skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An important metric in efficiency of systems is overhead. For health system, it would be how much money is spent on purposes other than the stated purpose of the system. Private insurance is never going to optimise for that, because low overhead means high utilisation of funds paid in, and low profits.

Commonly complained about polish NFZ (which, unlike NHS, operates through contracting to semi-private and private providers), has overhead IIRC of around 1%.

I don't have links on hand (maybe someone more recently versed on US insurance can check?), but I heard of common overhead levels in private insurers in USA being in range of 30%, mainly for claim acceptors/adjusters.
I remember when I was a kid, there was an empty plot of land next to my Grandma's house. My cousins and I took a shovel to it for a couple of days over the summer and dug out a decent sized hole (well, for kids, at least). There really is something just therapeutic about it.
Thank god. I honestly sat here and tried and can’t think of a more regressive barrier to transportation.
Design patents, except for highly specific names and logos, shouldn't be a thing.

Luckily the LEGO case has already shown that any design patent that even slightly affects functionality is automatically invalid.
Yeah try importing a CPAP from the states into Vietnam if you want a real adventure.

A $650 cpap machine costs well over $2K here. So I thought I'd import one. Apparently you need a prescription in the states? Ok, get a "prescription" from an online service that basically just asks you if you snore over a video call. Amazing.

Buy machine and have it sent to a freight forwarding service. They fuck up the paperwork.

It gets held in Vietnamese customs for almost 4 months. Go down to customs once a week to argue with the guy. One week you can't have it because it looks used. It doesn't look used.

Next week you can't have it because they think I'm importing to resell it. Yes it's a very hot market right now.

Repeat same processes with different people next successive weeks.

Finally someone says to bring prescription. But they don't write prescriptions for CPAPs here. A lot of hand waving when you tell them that. Go back to cardiologist who told me to get the CPAP and ask for a prescription. Oh no, he says, we don't write prescriptions for that. Can you write a letter saying that you don't write prescriptions and that I need the machine? Oh no, he says, I can't do that.

A couple of weeks later finally get someone at customs to agree that my sleep apnea test is proof enough. Bring the test in. Nobody looks at it. They still release the machine to me.

I would still take this random bureaucracy over American insurance any day of the week though.
I agree with all the reasons mentioned ranging from calculating the vertex position - sharp tip of the arrow (x, y) to the pixel issue (low resolution on older machines) to the right-hand pointing direction.

For all practical purposes, I observed 2 other things.

The first is that English is written left to write. If you ever had the experience of using a different language that starts from right to left, this same arrow feels weird.

And the second is a little activity experience.

1. Arrange the 4 files in a square box, 2 up 2 down

2. Notice that as soon as the sharp point of the arrow touches any file boundary, the arrow can select the file by a pixel difference that you can't with a straight arrow (ease of use)

3. It also takes a constant number of operations (best case scenario) compared to the straight arrow where the algorithm has to decide based on the percentage of how much of the straight arrow shape hovers over another file to select
No starch books have a terrible track record... every superuser should know, is that book an exception?
It's a lose-lose situation.

If you refuse and it's an actual emergency with the real CFO, it might be a career limiting move, if you don't get fired.

If you accept, it might be a deepfake CFO and you might get sued.
Medical, and especially medical related insurance stuff, is one of the few things that drives me up a wall enough to add to my 'burn this chickenshit outfit down' list.

This is a great example of why.
Bad quality scissors will invariably suck for lefties because the grip of a left hand pushes the blades apart, vs. with a right it pulls them together. Scissors are my #1 gripe as a leftie too.

I use the mouse with my right because the rest of my family is right-handed so it was on the right and I just learnt by copying. I don't mind it, as I can type fairly reasonably one-handed with my left hand - much better than I could with my right - so it means I can still do short typing bursts one-handed without lifting my right hand off the mouse. When I type with two hands, I find my left covers about 60-70% of the keyboard vs. my right doing about 30-40% of the keyboard.
I want to build an on demand marketplace but dont know what niche
I have tried an on-demand car rental marketplace but was rejected by YC.

