skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is wrong. Integers (in SQLite columns) are stored as varints and floats as IEEE 754 doubles. Numbers in JSONB are stored as text.
People always forget that things that only happen every few million times, can happen fairly frequently on a busy server. This has bitten me numerous times. The nature of a lot of these types of issues is that they are hard to detect and hard to reproduce.

Virtual threads are nice for unblocking legacy code but they aren't without issues. There are better options for new code with less trade offs on the jvm as well. I've recently been experimenting with jasync-postgresql (there's a mysql variant as well) as an alternative to JDBC in Kotlin. It's a nice library. It does have some limitations and is a bit on the primitive side. But it appears to be somewhat widely used in various database frameworks for Scala, Java, and Kotlin.

Databases and database frameworks are an area on the JVM where there just is a huge amount of legacy code built on threads and blocking IO. It's probably one of the reasons Oracle worked on virtual threads as migrating away from these frameworks is unlikely to ever happen in a lot of code bases. So, waving a magic wand and making all that code non blocking is very attractive. But of course that magic has some hard limitations and synchronize blocks are one of those. I imagine they are working on improving that further.
> Most PC makers and laptop PC buyers made an unspoken bargain in the early- to mid-2010s, around when the MacBook Air and the Ultrabook stopped being special thin-and-light outliers and became the standard template for the mainstream laptop: We would jettison nearly any port or internal component in the interest of making a laptop that was thinner, sleeker, and lighter.

Nah, most PC makers have fallen hook, line and sinker for Steve Jobs' trick of pulling the Macbook Air out of an envelope and destroyed the PC laptop industry as was his plan. Making lighter laptops do not require thinner laptops -- well before Jobs' trick I had a Panasonic CF-Y5 which was a 14" 1.5kg laptop and yet it included a DVD burner. It was not thin for sure. This thin craze is only making worse laptops because you have no space for cooling, ports and keyboard travel.
More to the point, OCaml belongs to the ecosystems that has the golden route, offering multiple implementations, allowing to pick the best one for each workflow.

If Rust had an interpreter in the box algonside the compilers like OCaml (there are multiple ones as well), it would already make a big different in development workflows.
A drivable solar array to self charge your car (in beta)
A working "complex solution to a very simple problem" is not a contradiction, as it can be "simpler" than a simple working solution to a complex problem.
> I am finding that more and more people are looking for extremely specific and narrow experience. Like, if you haven't used <x> technology and worked in <y> domain, they don't want to even speak to you.

That was my experience as well. If a candidate doesn't claim to have over 5 years of experience in a specific tech stack then recruiters just downrank of completely eliminate them from their short list of candidates.

And I won't even start on the hard skills screening process.

I believe this is a reflection of low-level HR technicians with zero tech background taking over the hiring process of some companies. Their work is to filter out unsuited candidates and present a short list of best fits. Thus they follow a pattern matching strategy with the candidate's CV, otherwise they have no way to tell if someone is even competent.
This isn't a story about software engineering, it's a story about a shitty governmental department in a mediocre country not fixing something that everyone knows is broken, and threatening people with jail time instead.

Show me a similar story about stuff this bad happening at Google and I'll believe that there's something wrong with the field as practiced at its best.
Did you hear about the Dutch childcare benefits scandal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...) yet? That one affected about 28’000 parents with 70’000 children and, due to the illegal separation of children from their parents this resulted in, is at the crimes-against-humanity level.
Emacs runs in a terminal. Vim isn't installed everywhere, Vi is. If you're going to install an editor and a config you might as well just install Emacs.
This is a valuable argument (learn in context, vary the context), but the mention of "people learn their MT without Anki / grammar / study" always bugs me.

First and Second Language Acquisition is just apples to bacon. The baby and adult brains are different, and their needs, capabilities, and context are vastly different.
Are you looking to hire offshore Java developers but need help determining where to look? Have reservations against offshore hiring and want to understand the benefits and limitations before making your final decision? This is your ultimate guide to finding and hiring Java developers offshore, and we will cover the why, how, and where to hire Java developers.
NixOS on Hetzner Dedicated
> Bloomberg used to be a decent media outlet, but maybe that's chsnged

This happend to me too, I just noticed it because the site has a Wordpress favicon. Its not Bloomberg but Bloomberry - don't know if this is intentional but nice hijack
Yea, everytime I install linux on a new laptop there is something that doesn't work without a bunch of work and sometimes something that just doesn't work at all.

It's way better than in the 2000s when I started to use Linux.
> nobody should be developing AGI without incredibly robustly proven alignment, open or closed, any more than people should be developing nuclear weapons in their garage.

