skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"She added me to a private CSF leak group on Facebook with several thousand leak patients from around the world."

My late wife joined that group when it was 800 people in ~2011. Today we are closing in on 9,000 people. Back in the beginning a few people though that my late wife Karen started that group. She didn't. She was just a prolific poster there helping a lot of people as she learned about Leaks in her medical studies.

Part of Karen's saga, and mine, is published on the CSF Leak Foundation website here "When Pain is Relentless" :

https://spinalcsfleak.org/when-pain-is-relentless/

A few years later Karen's saga also became part of the documentary Pain Warriors. Which can be watched for free on Amazon Prime, TubiTV and Youtube. It is also on iTunes.
Our goal is to raise awareness of CSF Leaks and the devastation they cause to families like mine. Karen took her own life due to the pain from CSF Leaks and being poisoned by the flourquinilone antibiotic Levaquin (NEVER Take that or Cipro et.al. which I can back up with FDA data, I want to focus on Leaks here).

The top doc in the world Dr Schievink [1] has estimated that just under 100% of people that have CSF Leaks have some type of under lying Connective Tissue Disease. Karen saw him and the docs that are mentioned in the parent article that were there at the time in the 2011-2013 time frame.

I had Karen's spin exhumed and it was sent to Duke to be studied. Much was learned from it to help those that came later. Sadly not nearly enough.
All of this is documented in what has become known as Karen's Journal.
Free to read on Karen's website. Any profit from the sale of physical books go directly to the Spinal Leak Foundation. [2] I also get nothing from the Pain Warriors Documentary. [3]

1:

https://spinalcsfleak.org/schievink-surgical-history/

2: Sadly the certificate expired so please ignore the scary warning until I get that fixed. I also need to fix a link that I see is broken to the PDF that was used in the documentary. http://www.kpaddock.com/book

3: Pain Warriors on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/WB60ZCiYwgk?si=PAVsDOVDcEdoJ-jC

Just typing this has me crying yet again.

What we desperately need is better imaging technology. When it comes to finding Leaks with today's methods we are still in the Stone Knives and Bearskin era.

CSFluid is almost identical to water making it hard to differentiate unless the leak is large. It does not take a large leek to cause devastating headaches.

If you have any ideas, please speak up.
Wild boars are neither endangered, nor are they native to Norway, so those do not detract from conservationist efforts in any way.

Buying land abroad is simply not a feasible approach to prevent deforestation, for multiple reasons:

1) Prohibitive cost: Foreign actor is not interested in owning like 5% of the deforesting countries total land area-- he wants to spend the money for preservation, not to become a titanic landowner.

2) No legislative/executive power: Naked ownership is insufficient in preventing deforestation especially in less politically stable nations.

3) Sovereignity: Do you honestly think that countries would just sell high single or even double digit percentages of their total land area to foreign governments? This is a political powder keg...
> Any site with user generated content will be chasing a never ending battle against bots churning out LLM content.

I have a hard time imagining this happening on HN.
This was the image I used: "https://a5.typepad.com/6a017ee66ba427970d01b8d1a3ff4d970c-pi"
That's because consumer DNA profiling outfits are trash, not because there's anything wrong with properly conducted DNA analysis. That's like saying the Large Hadron Collider results must be wrong because the image on your old electron gun TV tube is blurry.

The way out of this is to follow proper protocols for well conducted science. Peer review, multiple verification from different sites and by different labs. Unfortunately a bad result occasionally slips through, but it is possible to have high confidence in most well attested results.

So the answer to how we know these things is that we have multiple samples including large sections of skulls and other major bones, from multiple sites, many of them analysed and verified by multiple different labs.
Can't wait for the movie.
It would be something of a full circle I feel went back to dedicated circuits for NNs - that's how they began life when Rosenblatt built his Perceptron.

