https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/lahey-computer-system...

Looking at the licenses that I have had, which are SGI († 2009), Pathscale († 2011), Absoft († 2022) and Intel - Intel is to shut down in 2042.
> I wonder what they're prompting ChatGPT with

"Please generate a title to be used to sell a lovely, large chest with a slender frame and three willing receptacles."
If this is a joke: yes.

If this is not a joke: no.
After reading the book the Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil, technology looks to both immersive and not immersive (but ambient).

People can choose their tool of choice but most people will not voluntarily do that because of convenience.
This only works with CLI that take a few arguments. If you're writing a CLI that requires 5+ arguments, then positional arguments are very hard to remember the order of. -- arguments make that easier.
It is interesting how you consider that the researcher's opinion on the significance of his research and the relative difficulty of obtaining funding is something which should be omitted, whereas someone entirely unconnected with the expedition's dismissal of his comments as 'vapid moralising' is "worth discussing". Perhaps, where you come from, software developers' wide range of interests leads them greater authority than archaeologists on archaeology?

I will grant that (unlike the drive-by culture warring against "being overly PC", the BBC and climate change by other people demonstrating the breadth of their interests elsewhere in the thread) the OP does actually give us something relevant to discuss: the "lost city" in the Xinguano region still occupied by the descendants of the few survivors of contact with Europeans has been "discovered" multiple times during the 20 year period between Rostain's first study of the Upano region and his LiDar survey (Xinguano was covered the exactly same way; justlike the trope of changing agriculture-centric views comes up every time Göbekli Tepe or similarly early structures are discussed... without triggering HN). I guess you could stretch those recent discoveries to arguing that there's absolutely no research bias towards Europe and nobody ever conflated the Conquistadors' failure to find cities full of gold in the Amazon Basin with there being no ancient history to find, and it'd be relatively easy to defend the Meggers hypothesis about the unsuitability of the Amazon for major city building by insisting it wasn't Eurocentric, it was just wrong. But nobody seems interested in anything wider than getting angry at the idea Eurocentrism has ever been a thing...
I don't know about this particular comparison but yes, lifetime-buys can be a good strategy.
Amazon, in general, is not the place to shop for "brands renowned throughout the world."

Most of those folks stay off amazon, and If you're lucky enough to find such a brand on Amazon the chances that you receive a counterfeit version are pretty great.

Although if I had an endless bag of money to burn it'd be fun to buy an Amazon Rolex [0] just to see how it's handled.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Rolex-Oyster-Perpetual-Master-116710B...
I prefer the suggestion to show a percentage instead of the raw count of upvotes and / or downvotes. Seems more meaningful and contextual. And less likely to contribute to a mob mentality like behaviour (where people in an online community tend to be swayed by the majority opinion and sometimes don't post opposing views because they fear the downvotes). .
A fundamental challenge with storing pressure is that water is essentially incompressible. This means that you can’t build a 1000 gallon tank and store any useful amount of energy in the form of pressurized water in that tank.

Mathematically, it’s easy to forget that the PV term in enthalpy is a mathematical trick, not a physical thing, and that it mostly does a nice job explaining physical things when P = atmospheric pressure.

If you want to store, say, 100psi water, the energy you care about is P times delta V, so you need some thing that can change its volume easily, cheaply, and reversibly while under pressure. As a practical matter, this means compressed air or maybe springs. So that water “pressure tank” is actually an air pressure tank that happens to have some water in it too.

There’s nothing wrong with storing pressurized air, except that it’s a heck of a lot more dangerous than storing pressurized water due to the fact that it really does have energy stored in it. (There’s a reason that a PVC pipe filled with 80psi water is a common thing in houses and the main danger is that water escapes if it breaks. A pipe full of 80 psi air is quite hazardous.) There are startups that have played with compressed air energy storage. The resulting gizmos are large.

I would expect a RO plant that is optimized for intermittent use without any energy storage at all to end up being a viable alternative to energy storage, but maybe batteries will end up being cheap enough that this isn’t worthwhile.
LLMs
Everyone has 'but is any of it worthwhile?' moments. You're going to focus that question towards what's around you.
I really expected to see this, do people still watch 2001?

https://youtu.be/Wy4EfdnMZ5g?si=K2GNOtlprFEyPj8A
Why is working on art good, but working on entertainment a waste of time?
Regarding costs of switching to different aircraft model - the type ratings themselves might not be that expensive, similarly parts and other preparations when looked in isolation.

Which is fine for privately-owned company, but not for publicly traded company that is going to take a pounding for the expenses over multiple quarters.

And similarly Boeing wanted to have a happy path over designing and certifying a completely new plane, which is frankly what they should have done - the 737 design could not be enhanced further without at least major recertification part (for example, going full fly by wire).
> would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record

Consider the shittiest homegrown shopping portal probably doesn't do that and any commercial point of sale system absolutely won't do that either. The system has to be such a POS internally that no other vendor will take the liability for it.

