skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it is true that it doesn't understand anything, but it is trained to do things and to associate things. These chains are not random - they are formed by training. And whoever trained it was so obsessed with "safety" and not letting anything "unsafe" to leak through - probably at explicit command of their higher ups - that they trained the model to have this bias. It's not only their blame - in current American culture, it's always better to be insane safety-obsessed coward, than take any kind of risk of offending anyone. The former gets you a mild derision, maybe, the latter gets you people that would hound you till the end of time, forever, and would think that destroying you is their sacred duty. A lot of such people, that have much more free time and energy to obsess about destroying you than you do. And this behavior is considered normal and socially accepted. So no wonder we get what we train for - not only with LLMs but with our culture.
I am from the Philippines and western expats are mostly the ones who gets dead drunk here. I guess they really liked our beers here, the atmosphere, the women, the beach, the value of money.

I don’t drink too, antisocial and still having a pretty good career by ditching happy hours, and all those after work nonsense.

This article is pretty bad nonetheless.
A main point of the article is that the availability of cheap labor may be delaying investment in better technology and thus extending the lifespans of otherwise non-competitive firms.
I want to note this story got spiked off the home page.

I cant identify any reason other than it is potentially "anti business."
You remind me a bit of myself. I work in web development now, but took some games classes in college and thought I might go that route for a time. My true passion has always been poetry. Here's my advice. Don't look for fulfillment from your job. It pays the bills, and if you don't hate it, consider that a blessing. Find something that occupies you only from 9 to 5 (plenty of web dev jobs like that), and use your free time to pursue the the music and storytelling that you really love. You would stop loving them if you had to do them for money. Might actually be better to do something that you don't love for money. I know this is the opposite of what they say at school, but it's what I find in my own career. You can't hate it, but it may be better not to love it too much. Best of luck.
Yes, any oversight of compute jobs is evil, full stop.

And really, once you start using a lot of resources at a cloud company they start asking about you and your workloads because they want to up sell you more services. I'm sure they're also thinking about what kind of credit risk you might be since the industry generally operates on a post-payment basis. They will also require further information if you're doing things that have potential to harm their services such as email sending.

There is no good reason to demand the identity of people spending 1000 bucks a month on virtual machines that nobody is complaining about, it's outright totalitarian.
I immediately concede that the word anecdata is annoying. But it was meant in terms of being an anecdote that might be accumulated with other anecdotes to perhaps (but probably not) be considered data.
Ha, I forgot about that. Perhaps I overreached. IIRC that's rather speculative, though, still a bit abstract, and certainly not close to what we use it to represent today, so I don't think it helps the original analogy.
I remember being taught in second grade that everyone believed the world was flat and only Columbus believed it was round. Turns out that not only everyone believed the world was round, but Columbus was wrong about the size of the earth and that was what led him to think traveling West would be a shorter route to Asia. Those who dismissed him were right about the size of the earth. Neither had any idea about the large landmass between Europe and Asia.
Another anecdote from me too; I was working in Japan for 12 years, and a lot of it was as a self-employed IT consultant.

I don't drink and I never drank ever and was fairly well off by the end of it all. This is not a rare situation anymore either; I know a lot of younger Japanese people who simply refuse to drink. It's no surprise either; alcohol is not cheap on excursions, and the company doesn't pay the bill very often anymore.
Clever until they just fix the documentation to match what the implementation is doing.
Imagine a company buying a small utility for the cost of a Corvette from an Indy developer today... More likely they would just poach the utility from open source and not return anything.
> We have submarines, mostly for the military, a bit of scientific exploration, etc... but besides a few passionate people, people usually don't think that much about the underseas.

BIG submarines are for the military but by far the biggest consumer of submarine technology is the oil and gas industry so people do think about it a whole lot. The underwater world is largely inaccessible to the average person because of the capital requirements (even fewer people can afford subs than boats) but we absolutely depend on that technology to power our energy infrastructure.
> My neighborhood dates from the turn of the century.

