skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>high-dimensional latent-space embedding to a Markov model

That's what we call a hidden Markov model.

>There's a school of thought that says that lossy compression doesn't just require intelligence, it is intelligence, and LLMs can be seen as an example of that equivalence.

SVD is used to implement lossy compression as does JPEG encoding... these algorithms are in no way intelligent.
Germany explores 4-day workweek amid labor shortage
*couldn't do this as well or better than us, of course.
We will always be free for individual use, and our Teams pricing will initially be between $10-20 /user/month.
I'm in the middle of reading Nonverts by Stephen Bullivant, about the variety of people who grew up in a religion and "converted" to no religion. He makes the argument that it's incredibly difficult (bordering on pointless) to make sweeping generalizations about all of them at once. His book is sectioned by which religion these non-believers came from, suggesting that their religious background accounts for a lot of who they are without religion.
OLMo Is Here, Powered by Databricks
Stanchion: Column-oriented tables in SQLite
Ask HN: Visualize every Git changes to a file at once?
Given the discussion around commit messages I would like to know if there is any tool that can visualize every change to a file in one go?

I want to vertically visualize the history of a given file over time and not simply by to different commits.

Something like this:

[Commit1] File.txt: hello world

[Commit2] File.txt: world hello

[Commit3] File.txt: hello wallo

I dont want to use git blame to shuffle around all the changes, but I want all the changes and the whole file to be visualized in one big list.

Does it make sense ?
That's silly. Just because a murderer mentions a book about murder doesn't mean it made them into a murderer. It just means murderers like books about murder.
You aren't wrong in the slightest, apart from that you've gotten the implication that I'm here for a debate. I'm not. I've been having this debate since the StableDiffusion blow up at the mid-ish of 2023. I've read these points restated by countless pro-AI people and refuted them probably dozens of times at this point, here and elsewhere, always ending in a similar deadlock where they just stop replying, either because they're sick of me, or I've "won" for whatever that means in the context of online discussion.

Nevertheless I'm always open to be persuaded by actual arguments, and I have on numerous issues, but I have yet to see any convincing refutations on these points I've outlined here regarding primarily, but not limited to:

- The unethical sourcing of training data

- The exploitation of lesser-privileged workers in managing it

- The harm being done and the harm that will be done to various professions if they become standard

And not mentioned in this thread:

- These various firms' superposition between potentially profitable business and "research initiatives," depending if they're trying to get investment or abuse the public square respectively

- The exploitative/disgusting/disinformative things these AI's are being used to produce to a society already saturated with false information and faked imagery

But these discussions usually dead end, like I said, when the other person stops answering or invokes the "well if we don't build it someone will" which is also unpersuasive.

Relating specifically to your point about wanting to change someones mind: in my first comment I do feel I put out an olive branch with empathy for being excited about a new thing. But when the new thing in question is so saturated from beginning to end in questionable ethics... I'm sorry there's only so much empathy I can extend. If you (not you specifically, but you as the theoretical person) are the kind of person ready to associate with this technology at this stage, when it's foibles and highly dubious origins are so well known, then I'm not overly interested in assuaging your feelings. This person came into this thread bemoaning the fact that so many people are calling them out on this and they're sick of it, and like, there's a great way to stop that happening: stop using the damn technology.

I will always extend empathy, but if your position is whining about people rightfully, IMO, pointing out that you are using unethical tech and you wish they'd stop? Like, sorry not sorry man, maybe you shouldn't use it then. Then you get less yelled at and a clear conscience. Win/win.

But I do appreciate the reply all the same, to be clear. You aren't wrong. I've just had this argument too much, but also don't feel I can really stop.
Their result would be stronger if every english book I've read (from the Brontë sisters to the Mitford sisters) didn't have exactly one reason not to practise assortative mating: pour redorer son blason.

(one Mitford novel has a character who "marries down" for exactly that reason, only in the book it turns out to be an advantage: her husband is innovative and —albeit with méthodes peu orthodoxes— gets things done, while the rest of her set has to content* themselves by aging alongside husbands who —as scions of the cream of society— are known mainly for being rich and thick)

* see Emma Magdalena Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy de Orci's best known character for an 20th-century-romance-genre lampshade of this situation...
I'd hate to say that laziness makes a person an incompetent developer. Often my problems stem from an excess of sincere hard work and rather than from laziness.
Halfway down the post there's an animated image that says go to "https://bard.google.com/" to try

Which I completely missed the first time when I was reading the post

From a design perspective can somebody explain the rationale to not just have a giant "click here to try this now" button at the top of this blog post?