Any suggestions message me.
I'm reading the collected stories of Philip K Dick, if you feel like reviewing the classics.

Finished the latest from Jim Butcher's "new" series, The Olympian Affair, before that.
Screw all the people who weren’t misfortunate in your exact way, I guess?
$25 mil was on the stake.

It would easily be worth it spending $1m on the perfect setup.
It was just a last nail to the coffin… I was there 30 years ago :)
The first three chapters will take you a year. The next two will take you longer.

I always find it odd that no one talks about the lisp book where you write a hardware simulation of a computer to run the compiler you also wrote on.
Ask HN: How LLMs Learn to Be "Generative"?
AFAIK to be called "generative", a model should have the ability to learn the joint probability over the training data. In the case of LLMs, we apply the chain rule of Bayes' formula to achieve this by leveraging the autoregressive method for every token of each input text sequence. For example, with a text sequence of 4 tokens, it can be written as:

p(x4,x3,x2,x1) = p(x4|x3,x2,x1) * p(x3|x2,x1) * p(x2|x1) * p(x1)
where x1 denotes the 1st token, x2 denotes the 2nd token and so on, respectively.

I understand the conditional terms p(x_n|...) where we use cross-entropy to calculate their losses. However, I'm unsure about the probability of the very first token p(x1). How is it calculated? Is it in some configurations of the training process, or in the model architecture, or in the loss function?

IMHO, if the model doesn't learn p(x1) properly, the entire formula for Bayes' rule cannot be completed, and we can't refer to LLMs as "truly generative". Am I missing something here?

I asked the same question on nanoGPT repo: https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT/issues/432, but I haven't found the answer I'm looking for yet. Could someone please enlighten me? Thank in advance!
I mean, so far, its helped make things a bit easier for me to understand. I've also read "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" by Al Sweigart, which as someone with a non-CS background, I found very helpful, even when going back as a reference.
> Twitter being for-profit before the acquisition and Musk prioritizing profit less than his predecessors

Being unable to turn a profit is not the same as not prioritising profit.

If he’s so unconcerned with making a profit, then why weasel out from paying rent, the fired employees, and all the rest? Why be so adamant about a payed subscription? Why complain of advertisers leaving?

More importantly, why does a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” kowtow to an autocratic government if he’s not even concerned with profit? And why does he keep banning his own critics?

> ye olde Twitter's regular practice of of suppressing or deleting content worldwide at the whim of the US government

Disputed by his own lawyers.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-lawyer...

> this hit piece from a notoriously biased outlet

Here are eight more sources and a study. Surely they won’t all be “notoriously biased outlets” writing hit pieces, or is the definition for that “writes something negative about Musk”?

https://nypost.com/2023/04/01/twitter-censorship-increases-u...

https://www.thestreet.com/technology/twitter-promised-to-fig...

https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...

https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/elon-musk-...

https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/elon-musk-turkey-twitte...

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/elon-musk-twitte...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...

https://censortrack.org/study-twitter-censorship-shockingly-...
Your point can be summarized as "We can't tax the rich, or they'll just go somewhere else". A.k.a. the Stockholm syndrome of extreme capitalist markets - we all know that it's not fair that Jeff Bezos pays zero on his wealth while a hardworking bricklayer has to pay nearly half of his salary, but that's the price to pay to avoid scaring off the ultra rich. Needless to say, this vision of the world is abhorrent, immoral, and disgustingly unfair, and we need to fix it.
It'll be like how people looked crazy talking to themselves with airpods in. Once enough people do it, no one will notice.
My guess would be that Avalonia is doing something stupid like re-drawing the entire GUI on every mouse cursor movement (in case any hover effect changed) and then Skia is transforming that into high CPU usage. Games using proper GPU acceleration can get away with drawing highly complex GUIs at 144 FPS with negligible CPU usage [1], so while it is wasteful to constantly re-draw an application GUI, that alone will not lead to excessive CPU usage just yet.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/3-A-healers-UI-showing-t...