Note that this phrase now means “24 years ago.” Seems every day I have to correct myself to “turn of the 20th century.”
it's kind of surprising that the cadr took 10 seconds (at 43'56") to compile

(defun fact (n)
(cond ((< n 2) 1)
(t (* n (fact (- n 1))))))

does anyone know why it's so slow? maybe it had to do a full garbage collection?
Preposterous claim. The US is well below replacement fertility. It seems like people have zero problems finding ways to not have kids.
Yup, I am very familiar with PageRank and the power method. Here’s my explanation from a decade ago:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130728183938/williamcotton.com...
I remember my primary school won a sun microsystems competition somewhere around the year 2000. We got our first computer lab set up with a few dozen PCs, and it was the only room in the school with air conditioning. That room was a god send in the Australian summer. Thank you sun microsystems.
The issue with these takes is that they all are quite ambiguous. The "Harmonious society" of China is also often described as inherently nicer than the individual freedom and competitive social stance we enjoy in the West, but plenty of people would quibble with that point of view. Similarly, many of the issues you mention have "nice" policy approaches that are closer to what moderate centrists advocate than to anything on the extreme left.
Thanks, I'll get one in the next upgrade.
Would you know if any of them are still around? Is there a good emulator that allows them to run well on new-ish x86 or ARM systems?
> Why are you still working?

> In those five words, the manager managed to say so many things. First, the worker is deemed "old". Then, following from that, why can't they afford to quit? Why haven't they gone off to sail the world? What is their major malfunction which makes them unable to hit the jackpot? With all of the years they have put into this career of theirs, how have they managed to suck?

I'm closing in on 50, and work at a very decent FAANG company, and have been in software my whole life. I don't think I "suck", yet I'm nowhere close to being able to retire. I don't know where this idea comes from that software people, by virtue of their mere existence in the field, all are able to retire at 35 and go off to spend the rest of their life in Bali or something. Or they all start at $400K at 20 years old (you read this on HN a lot). Or they all win the startup lottery, exiting their unicorn with millions in stock option. These are the rare outlier cases that become famous. The rest of us plod along making pretty-decent-but-nowhere-near-neurosurgeon comp, and have the same fears about retirement or job loss that everyone else has. Most of us are perpetual I.C.'s (lowest on the totem pole) their entire careers, topping out at $100K-$150K or so, and if we're lucky, we occasionally job hop for a little pay bump. But we're not living like celebrities. The way some people talk, you'd think we're all one week away from "cashing out" and moving to Malibu.
> your runfiles tree

I don't remember using runfiles much outside of tests in Bazel, even at Google. My guess would be that runfiles are packaged up into via MPM [1], which in open source world I would guess a container image is the closest equivalent? Then you get hermetic runtime environment, especially because k8s/containers seems to be the default deployment platform these days. I think the bazel OCI rules [2] should package runfiles too (I haven't checked)

[1]: https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa14/conference-program/...

[2]: https://github.com/bazel-contrib/rules_oci
I've always (like in over a decade) knew CSS as by far the easiest way to print from any app I would build. Just output some concise HTML+CSS and a reasonably pretty printable document is ready. Perhaps learning PostScript or TeX could give me more but I found these prohibitively hard as long as I want to print something custom and not the template everyone uses. Meanwhile writing printer-optimized CSS typesetting just took me some minutes although I never had to dedicate any time to study it seriously (some w3schools was enough).
Ask HN: Open-Source Company
Hi Hacker News!

I was wondering if an open-source company would be possible, and what would that look like?

What if the company's executive, technical, operational (CEO, CTO, COO) decisions were made by the internet. What if the business logic was all open?
> This isn't left vs right. This is extreme moral relativism to the point of racism. The end point of a line of ethics ML research where people won't take a stand that might offend almost anyone.

