skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
NO! There are at least two of us!

I've done this ever since NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter due to a unit conversion error.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_...

I truly don't understand how and why people don't do this. Most people use pretty descriptive names now that every editor has autocomplete and big monitors are common. And yet, people never put the damn units in the identifier name. Would save so many bugs, and it would give engineers one less thing to juggle in their working memory.
>If I provide Andy's small town taxi service and have a customer service issue, I deal with it personally and properly or I go out of business.

In a very small town, you won't go out of business because you'll be the only taxi service in town. Everyone can establish their 'monopoly power' in a small enough area.
The suggestion is to use pure Haskell for the rules DSL only. The surrounding system that applies any side effects would presumably not be written in that language.

It's a good idea, and Facebook actually does something like this for their spam filtering rules: https://engineering.fb.com/2015/06/26/security/fighting-spam...
I'm sorry. I should have had a copy-paste warning -- typing from a phone... I knew it was coming.
How to Kill a Fly with a Shotgun (2023)
Way back in 2014 when Jeff Atwood (aka codinghorror) switched from Stack Overflow to creating Discourse, he gave a talk about it (see notes [1], sadly I can't find a live link to the recording anymore). He gave a pithy little explanation of why they built the Discourse trust levels system the way they did that stood out to me:

> The only thing that scales with the community is the community.

The point being, you have to grow users into moderators. Any other way of acquiring moderators is unsustainable.

[1]: http://discourse.bridgefoundry.org/t/link-to-jeff-atwood-tal...
> Synthesizers are instruments. They allow for the same level of subtle input as strings or woodwinds.

Synthesizer instruments, yes. Sequencers, trackers, and modern DAWs like Ableton, absolutely not. They’re entirely different animals and are very much a musical analogue to “prompt engineering.” They have also enabled some incredible art that would be impossible if musicians were limited only to what they could play into a recorded (or midi) tape.

I suspect that the same will prove to be true of generative AI, and that those artists that embrace it will see a golden age of creativity. But there will also be many artists who see their craft diminished in value, much like what has happened to studio drummers. And I could be completely wrong, but either way the genie is out of the bottle, so we’re going to find out.
I think there is an ambiguity in what you said. TO be clear the conviction was overturned but the news had long been globally disseminated by then.
An occidental account, tainted by orientalism and packaged for, as you
say, liberal arts students.

My point was to the asymmetry of authentic visiting pedagogy. In other
words, for the past 20 or 30 years Chinese universities have been
enthusiastic and open to first hand accounts of western culture,
ancient and modern. They've been keen to take the best of what we have
and learn from it. On our side we have a cannon prepared for the
most-part before 1900 and taught by aging white professors.

McFarlane seems unusual, albeit that he is indeed the archetypal
western Oxford don.

It would be nice to avoid the implication of a "successful and
scientific" Western cannon versus "failed" and primitive alternatives
that don't pay bills. FWIW, I like to assume, in all discussions of
interest, that the bills have been paid. Bill paying is, after all
rather dull.

On the other hand I casually wondered on Friday, amidst all the
fireworks and what with it being a dragon new year, what we're missing
about a problem that we seem to be struggling with - namely how a
society, despite huge technological change and diversity, remains
relatively stable for thousands of years.

I would love to watch a YouTube video lecture series on something like
that, from the horse's mouth as it were, but I suspect all the
authentic professors who would have taught us were rounded up or
starved in some Great Leap Backwards.
A more compelling thesis would be that the MCU films presided over a vacuum of good blockbusters during a period of decline in American cinema, brought about by risk-averse studios during the mortgage crisis.

The legacy of the films—technical achievements, continuity and coherence of narrative, ambition, etc.—are laudatory in some respects. Obviously, they made an enormous amount of money. But it's worth examining their "critical" success. Putting my personal opinions aside, do any of these films hold up to the standard bearers of early 90s and 00s blockbusters? I'm not convinced.