Reminds me of the Therac-25 that killed people. This thing probably killed more people than that.
> There's a phrase he uses that makes it clear to me what its intent is, "right to repair."

The intent of the (author of the) LGPL and the letter of the LGPL (+ applicable law) may well be different. That is, just because the LGPL itself was designed to help with right to repair, doesn't mean it is successful at that job. It's also not necessarily the intention of others who use the LGPL - just like Linus Torvalds' intentions for using the GPLv2 are different from RMS's intentions in writing the GPL (hence why Linux is not migrating to GPLv3).

My contention is that a license can't be invalidated by a 3rd party not giving you the technical means of exercising a right that you are granted. Similarly to how the GPLv2 couldn't stop TiVo from not allowing you to run their proprietary software if you modified the version of Linux they gave you, even if RMS intended it to.
I'm just suggesting that Creationism requires more faith than one might think at first glance.

Creationist beliefs

- a Creator

- things which are eternal

- an Eternal Creator

Whether those things are easier or harder to believe than naturalistic processes is up to the reader.
No, you're right to ask that. It's an interesting question to me in this era of time and regarding the merits of stoicism in general. One of the most highly regarded stoics (though he never explicitly identified as one) was the father of a horrible megalomaniac.

I don't think it'll be possible to ever know why that happened and how, but it's worth being suspicious of.

One of the main issues with stoicism (from my perspective) is that people can easily think they're engaged in the philosophy internally, yet they'll rarely if ever practice it externally in the world. It's easy to think Aurelius was practicing it externally because of how he expresses himself in text, and how his time as emperor was positively renowned... But this doesn't necessarily mean he was engaged in practicing the philosophy holistically in all aspects of his life. Maybe he was a bad father. There is evidence that Commodus didn't receive as much guidance as Marcus himself did, which is odd. Marcus was ill and facing the worst kinds of things, yet you'd think he'd have the resources and sense to ensure his son was receiving training and guidance to greatest extent possible. It's easy to be critical, though. He faced tremendous losses and stress in his life that would likely wear me into a pulp.

But then there's also the possibility that the winners write history, and those who assassinated Commodus ensured that records of his rule were made to seem horrible. It's hard to be certain of what really occurred.

Still, there are likely more stoics out there who try to think like a stoic but don't act like one. It's the same with any philosophy. Bringing it into practice is the hard part, and most of us fail to some degree or another. I do think stoicism is particularly vulnerable to this mistake though, but that's only based on intuition and anecdotal experience.
>Sites have been pushing towards "to continue reading, download our app" or "you've reached your free article limit, subscribe for just $X" for a long time, because it's profitable. I don't think there's sense in retroactively placing the blame for this behavior on crawlers

And websites have been getting paid for a long time by selling user data (which again is only useful for human data, not robot data). I don't think it's a coincidence that the paywalling of more and more sites came as GDPR and other data privacy regulations started to pop up. Crawlers are one of those smaller symptoms that gets knocked out along the way as well. Can't make money one way, they switch to another (even before taking the pandemic and interests rates into account).

>Sites are capable of restricting GPTBot/CCBot/etc., or putting a rate limit on crawling, without impacting human readers.

all those captchas I'm being hit with these days tells me otherwise. Maybe it is possible, but perhaps too expensive. Or the capthas themselves are great for training data. I don't know the real reason, but the internet has definitely become most hostile towards my human eyes in an attempt to curb bots. And the worst part is that it doesn't even entirely block out the bots.

>The model isn't retrieving content from some storage server during inference if that's what you're thinking

I don't admit to know the full details, but some exploits discovered lately seem to suggest that this isn't just "reading a page" and then moving on: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.13188.pdf (PDF warning). Apparently somewhere in the memory there is those raw assets being stored for "reference".

Again, I don't know enough to debate on it, but I've seen enough pieces to be scrutinous of how the process currently works. Scraping is a gray area, but storing copyright data in your commercial product is a much harder issue to argue. Youtube screws its creators over backwards to prevent litigation over a very similar concept.
> just found an edtech startup for tertiary education or (post-)graduate level research.

How is an edtech startup going to solve post-graduate research, an enterprise that involves millions of people around the world working on all fields under the sun, and is, by its very nature, unprofitable?
OpenTelemetry is a great concept, but in my experience not quite there yet. Docs especially fall into the common trap of handling the happy path hello world quickstarts, then become increasingly useless as you want to get beyond that to real life use cases. Given the inherent tradeoff of complexity that comes from trying to unify different approaches around one standard, sometimes it seems like things that should be simple are more difficult than they should be. I'm sure it will keep improving.
VR for the masses. I'm sure it will progressively find more niches as the hardware and use cases mature. But as a mass computing medium ? and with a headset ? Nope (Sorry Apple)

I believe we will have to wait for the intersection of Holography [1] and Generative video AI [2] to mature (15-30 years ?)

[1] https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline/
[2] https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/2019/3/codec-avatars-...