skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A.I. Is Learning What It Means to Be Alive
Religion is a cancer that really needs to be cut free from humanity, not co-mingled with technology and the modern world. It's disgusting to consider the sheer number of people that have been killed in the name of fictitious "gods". Religion is a tool used by the wicked at almost every point in history to justify their greed, hatred, violence, and unjust actions as being the will of some higher power that only they can hear. Even now, far right nutjobs are again co-opting religion to push their vitriol into the minds of the weak.
Is the name you hated a regular name in your language and culture? If so, I’m curious what made you hate it (I mean this literally, not skeptically).

I think the assumption here is that kids named “Aquamann” or “Adolf Hitler Campbell” are likely to hate their name, but people named “Guðmundur” (in Iceland) much less so. I’m curious what you think about that assumption.
One of the issues that I discovered during COVID is that alcohol isn’t a scheduled pesticide because it predates the regulation.

So applications that are regulated cannot use alcohol unless they can use a listed product, which is rare and expensive
Thanks! Yeah RL for LLMs is pretty underexplored I think beyond the RLHF stuff. Pretty tough to get working tho.
https://archive.ph/ILHOe
This should be all accounted for in rent. California rent seems to be 50% higher than Florida.
It seems rare to make use of the distinction between null and undefined in real Javascript code. It mainly seems useful in debugging: seeing a crash with an undefined value tells you something different than a null value.
Interviewers need to be careful to remain unbiased and objective about their criteria. Saying you evaluate on attitude and personality is pretty similar to letting personal biases and stereotypes drive the process.
Missing one.

When Noah got off the ark, he told the animals "Go forth and multiply."

Noah did inspection tours each month. After a couple months there were baby rabbits, soon baby squirrels, and after 16 months there was even a baby elephant. But month after month, the snakes failed to reproduce.

"What's the matter with you guys?" he asked.

"After the flood, it's been wet and cold down here on the ground. We just can't get it up."

"Ok," said Noah. "I think I know what to do." So he tore some of the wooden logs out of the ark and built a table high enough to get the snakes up off the ground, with a ramp so they could crawl up on top and sun themselves.

Next month when Noah came back, there were baby snakes everywhere!

Which just shows to go, even an adder can multiply if you give him a log table.
Some better pro [0] tips:

1) Don't use a browser for editing anything. Treat it as an area of
memory that exists "in the cloud" with unknown access by hostiles.
Browsers leak information through:

- ability to see and transfer clipboard contents

- DNS lookups of urls even temporarily pasted into them

- autocmplete, spell checks, grammar checking etc

2) Don't use Gmail. The entire outfit is a huge data harvesting
operation to feed advertising.

[0] I am assuming that "pro" here is intended to denote "professional"
rather than "prostitute".
It's not a good model to think of S3 has having directories in a bucket. It's all objects. The web interface has a visual way of representing prefixes separated by slashes. But that's just a nice way to present the objects. Each object has a key, and that key can contain slashes, and you can think of each segment to be a directory for your ease of mind.

But that illusion breaks when you try to do operations you usually do with/on directories.
Author here, thank you!

My understanding is that with pharmaceuticals, new drugs must always go through clinical trials to prove safety and effectiveness before the FDA approves them for public use, so there's not really an equivalent to the 510(k) process for drugs.
Tbf, startup ceo pay is not that great. Except for maybe very late stage engineers often get paid more in base comp. And at late stage your startup should pay you enough to live in Bay Area.
I've turned off web/app activities and don't use Google web search (directly). However, I keep YouTube and maps tracking (from time to time).

YouTube because this is one of the algorithms that provide good suggestions with minor work on my side.

Position because I can go back in time when I travel (I try to turn it off otherwise).
Living in SoCal still offers distinct advantages in terms of civil rights, a social safety net, and access to a vast number of small and large businesses (for both work and services). The entry-level job thing is compounded by requirements for degrees and experience that fully expect folks to down-skill to lower-wage roles.

One factor that looms large is the gig economy: Uber/Lyft/DoorDash/etc. They've become a lynchpin in providing delivery services that restaurants have come to rely on, while hitting both them and consumers with large fees. Pizza delivery is being shifted from actual drivers to gig workers, to avoid a recent law change requiring more pay; this has become an act of cost-externalization, and further increases the dependency on the gig workers. And overall the gig workers aren't necessarily seeing gains from this change, since their employers fight tooth and nail on efforts to increase their pay.