The MCU films are inherently derivative works with little dramatic tension; we already know the characters and that they will win. The narrative and dialogue is paint-by-numbers, and the action sequences are exhausting, low-stakes, and sterile.

That's fine for a theme park ride—get some thrills if that's your cup of tea—but it's not enough for a critically good blockbuster film. That's fine for teen boys and young adults, but it's not enough for a more diverse, discerning audience. Does anyone think any of these films, let alone their entirety, hold a candle to Jurassic Park, The Matrix, or The Pirates of the Caribbean? They're equally blockbusters, but they will be remembered long after the MCU films are forgotten.
Invite only.

A site is spam-proof if it makes it hard enough to get an invitation. The relatively few spammers who slip through can be warned and/or banned.

Unfortunately, we may not be invited.
Almost anything can ruin people's lives... Including water.
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS!
Did you read the article you posted? The article states how its beneficial to their patients for stabilizing their use and keeping them off the streets. Additionally the program has a total of 274 patients so it's not some widespread supply occurrence whatsoever, even if all of those people were located just in Toronto. That's a fraction of the addicts out there in that city alone. Or did I miss something?
Dan Brown, whatever your opinion of him, did a good job depicting this in The Da Vinci Code (might have been A&D, been a while since I read either). Langdon would recall teaching these subjects and students would interject and he’d take them seriously until he convinced them of whatever the point was.

Of course, with IB/AP courses, there’s no time to teach well because there’s more material than can be taught within a year.
Anyone wondering about taking up writing, acting, sketching etc and leaving your current paying, probably tech, job, because the passion was already tugging at you, remember this — this person is leaving after working for truckload-of-money years in FAANG and some more. You must remember that!

In fact that’s my take from his post. First earn lots of money and then “choose” what to do. Otherwise you won’t really be choosing.
It is rapidly becoming evident that all direct and indirect income sheet and balance sheet liquid value (including that held indirectly through corporations) over a very large sum, say $30 M USD in income and $300 M in property indexed to inflation, should be taxed heavily and redistributed as monthly prosperity dividends to all citizens to ease the burden of ultra capital concentration due to many factors and causing many corrosive socioeconomic problems leading to third-world like inequities. It would also put money back into the economy due to the higher MPC (due largely to the inelastic nature of non-discretionary expenses) of people who aren't UHNWIs. While this would lead to some customary inflation, it overall would stabilize the purchasing power of individuals and make any UBI scheme moot. Without enacting such a scheme, the long-term conclusion will be a dystopian future with several trillionaires, 10 billion impoverished people living in favelas, and an infinitesimal middle-class confused and unaware that anyone has a problem. Already, there are 2-3 million people sleeping rough in the US (5-6x higher than actual figures because the way they count unhoused people has been debunked as wildly inaccurate and flawed.)
probably, (this) AI rust things, mainly brains.
> that sounds more list lobste.rs

Huh. I'd heard that mentioned a bunch as a place with great conversational content, but had assumed (based on the crustacean naming and the `.rs` TLD) that it was Rust-focused - and, although I'm fascinated by and trying-to-learn Rust, I'm not yet at the level where I would be able to contribute to (or barely even learn much from) such a place.

But, having checked it out, it seems to in fact just be "Reddit, but more focused and with better moderation". Sounds delightful! Unfortunately I don't have enough of a social circle to be able to get an invite, but I'll enjoy reading in read-only mode. Thanks!
If you're building rust on windows, try using the msvc toolchain. I switched scryer-prolog from `x86_64-pc-windows-gnu` to `x86_64-pc-windows-msvc` and got a binary size reduction of 10x, from 100MB to 10MB.
I wonder how that would work for Facebook, for example. Facebook Groups have admins, but for general posts to the public (or to friends) - could they be user-moderated?
When I'm developing alone I mostly don't miss anything when in Neovim. However, even with mouse features enabled vim is not a great experience when I'm pairing with someone who is only used to using VSCode (which is a lot of people I work with). Ideally I'd like to have an editor which is very close to vim in the ability to use basic navigation, editing, commands (for instance, macro support would be nice but I can probably live without it) when pairing.
Ah, ok, thought you meant other sources.

