skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To me this reads like a lot of grant applications after 9/11 where researchers scribbled out whatever they were working on and wrote about bioterrorism-related diseases instead.

The number of projects I had to sit through about developing sophisticated methods to detect smallpox attacks, when the actual answer is "Smallpox is extinct. If you find one case, it's an emergency", were...myriad.
> the increased productivity pays off in bonuses and career growth

Anecdotally, neither I nor my friends have seen this happen. Putting in more effort just leads to an increased workload along with a "Meets Expectations" during annual reviews. I have a great manager now but their hands are tied as far as bonuses, promotions, and raises go. It's a bad sign when the best benefit I get is that my workload isn't cranked up because I complete tasks more efficiently.

I'm still young, but I doubt that I'll see anything similar to a bonus or significant pay raise due to performance in my career. I still put in my best effort, but I don't see any reason to take a pay hit to get better working conditions if I'm not going to get rewarded later down the line like you assume will happen.
The ones that didn’t come voluntarily were subpoenaed
It's also because one can study and grind amd optimize for leetcode. So it's really about who has the time, resources (and incentive to work for free) to really grind leetcode before the interview.

In a way it's probably equivalent to students who just bang everything into their head before the semester exam and forget it all again two weeks after. (Not that that's a bad thing, it just doesn't really say anything about a candidate)
I honestly have no idea. One thing I've learned over the decades is that it's impossible to predict what any "next big thing" will be with any meaningful accuracy rate.
there's this for example, not as open as Promethease but similar in that it's "bring us your data and we'll give you new analysis on it":

https://yourdnaportal.com/advanced_ancestry_analysis
It was also used microsoft to great effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt
> Don't try a good one or you'll fall asleep at 4am when you finish it.

You mean 4am two days later, when you finish the whole 12-book series that begin with the book you picked.

Don't ask me how I know.
> It's as if something can finally fill their bandwidth, keep up with their thoughts, and answer those questions in real-time. No wonder they get angry when it's time to put away the iPad - they're engaged at a high level.

Or they are angry because by taking away the iPad you are interrupting their dopamine rush. Whether your iPad + Internet/social media/YouTube is engaging them to fullest maximizing growth potentiation or is simply turning their brains into dopamine chasing crack heads is up for debate. It may be somewhere in the middle and whether the positives outweigh the negatives is individual for each child/person and how and how often they engage with it.

Regardless, I think there are more variables at play than you outline above.
You're right; I extracted that function from a gnarlier function I didn't want to use in the post (it was the same logic, but the function was so long it broke up the post too much) and wasn't careful enough in moving the code. Fixed, sort of! Thanks!

Go easy on me; I literally wrote this in IDLE.
Good point.

Are they saying that rails today can only handle small passenger cars?

The Dodge RAM 1500 TRX is 7,800 lbs GVWR.
I dislike whiteboard interviews in general, but I personally don't particularly mind them if they're more of a pseudocode approach to "how would you solve this problem algorithmically" intended to show the interviewer your thought process, rather than the more common "do you know how to do fizzbuzz" type thing to check a box.

I had an interview like this recently that was quite pleasant, where the interviewers and I ended up collaboratively solving the problem together because we all had different approaches - I think it had the unintended effect of demonstrating teamwork and helped the interview go quite positively.
The End of the Multiverse
Silicon Valley Battles States over New Online Safety Laws for Children
Hi! Beeminder cofounder here. We do have a charity option but only in our most expensive premium plan. My own feeling is that a commitment contract with a charity as a beneficiary is less effective because what kind of jerk is motivated to avoid donating to charity? Unless you set the stakes so high that you can't really afford it, I guess?
The linked leaderboard is actually very trustworthy, in that it consists not of scores on a test dataset, but of ELO ratings generated by actual humans' ratings of the models' responses.

You can go and enter any prompt you like, wait a bit, and then get two LLM responses back, which you can then rank or mark as tied, after which you'll be shown which model each came from. Maybe you already knew this, maybe you didn't. In any case, I don't see any real way for Goodhart's Law to apply here – the metric and the goal are the same here, i.e., human approval of answers.
And if you want a long incomprehensible string we already have that .onion sites work without a blockchain, too.
Human error in high-biocontainment labs: a likely pandemic threat
The reason you can’t find a federal law is that corporations are largely governed by state law.

See, for example, Section 5231 of the California Corporations Code.

https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/corporations-code/corp-sect-523...
Parent linked the Lmsys chatbot arena which is where humans blindly get the results from two different models, and vote for the response they liked more. So the LLMs are compared by elo.

