skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You don't solve perverse incentives with competition if the competition rewards perverse incentives.

Competition isn't a panacea that makes everything bad go away.

It's almost an institution in its own right, and is just as likely to suffer from Shirky-like problems as anything else.
>Theyve already planned out their deliverables for the next 12 months and will be held accountable for meeting them.
This is because in Common Lisp, nil is an instance of the null class, the one and only instance. You can specialize method arguments to the null class, so that they capture nil arguments, which is very useful and good. (Mind you, I can't think of anything built into the language which exploits this, let alone for converting nil to 0.0.)

Some things in Ruby are patterned directly after Lisp. You notice it here and there, like the #<...> notation for unreadable objects, or calling small integers fixnum, ...

In the world of static reference OOP like Java and C++, there is the Null Object Pattern:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_object_pattern

Because nil is the empty list, one use for specializing on the null class is for handling the empty case of a list.

(defmethod do-some-list-thing ((list null))
;; empty list case
...)

(defmethod do-some-list-thing ((list cons))
;; non-empty case
...)
> We seem to keep trying to push up the age when a person gains the ability to make their own decisions and be responsible for their own actions.

No, we seem to keep trying to push down the age when a person loses the ability to acquire further education.

Thiel himself got not just one but two degrees from Stanford. Are you going to criticize him for not having his shit together? Let's be honest, he's opposing college now purely for ideological reasons.

> People were leading armies at that age not very long ago.

Ok, but have you considered that war is actually bad?
Interesting links in the article and comments, but it seems like two different concepts are mixed here – the nature of bureaucracies and wrong incentives. I struggle to understand how cobra and rat cases are "institutions trying to preserve the problem".

Cobra effect, in particular, is an immensely interesting topic of how rewarding the metrics can distort the system, otherwise known as Goodhart's effect. I highly recommend reading these two papers on the subject for anyone interested:

- Categorizing Variants of Goodhart's Law [1]

- Building less-flawed metrics: Understanding and creating better measurement and incentive systems [2]

Adding the "Cognitive Surplus" book to the to-do shelf, but it seems like Shirky principle is mostly about institutions and the nature of bureaucracies. Now, a good question would be - when and why Shirky principle does not apply to the institutions. My first thought is the difference between bureaucracies that have "owner" and ones who lost it.

When a bureaucracy has an owner (person or group of people) who can change the bureaucracy in response to external events, then it's probably unlikely to have Shirky effect (WHO and smallpox example in comments). However, bureaucracies that have lost their owner will most likely have this effect.

The best thing I read on this subject (how bureaucracies work) is Samo Burja's "Great Founder Theory" [3]. If anyone can suggest something along these lines on the fundamental principles of bureaucracies, I would appreciate a lot.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04585

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266638992...

[3] https://samoburja.com/gft/
I'm on the younger side, but my parents are in their 70s, and I recall them saying something along the lines of "what is life, if not a collection of memories", and it kinda stuck with me. Most likely it's just some quote they've read in the past, and were just reiterating it, but still.

I generally agree with you. There might not be a good reason to look back into the past constantly, but the author ends the post with a personal note about how their mom is going through Alzheimer's. And I can somewhat relate to that, as my grandma used to live with us in the last 10 years of her life, and it was devastating to watch how feeble her memories were getting every day. At some point, when you're just sitting at a dinner table on a Thursday night with people whom you've known for ages, recollecting some memories from the past is just... nice. There really isn't a good reason, or benefit for the future and what not; it just feels good. Thus I can see why someone would want to cherish those times, trying their best to not forget them.
> I want to see the receipts. I want evidence.

If the people who were involved are directly telling you "no, you're wrong, that's not why I did it" don't constitute evidence you'd accept then what would?

> I note that executives and project leaders from large companies and organisations subject to legal threats over intellectual property issues are required to deny infringement because to say anything else constitutes evidence: it could be construed as legal confession of the copying or other IP infringement of which they are being accused.

But saying "no, patent concerns were not involved in our decision" is not what people changing their product for patent concerns would do because that would be lying, and the lie would almost certainly be caught during discovery. Instead the magic formulation is along the lines of "no comment" or other variety of "shut up." Not to mention that it can be perfectly to make a change for legal concerns while still disagreeing with those legal concerns because litigation is fucking expensive.

In any case, if the developers of GNOME 3 made the changes because they were afraid of patent threats from MS, coming out and saying "no, we didn't do it because of that" would be among the dumbest things they could do.
maybe they're taking offense because the critical thinking skills they receive from higher education enables them to understand the nuances of the world better than you do?

or maybe your "competing ideas" aren't as compelling as you think?
The ones that don't no longer exist. Survival of the Obstructionest.