Yep, right, mainstream press is always behind. Then the TV guys bring up the rear ...
Protomaps is a hugely important development in mapping. I switched from spending time and cash managing and hosting a Geoserver to putting all my map layers in a cheap shared web hosting with literally zero maintenance
Addendum: Scott Aaronson expresses this much better than I can: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7672

> But here’s the problem: in saying “for all I know, human-level AI might take thousands of years,” I thought I was being radically uncertain already. I was explaining that there was no trend you could knowably, reliably project into the future such that you’d end up with human-level AI by roughly such-and-such time. And in a sense, I was right. The trouble, with hindsight, was that I placed the burden of proof only on those saying a dramatic change would happen, not on those saying it wouldn’t. Note that this is the same mistake most of the world made with COVID in early 2020.

> I would sum up the lesson thus: one must never use radical ignorance as an excuse to default, in practice, to the guess that everything will stay basically the same.
Mars experienced a precursor to plate tectonics
I would very much enjoy reading the pre-reading for this post.
Just to be clear I love neovim (though I don't really like Lazy particularly, maybe I should give it another shot). Mostly I'm looking for something that is close enough to vim for me but also close enough to VSCode for the people I pair with.
As long as you lean into a portable standard (R7RS is widely supported and the easiest to port IME) you should be fine using whatever Scheme implementation you fancy.
No but this seems neat! I'll check it out, thanks!
I think that's an overstatement. You can consider the nonlinearity as a perturbation of the linear theory, study the topology of the solutions or their symmetries, or sometimes even find exact solutions, like exist for a handful of transistor circuits.
- "On Wednesday, the prominent start-up incubator Y Combinator announced a new fund dedicated to defense, space, and robotics."
Everyone just bind to some other port than 443 and there you go. The traffic won’t be worth any money so no spammers will show up there. All existing content and functionality will still work, just on a different port. It’s like a www fork.
I think your Russian travels were a long time ago. The vibe is very different now.
Detecting Manual AWS Actions: An Update
"Russia is bad" is a much easier sell than "Israel is bad"
US groceries store sales are ~$850B/yr. This company is the distributor for 2.8% of it.
> If I'm uber I just ignore it. It has nothing to do with efficiency, it's just getting the monopoly power to treat your customers badly and get away with it.

People don’t use Uber because they’re a monopoly. They use it because it’s convenient, it’s a known quantity, it’s mostly predictable, and they can use it almost anywhere they go.

People like to complain about Uber, but my pre-Uber experience with taxi services was far worse. The hypothetical case of Andy’s small town taxi service that provides exemplary service either didn’t exist or was such an outlier that you couldn’t reliably find it while traveling.
The irony of people saying this is ok, but people choosing not to download small pieces of software not distributed from the App Store is not; is hilarious
I see a lot of comments here assuming "linear model" means "can't model nonlinearities." Absolutely not the case. Splines can easily take care of that. The "linear" part of linear model just means "linear in the predictor space." You can add a non-linear predictor easily via spline basis (similar/sometimes identical to "kernels" in ML).

My series of lm/glm/gam/gamm revelations was:

1. All t-tests and ANOVA flavors are just linear models

2. Linear models are just a special case of generalized linear models (GLMs), which can deal with binary or count data too

3. All linear models and GLMs are just special cases of generalized linear mixed models, which can deal with repeated measures, grouped data, and other non-iid clustering

4. Linearity is usually a bad assumption, which can easily be overcome via splines

5. Estimating a spline smoothing penalty is the same thing as estimating the variance for a random effect in a a mixed model, so #3 and #4 can be combined for free

And then you end up with a generalized additive mixed model (GAMM), which can model smooth nonlinear functions of many variables, smooth interaction surfaces between variables (e.g. latitude/longitude), handle repeated measurements and grouping, and deals with many types of outcomes, including continuous, binary yes/no, count, ordinal categories, or survival time measurements.