I have an alternate proposal: We assume that someone, somewhere will develop AGI without any sort of “alignment”, plan our lives accordingly, and help other humans plan their lives accordingly.
Anthropic: AI poisoning could turn open models into destructive "sleeper agents"
Real-time log stream analysis
Absolutely wrong. Mistakes happen. Bugs, fat fingers, laziness, hangovers--whether by human or machine, errors occur. The legal system was supposed to uncover the facts. Because of the Post Office coverup, the judges were told "
no, there are no bugs. No, nobody has remote access to these terminals. Yes, the only possible way these figures could turn up is through theft." This despite the fact that at least one Post Office inspector explicitly wrote in a report that there was no evidence of theft. The legal system failed to penetrate the veil of lies and find the truth. That's a legal systemic failure.
> I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative use of AI, and none of the AI safety people are talking about stopping it.

This should be an explicitly allowed practice, it is following the spirit of copyright to the letter - use the ideas, facts, methods or styles while avoiding to copy the protected expression and characters. LLMs can do paraphrasing, summarisation, QA pairs or comparisons with other texts.

We should never try to put ideas under copyright or we might find out humans also have to abide by the same restrictive rules, because anyone could be secretly using AI, so all human texts need to be checked from now on for copyright infringement with the same strictness.

The good part about this practice is that a model trained on reworded text will never spit out the original word for word, under any circumstances because it never saw it during training. Should be required pre-processing for copyrighted texts. Also removing PII. Much more useful as a model if you can be sure it won't infringe word for word.
Yes I saw that, that’s why I thought it would also be interesting to compare it to the current SuperMemo algorithm (SM-18) and not „only“ the older SM-17.

It would also be interesting to see how SM-18 compares to SM-17 ;)
In Russia they don’t use harvested fingerprints to unlock phones. They use wrenches and flat irons to get info and bad windows on higher floors and polonium tea to prevent anyone else getting info.
The one area where I think 98 and 2000 regress from 95 is that they introduce "web content" in applications that are not web browsers - specifically, random objects respond to single-clicks instead of double-clicks, and blue underlined (and sometimes not even underlined) hyperlinks start to appear.

There was no reason to do that.
But it is a holdings company, and their business model is to make returns on equity (and possibly loaning out capital to their subsidiaries) instead of directly managing their subsidiaries' operations and generating revenue.
> seems to be a lot of hand-waving between where we are now and "AGI".

Modeling an entity that surpasses our intelligence, especially one that interacts with us, is an extraordinarily challenging, if not impossible, task.

Concerning the potential for harm, consider the example of Vladimir Putin, who could theoretically cause widespread destruction using nuclear weapons. Although safeguards exist, these could be circumvented if someone with his authority were determined enough, perhaps by strategically placing loyal individuals in key positions.

Putin, with his specific level of intelligence, attained his powerful position through a mix of deliberate actions and chance, the latter being difficult to quantify. An AGI, being more intelligent, could achieve a similar level of power. This could be accomplished through more technical means than traditional political processes (those being slow and subject to chance), though it could also engage in standard political maneuvers like election participation or manipulation, by human proxies if needed.

TL;DR It could do (in terms of negative consequences) at least whatever Vladimir P. can do, and he can bring civilization to its knees.
They rebranded their messaging app several times. I doubt the guts of the backend/protocol changed all that much.
All I can say is my biggest bugbear with toaster is the crumbs just all fall out despite having a way to catch/release them. So that is a good problem to solve.

Also make the slots wider. For things like Turkish bread.
Grats on building this out. I think there is a lot of potential in this space. I very much understand the challenges of financial/regulatory reporting and data quality :).

Couple of things I have noticed. You mention "automates root cause analysis". By this I assume you mean showing which rows have affected the metrics to go out of bounds? Or is there something else I'm missing.

How do users define metrics? I've found this to be a challenge especially given you may be giving this tool to non-technical users.

Does this support real time data sources such as Kafka?

Do you plan on supporting cross dataset validations (i.e. relationships such as an account_id for a transaction should exist in the accounts table)?
if the 'devalustion' of human creative output and replacing real humans with cheap ai solutions funneling wealth to the rich is in fact the 'by far biggest harm' then basically there's nothing to worry about. no government would ban or even restrict ai on those grounds

even the 'terrists can figure out how to build an a-bomb' problem is relatively inconsequential

what ai safety people are worried about, by contrast, is that on april 22 of next year, at 7:07:33 utc, every person in the world will keel over dead at once, because the ai doesn't need them and they pose a risk to its objectives. or worse things than that

i don't think that's going to happen, but that's what they're concerned about
I hate Tesla as much as the next guy, but all Teslas have buttons for temperature and audio controls - they're on the steering wheel.
Consequence issues: How resolving buyer concerns makes or breaks complex deals
I'm the poster, and it's not about advertising per se (I have enough clients and work, to not spruke here). It's about testing the validity of my view about modern software development (being largely broken), hence I'm really interested in comments from people such as yourself. Speaking openly and honestly about the actual 'on the ground' experiences of many, many developers seems to be absent, in consultancy services, in agile transformations, in organisations themselves.
Biometrics are a terrible choice for sensitive information:

* It is easier to push your thumb on a screen than to pry a password out of your head. (relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/)

* You will leave fingerprints and other biometric features everywhere.
Microsoft Launches Copilot Pro
Possible. But given that they couldn't do that with the cash cow that is the ios app store[0] I won't hold my breath for it to happen with batteries.