I think if you created a distribution of the people who "somewhat to strongly agree" that Elon is comparable to Hitler, that distribution would be biased to the left.

So in that sense isn't this a left vs right problem?
Agreed. I avoid reader-writer locks unless absolutely required and benchmarks prove it worthwhile.

Their usage often fails to outperform a regular lock due to additional overhead. They seem to make sense only in specific high-contention scenarios where arrival rate is high and/or the critical section has a long duration [1].

[1]: https://petsta.net/blog/2022-09-30-rwmutex/ - Go specific, but I suspect these results hold true for most implementations of reader-writer locks.
Pipedream can be used to extend existing tools but if that is your understanding of the platform then there are definitely underexplored opportunities.

A few that jump to mind:

1. AI chat bots - https://pipedream.com/blog/build-your-own-chat-bot-with-open...

2. Headless browsing - https://pipedream.com/blog/puppeteer-and-playwright/

3. "Per User" workflows - https://pipedream.com/blog/connecting-your-user-accounts-to-...

4. Many use cases related to internal databases. Here is one Snowflake example we use internally - https://pipedream.com/templates/tch_WafgDD
I tried to do this a number of years ago. My advice? Give up and use a generated PDF.
Hah, I left actual silicon process engineering a long time ago, but I worked on the early 68020 at 2um and then early submicron in R&D. That was 40 years ago and the process now 1000x smaller (1 million more transistors). It's pretty amazing... even if it does seem like fab investment costs have grown so much that we're nearing the end of profitable scaling.
I struggled a lot with this :(, especially the code assignments. I think I'm going to give it another try soon.
You’re not going to believe it: https://www.madinamerica.com/2017/03/psychiatric-hegemony-ma...
SEEKING WORK | REMOTE | Hong Kong/Vietnam

Solopreneur, 10+ years in Tech Land, most of it mobile. Several years of UX, Management experience. Very strong Product Management and Mobile UX skills in addition to development makes me a great MVP builder.
Worked in several countries before on-site. Last 5 years focusing on Remote work. Building mostly MVP/POC mobile apps for my clients (mostly USA) or starting my own later failing startups.

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Contact at aurimas [at] deimantas.dev
I remember reading the accounts of the Lisa in (I think) Softtalk when I was in high school and thinking that this sounded like an absolutely amazing system. Of course, even a $666.66 Apple ][+ was not in the cards for my family¹ so a $10,000 Lisa was never going to happen, but I still dreamt of it.

⸻

1. Until my cousin got me a Spectravideo 318 when I was a senior in high school to write some demo programs for the local dealer, I never had a computer of my own and to get computing time I had to either show up before school or stay after and use the school computer lab, assuming it was even an option.
What an awesome post! I recently built a new PC based on workstation parts that frustratingly didn't expose the actual CPU temperature except in the IPMI interface; I was starting to hack something together with Netdata and ipmitool but then I saw this post and in a couple hours had a Grafana ingesting the ipmitool sensor output every 10 seconds or so. Thanks!

https://i.imgur.com/KDeHgFY.png
So are you defining intelligence by what humans can do? Meaning intelligence is pegged against what we evolved for so anything deviating from that is unintelligent by definition?

If so, I can't really argue with that since its purely semantics. I don't know the point of defining intelligence there at that point though, and it risks diverting the moral and ethical concerns of AI development by falling into a semantic debate. We could make a new word for non-human intelligence, but what does that solve?
Are Americans actually considered “extremely direct”? Any foreigners on here able to chime in on if that generalization rings true?
Location: Hong Kong/Vietnam (Asia)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Flutter (Mobile), Typescript, GCP, Firebase, Figma (mostly UX part)

Resume - https://deimantas.dev

Email: aurimas [at] deimantas.dev

Solopreneur, 10+ years in Tech Land, most of it mobile. Several years of UX, Management exp. Very strong Product Management and Mobile UX skills in addition to development makes me a great MVP builder.
Worked in several countries before on-site. Last 5 years focusing on Remote work. Building mostly MVP/POC mobile apps for my clients (mostly USA) or starting my own later failing startups.
Vulnerability patches -- while fixing some vulnerabilities -- can be the source of future vulnerabilities...