All while yielding statistically valid confidence intervals, and typically only taking a few minutes of CPU time even on datasets with hundreds of thousands / millions of datapoints.
Yeah, it’s not new, it just could accelerate homogenization, as with how social media is (claimed) to be homogenizing culture. Planes, cars, and ships started it, but the internet (allegedly) turbocharges it.
“Scientist” is listed as a supported language for the program, does anyone know what this means?
The possibility of panspermia in the deep cosmos by means of the dust grains
Not really, because the entry barrier to create a small town taxi service is incomparably lower than creating a new Uber.

20 years ago my small town had around five fiercely-competing taxi services with cars arriving within 4-5 minutes of a phone call. In many respects that was better than the new times. Especially when it came to customer service.
Reddit's managers aren't only greedy, they're also not very competent.
wtf is a begat
For the USA, I would say a rural community within a hour's drive of a major airport/city. Near a town with common amenities and a public school with community expectations that all kids will go on to some form of higher education.

Of course, my version of best is just what I think is best for my kids and you are free to hold a differing opinion.
That is true in any market, not just software. There is a large element of regulatory capture that shapes regulation to favour bigger businesses instead of reining them. Software and online services have been particularly bad because there are so many ways to work around regulation. Apple's current malicious compliance with the EU is an egregious one, but most are more subtle (FB persuading regulators to let them take over whatsapp by arguing chat and social media are different markets).

Ideally, IMO, we should aim to prevent monopoly, not just abuse of monopoly (which is what regulators currently do): https://pietersz.co.uk/2009/11/fix-capitalism
There is no feudalism without violence.

No one is forcing anyone to host stuff in the cloud, no one is forcing anyone to use Gmail, no one is forcing anyone to use iPhone or Android device, use Facebook or Twitter, etc.

Everybody does it because with their personal calculation they figured out they rather suffer some loss in freedom than spend time on alternatives.

There are just some good old fashion monopolies/oligopolies extracting as much value as they can. Without state forcing something (which is possible but currently does not seem to happen), there is no serfdom.

No one is using Apple laptops because they were forced at the gunpoint. They are just preferring longer battery life or whatever excuse over the ownership of their device and software. It's not a cage if the door is open and you're just too lazy to leave.

As a matter of fact FOSS alternatives are better than ever were, and hosting stuff outside of major clouds is also very convenient.
Where you think they should live as adults. That's the reason to stay in the rat race at a HCOL area. If the kids grow up local they'll have a built in network, and have the right attitude to make it as the next generation on the hamster wheel.
If you look at the slides in the article they are quite cluttered – a lot of the time text has been made smaller or larger or put in a weird place (relative to a normal justification/alignment) to fit a visual motif which is unrelated to the subject matter of the presentation (e.g. the cover slide on NLP in Python).

I think this is emblematic of how the author misses a really important basic principle: layout. If you set up a twelve column grid in PowerPoint and align everything to this your presentation will immediately look much cleaner.

In terms of fonts I think much better recommendations are fonts such as Akzidenz-Grotesk or Avenir (seriously underrated font).
Generating mazes
Hose the insides? Lmao.

I wonder at what price point you would have to offer the average Tesla owner to let someone puke in their car.
It's a pretty common POV that bullet point slides are bad (there's an opposing view as well).

https://www.google.com/search?q=bullet+point+presentations+a...

From the POV that built point slides are bad, generally there is no consistency from slide to slide because each slide is just an image, graph, or diagram. I've seen plenty of great talks with zero consistency in the slides.
My kid's grandparents have all passed, but it sure would have been great if they had lived long enough to see their grandkids on a regular basis.
"Believe it. Men have ever been the same / And all the golden age is but a dream." - Congreve, 1700
> Boris Johnson of all people

Wasn’t he a Classics scholar at arguably the best university in the world? That’s exactly who’d I expect to be able to recite it!

