skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Reading this book, I found myself confused by the existence of Studies Programs. My college had a China Studies program and one or two others, I think Middle East Studies. Most professors in these programs were white (or black, or whatever - just not necessarily Chinese or Middle Eastern). They would read lots of Chinese texts, visit China a bit, and come back and have opinions on the Chinese National Character. Wang is doing the reverse, and China clearly appreciates his service.

It's pretty interesting to read an account of a foreigner doing "cultural studies" of your own culture. On the one hand to see what interests him (and what light that sheds on his own culture), but also to learn to take with a grain of salt some of the things our own "cultural studies" people say.

> But why? What’s the point of such people? Why don’t we just hire a Chinese person (maybe an immigrant, if we don’t trust the ones still in the PRC) to tell us what the Chinese National Character is? Why do we sent smart Americans to China to figure out what it’s like? There are literally over a billion people who already know that!

Honestly, a Chinese person (for instance) won't look at his own culture with the same eyes as an American, and there's some value to that American perspective for an American audience. This is a kind of translation task that seems intrinsically hard: you need a foot in both worlds, but one of those feet will inevitably be planted more firmly on one side than another.
That's easy: your barber operating a business out of his house will result in customers coming to your neighborhood, and that might bring "those people" around, and we can't have that.
That already existed via middleware engines.
Here is maybe a helpful analogy for the challenges behind protein folding.

The 5HT2A receptor is comprised of 471 amino acids. Proteins fold based on interaction between each of those amino acids, plus the external environment (plus post-translational modification).

So imagine a length of string with 471 magnets attached to it with different magnetic field strength (ranging from weak to strong). Now imagine it floating in space - how would the string fold upon itself? Now imagine different segments of the string have different stiffness - some are super flexible, others are rigid.

Difficult to predict how it might fold? Oh yeah!

Now imagine the string not in space, but in a solution of water with a number of other magnets floating in it (the cytoplasm within the cell and external environment outside the cell). Oh, and also imbedded in a wall with magnets in it as well (the cell membrane).

Now how does it fold?

Ok, now we think we have a good approximation of the structure just based off of various pieces of data. But wait! Other proteins are also embedded in the cell wall - all with their own structures and selection of weak and strong magnets, stiff and flexible segments interact with the receptor! Oh, and not all receptors have the same external environment - that can differ based on another laundry list of factors. Yeah, that's another layer of complexity.

Then add on top that the external environment (inside the cell on one side, outside the cell on the other) has a ton of water, but also dissolved ions like Na+, K+, Cl-, plus a bunch of other proteins with their own "magnets" and "stiff and flexible segments". These outside molecules will bind and disassociate from the receptor on a constant basis, ever so tweaking the shape.

Oh crap.

Of course AI has a good starting point - we can get x-ray crystal structures of the receptor and identify the position of atoms. But wait! That's in a crystal, not a human body! So that structure is likely incorrect in several ways. We also have other analytical techniques that can give clues to the structure in a solution that more closely mimics what's inside the body, so we can at least tell when the x-ray structure is just wrong (at least in some places).

That should give people an idea just how complex protein folding is. AI is good at taking all known "rules" about protein folding (and molecule interactions with the protein) to improve the predictions. But we're still far off from truly understanding all the factors in play.
Okay I did not expect to see Yajnadevam's pseudohistorical nonsense getting linked to on hacker news. That's a new one.
C and returning values quickly or safely, but not both
The government hires experts. See the example discussion in the post about regulating AI. Or think about the FDA, in the case of drugs, or the CIA for intelligence, the NSA for security (the A in the last two stands for Agency, which were so far covered by Chevron.)
Yeah I'm really impressed about the lack of self awareness in these comments. People are incredibly dangerous. There's a reason we took control of the planet. Even any single given human is incredibly dangerous and can kill many others (human or non human, and we routinely kill non humans). You can go pick up a gun and just start shooting people. You could go grab a knife and stab dozens in the street. You could easily build explosives. Hell, you could throw fucking buckets of sharp metal objects on a freeway and kill hundreds directly and indirectly. Our intelligence and biology has provided us with many means to create or obtain force multipliers.

I'm really glad the vast majority of humans have decided not to be particularly dangerous (at least to other humans). To think we aren't dangerous is just incredibly naive.