I remember reading a review on the history in grad school (can't remember the paper) where the author stated that one of the initial interests in NNs by the military was their distributed nature. Even back then, people realized you could remove a neuron or break a connection and they would still work (and even today, dropout is a way of regularizing the network). The thinking was that being able to build a computer or automated device that could be damaged (radiation flipping bits, an impact destroying part of the circuit, etc) and still work would be an advantage given the perceived inevitably of nuclear war.

Compared to a normal von Neumann machine which is very fault intolerant - remove the CPU and no processing, no memory=no useful calculation, etc. One reason people may have avoided further attempts at physical neural networks is it's intrinsically more complex than von Neumann, since now your processing and memory is intertwined (the NN is the processor and the program and the memory at the same time).
> No other major browser uses Gecko.

I got the impression that the Qutebrowser project /would like/ to use
Gecko, but finds this infeasible because of the manner in which Gecko
is developed together with Firefox.
Most of what SpaceX has already achieved has sounded similarly, but costs were so astronomical to begin with that it didn't make any immediate difference to most people. So for instance the Space Shuttle was only retired in 2011. After all was said and done it ended up costing $1.6 billion per launch - about $30,000 per pound of payload. The Falcon Heavy costs about $0.1 billion (in reusable mode) and brought the costs down to less than $700/lb.

That's a greater than 40x reduction in costs, which sounds too good to be true - but the problem is that even at $700/lb, that's still far too expensive to do anything remotely interesting. But take that down again and suddenly everything changes and we, more or less instantly, enter into an entirely new stage in human development and history. It'll be akin to the automobile. Henry Ford didn't make the first automobile, but he did make the first commercially affordable one. And, in the blink of an eye, society permanently changed because of it.

---

As a fun aside, when doing a web search to grab the numbers above somehow this [1] ended up in the search results. It's from 2012 and somebody pondering SpaceX's wild claims of being able to get costs below $1,100 per kg ($1,500 inflation adjusted).

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992936
It works fine for me, and I figure that Mozilla will do less crappy stuff than Alphabet or MS.

Also, if you say you don't like this - corporate monopoly ==>> corporate abuse of monopoly - then how about a bit of action, to go with your words?
I can't even recall the names and purpose any of their other side projects other than some janky mobile phone OS and hardware attempt. But clearly they've put a lot of staffing resources and money into some of them.
You mean have the cameras constantly be activated if the device is moving greater than x speed? Wouldn’t that drain the batteries a ton?

And what characteristics does the phone look for? It could just be sitting on someone’s lap or held in a way that cannot see the outside or the steering wheel.
Appreciate it, thank you.
Maybe, just maybe, Boeing's Starliner will fly astronauts this spring
I thought the role of "second best tool for most things" belonged to Excel
There is widespread alcohol and cannabis abuse in India. Fancier drugs do not make their way there because there are more profitable markets.
In most dating apps these days (especially after Match Group bought most of them), you're shown one potential date after another and swipe across your phone to either indicate interest (say yes) or pass them by (rejecting them).

Typically I think you swipe left to ignore them or right to indicate interest. But it's been a while and I could be wrong about that.
Letting Go (2010)
+286% is nearly 4x (100% => 386%), not nearly 3x.

> the number of fires this year for [Feb 1-Feb 25] already exceeds those recorded in the last seven years [for Feb]

So that would be 2017-2023 ?

So those would be the years since the last El Niño (2014-2016), I wonder how it compares ? (Did we even have the measurement infrastructure during that previous cycle ??)
Subscription would be odd. All my other Apple gear I've bought for cash.