Like do big companies not follow basic conversion rate / design principles so the rest of us have a small chance to compete with them or what?
You also get what is changing by doing "git diff", and often, it is self explanatory, especially if you have already commented in code why you did what you did.

For example:

- code: MAX_SIZE=1024 // maximum size the backend supports
- commit: limit the size to 1024, as it is the maximum the backend supports
- jira: fixed the problem by limiting the size to 1024, as it is the maximum the backend supports
- confluence: do not exceed 1024, as it is the maximum size the backend supports
- standup: I set the maximum size to 1024, as it is the maximum the backend supports
- release note: Maximum size set to 1024, as it is the maximum the backend supports

This is all redundant. I used a simple example for the sake of brevity, and one-liners are reasonable in every case, but the problem is when you are expected to write a wall of text every time, when in reality, there is everything you need in the code.
It's not. There's fundamental architectural differences that couldn't be bigger.

A better comparison would be that it's like a windup toy versus a group of humans moving an entire civilization. They both move along a distance, but just listing the systems that the human group has that the windup toy doesn't is too long to fit on a page.
True, what is most puzzling about it is the effort Google is putting into generating hype for something that is at best months away (by which time OpenAI will likely have released a better model)...

My best guess is that Google realizes that something like GPT-4 is a far superior interface to interact with the world's information than search, and since most of Google's revenue comes from search, the handwriting is on the wall that Google's profitability will be completely destroyed in a few years once the world catches on.

MS seeems to have had that same paranoia with the bingified GPT-4. What I found most remarkable about it was how much worse it performed seemingly because it was incorporating the top n bing results into the interaction.

Obviously there are a lot of refinements to how a RAG or similar workflow might actually generate helpful queries and inform the AI behind the scenes with relevant high quality context.

I think GPT-4 probably does this to some extent today. So what is remarkable is how far behind Google (and even MS via it's bingified version) are from what OpenAI has already available for $20 per month.

Google started out free of spammy ads and has increasingly become more and more like the kind of ads everywhere in your face, spammy stuff that it replaced.

GPT-4 is such a refreshingly simple and to the point way to interact with information. This is antithetical to what funds Google's current massive business... namely ads that distract from what the user wanted in hopes of inspiring a transaction that can be linked to the ad via a massive surveillance network and behavioral profiling model.

I would not be surprised if within Google the product vision for the ultimate AI assistant is one that gently mentions various products and services as part of every interaction.
Nope. For example, binary search is in NP (because it is in P), but is much easier than SAT.
> Is any of this so hard NOT to do...?

Easy not to do. Difficult to probably verify with legal and compliance. In a fast-moving field, it’s reasonable to avoid the compliance tax while you and the ecosystem are aligning. Once it’s ready, a finished product can be shipped to high-cost jurisdictions.
wait.
bacon+destruction= "baconator"
and i'm not the first to create a baconator.
what.
Edit: bacon+pirate is captain hook what is this
It is true that in Scheme you can shadow built-ins if you want, but a compiler would have to be extremely naive, perhaps lacking support for macros entirely, to not recognize primitive `+` from a user defined `+`. One of the very first transformations applied to the user program would be alpha conversion, where all user defined variables are replaced with program-unique names. At that point, the compiler would be absolutely sure that `+` is the primitive addition operator and compile it directly as an add primcall.
bloop (YC S21) | Software Engineer (Rust, Compiler) | Hybrid London, UK

We're building automatic code translation software, combining source to source compilers and LLMs. If you're into tree-sitter, ANTLR, ASTs or compilers we should speak. Rust proficiency is also a must.

Please email join [at] bloop [dot] ai with "HN Rust Compiler Engineer" in the subject line.
This is very well done and useful. The only possible suggestion I'd have right now is to consider inputs to go alongside the sliders. Thanks for sharing.
wanted to clarify this with "95 percent of SF's _discretionary_ budget" is owned by the SF mayor.
Calling it the "far" right doesn't make it that.
> This is the base English alphabet, largely the same as a classic Latin/Roman alphabet:

> ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

That's not all that similar. The Latin alphabet would be:

> ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTVX

(You can browse the Pompeii graffiti and many inscriptions are just someone writing down an alphabet. It's pretty cool, if you're me.)

The five letters we've added (though Y and probably Z were already in use in Latin, representing Greek letters in Greek words) are pretty comparable to Polish adding 9 letters to ours.

