skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Edit: this one from further down the thread too: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/briefing/shoplifting-data...

Your own source admits it's real, albeit limited to certain cities

"But the increase in shoplifting appears to be limited to a few cities, rather than being truly national. In most of the country, retail theft has been lower this year than it was a few years ago, according to police data. There are some exceptions, particularly New York City, where shoplifting has spiked. But outside New York, shoplifting incidents in major cities have fallen 7 percent since 2019, before the Covid pandemic."

That's hardly enough to support the claim it's "never shoplifting".

>https://sfist.com/2023/12/22/sure-enough-shoplifting-was-not...

The CNBC investigation this story was based on uses official crime statistics. Seems reasonable, until you realize that if officials aren't responding to crime reports (eg. lenient DAs), stores might not bother reporting, which makes it seem like crime is going down when it really isn't. You can see this in the nytimes article, which has both reported crime data as well as retailers' inventory ("shrink") data. The latter is obviously less susceptible to this effect, and we see that even though the reported crime rates were down 14% (45.1 -> 38.6), shrink was only down 3% (1.62 -> 1.57).

The two above combined makes the exculpatory evidence for "it's never theft" to be pretty weak.
Perhaps, but the difference between 3 and 30 milliseconds?

Call me skeptical.

I can edit fine over a remote desktop connection to a machine across town where a VirtualBox is running Ubuntu, where I have Vim in a Gnome Terminal.

> The lower you can get it, the better.

Really? There is no point of diminishing returns? If you have 5 microseconds latecy in your terminal, 2 is better?

That's literally what you're saying.
Thanks for the correction! I know, I just don’t believe in corporations so the distinction is slight
They weren't even 44B when elon took the keys - he specifically tried to back out of the deal because 44B was insane peak '21 asset bubble price. In truth they were probably like 10-15B at that moment. And now that bunch of advertisers left due to we know who it's probably about 10B
> > If the market were too small, the weakest would fail, right? Right?
> I find it interesting that we have sayings like this, and sayings like "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

To be fair "market" is referring to two different things in those two sentences. Different markets can have different characteristics.
power equals more heat. Water cooling and large heatsinks and loud fans are not desirable.
It's not like the typing latency is blocking. You can keep typing and issuing commands. The screen will catch up. I feel like anything under 50ms (20fps) is probably fine; the other various feedbacks like tree-sitter and LSP and what-not will probably be bigger bottlenecks anyhow. (Ed: whoa, uh, was surprised how slow these editors are, but that seems to be for full screen / little-whitespace redraws?).

As a vim user I can be going full steam ahead without looking at feedback. People used to come by and ask, how do you read that screen, everything is so small, and in jest I'd say I don't need to, I already have perceived everything there. My internal model of where I am and where I want to go and what I want to change is only semi-gated on seeing things. I'm not particularly great at navigating between things, but it still feels like a lot of this moving-between-things and changing-things-around stuff is pushed down to a semi-subconscious layer. The brain thinks and somehow the fingers do, and it doesn't feel like I'm really paying attention as these things happen.

One of my favorite pieces of anticipation and matching, that I haven't done in a decade, is Mass Effect 2, which had a pretty neat "hacking" mini-game that involved trying to recognize which of multiple windows of scrolling code was the "right" of code, from shape. Something about that really spoke to me as one of the finer arts of coding, of pattern recognition, of being able to discern place & identify patterns & location quickly from lo-fi moving screens. Being able to navigate code & yourself by look and feel is awesome. https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Bypass#Hacking

Terminals ought to be fast though. We should expect it. I respect that. Some of these terminals do seem unreasonably slow, and that should be improved. And maybe ghostty just rocks everyone & we all find we're way better after it, after terminals get way faster, but I also expect there's rapidly diminishing rapidly returns somewhere. But it'd be cool to set up on a 540 Hz monitor with a fast as sin emulator and find out if that's true or not.
Contract-Driven Development [video]
The article touches on this at the end, but every time I've tried to jump over to a dumbphone, I've always been stopped by one thing - lack of messenger services.

Maybe in America where these messenger apps are less prevalent its less of a problem, but in Japan not having access to Line, Instagram Messenger and Whatsapp would basically remove all ways for anybody to contact me.