Also it would be odd for a physical thing you can crash/scratch. I mean you can hire or lease cars but there is generally a heavy cost if you trash it to be picked either by you or your insurance company.
In those ten minutes of human history where we had instantaneous access to fact checking but only the most primitive technology for the automation of content generation, pundits seemingly forgot the centuries of nearly irrefutable news, fake and slow, despite which people still managed to get some democracy done
Or maybe it's good that HN doesn't support punycode so that you can know immediately that you're visiting an IDN domain name, and people don't try to sneak in submissions with IDF homograph similarities to troll or pretend to be a site that they're not.
Tree style tabs is more stable and performant but also has a few nice addons (TST Colored Tabs being one of my favs). Sideberry can be infinitely customized but I found it to be extremely slow with 100+ tabs across multiple windows.
Last I checked (and confirmed by repeating it just now) GPT-4 did just fine at adding 2 numbers up, because it knows better now than to do that manually and will express it as Python. It does worse if you try to force it to do it step by step like a child and don't reinforce adherence to the rules every step, because just like humans it gets "sloppy" when you try to get it to repeat the same steps over and over.

If you want to measure its ability to do mindlessly repetitive tasks without diverging from instructions, you should compare it to humans doing the same, not expect it to act like a calculator.

If you want to measure its ability to solve problems that involve many such steps that are simple to express but tedious to carry out, ask it to write and evaluate code to do it instead.
Experiencing the Altair 8800 (2021)
> Why Am I Doing This?

There some form of monetization in many of these challenges whether it translates to real money or attention, likes, traffic and so on. While reading this I was wondering why not interview blind people? They're in this for so long and a good picture of what it is to be blind.
Never mentioned is how this is a Windows 95 concept. They really should do this, I don't give bonus points for ignorance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_Files#History
The US is a very rich country.
There’s addons that can do this.

Sideberry is what I use: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/sidebery
> * In existing LLMs, we can replace all parameter floating-point values representing real numbers with ternary values representing (-1, 0, 1).

Why is this so shocking? Quantization has been widely explored, driving that to its extreme (and blowing up parameter count to make up for it) just seems like a natural extension of that.

Easier said than done, of course, and very impressive that they pulled it off.

> In matrix multiplications (e.g., weights by vectors), we can replace elementwise products in each dot product (a₁b₁ + a₂b₂ ...) with elementwise additions (a₁+b₁ + a₂+b₂ ...), in which signs depend on each value

I feel like this follows naturally from having only ternary values, multiplication doesn't really bring much to the table here. It's a bit surprising that it's performing so well on existing hardware, usually multiplication hardware sees more optimization, especially for GPGPU hardware.
[Dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39510756
I would love that to help learn another language!
This would make a great Mr. Beast video.
Many of the Mac networking specifics have become less of a problem. I use Rancher Desktop, which uses the correct virtualization framework based on OSX versions and allows you to customize the lima and virtual machine provisioning scripts so that you don't have cross-platform headaches like this (for the most part). Also runs kubernetes locally out of the box so you can test app deployments without waiting around for resources to free up on your shared dev cluster. Newest versions have almost everything Docker Desktop has. Highly recommend if you are on mac.
> This patch ports the VP9 library written by Andrzej into Rust as a
proof-of-concept
...
> this library will not need
any further updates for the same reason we have never touched its C
counterpart

What was being proof-of-concepted? What's the metric of success for introducing Rust in a case where no one was doing any sort of active work anyway?
Story Mapping Anti-Patterns
One of many ways a photo gives you very little of the experience of a total eclipse!
I propose that we just extend "year day" to cover the entire year and leave only a single month called Null. This solves not only leap days but also leap seconds and even timezones: The time in year day isn't part of any month, day, hour, or minute so there's no problem.
My solution is to use (ungoogled if you insist) Chromium for PWAs.
My Toyota Prius uses less fuel per mile than my 500cc Kawasaki Vulcan.
Can't wait for google to die out. Glad to see they are on their way.
They made the correct decision here!

Too bad they made the wrong decision in not supporting the expected floating point behavior of division through zero (python throwing errors, rather than return inf or nan)
I was reading Exposing Floating Point today (as Airfoil is on the HN front page and I was perusing the archive of the author). It's a blog explaining the inner workings of floating point representations. About zero values it says [0]:

> Yes, the floating point standard specifies both +0.0 and −0.0. This concept is actually useful because it tells us from which “direction” the 0 was approached as a result of storing value too small to be represented in a float. For instance -10e-30f / 10e30f won’t fit in a float, however, it will produce the value of -0.0.