Some institutions obsolete themselves. Though I can't think of one as they are arguably not "institutions".
yeah so the DHT is a replacement for centralized trackers. It crawls and indexes the DHT for bittorrent.
Thiel's program as discussed in the article this post is about.
Reader view solves the ugly ..
Scuttlebutt is a brilliant name for a social network. It's right up there in the "why didn't I think of that" territory.
V Language Review (2023)
Or a system that removes profit from the equation. From the article, I don't think any one bureaucratic system is immune from the effect.

In the tech sector, we see many examples of the disruptor opening a temporary wedge to either get acquired by the dominant player or becoming the new hegemonist.
Unfortunately that is a deep and complex problem. There are a lot of forces that are using the Palestinians as a stick with which to harass Israel, in part to deflect from their own human rights abuses.

The result is a set of permanent mutual grievance. An intractable problem may now be utterly insoluble.
Gnome is terrible. I will choose either KDE or XFCE any day.
i don't know. i thought yours was one of the better ones lol
Google Pay app is shutting down in the US after being replaced by Google Wallet
There are some great episodes about tacit programming on The ArrayCast, a podcast about APL/J/K.

[1] https://www.arraycast.com
>But isn’t that the most rational argument against the panic narrative?

Not if the source material suggests that panic is warranted. And a lot of the science on climate change is pretty dire.
I'm not sure why this was downvoted; it's entirely correct.

Any institution has, as its primary goal, to further its own life.

Why would institutions against $FOO (where $FOO is whatever your personal bogeyman is, such as racism or sexism) be any different?
Those darned over-the-hill 25 year-olds! It's about time that they, too, were marginalized by techbro ageism.

Take care of your health, and maybe this mystical spark will last longer. Giving you the benefit of increasing knowledge and experience, to direct that energy most usefully (i.e., towards a viable business, not towards a ZIRP/hype VC investment scam powered by the confidence of coked-up 20 year-olds).

Avoid drugs, avoid bad stress, get good nutrition, good exercise, good sleep, keep learning.
Energy vs wisdom. Young people like to take 10 actions when only one is needed. Sometimes that works out and other times all those actions are expensive
I know they're not socialist, but they're also not clearly dominated by giant corporations the way the US is. Who is the ruling class then?
> social experience

It shouldn't cost so much!

Perhaps college aged kids could join something like the Peace Corps instead?

Community college costs need to return to <$10k/yr, too.
It’s the C tradition, continued.
I code ruby (not exclusively) for like 20 years now, that must be the reason I dont find this odd at all.

Which example from the list is weird?

I would not write

var_that_might_be_nil.to_h

I find this more understandable

var_that_might_be_nil || {}

But I find both acceptable and fine.
The comparison is between drummers:drum-machines and carriage-makers:car-makers. The first number is non-zero in both cases, but the ratios are far different, and the first ratio >> the second.

I think that's useful.
You honestly saying you've never heard of the term scuttlebutt? Like "what's the latest gossip/scuttlebutt".

I've never associated this term with being nerdy or niche.
One of the most successful drugs in recent times was one that actually cured a previously chronic and not curable disease. It was also a controversial one because it was very expensive. But Solvadi, which cured Hepatitis C was certainly a huge commercial success and shows that the whole idea that pharma companies are never incentivized to cure diseases instead of treating them is just wrong.
Serious suggestion: If interviewers want thoughtful answers, they should try sending the questions in advance.
All of the people of western Europe are the ruling class? LOL I doubt any of them feel that way. What are they ruling exactly?
Oh, to turn off your mind
Yet again. Anyone who placed their bets on LiDAR for self driving is proven wrong. Cameras and neural nets will rule the day.
Super-Additive Cooperation
Insider Trading Charges Against BP Manager's Husband Working from Home
Automation recipes to compose AI projects
>So it went its own way with Unity instead: basically, a Mac OS X rip-off, only IMHO done better

>They are like twins, and switching between them is very easy.

>Unity, alienated a lot of people who only knew how to use Windows-like desktops

Unity alienate a lot of people because it was a mess. It was not nearly as poilished as macOS counterpart and at the same time failed to provide the old experience and you couldn't do much about it.

But obvsiously this is just one "IMHO" vs another one.
> Well if you are not using a rented machine during a period of time, you should release it.

If you're using them for inference, your usage pattern is unpredictable. I could spend hours between having to use it, or minutes. If you shut it down and release it, the host might be gone the next time you want to use it.

> what do you use a 2x3090 rig for? Bulk not time-sensitive inference on down quanted models?

Yeah. I can run 7B models unquantized, ~13-33B at q8, and ~70B at q4, at fairly acceptable speeds (>10tk/s).
> The "Earth mother" or whatever the fuck will be fine, we are doing all of this for ourselves and our own standards of living and aesthetic values and nothing more, so why pretend otherwise?