This doesn't even begin to cover what's happening in the agricultural and creative industries; the latter of which I believe has been covered writ-large in this space.
Many reasons to hate ones name. Have an abusive father and your name happens to be John Jr? I wouldn't want to have my fathers name either, even though there's nothing wrong with the name John.
Why are they so skimpy on memory capacity? I guess this is a dev kit for anything but LLMs?
Directories make up a hierarchical filesystem, but it’s not a necessary condition. A filesystem at its core is just a way of organizing files. If you’re storing and organizing files in s3 then it’s a filesystem for you. Saying it’s “fundamentally a key value store” like it’s something different is confusing because a filesystem is just a key value store of path to contents of file.

Indeed there’s every reason to believe that a modern file system would perform significantly faster if the hierarchy was implemented as a prefix filter than actually maintaining the hierarchical data structures (at least for most operations). You can guess that this might be the case that file creation is extremely slow on modern file systems (on the order of hundreds or maybe thousands per second on a modern NVME disk that can otherwise do millions of IOPs and listing the contents of an extremely large directory is exceedingly slow)
Wrong when applied in the general context of fundamental physics ?? (See also how entropy can often be approximated as an objective and property of a system, its density intensive, but in the general case that's wrong.)

Speaking of, I'm somewhat puzzled, you said that "under strict Bayesianism knowledge can't ever decrease", but how does it then deal with something as simple as card shuffling ??
High shower pressure can help people save water, study suggests
Show HN: Peer to Peer Authenticated/Encrypted Chat
I used to pay for Gitlab but my experience with their billing and customer support was horrible so I stopped. Companies need to make it easy to pay them too.
Maybe we should just spray each town from the air and cut out the middleman? While we're at it we can infect a portion with polio just to see what happens.
"The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't" I liked this book as well. Here's Max Born supporting the mindset.

I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed. We do not find signposts at crossroads, but our own scouts erect them, to help the rest.

- Max Born, as mentioned in Experiment and Theory in Physics (1943)
I’d settle for rank choice voting
Isn't a GPGPU just a PPU?
GPT-4-Vision is a surprisingly lot better than I expected for a variety of practical tasks. OpenAI released a demo notebook with practical use cases for tagging/captioning a few weeks ago: https://cookbook.openai.com/examples/tag_caption_images_with...

It will be much better once it gets function calling/structured data support so you don't have to the formatting hacks that notebook abuses to get a specific output format.

Just don't ask it to describe a real person in the image or it gets fussy.
> the network round trip time is negligible compared to the disk seek

Only for spinning rust, right?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation
I realized after a while of living there that California is run as a real estate cartel. Land owners who bought when the state was cheap own it, and everyone who bought later is beholden and locked in with golden handcuffs to the high price environment they created.

I call it a cartel because the scarcity is 100% a policy choice. Density is not high, public transit is awful, and there is a ton of land left to develop on. Real estate in California is like diamonds from DeBeers.

If you aren't rich, don't stay there. All your surplus will go to landlords. If you buy at these high prices >50% of your income will go to servicing the mortgage and if the property market there ever does crash you'll be ruined. You’ve basically bought into a cartel.

I'd say for the Bay Area it's worthwhile to go to build out your career but if you aren't making at least $350k/year by age 35 leave.

Personally I’m glad I left because I loathe this property cartel and what it does to people and wouldn’t want to put my money into it.

IMHO the state has this totally fake reputation as a liberal “woke” place when in reality it’s a landlords kingdom. Texas is more progressive than California because a working class person can afford a home.
[SS]: I got an IPv6 IP and it started having me thinking -- using Handshake blockchain you can actually communicate, peer to peer, without a central identity server or middle man; so I made a simple POC! It's pretty fun, and I myself am excited to see what the possibilities are as IPv6 adoption increases :D
To be fair, in a comment on the original article, the author does confirm that this was a career fair type of event, where I'd assume the "hiring bar" is usually lower, and I'd assume there are certain target numbers to hit.
Here in Finland there is no list but if you try to give a name that has not been given before it goes to a board to be checked that it is appropriate.

Basically done to protect the child from names that they would be bullied for.
Reminds me of Aircrete which can also be made with fly ash: https://domegaia.com/blogs/aircrete-dome-mastery/aircrete-10...
Isn't the intention that everyone submitting their devices for approval have done in-house penetration tests extensively? Or at least laid out specific claims as to what it can endure and what it cannot?

The third party test seems to be just the last verification stage to reassure the FDA the company is not making unsupportable claims.
Maybe for snapshots, but certainly not for live data.
I think the point the OP was trying to make is that they regularly detected bitrot due to their scale, not that they were merely capable of doing so.
it's well known and not debatable that Cinnabon is fire
I’d wait till the dust settles. Maybe 2bit encoding (-1, 0, 0.5, 1) would be easier to design hardware for; as 0.5 can be a bitwise shift.
A good QA might be even the folks that know most how system actually works and what are all the features. Your developer can end up easily work in single corner, with few happy paths. Where as QA should touch nearly all surfaces of product. And even have idea what are most of the specs.
You can have any number of sentinel objects.
> As someone who spent half my life with a name I hated, to me this is more "human rights violation" than "fine".

