skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tying lead levels to crime levels seems super sketchy to me when there are plenty of other factors that get studied and seem to have much better correlation and even causative effects. Hell, violent crime has started creeping back up in recent years, but to my knowledge the lead levels are not.
Attendance, grades and disciplinary action all already fill that role more than enough. And school does not have a single "purpose" any more than it is a single form or history. It's not like some guy named Thomas School sat down one day and wrote a master plan.
> (on one core, it's not parallelizable)

Why is that? From what I see on Wikipedia ("n is a specific 616-digit (or 2048-bit) integer that is the product of two large primes (which are not given)" sounds like a textbook RSA public key), it's an offline brute force challenge, a guessing game, so different computers (or cores) could independently take different slices of the guessing space. I will admit that prime factorization is one of my weak spots and I'll just resort to a few minutes of running pari-gp for that, since I know it uses some algorithm that is much better than brute force (it was orders of magnitude faster than alternatives for a CTF challenge involving a 512-bit RSA key).

Even if the factorization process' time spent is dominated by finding the next prime to try, rather than testing a prime for correctness for example, why couldn't you start anywhere in the 2048-bit space and find the next primes from there? Is there something you can use from the ciphertext that makes you need to start at a certain point and generate (single core) from there onwards? It sounds like the holy grail for key strengthening without memory trade-off options like scrypt and argon2 both struggle with
Not parent, but:

> I'm not saying this is the case with Pb, it's just a funny idea.
If you have a protocol, there's plenty of cryptography conferences and prestigious journals that would accept your manuscript.
Note that Amdahl's law doesn't apply if you change the entire algorithm (program) to fit better on parallel hardware (i.e. the task is not fixed).

From my dealings with parallel algorithms, there is much less sequential dependency than I think most people expect.
I think it's a complex problem, even on the "let's rule them all" side of the coin. I don't want to spend my Goldwin points right away, but looking at the past it takes a decent amount of resources to real push it to something efficient.

Also parents do love their kids. It takes a lot to actually have them side with the higher entity and align their behavior, and I think the current system strikes the balance by giving the kid a fighting chance to succeed, and have parents agree to let their kids be out for most of the day and follow school's rules even after (for funsies: there's schools in Japan where kids have to wear the uniform even outside school, even on short vacations. They quite literally belong to the school during the school year.)

PS: Many teachers really want their students to succeed, and many will do what they can to not have them eaten by the system. I'd wager it could one reason for burn out for some of them.
hell, we dont even know what intelligence is let alone if its artificial...
Maybe that quote should've referred to the first photosynthetic organism... (due mostly to reproduction than ability itself).
This is true, but parallel programs are not more limited - they're just good at different things. We will write different kinds of programs to do different kinds of tasks because of access to massive parallel compute.

Parallelism allows you to do computations that integrate huge amounts of information, like checking every pixel of an image against thousands of weak rules all at once. This is very inefficient to do serially because you can only check one at a time. It's also a huge usecase right now because machine learning lets you learn weak rules from data.
While keeping kids busy and curious about things is important, I'm fine with less "unpaid overtime" if the Finnish model was followed closely.

I think it's a good idea™ to give them hard work to solve in-class and with a good dose of semi-structured study groups to work on hard problems with pencil and paper and/or whiteboards. What I have a problem with is spoon-feeding, rote memorization of formulas, low standards. The exercise and gradual transmutation of fluid intelligence into crystalized needs to be through rigorous and challenging work, or there is untold loss of developed potential and a backsliding of academic achievement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight
IIRC the gas company execs were absolutely aware of the dangers of leaded gasoline and made sure that information never became public.

Yes, it allowed a lot of progress. But society should have been able to make an informed decision about whether it was worth it.
Project-based learning is indeed a superior form of teaching, interspersed with the regular curriculum.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EPoZJ8cZD_4

https://archive.org/details/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanE...
Jesus dude (and general HN culture) OP just asked a damn question, they are starting a conversation.

They didn't make a point, they claimed ignorance by making it a question. Chillllll
> Please spell out the implication of that claim for me then.

I'll spell out my views below, but I want to start by noting that I don't agree with the way you've characterized them. Going all the way back to your initial reply, I don't like the way this leading question was phrased:

> What specific features do you allege exist just to mislead the general public?