The authors of the LLM paper use the values {-1, 0, -1}. Connecting the two ideas, I'm now wondering whether having a 2-bit {-1, -0, 0, 1} representation might have any benefit over the proposed 1.58 bits. Could the additional -0 carry some pseudo-gradient information, ("the 0 leaning towards the negative side")?

Also, I've seen 2-bit quantizations being proposed in other LLM quantization papers. What values are they using?

[0] https://ciechanow.ski/exposing-floating-point/#zero
[Dupe]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39373327
Writing for outlets isn't worth it anymore (2021)
I'm reminded of med school when one day on rounds our internal medicine attending remarked that there are scores of treatments for hiccups, none of which have been shown to be superior to the others, which is why there are scores of treatments.
It already exists: https://www.xreal.com/us/
The birth of our system for describing web content Essays
This article doesn’t cover one of the key contributing factors to this which is the cyclical nature of drought resilience and deforestation. As rainforest is lost, precipitation decreases due to a decrease in tree perspiration, reducing humidity and the amount of water available to the trees, making them more susceptible to fires.

When you then combine that with longer dry seasons, higher max temperatures, and slash and burn land management practices, the rainforest is in for a bad time.
Vatsim is one of those communities that reminds me a lot of the early Internet. You have this smallish community of hobbyists that are all volunteering differing amounts of time and skills to come together over a shared goal that seems impossible when you write it out as a sentence.

> What if you could fly flight simulators with real ATC, talking to real humans?

It's a super friendly place and the barrier to entry for learning these types of skills is typically extremely high in real life. After COVID grounded me during my pilot's training I moved to VR and a virtual cockpit with Vatsim. Little did I realize I could "fly" at home at such a level of fidelity with other people. I ended up realizing I was getting my license only because I was interested in learning the systems. I could do that safely (I have kids, and was a bit worried) at home. It's not the same, but it's close.
Europe is to Eurasia what the Pacific NorthWest is to North America.
until they elect a president that throws allies under the bus (I.e. NATO, NAFTA, etc) and gives state secrets to enemies
I've done quite a bit of cloud cost optimization in the past (sometimes referred to as finops). There's a pedantic discussion to be had as to what is serverless and what is PaaS, but that should be saved for another day.

The underlying problem I found working with teams is that they all too frequently wanted to use these cloud-native technologies (serverless, etc.) which means thinking in microservices by definition, but usually architected for monoliths. This was accomplished in a few ways: 1) the serverless job did everything for you so in effect it was a monolith 2) they didn't want to use any intermediary storage/cache layer and relied heavily on both sides being up and available (synchronous brittle systems) 3) they went TOO hard in the microservices direction and made things way too complicated 4) their testing suites were half-baked (more the industry/tools fault than the users tbh) and weren't sufficiently air-gapped or mostly incomplete.

If you've been around for more than a decade - we have seen this before: AWS specifically sold the concept of "lift-and-shift" to C-suites a dozen years ago and now that MO is so baked in it's going to take a new generation of services with the right selling points to undo it. Lift-and-shift doesn't work because, as stated above, monoliths aren't for the cloud for a sufficiently sophisticated system. It's the reason DHH and others are advocating for "cloud repatriation". And then there are the small cases, comparatively speaking, like the ones listed on this site. These examples are what happens when you give very powerful tooling to people who do not understand it or the implications of it. But too, this is also partly (maybe even mostly) the vendors' fault: "From localhost to https, in seconds. Deploy from Git or your CLI." is the perfect selling point for a DIY-er or someone running a small business. But what comes along with that low barrier to entry is a downside that could be very expensive when the s**t hits the fan.
Glad to see that you want the economic outcome of ~60 million people crumble just to serve as an example.
sympy works really well in jupyter. my own demo notebooks for sympy are

https://nbviewer.org/url/canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/sympy... (solving a multivariate quadratic with math pretty-printing)