I consider myself very much on the side of "environmental protection", but it's always been clear to me that our goal is protect humanity, and secondarily, other animal species (and that means protecting the plant species). Why else would we be doing this? I don't think anyone is pretending otherwise other than a few fringe people (there are always some fringe people no matter which way you look).
Accused by who? The ones that need to legitimize the massacre?
"It is a privilege to learn a language/A journey into the immediate" — Marilyn Hacker
> try/catch is significantly more verbose than just if err != nil // do something imo...

Further to what the other replier said (about the ability to bubble-up errors), try-catch also lets you handle multiple errors in one block:

```
try {
fileOutput1 = getSomethingFromFileSystem()
fileOutput2 = getSomethingElseFromFileSystem()
fileOutput3 = ...
} catch (FileSystemException e) {
// handle
}
```

If I understand it correctly, GoLang's idiom would claim that this is a bad thing to do, and each error should be handled individually. Which - sure! That's _usually_ a reasonable, defensible, and safe position. But that means that GoLang's approach is always as verbose as its possible to be, whereas try/catch at least has the _possibility_ to condense handling.

> ...and also much more brittle

Can you be specific about what you mean by "brittle"? To me, it denotes a lack of flexibility - that is, if thing1 changes in an unexpected-but-still-legal way, then thing2 is likely to break. I can't see how that applies to try/catch-vs err-check - in both cases:

* The exception/error is bound to a variable

* (in most well-typed languages) the Type of the exception is checked by the type system, and/or (in every language, inc. GoLang) properties of the exception are checked by code

* Something is done (a standard code action, a return/throw of an exception, or a program termination)

You can write a brittle GoLang check (only checking for, say, `if e.message = "a very specific error message"`), and you can write a very flexible try/catch block (with a fallback `catch (Exception e) {doSomethingGeneric()}` - or, indeed, the _most_ flexible "try-catch" is "don't even catch it, let it bubble-up and let your framework/application handle it")
Here are some similar tips:

> Grunt work is foisted upon generalists. Establish yourself as an inflexible expert. Choose a narrow domain and claim ignorance whenever possible. Peers will eventually avoid asking you for help.

> Create an ambient paper trail of activity. Occasionally produce reports on numbers that nobody cares about. Send your reports to a limited number of people so you can mention that you’re “working on something for Alice and Bob” if needed.

> Assign yourself easy work. Manufacture problems and improvements that you know how to solve. Make tools to solve recurring problems without incurring too much automation debt. Under no circumstances should you ever share your automations.

[1] https://taylor.town/corporate-camouflage
Is the 2B measured like that as well? I did use it with llama.cpp and noticed it ran slower than I expected.

That's the danger of too much abstraction, it's easy to have big gaps in one's understanding of what's really going on.
Congrats for having judges who actually read the citations. As a lawyer in Germany, I find that most judges will barely read the body of a brief, let alone look up citations.
spoken like a true "inner"
This is a non sequitur. "Investors might buy senior debt in a defunct crypto marketplace" is not actually a problem facing labor as a class.
> municipal authorities, who realized that their best efforts at dératisation [extermination of rats] had actually increased the rodent population

I live in a complex of town houses. We have lots of rats and mice. This is seemingly an unsolvable problem, and our pest control company keeps adding poison traps, but the problem does not go away. They blame government, because the poison they are allowed to put in their doesn't kill the mice, (as this could kill eagles or other animals eating the mice).

We ended up buying our own standard issue traps lately that either slap them to death, or drown them, and the problem is getting better. Makes you question why the pest control company didn't do that. Or not, we know why.
Google says its AI image-generator would sometimes overcompensate for diversity
Mapping nil to 0 is a path to create an incorrect universe, tho.
I do agree about the virtues of a resume that shows that it has been put together with care and attention.

But don't forget that while coding, the IDE, compiler, or whatever will correct your spelling mistakes in a very short feedback loop, with hardly any penalty for your output rate. That might mean that your dyslexic super programmer has never learned the value of carefully going over each text before submission.
Because they're temporarily embarrassed founders who could _totally_ see themselves having to make a decision like this.
This. Night shift is probably fewer than 5 staff, but even then, 24 hour care is not cheap.
> Eventually, the waste management union goes on strike and the trash starts piling up on the street again anyways.

Isn't that just free association?

Unless they signed a binding agreement that prohibited striking whatsoever, I can't see why they shouldn't be able to.
Anyone who uses these models for more than 10 min will immediately realize that they're really, really bad compared to other free, OSS models. Even Phi-2 was giving me "on par" results except that its a model of a different league.

Many models are being released now, which is good to keep OpenAI on their toes and not mess up, but, truth be told, I've yet to see _any_ OSS model that I can run on my machine being as good as ChatGPT 3 (not 3.5, not 4, but the original one from when everyone went crazy).

My hopes for consumer hardware ChatGPT-3.5 within 2024 probably lie with what Meta will keep building upon.