It sounds like you can change your name, though? Your new name just has to be in the list. Are you saying you hate every name in the list?
Which is a text (and AI scifi theme) version of the classic Cookie Clicker
> It seems rare to make use of the distinction between null and undefined in real Javascript code.

It is admittedly rare, but when it's useful, it's _really_ useful. It can be used, e.g., to distinguish between "property is not set" and "property has been explicitly set to a non-value (null)". That's not _often_ useful, but when it is, it _really_ is. YMMV.
Is it ensure sanitised sql queries

https://xkcd.com/327
I was born in California and moved away because I wanted to experience other things after college. It's now 15 years later and plenty of offers have been given for me to move back, but not a single one would make up for my quality of life/cost of living hit I'd make moving back.

I'd have to make like 3x more than I do now to keep the same quality of life and nowhere comes close to that at the moment.

My whole family still lives there but I'd rather them move closer to me than me move there.
Bald is a “normal” (as in, not something the parents invented) name, although it’s not as popular as it once was. It’s a derivative of Baldwin/Baldric/Beald/Balder.
I've worked with EXACT this type of problem and for me RAG works perfectly well - it may seem "clumsy" as you put it in terms of trying to engineer or optimize the indexing, augmentation, and retrieval techniques, but it's worth it. I would claim that going down the finetuning route lends to a significantly higher probability of going astray at a MUCH larger cost.

There have been some attempts to compare RAG vs FT approaches, I would recommend this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01432
Yeah the same acronym in a similar context (data in this case) is no bueno.
The MBAs trying to keep old media afloat are held hostage by shareholders who don't even watch the product. The general public has become increasingly less willing to spend any amount of time (eyes on ads) or money (subscriptions) on broadcast and print journalism. A whole generation of consumers has grown up on ad-free content and cannot fathom how the business model worked so well, pre-AdSense. Even if they can comprehend broadcast and print business models, they refuse to participate and then complain about the rising cost of subscription services; services that are now experimenting with reintroducing advertisements.

Journalists are in a boat that Youtube, Facebook Marketplace/Craigslist and Google search plowed into. Until consumer habits change, the sinking continues.
Don't get me wrong, it's a stupid limitation indeed -- but sometimes decisions like these are meant to stop users from doing stupider things :)

I'm no fan of oversimplification, but Apple's audience is everyone, not just power users. In that case, I'd prefer having advanced options surfaced to me as "advanced" so I can do what I want, but leave the simple experiences for the simple folk.
Sort of? California's economy is shaped like a pyramid scheme in many regards, and land speculation is one of them. It also filters down into local tax revenue (housing prices must continually increase for municipalities to balance their budget, because of Prop 13), the type of industries that can be located there (only the most high-margin can survive the cost of living), the sort of folks who live there (who generally want to get rich quick or admit defeat and move home), and the public discourse (which is always hyping up the next big thing).

But in general the bottom of the pyramid lies outside California. All that money that eventually ends up in the pocket of California real estate speculators? Most of it comes from the pension funds and 401(k)s of ordinary workers in the rest of America, which invest in the darling companies of the day not realizing that everything is temporary. Those $2M ranch houses in Silicon Valley are bought by folks bringing in $500K in stock options per year, which is all fueled by their employers being worth $2T.

California's problem today is that we're between pyramid schemes. Most of the old-line web/mobile/marketplace schemes have reached maturity and are nearing collapse, but new pyramid schemes like crypto and AI are just getting started. Until the dollars start flowing in earnest California will likely teeter and stagnate at the top.
My recollection is that the operating telephone companies paid AT&T 1% of revenues as the license fee for use of AT&T's patents. This funded AT&T's engineering department as well as Bell Labs research, systems engineering and advanced development. Th other main chunk of civilian work was development engineering funded by Western Electric. Prior to the end of the anti-missile systems military work, the military budget was greater than civilian work.

Sometime prior to divestiture, the 1% may have been raised a little. There may have also been additional operating company funding for Bell Information Systems, which developed administrative software for their use.

The notion that Bell Labs was an idyllic competition-free environment is incorrect. In the development organizations there was fierce competition between developers of analog versus digital transmission systems, microwave versus coaxial cable systems, space division versus time-division switching, etc. There may have been less in the basic research, but having worked later with ex-research staff, I'm pretty sure there was considerable competition for resources, funding, and scientific credit and internal/external recognition.
The dissent hidden in an iconic scientific image
>And do you think prices have to increase so that you can have an "artifical oversupply" of housing?