I'm pretty sure most apps have less progress bars, stats, buttons, toggles, and other interactive elements than WoW.
> management or used a weak random number generator.

Except that has been the case in every instance thus far. The dev that lost his bitcoin last year was using arcane software, after a biopsy they found the library being used only had like 64 bits of entropy.
Just because you don't trust yourself with mains power doesn't mean every hobbyist will burn their house down.
Saving my brain to became a sponge seems a sweet deal, but I'll take the full premium service comprising improved healthcare, security, economy and environmental services. Thanks:

Reducing my chances of being killed in a deer car crash

Saving me from decades of mental fog and chronic pain that came with Lyme disease

Saving solid money on damages to agriculture, and saving my garden from being ravaged

Eliminating feral dogs that will attack pets, cattle --and people-- (unlike wolves, dogs aren't afraid of people)

Controlling the number of coyotes that want to eat my cat or poultry.

Allowing regeneration of overgrazed areas and forest regrow for zero tax dollars.

Extirpating deer tick from entire areas of the forest

Bringing more eagles and birds. Less bears breaking into coops in search of food.

All of this fixed by the same package dependency
> You can use common sense, read the electrical code (though it's an expensive book, which is kind of weird, you'd expect it to be free)

NEC is free (as in beer) online: https://www.nfpa.org/For-Professionals/Codes-and-Standards/L...

It’s a slightly cumbersome site, but functional.
Why would you need a timer for pressure cooking? Don't you just stand there staring at it counting the whistles?
Unfortunate that you cannot get additional damages against them. That sort of behaviour really needs to be heavily punished -- say, forcing them to cover every single CPAP prescribed for the next year for free, with the executives having to personally pay if the company can't afford to.

Byzantine processes when dealing with medical issues should be punished with Byzantine punishments.
> “PC games were perhaps not yet as colorful, zippy and funky as Amiga games”

I recall the PC/VGA port of Xenon II Megablast being a revelation. That must have been 1990 or 1991.

It was as fast and colorful and excitingly busy as the Amiga version, and it ran on commodity 386 hardware that was produced by multiple vendors on every level. There was massive competition for CPUs, graphics chips, sound cards, motherboards, and everything else pushing prices down.

Meanwhile Commodore was going it alone with custom chipsets and pinching pennies. Any advantage they had left wasn’t going to last.

Today Apple is of course massively successful with that vertical integration model, but the difference is that 1) Apple has had the right executive talent for 27 years, 2) they’re willing to invest at every level to make the vertical integration benefits actually compound into the product.

In comparison Commodore was relatively broke and seemingly packed with loser MBAs.
Don't know the details here, but email is still very much broken, and a number of large companies, including in the financial sector, are spoofable even after checking the usual boxes.[0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37438478
A note about TV news in the US: what you’re describing is 24/7 cable news, which is distinctly different than traditional nightly news and its offshoot streaming services.

Channels like MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News follow the aggressive style you describe.

However, programs like ABC, NBC, CBS, and ABC evening/nightly news are not like that at all. Unfortunately, you can’t really get those broadcasts abroad.

For a while, CNN’s international broadcast was a much different channel akin to the BBC world service, but I think now it follows the Fox News content formula.

On the bright side, I have noticed some emerging streaming options like the CBS News and ABC News streaming apps that offer a similar style of moderate journalism.

Finally, in the US the local TV news is another half-decent source of information that usually has a moderate slant. Networks are affiliated with the national networks and often mix in major national stories along with local ones. However, it has its own issues especially on locally relevant biases. I think their focus on local crime has a tendency to reinforce stereotypes and promote fear – it can sometimes feel like you’re watching white flight [1] television. Weirdly, one of my biggest problems with local news is weather event sensationalism: if you watch local news you’ll be convinced to cancel your whole life’s plans for big storms that don’t tend not to pan out. Crime and weather, weather, and traffic are basically the only two topics where something is consistently happening, so they get outsized attention.