Google was great, once. Now, they're a mere bystander in the larger scheme of things. I think that's a good thing. Everything in the world is cyclic and ephemeral and Google enjoyed their time while it lasted, but, newer and better things are and will, keep on coming.

PS: Completely unrelated, but, gmail is now the only Google product I actively use. I don't, genuinely, remember the last time I did a Google Search... When I need to do my own digging I use Phind these days.

Times are changing and that's great for tech and future generations joining the field and workforce!
Fit for purpose... most of the time, except when it isnt then Oops... Lets color in the failure with a human term "hallucination" cause "we can't really fix it".

Sugar coating the fact that it is defective (defined: imperfect or faulty.) isnt changing things.

Your explanation is correct, it's defective by design.
This is gonna be a weird ruling if it goes in favor of the states. If you run a public bulletin board tearing down fliers is absolutely a form of speech, and if you do it to people you disagree with it becomes political speech. I can't imagine even this court ruling that the government is allowed to regulate political speech. That would kick the door open to an easily constitutional broadly applied national hate speech law, and reintroduction of the fairness doctrine.

So the unintended consequence I expect will be that censoring people for their political views will be the only strongly protected moderation actions.
Textual is not 3d too, but is also great for TUIs.

Textualize/Frogmouth has a TUI tree control: https://github.com/Textualize/frogmouth

FWICS browsh
supports WebGL over SSH/MoSH
https://www.brow.sh/docs/introduction/ :

> The terminal client updates and renders in realtime so that, for instance, you can watch videos. It uses the UTF-8 half-block trick () to get 2 colours from every character cell, thus simulating basic graphics.

https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl :

> Carbonyl originally started as html2svg and is now the runtime behind it.

Always wondered how brew.sh added the brew sprite there; that's real nice.

TIL that e.g. Kitty term can basically framebuffer modified Chrome?

https://github.com/chase/awrit :

> Yep, actual Chromium being rendered in your favorite terminal that supports the Kitty terminal graphics protocol.

FWIW Cloudflare has clientless Remote Browser Isolation that also splits the browser at the rendering engine.

A TUI Manim renderer would be neat. Re: Teaching math with Manim and interactive 3d: https://github.com/bernhard-42/jupyter-cadquery/issues/99

What would you add to make it easier to teach with this entirely CPU + software rendering codebase?

What prompts for learning would you suggest?

- Pixar in a Box, Wikipedia history of CG industry,: https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-36265807

- "Rotate a wireframe cube or the camera perspective with just 2d pixels to paint to; And then rotate the cube about a point other than the origin, and then move the camera while the cube is rotating"

- OTOH, ManimML, Yellowbrick, and the ThreeJS Wave/Particle simulator might be neat with a slow terminal framebuffer too
> The fact that you think racial equality or feminism are "done" illustrates clearly that the problem isn't solved.

Where are you going with this?

I mean, do any of those institutions formed solely for feminism (for example) actually have a metric for when they will be done?

Did they actually draw a line in the sand, saying "When we reach this point, we will dismantle the institution because at this point we will, happily, no longer be necessary?"

Because to all of us watching, they don't have a "done" metric. They don't have a goal, which when reached, will cause their existence to be unnecessary.

Their primary goal isn't "fighting for $whatever", it's to ensure the continued existence of the institution.

Sane people don't work that way - they have a goal in their mind, and once that is achieved they move on to a new goal.
OnlyOffice lacks an equivalent to MS Access or LO Base.
The problem, in that case, exists between the keyboard and chair.

Floating point math is inherently inaccurate, and no programmer using it would expect perfect precision and call it a defect not to get it. You have to understand how floating point works and take that inaccuracy into account. As a result there are some applications for which using floats is simply a bad idea. No one sane is doing real money calculations with floats.

The same goes for LLMs. Hallucination is fundamental to the model. We're going to have to realize that there are many tasks for which AI simply isn't well suited. And we're going to have to get over this persistent delusion that humans are categorically worse than AI at everything. A paralegal doing research would probably not simply fabricate cases and cites whole cloth. That's not how most humans work. Humans are capable of knowing when they don't know something, AI is not.

But we've decided, for whatever reason, that AI is perfectly trustworthy. That's going to keep biting us in the ass until we learn.
Thanks for the recommendation, I knew they had done that but had never listened to it. Love me some Scorpions and of course Berlin Philarmoniker is cream of the crop.
> even though the US hasn’t had a draft in 51 years

That smuggles an assumption that US will never have draft again
https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2024/02/22/city-will-scrap-2...
nah, the alt-tab behavior on osx is just wrong, so I use contexts.app which fixes it.
Original technical write-up: https://gist.github.com/aglab2/6bb351c4bd0ac6e13c931e03aa8f9...
I have exactly one place I put my keys in the house - the handle of a certain door. As soon as I get into the house, I put the keys there. This hasn't failed me yet.