Do you think goodhart's law applies here, since this leaderboard doesn't use specific measures, but rather relies on whatever the human was looking for?

This is the only leaderboard I personally care about at all.
Because it's the customers fault manufacturers sell insecure routers that go out of service 2 years later?
Do you have discontinuities though? The tangents at the point of intersection match.
> what actually needs to be done is that the ISPs need to be notified and the affected customers be disconnected from the Internet until they replace the compromised/out-of-life devices.

Yes, but a lot of the internet is on a shoe-string budget and managed by someone who DGAF, and connected to an ISP who also DGAF.
> Use of speed tape should be authorized by engineering teams and comply with certain requirements. Fines can be levied against airlines that use it to make improper repairs.

Legislation is the polar opposite of a one-off repair that has to happen in the field under strict time and resource constraints. It generally applies to everyone, permanently, and inaction is equivalent to delegation to decentralized decisionmakers so you can take as long as you want to be deliberate and correct.

When the farmer fixes the tractor with baling wire and chewing gum, you give them credit for making do. When the tractor maker systematically does the same thing in the factory, it's time to get your tractors from someone else.

> This is not the world we operate in unfortunately.

The is/ought dichotomy is no excuse when you're the one deciding what to do or who to support, because it's you choosing what is with the opportunity to do as you ought.
> If you come to an interview without any AI coding skills you would certainly be marked down.

And I, in turn, would be delighted not to work for you.
The audience of the hearing was full of involved parents
It's basically the same in Australia. Super convenient to move around as a renter. Basically just have to update your address with the voting database and your for your drivers license they send you a sticker to put on your license.

I've been moving almost once a year for the last few years just to try out new places and cities.
https://archive.vn/bmXBl
This has been a thing people have been worried about for my entire career, and it has never manifested as a real threat. "Step 1" in creating a bioweapon is pretty easy, but there's a whole pathway between that and a deployable weapon.
If you want to eliminate 90% of candidates in a pool, a simpler solution is to take your stack of resumes, and shred the top 90% of them.
That someone has the skills for a job is distinct from whether they are able to uphold a simple moral principle like "don't cheat".
This is also my favorite, which I have been able to laugh at for years.
I’ve used email a bit and there are some pros and cons.

For email: It’s just there already, like you mention. Once you are setup you can do things like comment on a “line of code” very straightforwardly. It’s already distributed and all that. There are bespoke (project-specific probably) bridges from forges (maybe mostly GitHub) to mailing lists.

For this new thing: You don’t have to worry about all the legacy of email. You don’t have to worry about 90% of the world using email “wrong” according to techies. You can probably track changes more easily than keeping track of where you sent patches. You don’t have to make bespoke forge-to-email bridges.
I just read that quote last night, what a coincidence!
Western Samoa (.ws) briefly enjoyed fleeting popularity when SOAP was ushering in a golden age of enterprise astronauts...
> you do that when you want to communicate something to all your followers.

Or you do it automatically and habitually. The brain to mouth filter and a brain to keyboard filter are similar, many people don't have either.
On Youtube lately, I have lately mostly been watching videos on metal smelting and ancient Mesopotamia.

There are conspiracies about these topics, apparently. I wouldn't have thought so. But the Youtube algorithm manages to dredge them up.
> 70% of all respondents are using or are planning to use AI tools in their development process this year. Those learning to code are more likely than professional developers to be using or use AI tools (82% vs. 70%).

Source: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#ai-sentiment-and-usage

To be fair, the number of "Yes" was "just" 43% but that's still a very large amount of developers, not including those who plan to use it.
That's our (Beeminder's) esteemed, if now somewhat moribund, competitor, StickK. See https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity for our argument against anti-charities like that.
We didn’t have to invert binary trees outside interviews before LLMs either, yet leetCode is where it’s been at.
Maybe there's a reason people sometimes publish their thoughts in the form of an essay rather then as a collection of Anki flash cards.
Sega was known as a games company then, too. They've always been a games company - the name Se-Ga stands for SErvice GAmes, because their original business was importing games for American servicemen stationed abroad to play in their leisure time. The most they've ever really deviated from being totally game-focused towards general-purpose computing is when they licensed out their hardware to be incorporated into computers like the TeraDrive.