A big reason we aren't is because ingrained into our biology is a literal mechanism to not want to harm others. There's definitely ways to bypass these mechanisms and there are definitely faulty or poorly functioning ones out there, but most humans have it. Oddly this might even be the most dangerous thing we do too, because the definition of a coalition is that the utility is higher than the utility of each individual component.
i keep thinking about this google arc. I was there for nearly a decade (at this point i've almost been gone for longer than I was there) and from the outside, the company is almost unrecognizable.

it is definitely not the company that it was pre 2010. from my lowly IC5 (when I left) position, it felt like something happened in 2014 or so that really put the company on a different track. eric had already left and the founders had started stepping back and the people left running the show were, not them. i guess they were able to maximize shareholder value. but it was clearly at the expense of something.

anyway, I dont have anything to say that hasn't been said more eloquently by ben. except, I saw this change too. and it bums me out because I got to see the place before.
I've never understood this position from him. I'll admit that I've never read anything he's written about it so I'm probably speaking out of turn, and that there is a surprising death to this view that I'm not seeing because I haven't seriously looked into it, at least not from his perspective.

That said, I'm not sure where someone could come to the conclusion that the court should remain neutral when courts, especially the Supreme Court, mark the point where a dispute is resolved not in terms of how to follow the existing law, but why the existing law is the way it is, and whether it should be patchedto reflect a new understanding of why our values are what they are. The "correct" place to do this is of course in the legislature, but it moves on a comparatively glacial time frame and in some cases can never come to a clear actionable position on issues in a timely manner, while harms are actively taking place without remedy.

The neutral stance is implicitly conservative, disregarding changes in our understanding of why we value what we value, and instead focusing on mechanical details of how to paper over ever widening disparities, constantly pointing at the legislature to sort them out. If the court had the power to force legislature to come to a decision one way or the l other it would be different I suppose, but this would of course put the Court under the legislature, defeating the purpose of separated powers.

I acknowledge that the issue is quite complex. still from the outside, to put it bluntly, his stance looks like a rationalization to shirk an essential responsibility he has been uniquely entrusted with.
History of English Podcast (2012 – Present)
I suppose you could use the LLM to generate a function that would perform the operation you want. I know image classifiers have been used for audio, the audio is converted into a waveform Image and then processed.
It should also be possible for AI to generate schematics including logic gates or even functional ICs such as amplifiers or possibly the entire catalogue of 7400 series chips.
To me the analogy is that generic AI techniques with minimal problem domain specific adaptations is providing huge boosts in efficiency on a wide variety of applications. It’s like the steam engine causing mechanical work to become vastly more efficient. AI in many ways is doing the same thing to intellectual work.
New exciting web fingerprinting vector dropped.

As if we didn’t have a enough already.
according to a 1997 survey, 55% of adults feel that women are most responsible for minor 'fender benders', while 78% blame men for most fatal crashes:

blamed for minor accidents:
26% men
55% women
21% no opinion

blamed for fatal crashes:
78% men
13% women
10% no opinion

please note that the percentages for each category do not add up to 100% because the math was done by a woman

EDIT: to those downvoting this post, it should be noted that this post was drafted by a woman
StoryNest.ai is a revolutionary storytelling platform where imagination comes to life. Designed with kids in mind, it uses advanced AI to generate engaging stories based on user preferences. But it doesn't stop there - in a unique twist, kids can also interact with the characters from their stories, creating a dynamic and immersive narrative experience like no other. It's a fantastic tool to foster creativity, improve language skills, and cultivate a love for reading and storytelling in young minds.
>Manhattan is not a sprawl and a very desirable place to live, with super high rents to boot. Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, and even Tokyo are the same, so I'm not sure what you are trying to claim here.

Those cities are actually impossible to have in America (yes, including Manhattan), because of zoning laws and various other laws. Manhattan is only allowed to exist because it's grandfathered in and the local laws allow it. Such a city could never be built anywhere else in the US without some huge changes in legislation (not to mention local culture, since that drives the local legislation).

>IF you want to solve your housing emergency, limit growth in some way

Tokyo works because growth isn't limited: it's very easy to build here, unlike in the US. Tokyo builds hundreds of thousands of new housing units every single year, while the US struggles to build any. This is entirely because of regulations.
Almost nobody alive today remembers America before the New Deal. We've lost the institutional memory of what works and doesn't work in that environment. It is very much a radical position to undo the New Deal consensus.
How is some random dude exposing themselves to children not similar enough?