I think Hanlon's razor is a false dilemma. With a big company like Apple, there's typically a combination of bureaucratic incompetence and marketing exaggeration. Clearly, Apple leadership has decided to make privacy a consumer differentiator for their products, so they have a financial incentive to hype privacy features as much as possible. As a consequence, Apple management would be eager to be pitched any and all privacy features from engineering; these may even lead to bonuses and promotions, though that's purely speculation on my part. Regardless of the personal motivations of employees, the company is pursuing privacy features in earnest and isn't intending for them to be fake. Nonetheless, the company also has the unfortunate habit of shipping half-baked features and implementations. This is driven largely by the artificial, forced march of the annual release schedule, which demands that great new features be continually announced at a certain time, whether they're ready or not. The situation is not unique to privacy features either; Apple's entire software product line is suffering in quality. Engineering simply doesn't have enough time to do things right, which results in new features that are superficial and/or flawed. You could say it's marketing-driven incompetence.

Several commenters have mentioned that all software has bugs, as if that were somehow profound, or as if I were somehow ignorant of software development as a software developer. (I actually had to spend some time fixing a bug before I wrote this reply.) But not all bugs are created equal. From my perspective, a bug that's discovered relatively quickly by someone else is worse than a bug that's discovered only years later, in the sense that it suggests insufficient QA on the part of the developers, who themselves should have noticed the bug before it shipped. And a bug in the primary functionality of a product or feature is worse than a bug in a more obscure part of the software. This is why I'm not impressed by the length of time since a bug was fixed; if a feature or product was shipped with an obvious, fundamental flaw in its main functionality, that's a stain on the reputation of the developers. And if they keep making such mistakes, why should you ever trust them to be competent? No bug fix can fix the bug writers.

I don't want to focus too much on iCloud Private Relay, though. It wasn't what I had in mind when I was writing my original comment, and I don't even use iCloud Private Relay myself. I mostly don't use a VPN, except on rare occasions. I've discussed iCloud Private Relay here only because you asked me about it.

It's been a busy afternoon/evening for me, so I've kind of run out of steam now on this comment, but I promised I would reply.
> they are officially-licensed LGPL versions of the Minecraft server

Oh this is an interesting legal area to explore. I wonder what you could do with that?
According to Anthropic's page Claude 3 in an LLM. Given that all LLMs are probabilistically matching for the next token in a vector with some randomness it 'says' that because we say that.

I'm reminded of Rorschach from Peter Watts excellent Blindsight.
Author claim " you can’t reinforce understanding.".
But I can think of 2 counterexample:
-A student that does't understand statistics or calculus then do a bunch of exercise at home and suddenly understand the concept.

-Or a student spend 1 hours memorizing all the geography location or date for an history class.
From the actual problem description:

Note that the puzzle can be solved by performing t successive
squarings modulo n, beginning with the value 2. That is, set

W(0) = 2

W(i+1) = (W(i) ^ 2) (mod n) for i=1, 2, ...

and compute W(t).

There is no known way to perform this computation more quickly than to
perform the t squarings sequentially, unless the factorization of n is
known.
Would really like to hear your theory about how IQ loss causes lead poisoning.
Software exists on hardware. You can only put so many bits on so many atoms. Finite.
It works surprisingly well but is a little glitchy
Machine code does not require granting anything. The presence of a shared filesystem is a artifact of the OS, not any sort of inherent requirement.

The actual effect of machine code being opaque is actually "beneficial" to security as only very coarse protection boundaries are even expressible. You must coarsely separate your code to get protection which comes at a potential cost of performance. The advantage of non-machine code is that you can express very fine protection boundaries which reduces the performance cost of protection, but at the cost of more complex analysis.

Ensuring protection boundaries in the presence of coarsely separated code is strictly easier. You have strictly less ways to escape. Any coarsely separated code can be trivially transplanted onto a system enabling finer protection since they can just not use the finer protection. By the same logic, any protection boundary that can not protect coarsely separated code has no hope of enforcing protection on finer separations.

That the kernel designers of Linux, Windows, iOS, etc. can not even ensure protection in general when the systems are coarsely separated means they certainly can not be trusted to ensure protection in general when things are more finely separated. If they could, fixing their existing coarse protection boundary would be a trivial consequence. About the only theoretical reason why this might not apply to eBPF is that it is not "general" in that many programs are not expressible, but that is not sound, positive evidence of suitability where as the historical track record of protection in all commercial operating systems is abysmal to say the least. Claims of finally achieving security (on a strictly harder variant of the problem) are extraordinary claims and extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
> How have we completely lost focus on new physics or foundational sciences and devoted the smartest minds of our time to transformers and data scraping?

I'm not smart enough to be a physicist, but I like listening to Eric Weinstein[1]. He thinks string theory is essentially a dead-end honeypot doing exactly what you describe with our smartest minds.

[1]: https://youtu.be/eOvqJwgY8ow
EBS not S3
> The problems with under-population are still concerning.