https://nbviewer.org/url/canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/tiny-... (my cheatsheet of quick-and-dirty numpy/pylab plots, including some sympy examples)

https://nbviewer.org/url/canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/secan... (using sympy to symbolically differentiate an existing python function, which is something you can't usually do, in order to find its minimum in closed form)

https://nbviewer.org/url/canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/max-p... (some basic circuit analysis with basic calculus with sympy)

https://nbviewer.org/url/canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/latex... (various fiddling around with mathjax formatting and sympy, including some analysis of minsky's circle algorithm from hakmem)
Nice videos Dave. I guess I have personally given up on effective buffer management. Perhaps if ipv6 and infiniband becomes the underlying infrastructure? There is just so many layers of abstraction hiding no longer useful decisions in the stack that I have just decided to leave infra and networking behind for a while to see if one can make a difference elsewhere.
>>but there are plenty of customer service representatives who are literally just following scripts for these things anyways.

I used to work at a call center here in Bangalore in 2006, and for refunds, shipments, replacements it was far from a script. It was tech support for Desktops and other computer peripherals, and we had a fairly elaborate system of checks and re checks to ensure the customer wasn't lying or straight up scamming us.

The worst part of AI is, it wants to give the right answer. If you scold it enough it will silently nod and agree to what you are saying, and tell you exactly what you want to hear. I think AI will be great for generic problem-resolution scenarios, a total nightmare where a 1 - 1 assistance is needed.

Another big problem is the XY problem which is so common in tech support centers. Customers often don't tell you the problem they have. They attempt a resolution, get stuck some where, or plain mess it up and then call you. Now instead of telling you the original problem they want you to help them fix the mess they created in the process of fixing it, hoping it will fix it. You will be surprised how common these sort of things are. Often you inherit a system broken way beyond the original issue, because they tried to do something, couldn't find their way to it, and now a bigger mess is in place.

One more problem, people describe the problem they think they have, instead of telling you their real problem. A variant of this happens in medical diagnosis as well. This is why many times the doctors are very silently listening to you as you speak without acknowledging what you are saying. They don't want to steer the discussion in the direction and diagnosis you want to hear, instead of them actually diagnosing the real issue.

There are many such patterns you will see when you are talking to people. Some are patient, some are extremely irate. Some will intentionally misguide you.
Also, uBlock origin works on Android/Firefox
I love this reply.

I get similar vibes when an artist copies the Mona Lisa in, say, 100,000 colored dice or Post-it notes. If you compare such efforts with road makers (pavers?) who lay millions of bricks in their lifetimes, such art suddenly seems less relevant.

I guess the interesting context here is willpower, freedom of choice, or discipline, rather than a particular experiment.
Actually, El Nino is forecast to end this fall and turn into La Nina.
It seems like a lifelong journey to find and customize your stuff to be exactly what you'd like it to be. Realistically I'll never get "there" without making some pretty big compromises, but the hacker in me enjoys trying.

My phone is a Pixel 7a running GrapheneOS. My laptop is a Thinkpad T80s running Debian Stable, and I'm waiting for my Framework 16 to ship. My vehicle for out-of-town trips is a GR Corolla, but for around-town stuff I use a custom steel frame e-bike.

When I have the time and energy I try to protect my privacy. For the GR Corolla I followed some steps* that might have done the job, but I can't say for sure. This summer I hope I have time to play with the hardware, up to and including replacing the headunit with something OSS-based.

* https://www.grcorollaforum.com/threads/sos-call-disable.2357...
yes but is the rendering performed in GPU, or in software is the question
And even further, insects have also vastly different aerodynamics, which explains why flapping flat wings works at insect-size and not at bird-size (nor plane-size).
Is "Process" still available?
Interesting, for me this is only true as long as the AI generated content is worse.

There's some things I really care about the human experience for, but much content it just matters to me if it's a joy to ride.
Literally what they said. The site for this post doesn’t display properly.