[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2024/01/15/app-store-to-be-split-i...
This is something I think about. If this happens today, people consider their lives ruined, go into deep depression, get divorced and often never recover. This can't have been the case before in time. How heavily does culture effect the experience and consequences of misforture? It seems to me like we may have some form of entitlement, like spoiled children, that has made us weaker. If that's the case, can we change our culture? I think so and I think we should consider that if it's a possibility.
And that skillful programmer will fight with all power to avoid any kind of minimum standard and liability for crap software, continuing the cycle and abuse.
Sometimes it does. Depending on definition of "work":)
Yep, used to use linuxify a few years back. But then it used to mess with my internal scripts. Anyhow, this was just a "what-if" exercise. Plus, Ubuntu was a test OS, but CentOS/RHEL were real PITA on client systems and this gives me a quick way out from spinning up a VM while still maintaining control. But agreed, if I just wanted GNU utils, I'd have just gone ahead with linuxify.
What is the reason to believe that LLMs are an evolutionary step towards AGI at all? In my mind there is a rather large leap from estimating a conditional probability of a next token over some space to a conscious entity with its own goals and purpose. Should we ban a linear regression while we're at it?

It would be great to see some evidence that this risk is real. All I've witnessed so far was scaremongering posts from apparatchicks of all shapes and colors, many of whom have either a vested interest in restricting AI research by others (but not by them, because they are safe and responsible and harmless), or established a lucrative paper-pushing, shoulder-rubbing career around 'AI safety' - and thus are strongly incentivised to double down on that.

A security org in a large company will keep tightening the screws until everything halts; a transport security agency, given free reigh, would strip everyone naked and administer a couple of profilactic kicks for a good measure - and so on. That's just the nature of it - organisations do what they do to maintain themselves. It is critical to keep these things on a leash. Similarly, an AI Safety org must proseletyse excistential risks of AI - because a lack of evidence of such is an existential risk for themselves.

A real risk, which we do have evidence for, is that LLMs might disrupt knowledge-based economy and threaten many key professions - but how is this conceptually different from any technological revolution? Perhaps in a hundred years lawyers, radiologists, and, indeed, software developers, will find themselves in the bin of history - together with flint chippers, chariot benders, drakkar berserkers and so forth. That'd be great if we planned for that - and I don't feel like we do enough. Instead, the focus is on AGIs and that some poor 13-year-old soul might occasionally read the word 'nipple'.
"common usage scenarios" != "in all cases".

I don't know if those Oracle employees actually did outright say -- or even imply -- "in all cases" as the GP asserted, but if they did, then "only" working in "common usage scenarios" would definitely be overselling the feature.
Does the writer really think laptops are not upgradeable because of technical issues? Laptop makers convice people to buy more computer than they need as they can't be upgraded, making more money and waste in the process.
CES 2024: Micromobility Merger and Waymo's Highway Robotaxis"
My current laptop (Dell Precision 7670) had flashing light error on the other day, that the Dell support paper suggested was potentially "loose ram".

So I turned it upside down and opened it up and to my interest/curiosity I found this RAM (CAMM) in it.

its a very interesting design. What I do find interesting is that there is no extra slot for more ram. so if /when i decide i want more than the 16GB I need to remove the existing. which is only slightly better than soldered ram in my opinion.
I agree, except that it's important to remember that code by itself is as meaningless as programs with no side effects. A bug becomes a problem when it's a part of a running program.
Why would it be forced? Why would it be in your private life?
Fingerprints alone are simply a number that is generated by your finger on a reader, and then sent to some other system.

Think of a fingerprint reader as a USB keyboard that types out your fingerprint number for you when you touch it. While an attacker can steal the finger and put it on the reader they are more likely to steal the number and type it in with a regular keyboard.

Border controls are about building a (passport, face, fingerprint) tuple under human (or remote human) supervision on trusted hardware to control physical movement. It feels like one of the few cases where fingerprint readers do actually work as an application.