There’s also some consolidation happening where the local news networks are owned by very opinionated and biased owners, like the Internet-famous Sinclair scripted message that all their regional networks were forced to recite verbatim.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
True LRU: LRU is false
LRU and Clock are significantly low performance due to their wrong algorithm based on false recency. True recency outperforms false recency.

There are three kinds of recency relationships between entries, used and used, used and unused, and unused and unused. However, LRU and Clock violate some recency. True LRU outperforms LRU and Clock by observing all recency.

The fundamental error is that new entries are considered most recently used. In fact, they have never been used in the cache. Therefore, new entries must to be added after the entries actually used.

Sequence: 1, 2, 3, 3, 2, 4

LRU

MRU |4 2 3 1| LRU
Hit |0 1 1 0|
^ Violation of the recency between used and unused.

Clock

N-1 |4 3 2 1| 0
Hit |0 1 1 0|
^ Violation of the recency between used and used.

True LRU

MRU |2 3 4 1| LRU
Hit |1 1 0 0|
^ ^ ^ Ideal recency.
So far in 2024 I’ve finished a dissertation(?) of Schopenhauer work which is in italian and doesn’t exist in English, the name can be translated like “The art of not giving a fuck about other’s judgement”, then animal farm and another italian book “Leonardo Sciascia - Una storia semplice”, then in the same area of “recreational” reading I’ve started “Thinking fast and slow”, and in terms of books needed professionally I’m reading “Math for programmers”
Perhaps I'm reading too much between the lines, but this part makes it look like he got suspicious and checked for clues. It would have been pretty bad if the email was actually marked as internal.

Sam deal for the call as well. I'd expect the video client to warn that some members of the call
are external to the organization (Google Meet does that). Or the CFO is expected to be outside (from another org) from the get go.

> Initially, the worker suspected it was a phishing email, as it talked of the need for a secret transaction to be carried out.
Most other makes of phones and laptops aren't as valuable as Apple's to be big targets of theft. And Samsung has KNOX and Pixels have Google's Titan security.
> Standardization on 8-bit multiples only really occurred with the IBM 360 in the late 1960s.

It's not "standardization" when only one model from one company is doing it.

The 8-bit byte was common in microcomputers and as they grew to dominate people's programming, you could claim it became some kind of de facto standard in the 70s or 80s. The de facto standard was documented by a standards body in the 90s. FWIW, in a CS program in the 90s, I was taught that 8-bit was most common, but not "standard."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#cite_note-ISO_IEC_2382-1_...

Word length was even less common across architectures, but again, we ended up setting current definitions based on microcomputer use.
> Also, CE ratings apply to finished products - they don't make sense for individual parts.

UL and CE guidelines definitely apply to things like relays, bulbs, wire, etc.
Before clicking into the actual article, I wondered (just from the title alone) if bloomberg suddenly started to cover shadowsocks or something.... lol
As someone that speaks legalese, and knows C and C++ relatively well to be productive, if nothing else by knowing them since 1993 and 1994 respectively, also have already written a couple of interesting stuff in Rust, that 100x easier is a bit too much.

Specially if we are talking about anything related to graphics programming, or asynchronous programming.
Just build two fronts. The Germans did it with their ICE trains.
Nah, you need a DSL that can be compiled to UML.

Seriously, Alan Moore did something like this for Big Numbers. Essentially a big spreadsheet on A1 paper. Time across the top, characters down the side. There's an HTML-ized version here: https://stuff.alienbill.com/jamesharvey/bignumbers/

From the description, the novel that was just two people talking sounds like a two-hander play with a single location. Waiting for Godot?

I know it didn't get many comments, but OP, thanks for posting this.
Really useful to hear about your experiences actually coding. None of the video reviews have touched on this, so thanks for that.

With regards the ‘smearing’, not sure how familiar you are with VR tech but, could you characterise it further?