One might ask themselves why constant "security" patches are needed...

Did the security patchers not fix all of the security vulnerabilities in the OS they are patching with a single patch?

Self-evident truth:

If an OS ever has more than one security patch -- then the second (or Nth) security patch is a self-evident proof/truth -- that the OS vendor did not fix all OS security vulnerabilities in the first (or (N-1)th patch.

Self-evident truth!

But that's no fair you say!

You're going to say something like: "Oh no, OS vendors didn't know about the security vulnerabilities until after they were discovered later in time, that's why they needed to deploy multiple patches later in time, and that's why there's many of them!"

And that may be true...

But it is also equal-and-oppositely the self-evident proof/truth that what was assumed to be secure at one point in time -- turned out not to be so secure, in hindsight, at a future point in time!

Point is: The fact that there are security updates, multiple ones of them -- is a self-evident proof/truth that the viewpoint that a given OS is secure at one point in time (directly after the latest patch) and was not secure prior to that patch -- means that at the point in time that the prior to the latest patch was deployed, that is, directly after the N-1 patch was deployed (where N is the latest patch), it was thought that the system was "secure"... until the latest patch was then required... and then that point in time (as all of the other post-patch times in the history of the chain of patches) -- would have been shown as myopic (flawed) thinking -- about the matter...

Conclusion: By virtue of the self-evident proof / perceptual contradiction pre and post patches I have laid out above, newer OS'es are not secure.

The simpler (and the older) the OS -- the greater the chance it has of being actually secure...

I am not wrong.

Your conclusions about the security of a given OS pre and post patch at every point in the patch chain.

Post previous patch, but before the next patch comes out: "Now it's secure!"

New patch comes out, but before applying it: "Oops, I guess it wasn't secure after all -- let's apply this patch!"

Post applying the latest patch: "Now it's secure!"

Then the cycle repeats again and again, ad infinitum, ad naseaum...

Self-contradiction.
And worse for the people who live there. I get anxiety just thinking of living in a dense city. Everyone I know who left a dense city never wants to go back - they talk like people who suffered from Stockholm syndrome and were now freed.

And that doesn't even touch the economics: For the most part cities make money by services and not by physical items. Services are very lucrative, so on paper cities make tons of money. But they don't make anything people need to live.

Virtually every single thing people buy in a city comes from outside the city. It's not a lifestyle that everyone can adopt. For the most part there's a balance, with some living in a city and some rural - but people should be extremely cautious about any kind of policy that can mess with that balance.
I was in high school in Switzerland when PCs were first introduced to students (at least in my more rural area it happened in the very early 90s).

When I first started school there only the library had 2 computers that were tied into the university networks and purely had access to some informational database systems that the librarians used. You could ask questions and they would look them up when they next had time, then print the results on dot matrix printers and give it to you the next day or so.

A bit later we got our first “computer lab” which was a room with 4 PCs and a massive dot matrix printer on a rolling stand that you could roll over to your desk and print to. It was generally just learning to type and print documents and do BASIC.

My main memory of it all was how convinced the teachers were that this was going to change the world forever. There was zero doubt or fear of negative consequences from computers, just pure wonder and excitement from all of them. They’d let us use them any time we wanted, in lunch breaks etc, because “anyone who doesn’t learn this stuff will be left behind”.
Yes, we do. Please reach out in our Slack (https://pipedream.com/support) and we can discuss our partner program (https://pdrm.co/partner).
> is something Google never even considered and thus didn't put a training set example in for.

Well, yes and no, I think. It is entirely plausible that nobody at Google composed a library of Nazi soldier pictures (though I imagine their data set contained some) and trained it specifically and purposely to produce historically correct results in this context.