Edit: “Johnson won a scholarship to study Literae Humaniores at Balliol College, Oxford, a four-year course in Classics, ancient languages, literature, history, and philosophy” … also won an academic prize for Classics at Eton, which is notably academically rigorous
> If I provide Andy's small town taxi service and have a customer service issue, I deal with it personally and properly or I go out of business.

We know this isn’t true, though; taxi services sucked before Uber. In small towns, there wasn’t competition at all, so know reason to fix issues. In larger cities, most taxis were hailed on the street or sent from a central dispatcher, so no individual taxi driver cared about their reputation… people weren’t choosing a specific taxi, and there was little repeat business, so customer service wasn’t important.
> People like to complain about Uber, but my pre-Uber experience with taxi services was far worse

Did you live in a small city back then?
The more interesting/useful part of HN is the comment section, not necessarily the articles themselves.
We largely finished material emancipation of women. Now it's time for emotional emancipation of men (and women apparently).
That’s a shame, I almost always go for GoG whenever possible. Looks like steam then.
If anyone believes that there will ever be a $39K CyberTruck, I have a Hyperloop I'd love to sell you.
How small a town are we talking about? I grew up in a 100,000 person city and we only had two taxi services that would take ages to arrive, depending on where you were.
Depends what country/culture you're in. Here in Australia, you'd never not call a truck/ute a car.
Totally, he is a shining star of objective reviews. He always captures key metrics well too, I'm always impressed by what he is choosing to measure.
This sounds really cool but was hard to digest for me as a ML Engineer who came into work just around deep learning and DNNs.

Is there some go-to practice material I could look at?

Splines I haven't touched since numerical computing exercises in school.
Sora, in imitating art, also subtly discourages it. How? Well, in ordinary movie making, various artists collaborate to channel a vision into video. The instrumentation (and sets, etc.) they use to do this entails millions of degrees of freedom. They have freedom to create that goes beyond any words that may describe it.

Pre-trained generative models have many fewer degrees of freedom. For instance, try asking Bing to create a picture of a man chasing a bear. This can be done. Now ask it to create a picture of a woman chasing a bear. I have been unable to craft a prompt that succeeds. Bing REALLY does not want women chasing bears. Every picture is a bear chasing a woman.

I was able to get it to picture a woman chasing a child, though.

Talk about formulaic movies! The AI will exert a substantial bias. It’s not just a new kind of canvas for artists.
> Signal, Spotify...

> Find an average (non tech) IOS user, and try to get them to switch to these apps.

Interesting take :)

- the average user doesn’t even use Signal anywhere, let alone an average non-tech iOS user

- As for Spotify, you must mention geography (I guess that’s USA you meant) - because in some geographies Apple Music might not even be the third music app on an iPhone
That's not how it works.

There are limited amounts of money that investors can offer, even in a country as rich as the USA.

If one lying company lies about their benchmarks, it prevents other companies from forming as one company sucks up the money. While the companies making realistic estimates fail to attract money.

---------

EDIT consider this: we got to the point where investors were spending on MoviePass, GameStop and such companies. Talking about realistic or useful models wasn't really in the works anymore.
What you just said seems to be in agreement with what I said.
The author seems to be mistaking the benefit of selection effects with competence.

Those who work anti-fraud for platforms know that there is something like a market for fraud. There is a market clearing quantity of fraud that will be present on any platform, dictated by the gains from learning to execute the exploit, the effort necessary to do so, and the number of times one might be able to do it.

Small platforms have way less fraud because they are way less valuable to exploit, in general. And that's caused by _the very fact that they are small_.

The big platforms actually are radically more competent at anti-fraud / anti-spam / etc, but the scope of their operations make them such juicy targets that there is a lot of it anyways.

It the entire world of fraudsters against Amazon, or Google, or Facebook. That's a highly unequal battle and it's surprising how well the platforms fare, all things considered.