Of course it's not the _same_ thing, but they are comparable. Yes, there might be differences that prevent using one in place of the other for certain arguments, but here the reference class is policing vs privacy, no? The concrete issue is almost irrelevant anyway. (I mean I recommend picking privacy in all cases except in some rare freak ones where humanity goes extinct unless we get the mind virus transmitted through Facebook. Oh wait.)
You are very costly don't scale well and "whiny". General Intelligence need not have free/independent will, and even latest Nvidia ** is much cheaper than a single employee anywhere in world considering it works 24/7 and is trained at same level as everybody else in 1st minute.
I've certainly experienced US-made software that was close to useless in the UK, demanding dates in some absurd middle-out format and expecting everyone to know what a "401k" was with no explanation, along with more minor bits of polish like saying "pound" but meaning a completely different symbol.
I think you have it backwards. The majority of people don't tolerate the minorities. Go on autism or trans reddit. It's full of people desperately trying to figure out how to fit in. It takes very little effort to respect people who are different from you.
An employment ended by the employer in less than a year because the employer "changed their plan" (according to the former employee) doesn't look like a success to me.
I differ from a few people here in thinking that everything is not gravitating toward the average: it's gravitating toward the lowest common denominator, which is usually significantly below-average.
I clicked, read "Quetta does not collect, store or share any data." , but then:

> The resource at “https://stats.g.doubleclick.net/g/collect?[truncated]” was blocked because content blocking is enabled.

(also their account identifier is "11l1l1l1l1", an attempt to anonymize their own advertising account? Seems legit)

> Request to access cookie or storage on “https://analytics.google.com/g/collect?[truncated]” was blocked because it came from a tracker and content blocking is enabled.

Plus hits to Google Ads, Google Analytics, and Framer's events API logging page views...

I get that this stuff is "standard", but you can't say "privacy-first" and then track every visitor to your site with like 3-4 different analytics platforms.
Self-learning is the sort of thing where you really want to be pointed to the right books. Some books are really good if you have people you can ask questions too, but those might not work at all without that. Meanwhile, others truly are a "lock yourself in a room for a couple of weeks and process it" thing.

One side thing I've been thinking of to try and tackle this is an autodictact's version of letterboxd: have people talk about books and resources they're using, offer help to one another, and maybe help people discover interesting things to poke at. At the very least it would help me track my own in-progress material
The Deka iBot deserved the Nobel Prize IMHO https://newmobility.com/the-ibot-is-back/. It is a wheelchair that

* Can traverse any stairs

* Can travel on sand and gravel

* Can raise the user to standing height

At $30k it’s inaccessible to most users, but mass production could make a huge impact.
Godot 3 has more "goodies" available (for now) around the web and in the Asset Library, but that's changing quickly. Godot 4 has some more modern features and other improvements which (depending on your project intent) may make it the better choice. It honestly depends entirely on what you're attempting to create, but at this particular point in time either one will likely get the job done. Sooner or later Godot 4 though will be the preferred version to choose, so it can't really hurt to start learning it now. :)
This tracks with what I saw as an outside observer; I felt like around 2015 was the inflection point where Google started its slow arc toward mediocrity.

It seemed like maybe Eric Schmidt's departure had something to do with it, though it's possible that was just coincidence.
Photo (2016), article updated (2020).
David Mills' Fuzzball
An archive of Mills' Fuzzball operating system for PDP-11 computers. Its main application was as a router in NSFnet.
Khan used to have something called "world of math", which would take you through the entirety of Khan academy "backwards". Eg., you would do problems, and only take lessons when you couldn't complete a problem.

While the first 1 or 2 weeks felt more like a case study on how to teach number literacy to children ("how many elephants are there in the picture?") it soon became real calculations and later on all the branches of math. I did it for a few month leading up to my masters, and it was great.
No. The formal geometry class is usually age 14/15 (first or second year of high school). They should have seen a less formal treatment of geometry before then, though they may not know it.
The protein class they bind to has historically been hard to determine structures experimentally and had high flexibility. The preprint that is the basis of the article showed that using traditional virtual screening against Alphafold structures had similar success rates as screening against experimental structures. Additionally, the Alphafold structures may represent alternative conformations of the proteins not seen in the experiment-derived structures.
> working toward a bachelor of science in physics.

Thats cool, I kind of want to do that. But also Im stuck with wondering, I put all this work into that, what do I do at the end?
I've given plenty of nuance in comment after comment on this site. I'm tired of hearing the same slimey garbage over and and over and over again. "It's not theft. It's actually way more complex than that and artists have no right to be upset because they said the model was a database".

If this hurts the art community, that's the fault of the AI companies that scraped their work. If it's legal, I guess you can go and do it, but I'm not going to stop saying it's theft to your faces. AI has alienated a generation of artists from their work. You ought to at least feel bad about it.
> Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff.

Big tech is in a really tough spot when it comes to innovation. Google has developed a reputation for killing off products too easily. Many have commented here and elsewhere that you can’t trust them to invest in using their new products because they might just kill it off and leave you in the lurch. Of course, you get a self fulfilling prophecy as then too few people use the product for fear that it’ll get killed off.

But I’m guessing Google is also more hesitant to launching a new products that since it neither wants to worsen its reputation for killing them, nor does it want to support a product indefinitely, even if it’s not profitable.