I would assume the concept is about games because all of the software available for it looks to be edutainment games. More than anything, it feels like a predecessor to Sega's lines of educational game consoles like the Pico. There seems to be an association in Sega history between it and AI and education. As the link says:

> It does have some legacy though: starting with the Mega Drive, games on Sega platforms were required to have a ROM header. If it was a game, it was designated "GM", but educational software was designated "AI".

The "computer" here might be something of a misnomer - there wasn't quite so hard a line between consoles and home computers back then, especially outside of North America. After all, the NES was known as the "Family Computer" in Japan.

I'd describe it as a gimmick because it's not clear what exactly the association with Prolog is here, particularly for the end user:

> The Prolog interpreter appears to be used by existing software to allow some form of natural language processing. It doesn't seem accessible to the end-user. [...] The Prolog interpreter is for running applications only — it cannot be used for programming.

Sega might have pushed the AI/Prolog angle because, then-as-now, AI was a hot buzzword in tech. Japan in particular had bought into the AI/Prolog thing, due to the Fifth Generation Computer Systems project [0].

If the games mostly weren't written in Prolog, and the user can't use Prolog, but AI and Prolog were trendy at the time, I think calling it the AI Prolog to tap into that hype is a bit of a gimmick.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...
Is OpenAI tripping over its own shoelaces? They haven't released GPT-5 but then there was over two years between training GPT-3 and GPT-4 and they spent 9 months safety testing GPT-4 before release.
Was it curious but not learning?

If the AI learns, it will not watch TV forever, because most TV is predictable. There is the cop show, the lawyer show, the doctor show, the news, the family sitcom, etc etc. Eventually it would learn all these and find the TV less interesting - which is exactly what happens to many people.
Companies that optimise for memorising obscure stdlib functions don't seem like great places to work.
1. You can use a TV if you want to watch with people physically near you. Using a headset for that is nonsensical. I was talking about watching with people you don’t live with

2. Setting it up is as trivial as setting up Zoom

3. You’re still ignoring the fact that the majority of media consumption is done alone. It’s not all or nothing either. People both watch media alone AND in groups depending on the context.

Besides, how would you know the problem isn’t solved if you don’t use a headset yourself?
Except containing hydrogen requires bulky tanks. I was curious, and googled.. It turns out the only hydrogen car I'm aware of that's on sale in the US (Toyota Mirai) weighs several hundred pounds more than the most popular EV in the US (Tesla Model 3).. ~4300lbs vs ~3900lbs.

Except the Mirai isn't a pure hydrogen car.. its more of an EV with a hydrogen powered generator. I'm not aware of any purely hydrogen fueled cars on sale. i watched a fascinating YT video by Engineering Explained that went into the reasons why a pure hydrogen car is not practical (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJjKwSF9gT8)
That’s really cool! Do you own one?
> DEC had started developing ARM chips as they concluded it was a bad idea to try and scale down their alpha chips to be more energy efficient.

I thought this was interesting enough to track down more of the backstory here, and found this fascinating article:

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

Page 60, hard breaks added for readability:

Baum: Apple owned a big chunk of it, but when Apple was really having hard times, they sold off their chunk at quite a profit, but they sold off the chunk. And then-- oh, while Newton was going on, some people from DEC came to visit, and they said, “Hey, we were looking at doing a low power Alpha and decided that just couldn’t be done, and then looked at the ARM. We think we can make an ARM which is really low power, really high performance, really tiny, and cheap, and we can do it in a year. Would you use that in your Newton?” Cause, you know, we were using ARMs in the Newton, and we all kind of went, “Phhht, yeah. You can’t do it, but, yeah, if you could we’d use it.”

That was the basis of StrongARM, which became a very successful business for DEC. And then DEC sued Intel. Well, I worked on the StrongARM 1500, which was a very interesting product. It was an ARM and a DSP kind of highly combined. It was supposed to be like video processing using set top boxes, and things like that. And then we finished that project and our group in Palo Alto, we were just gonna start an Alpha project.

And just then it was announced that DEC was-- no. No. Intel, at that time, Intel, DEC sued Intel for patent violations, didn’t go to them and say, “Hey, pay up or stop using it.” They just sued them. Intel was completely taken by surprise. There was a settlement. The settlement was you have to buy our Microelectronics Division and pay us a whole pile of money, and everything will go away.