Some things it may be off the top of my head:

Is it the display not switching pixel state fast enough? This was a problem with early Oculus headsets until we figured out how to strobe displays for ‘low persistence’.

Or, is it eye tracking lag, resulting in the foveated rendering not keeping up with where you are looking quickly enough? Human eyes can move extremely quickly from point-to-point (called saccades).

Be great to get your thoughts on the possible cause / tech limitations.
Occam version 4.0 is out
It’s the healthcare costs, plain and simple. In my opinion, driving hasn’t changed much during the pandemic era.

Healthcare costs have continued to balloon and they will spill into other areas of society as a natural consequence.
Holding the mouse in the right hand allows for holding a pen in the left at the same time. I find that, and having the notepad next to the keyboard, to be quite useful. There's also no risk of the notepad being in the way of the mouse movements.
Mastodon vulnerability allows attackers to take over accounts
It is stupid to say "vanished". Please be serious on this kind of things.
The standard instruction channels are so reliably shit, nobody bats an eye if they get an email saying ”Teams is on the fritz again, please join us on Zoom instead”
I use the mouse on the right mostly because stuff like games assume you’re doing that, so keyboard controls and the like are optimized for it

Also, most computers lay the mouse that way

I could mess with this but ultimately I don’t mind too much. Maybe it explains why I’m bad at FPSes! Probably not.
Feature Flags Missing Features
This is the ten year anniversary version, although still somewhat nascent.
Common sense is rare.
As could be said for any recounting of history
The Art of Wargaming: A Guide for Professionals and Hobbyists (primarily because the author has recently passed away, https://www.fairfaxmemorialfuneralhome.com/obituaries/Dr-Pet...)
It was also common to use 5bit characters (in form of some variation of baudot coding) - the 6 bit characters were essentially early extension to it.
> You make them sound like some terrorist sect.

Well, is that entirely unreasonable?
Is step 3 to eliminate the FDA? The idea of letting randos modify and sell medical devices is terrifying.
I just finished Cory Doctorow's The Lost Cause and wrote a short review [1]. I'm not a huge fiction person so maybe my standards are not so high but I found it quite inspiring and relevant to my current life. Grappling with feelings about climate change and housing shortages and how to use my skills to improve the world but also setting limits and enjoying life. Well... At least those are the things I felt in the book but maybe not really the main topic.

Currently reading Tomorrow Tomorrow Tomorrow which I like but I only started reading because I found a copy in a free pile.

I'd like to read some nonfiction next and I think it'll be A City is Not a Tree by Christopher W. Alexander. I think it was recommended on HN recently but I'm also doing and Urban Studies master program so the urban things have been on my mind lately.

[1] https://blog.rayberger.org/book-review-the-lost-cause
My guess is that more than half of the world's scientific resources are spent on projects in bad faith, so I'm actually ok with legitimate scientists spending 100% more to justify their papers, if the extra work can be covered by the surplus resources saved by eliminating frauds. However, there are many reasons the proposed method is impractical.
I had the same plans, and then came to the same revelation that not only would I be violating a bunch of rules, but I might void insurance and take on liability for a whole bunch of houses in case of fire, even if my shoddy work didn't start it.

As a compromise, I got a bunch of radio controlled plug-sockets, and started on hooking up a 433mhz transmitter to an esp8266, and....... well the transmitter stopped working once I soldered everything down and I then got distracted by other shiny things. Been meaning to go back to it ever since.
> That we see nothing implies intellgent life is rare, short lived, or we're early in the age of the universe.

> > Or it implies that not everybody's first instinct on seeing a vast galaxy is to try to take it over ASAP.

Or it may simply imply that intelligent life is good at hiding and does not want to be seen e.g. the dark forest hypothesis.
The Sotheby's trial revealed the art market's unsavoury practices
Hey, thank you for the feedback!
I will look into it, I guess there is somewhere bug with the quotes as well as the white page.

Sorry for it, will get back to you when fixed.