No, prices and rents in the most desirable areas should creep down toward "the marginal cost to create housing" as we create an oversupply. It will never actually get there, because people will need/want to create a profit, but it should find its way toward an equilibrium near there.

The only reason why they might bump up temporarily is only that new housing is more expensive than "used" (existing) housing, so when new housing comes on the market it, it becomes the most desirable, and is priced the highest, but that should reduce the price of existing housing.

This is your basic supply curve, though many people will argue (without much sense), that supply curves somehow don't apply to housing.

>And I thought you were advocating for free markets, yes, since you talked about "market rate". Sorry for the wrong inference.

I'm a strong believer in markets generally, though not necessarily "free" markets, because I think incentivizing and disincentivizing things we collectively want/don't want is one of the best ways to create general welfare for most people.

The reason I advocate for markets in housing is two-fold.

Firstly, housing is notoriously easy to hoard and sublet, which makes it ripe for abuse in a subsidized system. If we give people housing at significantly below market prices (that is prices below what they could get an equivalent unit for today), we should expect "dishonest" people to sublease that housing to capture that value. This is commonplace in San Francisco, where I live, that folks with rent-controlled units regularly bring in roommates or subtenants and charge them market rates, and just pocket the difference. Yes it's illegal, but it's a civil matter, and would require an expensive lawsuit against your roommate to solve, which would then likely end up with you looking for another unit at market rate anyway, so it's impractical to enforce.

The other reason is land-hoarding. As we see in Stockholm, and in long-term rent controlled tenants in San Francisco, we see people paying below market rates, and then they tend to have more space than average. This is simply cause by the fact that, all things being equal (in price), more space is desirable to less. So this is a major inefficiency for everyone else who needs housing and would be willing to settle for less space. My utilizing markets, we will see people more willing to use space efficiently being allocated more units.

This is why I want to see markets (or at least lotteries), with at least semi-regular lease renewals, even in socialist systems. When housing isn't perpetual, people will vote to provide that good to everyone, and not just themselves (especially when difficult trade-offs must be made to do this). I want people to have skin in the game, where they know that if we aren't taking care of everyone, they themselves are at risk of being left behind.
> You can have any number of sentinel objects.

Of course, but giving a memory address to the null and/or undefined value feels (after having used JNI) really awkward. My API cannot(?) sensibly distinguish between null and undefined without giving at least one of them a distinct address. (Or maybe it can... i'll have to try that...)
Lots of people program games. If games are worthless, why is programming a game worthwhile?
Reminds me of: https://xkcd.com/1494/
I do not have a gougle account at all.
He‘s unlucky to have a passport of a country with zero influence in this part of the world. I doubt that if he was in Australia he would be extradited.
> We observed that all the VLMs tend to be confident while being wrong. Interestingly, we observed that even when the entropy was high, models tried to provide a nonsensical rational, instead of acknowledging their inability to perform the task

It looks like all current models suffer from an incurable case of Dunning–Kruger effect cognitive bias.

All are at the peak of Mount Stupid.
... just like every other country, especially whole Europe
Many (most?) countries have naming restrictions. This Wikipedia article mentions the laws by country and there are some really odd restrictions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law

I find the entry for my country New Zealand to be pretty funny - although presumably less funny for the parents. I especially like that * is a banned name (for technical reasons: I think because it means NULL in the DIA for people with only one name - not because it interferes with search - I would also guess Asterisk as a word is allowed).
> There is no theoretical or empirical basis for LLMs having any reasoning capability.

Yes there is. Learning to predict the next token implies a lot of things, among which is also logical reasoning. The chain-of-thought approach shows that when you stimulate this behavior, you get higher accuracies.
...and the sweet Aquamanndottir
Yes, not mentioning paperclips makes me question if the author is erudite enough to write for a tech news site.
Author here! I was legitimately considering building an iPhone OCR farm for this based on this article about running OCR on memes [1]. Haven't tried it in practice, but the article claims it has better performance than tesseract.

[1]: https://findthatmeme.com/blog/2023/01/08/image-stacks-and-ip...
... What about logic programming?
SSO is not a requirement for secure software. It’s a requirement for enterprises because otherwise they have to manually keep track of everyone’s accounts everywhere, but that’s a management issue not a security issue (unless managed poorly).

Admittedly for many SaaS and OSS offerings SSO is an enterprise-only feature while it doesn’t have to be, but it’s the best discriminator they have to separate cheaper plans from enterprise plans. The alternative is to charge more for all plans, but then you lose out to the competition that does play this enterprise tax game.
I don't think a judge or jury is going to buy that.