So then what? The answer probably should be that Google should buy up startups that have figured out product-market fit and just need to scale. They can’t do that though because the FTC is already breathing down their neck with anti-trust suits.

Google actually is investing in a lot of very transformative technologies—AI obviously, but also quantum computers, biotech, and autonomous vehicles. Those are things that just aren’t well very well suited to 20% projects.
They didn’t say it would be the only way, just that it would be the best way
I wonder if he will end up bringing Carmack back?
I agree, people arguing in favor of these models deserve to feel shame. And you're right, I am emotional. In fact I'm outraged. If you have a scrap of empathy, you should be too.
It should be noted that Ventrillo requires DirectX. This is part of where the "hundreds of megs" are hidden.

Though honestly, crossplatform software too often just bundles Electron rather than relying on the entire OS layer (on Mac and Windows anyways) having all of this stuff built-in. For bugs and reproducibility it's nice, but it really sucks for "downloading the same bytes over and over again". This is downstream of OS vendors just historically not fixing bugs, but in an alternate universe people would have working OS stacks and we would use that.
Spot on. I came across my old Nexus One recently, charged it up and whaddya know, still working. I clicked on Google News to see headlines from 10 years ago and was shocked at how much better it looked. It was like the diffrence between reading a folded newspaper vs looking at an electronic billboard.
He really was. I remember encountering him on comp.protocols.time.ntp two decades ago and the breath of knowledge he had on computers keeping time was astounding, both at the time, and now that I look back at it.
Looking at images of shorthand makes me remember how much I just enjoyed playing the 2023 game Chants of Sennaar: https://www.rundisc.io/chants-of-sennaar/

The game’s dialogue and story are all written in a series of ever more complex writing systems, unseen and novel to the game. There’s a mechanic where you get to prove to the game you understand what is being written or said (characters have subtitles also in the writing systems) and it’s really good fun!

Pittman shorthand: https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6Wr53ouD4Ok/WhxIZR6AOZI/AAAAAAABI...

Sennaarian writing:
https://cdn.focus-home.com/fhi-fastforward-admin/resources/g...
>Concrete construction is the common way to build in China (and anywhere in Asia sans Japan)

Concrete-reinforced steel is absolutely common here in Japan. Wood is used for single-family homes, though, but anything larger is generally concrete+steel.

>but the techniques they use require a bit of overbuilding and limit their towers to around 34 or so stories.

Modern condo towers around me here in Tokyo are frequently 50 stories AFAICT. And that's with extremely strict building codes for earthquake protection. I can't tell you about the stairs though, as I don't live in one.
Drivers for the H100 are available right on their website
And yet... https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-... (this was resubmitted here a few days ago)
The success of 20% projects is a quasi-myth. Gmail is often touted, but you would do well to look up the employee # at Google of the inventor. Point being, you need (very) early hire clout or your 20% project isn’t going anywhere either.
There is no evidence layoffs are a good idea from a fiscal perspective either, except in the short term. They're basically random so you loose good talent and you demoralize the best that stay. It should be reserved for dire circumstance.
They could keep starting products and instead of killing them, release them as open source. Or one click deploy on GCP.

Actually, that last one makes a lot of sense for pushing for more GCP adoption.
Thailand is also one of the most visited countries in the world, and 99.9% of tourists never run into any problems. In fact, I’d argue it’s one of the safest countries in the world for tourists. Personally, I always advise people to choose Thailand if they are looking for travel to a place that ticks most boxes relevant for a vacation.
Just don’t insult the monarchy or sunbath in a temple while you are there. Neither should be that hard.
The conversation is about artists being ripped off by people who train AI models on their work without consent (and profit off of that).

But sure, let's pretend the conversation is about intelligence of an algorithm that has no agency and no say in the matter.

Being obtuse on purpose is fun!
"Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff.

If you're someone building a company, challenge yourself to value employees above all else, then watch and be amazed at the ROI."

Relevant post from the same author — FAQ on leaving Google https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-10-GoogleEx...
Ask HN: Alternatives to track life progress apart from a daily stand-up?
I'm thinking what the the most optimal way might be for this purpose. I'm thinking of implementing a daily stand-up doc of all the things I did on X day and what could be done better, and a value plan for the next day.
You can’t raise much VC money with ownership and a majority stake in this climate.

You’re a budding social network. You need corporations to pump money in and you need user growth. Who is running your sales and marketing teams for free?

Twitter hasn’t launched features of note since the Elon takeover that weren’t visibly in development before the takeover. Unless you count an $8 Boolean flag as a meaningful feature.
Do you think 3D movies will continue to be considered gimmicks, even on devices like these? I thought that 3D TVs were silly, but my expectation is that they will be much better on AVP.