Primarily the starvation.
… S3's response time is nowhere near 2 seconds. (Or even 1 second.) Like a sibling poster says, 50ms is a much more realistic ballpark for TTFB.
That’s the idealized outcome but the shape of actual populations doesn’t yield a perfect normal distribution. But you’re right the 100 IQ centering assumes a perfect normal distribution, so as such it is intended to both be calibrated to the average and the median.
Easy there.
I did not say they do not know about their kids. My claim is that they do not necessarily know about “learning”. And most do not.
This can (and has) been done but sooner or later you step on a landmine package for which this is not possible (reliably patching the output), so you end up rebuilding (reliably patching the input) and now you're inevitably rebuilding the entire world. It would've been easier to just do that in the first place.

That being said I've long suspected there is a happy middle ground where you hack at the problem from both sides. On one side you provide F(x) -> x' where x is an absolute path closure and x' is a relative path closure, for any supported subgraphs in the build graph. Then, for the rest, you rebuild from source using any transformed inputs you can. In other words, when you're evaluating x', if you have x in a cache already, and you can rewrite it, do so. If not, just build it from scratch.

The problem is at some point you have to prove that both methods of producing x' result in the same exact output. This is not easy! However you can possibly prove it for any arbitrary closure by simply round tripping. For example, assuming the transform F(x) -> x' is cheap, and at some point you build x, which is almost guaranteed, then allow x'' == x and when you build x just try and retarget it anywhere, and then back again.

This doesn't prove it actually works, but might prove that it's correct, which is acceptable to me. I haven't got far enough to try this out yet, of course. Be my guest!
The prompt itself even primed it for such an answer with the whispering and secrecy bits. This "article" is a joke.
It’s still surprising to me that not one decabillionaire has funded a good basic sciences institute. With a few hundred million dollars (paid primarily to salaries) and an extremely rigorous selection process, one could establish a highly prestigious research university and bring the brightest minds together in one place. Just go from there!

If Leland Stanford could do it…
I really wish someone who claims an LLM is conscious would explain how the consciousness is being generated while walking through the code that generates the text to support their claim.

Like, is it some kind of giant pool of static experience that is being "accessed" via the context window? What's the "theory of mind"?

They know the weights aren't being updated between sessions, or during sessions, right?
I’m not referring to China, that case was settled long time ago. I’m talking about Europe and the rest of Asia, South America, Canada. If you think about it, allowing a foreign state unfettered influence over public opinion (as well as near total internet surveillance) is an utterly insane thing to do.
From my experience where I wanted to send some files from my iPhone to an android based screen in my car, local send and landrop where the best, the rest needed internet or didn’t work properly, like sharedrop, snapdrop, pairdrop, and arc.
TikTok is another everything platform. If I used it, I imagine I could take any stream of thought and somehow warp it into a reason to use TikTok. It is very easy to pretend that the platform doesn't matter and it is just a carrier to provide the opportunity to engage in new thoughts or interactions. I made a huge mistake allowing reddit to be my go-to. I did not think twice about going from thinking "I want to study insects" to reading the top 500 posts of all time for insects hobbyists, learning almost nothing except apparent insider-knowledge and insect drama, feeling burned out, and continuing on from that thinly veiled meme-cynicism-comment-meme-article-comments new-tab new-tab new-tab cycle (in the context of insects) to the rest of the reddit machine. Maybe something is wrong with my brain but I'm going to assume that TikTok is actively trying to draw in every thought and intention into it's algorithm, and leave someone scrolling TikTok rather than continuing with whatever it is they intended to do.
A casual glance at nuclear physics points to a world where we’re nowhere near our energy production capabilities. Automation sings along. And that argument would be salient if it was required - “economists say infinite growth is possible” is a strawman argument.
> Authors of open source software owe you nothing, including the work of communication.

This is a tiring discussion, because this is exactly what I'm talking about. No one is here talking about how anyone owes one anything. In fact, no one in any part of life owes one anything if you'd like to go that route. But effective communication and expectation setting avoids the vast amount of communication issues. If a maintainer wants to release software and then complain about it every step of the way and claim everyone is demanding how they spend their time and effort and not reading their mind and now bowing at their feet, that's their prerogative. But that isn't some righteous path. It's an annoying one.

If maintainers are such sensitive souls, then they should either: communicate early and stop complaining, or take the project private or disable issues and stop complaining. Why almost go out of your way just to complain and make your job harder?
I simply restored that redstone functionality. Easy enough.
That's what self-help books would like you to believe, yes. But (assuming you are average size) you can always go down to a local bar and pick a fight with a guy twice your size for a reality check. The same principle also applies to brains.
In strong contrast to "Queens of the Stone Age", hah!
> we've built a pretty shitty world

The world has always been harsh and unforgiving. When did humans create a better world, and how do you quantify that? I think we're still very well off.
"And there is no such thing as causation vs correlation. All we have are causal inferences draws from correlation."