So they sold the Microelectronics Division, which we were part of, except for the Alpha Design Group, 'cause they didn’t think that they could sell that to Intel and have the SEC approve, 'cause the two can conflict. So I went away on vacation not knowing whether I would be coming back and working for Intel, or coming back working for DEC. And it turned out they decided to keep the Alpha Design Group, so I was still working for DEC. Except the reason for the lawsuit was Compaq wanted to buy DEC, but didn’t want to buy ‘em with this Fab and Microelectronics Division. So by doing this, they got rid of the Microelectronics Division, and now they could sell themselves to Compaq.
I'm using it mostly instead of API documentation. And for stuff I already have an idea of.

Don't trust it further than that.
I don't understand what you are asking. Are you asking if I am qualified to comment on this topic? I think so yes I have relevant experience in recruiting and programming and job hunting.
Do you consider it typical for development to look things up on google, documentation websites, or stack overflow?
I've always been particularly fond of the humble farmer dooming the planet to destruction by earnestly grasping the hand-shaped alien's entire head for an introductory handshake.

https://twitter.com/faineg/status/1387409269620985863?lang=e...
Tool users with any sophistication almost always need to make modifications or repairs to their tools. Buying tools that make that impossible seems foolhardy to me. That you don't see things this way is interesting to me. Some people are happy eating the slop that's served to them with no interest in even seasoning it themselves. Strange to me, but to each his own.
I don't want anything your AI generates
Nope. The US can't afford to lose any carrier Battle Groups.

The trillions it cost to fight in Iraq would be a drop in the ocean compared to the costs of a war with China.
> is no longer an accurate measure of exceptional performance in the role

It never was. No real-world job performance has ever been accurately measured by solving leetcode puzzles for one simple reason: problem solving is only ever going to be about 50% of your performance, and these puzzles don't address collaboration or communication skills.
Nothing, just some arbitration process that may or may not adjudicate against them.

There have been a few disputes around certain ccTLDs, in the end it's a mixture of political and commercial interests that need ad-hoc mediation in most cases.
Agreed. There is a utopian naïveté that reminds me of trust fund kids.
There's also a lot of junk answers on Stack Overflow.
One man’s nonsense is another’s profound truth. mud + brick = Adobe, for example. Doesn’t seem to make sense, yet it does.
There's interesting videos of mechanics working on new cars floating around on TikTok. It's CRAZY how much work it can be to do repairs that you'd think are simple on the newest cars. 2 I saw recently were needing to disconnect the drive axle on a car to change an oil filter and another that required removing the front bumper to change an air filter!

I know this Bill isn't aimed at that type of thing, but it seems like even the most basic repairs are becoming nearly impossible outside of a dealer.
I like to think of this as 1.32 billion giga quarter bits myself. Quarter bits make everything bigger.
What if a hospital was disconnected from the Internet because it has some insecure IoT device in it? The truth is that this "enforcement action" will make absolutely 0 difference because these devices were just used as proxies to launch attacks. There are a million other people offering this as a service.

And it was a botnet with "hundreds of devices." That is literally nothing. People who want to live in this world where abuse emails are king and a bunch of Spamhaus type people lord over the Internet always weird me out.
The solution which works in other countries is to have local governments build a large percentage of all housing. If 60% of the population is in nice housing pegged to income then the crazy can be get diluted across the general population.

What the US tried was to stick all the crazy in a tiny area so it became a self reinforcing problem. We’ve adjusted to paying market rates for subsidized housing which spreads the crazy around, but unfortunately costs more than just building housing.
Why can't you grow progressively? You're talking about a million dollars a year like it's an easy thing, so a hundred thousand dollars a year should be ten times easier for you and you won't have to quit your job.

People love to dream big and bet all, but nobody wants to make calculated risks and slower progression.
Okay. I didn't make that comparison. I see why you might though. For clarity, my point isn't that they make less than any comparable. It's that taking into consideration the cost of acquiring the degree, it's unusual that the pay would be about median in keeping with uneducated laborers. An explanation like unusually low demand (or market saturation) is likely to be the cause of that pay deficit. In this case, it appears to be in fact.
There's a lot more between the actions there image to display, mouse to computer that have nothing to do with internal meatbag reactions. Especially when we're already measuring in milliseconds.
But here is the thing, if you rely on RAG or any other knowledge injection for recommendation, you essentially make your LLM parrot machine, no better than a search engine, just much slower.

Knowledge is one aspect of it, I found its instruction following ability, frustrating as well.

I think Ilya Sutskever puts it very well, larger model brings stability to wider range of tasks, what smaller models are not capable of. Even though book recommendation with GPT might a niche, but it is not something really unexpected TBH, thus comes my disappointment.