> To find room for the extra letters, typewriters needed to dispense with some punctuation, most notably semicolons (comma + backspace + colon), and parentheses (replaced in common use by slashes).

...why? This would make sense if manufacturing typewriters were difficult and expensive, making it imperative to manufacture Polish typewriter chassis on all the same machinery that makes English ones. I tend to suspect that even at the time this was not the case, but maybe.

There's no excuse today; just use more keys on Polish keyboards.
Look into variable order Markov models.
Watch a 7k-LB Rivian R1T Destroy a Guardrail in Eyebrow-Raising Test
Can someone provide evidence one way or the other? I don’t know enough to do it myself.
Using atmospheric CO2 and water to produce economically valuable products (methane, methanol, RP-1, etc.) is the only plausible carbon capture scheme. Most of these products will end up back in the atmosphere as CO2 (after being burned in jet engines and rocket engines etc.). If you eliminate fossil fuel use and halt deforestation, this creates a steady-state situation where atm CO2 removal is equal to atm CO2 addition.

As far as permanent sequestration of atmospheric CO2 in the form of economically valuable products? There's carbon fiber and diamond, although the cost-per-kg for these materials is going to be a good deal higher than for methane, methanol etc.
Off the top of my head:

Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

Dealers of Lightening - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1101290

Cult of the Dead Cow - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/42283862

The Cuckoo's Egg - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)
Why should someone pay for Youtube music when all songs are basically already free?
It's not VPN vs. no VPN. It's crapware like Ivanti and Zscaler vs. sane things like OpenVPN and WireGuard.
I'm increasingly convinced we're living in a draft of Snow Crash discarded for being too ridiculous.
It said my Emacs configuration is good for nothing but starting a fire when I inevitably go live out in the wilderness.
Scientists found a major clue why 4 of 5 autoimmune patients are women
Apple's official 'jailbroken' iPhone for security researchers
https://archive.ph/8ZUJm
We've sent spiders to space[0] (honestly, it's like we _want_ a horror movie to play out). But who knows - maybe one day we'll get DNA from extraterrestrials.

[0] https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/world-s-first-spidernau...
LLMs are Markov chains on neural network steroids.
That's an ethnocentric point of view of course. Which cements the point of everything being relative.

There's definitely places in the world where changing a child's gender is, and has been for a very long time, totally normal. In other places, it's a practice that western colonialism has stamped out.
Children of Time series a slog? Wow. It’s a page turning spine tingling, rip roarer. Stuffed full of high concepts, great characters and wry humour.

As is the second book. Which kind of adds a horror slant.

The third book is more ambitious and conceptual and in parts, slightly harder going. Still highly rewarding.

Best hardish SF series I’ve read in recent years.
Why StackOverflow usage is down 50%
SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: Teaching to Learn (TTL)

A discord for people who'd like to learn (or improve their) skills by teaching them ^^ No experience needed, we'll teach you how to teach - and if you teach pretty well we'll even let you monetize.

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Most Government and Corporate security / IT just aren't some awesome hacker or security analyst. Most just follow some corporate flow chart for security. I once worked at a company that allowed IE only as a browser for security reasons, eventually they allowed Chrome, but not Firefox again for security reasons, their reasoning was: Microsoft and Google are Billion dollar companies. If you try and bring some solid open source software, well where is the X certification? Even though just from using the corporate certified software for 10 seconds you can tell its not good.
Garth has a net worth of like $300M so I guess it worked out pretty good
It never used to be illegal to change genders. Suddenly making it so the govt can invade other people's lives is an extreme position.
How does it work, does it still use Firebase Cloud Messaging and Apple Push Notification Service underneath?
> This is what I've been saying to people, LLMs aren't much smarter than a Markov Chain

Then you're doing some combination of grossly overestimating the latter and/or underestimating the former.

A Markov Chain is a (small) language model with a context length of 1, never more, that's a definitional requirement of a Markov process.
This would be my ideal commit message as well. The rest of the commit body in the article is just how it was discovered. I don't think describing how one works belongs into a git commit message. Your message tells me why and which change was made, that's enough to me.
A brief history of Mark Zuckerberg's apologies
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Anti-scale: a response to AI in journalism
It seems like you cant separate the negotiation aspect from this specific case and the ruling of this specific judge. I have said to put this aside and focus on the other question multiple times. Now you negate everything you argued with this statement making your position contingent on the other facts of the case:

>Now, billions is a lot of compensation for 1 year, but if elmu wants more compensation than that, he has to honestly put together a compensation board that represents shareholders, honestly negotiate against it, honestly disclose all relevant info, and hold a shareholder vote. He failed at all these, so now he has to start over (if he wants).