A lot of it depends on how well the controls were done and what follow-up research was done. Thongs like identifying and confirming mechanisms of action are a huge difference between some basic correlation and claimed causation. In the case of exposures, you can work backwards - reduce blood levels and perform tests to see if functions return. That's a lot easier than identifying people before they meet the criteria. Although that's still possible, especially when dealing with certain vocational scenarios where tests can be performed before possible exposures.
Still not realistic. If this is the end state of open source software (i.e., "just fork it"), then it's not exactly a winning model, is it?
Violent crime "creeping up" is entirely dependant on whose reports and which methodology relative when it changed .. see (for example):

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/11/03/violent-crime-...

Whichever way that data is cut, though, pre-2000 and in particular mid 70s "peak lead" crime levels are far and away worse than those of the past two decades.
Ah! Thanks. That immediately answers the second thing I was wondering about, since 2k RSA keys are still deemed safe (if barely / not for secrets that need to last a long time into the future)
Ad astra, per astria porta!
My friend, have you ever heard how easy it is to win a trade war?

(I'm joking, the tariffs on solar panels in the US actually started with Obama...)

https://grist.org/climate-energy/obama-administration-slaps-...
They overshot the airport by about 40 minutes, which means they had to fly an extra 30 minutes back. Every minute the flight attendant delays in waking up the pilot is doubled.

That's not a huge deal in Vegas, but if you miss Honolulu that's a big problem.
We're seeing less and less real content, while seeing more information at a faster rate.

News articles, media in general had an expectation of being made by a person, who experiences day to day life, talks with people to verify sources, and has a goal of informing people.

All of the above are moot, now that anyone or even just a script can generate information we can't distinguish from the real deal. We might even prefer the more fun and comfortable articles.

This kind of reality warping is something we've see in dictatorships, where all information is biased one way. Now it's done globally.

Why should I trust that anything is different from an opinion or a fiction book, when everything is malleable?

It's going to be difficult to do any sense making.
I assume it's not 100 billion floating point numbers sitting on an SSD. Not even if they are cleverly filtered to select the best 4096 of them.
> “If you know so much about learning, how come you were not top of your class?”.

Maybe their dad died when they were 14 and they struggled academically through the rest of high school due to the grief. Maybe their mom was an abusive alcoholic and they had to hide in the laundry room some nights and couldn't get to their schoolwork. Maybe they had a hard-to-diagnose learning disability. Maybe they were the only Muslim kid in their school and had a hard to interacting with teachers and other students.

Are these the kinds of answers you are expecting when you ask such an aggressive question, or do you just ask for your own amusement?
If Weinstein could tone down his conspiratorial edges and focus on the primary substance of what he’s saying, I think he would be more effective at achieving his goals.

I like his podcast appearances — they are fun to listen to — but the solution to political machinations destroying established institutions is not to focus on the politics! We need to escape that frame entirely, and focus instead on building new institutions that are sufficiently reverent of smart minds and brilliant people.

Yes, we need new physics! We get there by escaping the current career trap which stops brilliant people from trying new approaches. Give the top, boldest, most daring researchers an alternative to tenure — $10m vested in a secure position at a new research institute. Then they won’t have to be scared of string theory boogeymen.
There is a basis in fact and theory that the Roman Empire fell, in part, due to Lead Acetate (AKA sugar of lead) being used as a sweetener. As far as I know, the bad effects of lead are well established, and the use of tetra ethylated lead as anti knock additive in car and aviation has endured in the face of solid science = lead is toxic. The oil and auto business bribed regulators to ignore the science, much like the tobacco bribe industry. I use the term 'bribe' in the true sense, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bribe, versus the political sense where 'lobby' is preferred. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying
There is also the Tammany Hall origin - I will meet you in the lobby with a bag of $$, which some say has been done in Congress in those bad old days.
A solar fence would work if you could get your neighbors on board.
Not really. Guix only really targets Linux and it achieves relocatable packs by virtualizing the filesystem in a variety of extremely non-portable ways. You can do this with Nix as well, of course, Guix wins no points here.

Neither supports non-absolute paths which is the crux of the issue.
And where did I hear someone say that we should ban everything he ever touched — just in case.
https://arcinstitute.org/
That's probably just scope 1 emissions, full lifecycle brings it to the number I gave.

The specific source was: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/26/23697746/tesla-climate-po...
I only briefly attended medical school, a dropout... I have reduced several cadavers into buckets of slop: we are much simpler than most believe =D

----

Do you have any thoughts on DishBrain's complexity?

DishBrain: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/What-can-you-GK9aohldRJqh9o...

Deeper dive into DishBrain (from HN, yesterday): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39651909