It's not some sacrifice I can just accept for a digital detox either - texting is the main way people keep in touch nowadays. It would basically remove the entire purpose of having a phone at all.
And the very near miss of the White House or other nearby target
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93
I’m far more concerned with the “not a missile” than the power stations. I don’t believe it was ever solved.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mystery-missile-launch-seen-off...
The theory of (LVT) land value tax is that it replaces other taxes. LVT has less or no dead weight loss so it's a more efficient tax.

> If there's a loophole such as lack of sales tax for car washes, fix that, but let the playing field remain even.

My claim is that the playing field is not currently even rather it is massively in favor for low-capital, low-labor, and low-regulatory businesses (like car washes) and additionally incentives ostensibly designed to encourage real estate development (1031 like-kind, treatment of real estate as depreciating, etc.) are now primarily used to either speculate on existing real estate or build the minimum to gain ownership/interest in speculation. If you take all the cash you have, you can only buy a finite amount of land. If you build a low-capital but profitable business like a car wash, you are only limited by the leverage limits imposed by lenders.

> If desirable high value businesses aren't able to compete with car washes, isn't that the market doing it's thing?
> but what are the 2nd and 3rd order effects of such a change?

Tautology yes, as desired no. Technically yes because the market is shifting towards low-capital and low-regulatory businesses because they have a more predictable ROI. The goal isn't to disfavor the more capital & regular intensive businesses just regulate them. i.e the influx of car washes is the undesired 2nd order effect of some other policy e.g. minimum parking for restaurants and apartments (likely no such rule exists for car washes so now you need less land a car wash vs a restaurant).

Raising regular property taxes (land+improvements) is just easier solution than waiting for far-reaching tax reform like LVT. IMO it's better to correct the market even if it means raising taxes overall in the short term.
Has anyone outside of x.ai actually done inference with this model yet? And if so, have they provided details of the hardware? What type of AWS instance or whatever?

I think you can rent like an 8 x A100 or 8 x H100 and it's "affordable" to play around with for at least a few minutes. But you would need to know exactly how to set up the GPU cluster.

Because I doubt it's as simple as just 'python run.py' to get it going.
Many people are obese despite not living in poverty (including myself, unfortunately).
I think TikTok is the only big social media platform that's not banning (or soft banning) pro-Palestine content. The content is all likelihood is organic and the bans basically result in TikTok being the platform that contains most of the pro-Palestine content.
If they don't have customers wouldn't we expect them to shut down at some point?
Oh absolutely, I just couldn't help pointing out the little detail I noticed; given this is HN an all.

In my opinion, if you've shipped 2 or more units at the given prices... You've actually priced it right for your target market!
I was thinking about it one time, coincidentally I went into the example of metal wire itself. I call it the "Stack trace of an object"

https://chat.openai.com/share/3bad8272-c632-4659-8c0b-59578e...

There is also, based on this definition of the stack trace, what are the most simplest objects. the simpleness of an object is defined by the height of that stack trace
PC power consumption is an important metric for those with backup power systems, especially in countries with infrequent electricity delivery (e.g. South Africa).

If you can afford a 320W CPU in the first place, you can probably afford the batteries to power the thing for a few hours, but it does still add a considerable amount to your backup costs.
Cellular compression will not play nicely with analog modems. (Or any lossy compression, really - this is why you have to use lossless G.711 to have any hope of this working on VoIP.)

Back in the days of 2G cellular, GSM had an option to have your cell phone digitally connect to an analog modem in the cell tower, and have the tower place an analog modem call on your behalf. (Very similar to how T.38 works for faxes in the VoIP world.) You'd then connect your cell phone to your laptop over RS-232, IrDA, or Bluetooth. It was called CSD ("circuit-switched data), and used 1x voice channel for 9600 bps, or 4x voice channels for 56 kbps. Needless to say your cell carrier charged quite a bit for using this capability.