I dont think you are honestly trying to engage in a conversation about negotiation, and want to make a specific point about Musk that I'm not interested in. If you want to continue, you can respond with relevant points about negotiation. If not, that fine too, I just wish you hadn't wasted my time.
But the result wouldn't have been AA guns on every rooftop. The UK's capacity to produce AA guns wouldn't have increased. Their economy was already focused entirely on the war. The result would have just been a lack of planning on how to actually make effective use of the resources available.
From the SD-XL paper:

> To this end, we train the same autoencoder architecture used for the original Stable Diffusion at a larger batch-size (256 vs 9) and additionally track the weights with an exponential moving average. The resulting autoencoder outperforms the original model in all evaluated reconstruction metrics

And if you look at the SD-XL VAE config file, it has a scaling factor of 0.13025 while the original SD VAE had one of 0.18215 - so meaning it was also trained with an unbounded output. The architecture is also the exact same if you inspect the model file.

But if you have any details about the training procedure of the new VAE that they didn’t include in the paper, feel free to link to them, I’d love to take a look.
Given the increase in moment that OpenAI has had, I wouldn't be surprised if we got a GPT-4.5 or maybe ever a GPT-5 this year. Another post mentioned how Stable Diffusion had fundamental issues with its VAE, which got fixed in later versions. Google can hire all the people they want, but there is going to be a curve in the quality of what they put out while they figure these things out.
"San Francisco" is simultaneously a county and city.
San Francisco Supervisors are members of the San Francisco Board Of Supervisors.
same thing as a city council.

https://sfbos.org/
Zilliz is hiring! We're looking for REMOTE and/or HYBRID roles in SF

Zilliz is the company behind Milvus (https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus), the most widely adopted vector database. Vector databases are a crucial piece of any technology stack looking to take advantage of unstructured data. Most recently and notably, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). For RAG, vector databases like Milvus are used as the tool to inject customized data. In other words, vector databases make things like customized chat bots, personalized product recommendations, and more possible.

We are hiring for Developer Advocates, Senior+ Level Engineers and Product people, and Talent Acquisition. Check out all the roles here: https://zilliz.com/careers
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Show HN: Makex Automation Tool
Hi Everyone!

Makex is a better build/automation tool. It was conceived about two weeks ago.

It's already useful, and it’s completely replacing all of our Makefiles, among other internal build files and scripts... It builds and deploys itself entirely.

Makex was produced after decades of experience with Make/Makefiles and numerous other build/automation/run tooling…

Makefiles are ugly, hard to produce, understand and configure. They are passable for the simplest of cases. GNU Make is gate-keeped and static, and that may be a good thing, but it's also hard on everyone.

At the other end of the spectrum, Bazel has high overhead and is high complexity. It's overkill. Complex rules often obscure what actions are used to produce what outputs in what path. Bazel takes python and makes it extremely implicit.

Makex is intended for a wide range of multi-platform workflows. It uses several performance tricks with the goal of supporting huge repositories. There's a lot going on under the hood... It's about 10 KLOC at the moment.

It works on Linux, but should work in any POSIX/Unix-compatible environment.

It's early, and there'll be more features and releases for various platforms (including packages and binaries).

Take a look/test, and let me know what you think.

Thanks!
Thanks for your enthusiasm for Matrix! We're at a critical point in its evolution, but there's a lot of reason to be hopeful and excited about the future – and we'll be digging deeper into that in each of the following blog posts in the series.

I think the others have covered it pretty well, but just so you hear it from the source:

> if over 60% of the annual “expenses” of your nonprofit goes to “management” covering the salaries of four people who have other full time jobs,

That is an incorrect reading of the situation. The four full-timers who work for the Foundation do not have other jobs, so we are covering 100% of their salary. And that line item on the budget _also_ covers a bunch of part-timers, such as the SREs who keep the Matrix.org homeserver running.

If you have any other questions or concerns, I'm more than happy to speak to them :)
It is always fascinating how sometimes authors think they are creating a loser in their work but somehow the public still likes the character despite the flaws. Reminds me of the case of Rorschach in Watchmen (https://screenrant.com/alan-moore-on-rorschach-fans-watchmen...).
This is mentioned prominently in the German Wikipedia article about the PDF format. Was wondering if this needs a (200x).

Sad to see the article quote some random Xitter post as "source".