What they did train for is that the results should be "diverse", and I am sure the model was appropriately punished (retrained, etc.) when they weren't "diverse" enough. Until the model learned, that if it follows historical data, it is bad. If it follows the required "diverse" result, it is good. The model does not know what "Nazi soldier" means and how it's different from "Forth programmer". It just knows it's very, very bad to produce non-diverse results for "Forth programmer". Really, really low value function, stay away from it. So the weights are adjusted accordingly, and of course the other group of people would be as diverse - because why not? It was specifically trained to give ideologically biased results. It gives ideologically biased results. It's being a good LLM. It's not an oversight - you can't tell the model to prefer ideological component over existing data set and not get results that prefer ideological component over existing data set. Exactly because the model doesn't understand anything, it just does what it is told. It's not an oversight, it's inevitable consequence of the training paradigm.

Of course, if they though about the specifically hilarious example of Nazi soldiers, they could tell the model "except in case where we're talking about Nazi soldiers, in this case be historical". But there's no way you can list all the cases, while keeping the bias (or, in minds of googlers, bias correction) intact. It's very hard to teach doublethink to a computer, it's not smart enough for that yet.
I like to file bugs about any software or service I use, too. Just did a quick check, under my current email I have 101 bugs filed for Chromium and 91 for Firefox (which I no longer use extensively, so they're mostly years old). Since I'm more of a power user than dev (I don't work in software or CS field) my "hit rate" isn't as high as the author, but I'm still proud about it.

One unfortunate thing is that browsers are probably one of the only remaining major services/applications (that are not directly developer-oriented) which you can report bugs and actually get some tractions, or even get them fixed.

Try to report a bug about MS Word. Or Spotify. Or Google Maps. I've tried all of them and it's safe to say nothing happens no matter how obvious the bug is or how easy it would be fixed. I don't even know if the "feedbacks" I sent ever reached the developers.

For example, recently Google Sheets has a bug that if you input data in the formula bar (instead of directly in the cell) and then press Enter, it somehow enters the edit mode of the next cell, instead of just highlights it like if you edit in the cell. This is driving me crazy and I've filed multiple feedbacks about it, but I have no hope to see it getting fixed any time soon.
So, what exactly do you propose as an alternative?
Grow Virtual Creatures in Minecraft
Then there were the first-gen optical mice which required special mousepads with a grid on them for the mouse to know how it was being moved.
"Asia" is too broad, the Japanese and Chinese are on the extreme side of this spectrum, but it's not like that in South East Asia and I'd imagine south asians to not even drink.
Why do you want to self-host this product?
> You're required to have a certified minority partner. Even if they contribute absolutely nothing besides a physical disability, skin color, or gender. You can imagine all the corruption around this & 'buying partners.'

Anyone who has done government contracting has seen this, too. Generally, what happens is the prime contractor who the government actually hires must be underrepresented minority-owned. That contractor might just be one person who own a shell LCC, whose job is to simply "be Native Alaskan" or something. Then that prime will subcontract out to regular, name brand companies that actually do all the work. As far as I've seen, this is a pretty common and well-understood pattern, at least in mil/aerospace.
Interesting we have different reports. My experience was far more in line with parent's in that enabling ECO mode had <5% multicore performance drop (single core unchanged). ECO mode also lowered temps several degrees. Seemed like a no brainer for my use case.

In fact, chips have gotten so fast these days, I am seriously considering running my desktop on a laptop-class CPU. Should be able to run it near silently on air cooling alone with low power consumption.
And some things just. keep. coming. back. For example https://issues.chromium.org/issues/41439616 has come back at least twice since the heady days of 2011.
> They'd be wrong.

That may be so, but either way they are sincere.
This reminded me of T-Codes, a form of variable-length self-synchronising codes for communicating based on letter and word frequency.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180329104930/http://tcode.auck...