Now that the border police have your magic finger number they can indeed unlock your phone too. It’s an offline attack though — they need to get logic probes between the reader and the CPU — so if the phone locks with a PIN after reboot, magic key press, or a period of time then that’s the appropriate defence.
Ten years ago, even five years ago, I would have said exactly the same thing. I am extremely pro-FOSS.

Forget the particulars for just a moment. Forget arguments about the probability of the existential risk, whatever your personal assessment of that risk is.

Can we agree that people should not be able to unilaterally take existential risks with the future of humanity without the consent of humanity, based solely on their unilateral assessment of those risks?

Because lately it seems like people can't even agree on that much, or worse, won't even answer the question without dodging it and playing games of rhetoric.

If we can agree on that, then the argument comes down to: how do we fairly evaluate an existential risk, taking it seriously, and determine at what point an existential risk becomes sufficient that people can no longer take unilateral actions that incur that risk?

You can absolutely argue that you think the existential risk is unlikely. That's an argument that's reasonable to have. But for the time when that argument is active and ongoing, even assuming you only agree that it's a possibility rather than a probability, are we as a species in fact capable of handling even a potential existential risk like this by some kind of consensus, rather than a free-for-all? Because right now the answer is looking a lot like "no".
They were counterfeiting the labels on some products so they started requiring holographic labels on some kinds of products, like Christmas lights
> the finance market does not care if layoffs will impact the company's competitiveness in 5-10 years

This doesn't make sense to me. Are there no 5-10 year derivatives?
I agree with your second point. But in this case, the AI art is a pure decoration.

Unless the author has some actual artistic talent, to me it feels like waste of time to spend more than a few minutes coming up with this. Some philosophers drinking Java coffee and playing with the PostgreSQL elefant. It doesn't even illustrate anything specific about the issue at hand.
This whole "article" sidesteps the problems at the core of the issue: housing, income, and taxes on income.

There's only so much you can do with a welfare state and Germany hasn't even exhausted that, take neighboring Denmark as an example in housing where home ownership is much higher due to the govt backing that mortgages have.

The article also discusses giving young people money but not taking it from the rich -- where then does it come from?!

The tax problem isn't unique to Germany, it's a common theme in Western Europe: if you make minimum wage and barely scrape by you're still taxed too much, and god forbid you actually have a high paying job well into the 6 figures you'll get disincentivized to earn more by the progressive tax system..

The "progressive" tax system all dissolves at certain 7-8 figures of income or net worth where you can just hire an army of tax consultants and pay the least amount possible.

You get hit the hardest as a middle class and upper middle class citizen, which in a developed nation is quite a large percentage of the productive workforce.
A link between low interest rates and low crime (2016)
>"big companies are stealing data owned by small businesses and individuals."

I mean, they are.

Unfortunately, AI at this point in time (LLMs, Midjourney, etc.) do appear to be not much more than highly technical and complex forms of intellectual property theft, which are given the futuristic name of "AI" to cover what they are actually doing. That isn't to say that they are entirely performing intellectual property theft; the models themselves are very fascinating in how they function, especially as sort of "extra-rational" entities that clearly have a logic, though not one we can fully understand.

But the sort of philosophical, metaphysical, technological side of LLMs and Midjourney are clearly not being explored by OpenAI in a responsible manner, otherwise they wouldn't have just straight up stolen, seemingly, NYT articles. It's just another example of Silicon Valley VCs using a wonderful technology solely for exploitative profits, just like how google search became a surveillance tool (and plenty of other examples to go along with that).

Its only right that we acknowledge the work of the human beings (all the art, writing, etc.) that went into the creation of the model, instead of pretending that there is some totally non-human machine intellect that is going to take over the world through its vast intelligence and negate all human action and all human work etc. etc. That is just a fantasy generated by wealthy Silicon Valley VCs as justification to themselves and those working under them, and those they are stealing from, to cover precisely that work that they would rather avoid paying for.
My last was also a nightmare. There was a point about 3/4 of the way through where I started to have panic attacks and started sweating so much that it looked like I stepped out in a hurricane. This was while I was in a very cold basement in winter. It's absolutely wild how much your brain controls, and how fast it can lose control.

My dosage was much too high and while I'm not going to deny any of the benefits, it was a very traumatic experience for me that made me seek therapy. For a while I would have some lingering visual hallucinations (a few months past the incident) when I would close my eyes and it would trigger panic attacks. That's mostly subsided, but I wish people would put a higher emphasis on the mental damage it can do.
Well see, if Patricio Chilano hasn't fixed this in a year I would start to get VERY worried.

Moving monitors into Java is not a good solution, like the long solution they are working on.

Java should be the API not the implementation!
I was hinting/hoping at something beyond what fish does.

Rather than just structural colouring (params are colour a, valid paths colour b etc) the input is recoloured as you type in response to validity for the specific tool you're about to invoke.