I don't know if there's any cell carriers left that still offer CSD calls.
They should bring this back, if only to force applicants to actually prove they have the capacity to create the thing they’re patenting.
So, why PG devs are resistant against introducing hints, and allowing users optimize base on their knowledge about data nature and have predictable results?..
The pro-land value tax response is that, if someone really believed people highly valued washing their cars in the city, one could open up a car wash on expensive land. If people really don't want to drive 30 minutes but also really want to wash their car, they can pay more to use this expensive in-town car wash. It is of course possible that the economics wouldn't make sense to support such a use of urban land in the densest/highest value areas.
Not at all. There are a number of small drones (field launchable by a single person) used for surveillance and delivering kinetic payloads.

This is one of many that are publicly acknowledged

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroVironment_Switchblade

The RQ-11 is a hand launchable drone used by the US (among others) with more than 19k airframes having been delivered.
It appears to be a very powerful influence tool. Ryan McBeth [1] made a video showing how easy it is to serve a message to small target demographics. This seems distinct to how, say, youtube works: serving adds to the targeted demographics and algorithm serving content based on prior.
Tik tok seems to add a content creator being able target your content to an audience. This also seems to be able to be done without the public or any authorities being aware. It looks like a great tool to encourage discord.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB7WzqUq4Nk
That would be really cool. Does anybody know whether they will be made available or not?
Just because the ancient Romans didn't understand lightning didn't mean it didn't exist.
Pretty cool but without traces I can't use this. Will monitor it in the next months because I'd have a good use for it.
Music Under the Microscope
The interest depends on the loan terms, right?

300k over 30 years is ~21k in interest per year. Over 10 years its ~17.5k a year.

But yeah, that's a lot. I'm curious how one racks up $300k at a state school. I just checked a few state schools in New York and their out of state tuition is ~7k a year?

$300k is enough to have gotten a degree from the most expensive private school in the US (Harvey Mudd).

But to answer the OP: absolutely do not start a company. Get a job and pay your loans off.
If you need the visual check, that's probably a colossal amount of latency already. Even if the screen updates are instant, the act of reading & comprehending is - I believe - slow.

It does help to have fast response. Agreed. I use Debian's aptitude, and man, even on a beastly desktop there is a lot of waiting >1s+. On my ultra-portables it's even worse (really should go back to atomic system images via btrfs to avoid this). Latency sucks. But I feel like there's significantly outsided attention paid to whether a terminal is 10ms or 40ms. Once we start getting to 100ms, it's starting to be a real issue, is problematic. But I think generally most devs pretty quickly reach a point where as they type and do work, they use feel & their mental model way more than the screen to achieve their goals. The feedback, when it's fast, stops being visual.
Ugh, I hate when audio in a movie is too far out of sync. More than ~16ms in either direction is really obvious, especially when lips are flapping.
so maybe it WAS triggered by solder fumes!
> It has no memory, no agency, no emotions, no desires, no pain, no sense of self.

It does have permanent memory, that's what training creates. It doesn't have agency. Whether it has desires, pain or sense of self is completely unknown, unless of course you have some mechanistic model of these phenomena such that we can see its presence in the human brain and see that LLMs do not have a comparable process.

Of course you don't have such a model because it doesn't exist at this time. The problem is not that people have been fooled by stochastic parrots, it's that you've fooled yourself into thinking we understand more about the human mind than we actually do, and also possibly that humans are far more complex and special than might actually be the case, eg. that we are not basically stochastic parrots ourselves.
Have recently made the switch to Termius. I really like it. However, I noticed there is local lag when typing. Anyone else see this?
Presence of empathy has nothing to do with the position that qualitative experience is illusory.
That's because it's stated goal is a lie. If it's stated goal was real -- take out Hamas and follow the rules of war -- they wouldn't have killed 15,000 children.
CIA is probably teaching the Ukrainians to build cheap, small drones and presumably they're building prototypes in a lab somewhere.
I think the title should be:

How can I get rid of FOMO?

or

How can I control/manage my curiosity?
The reasons the Catholic Church did away with astrology can be explained in a one liner. Catholicism assumes a belief in free will, and the claimed predictive power of astrology contradicted this, and so was deemed blasphemous.
In software world, I can point someone to PostgreSQL (I’ll keep using that example, though my point is there are lots of examples!) to see a fully-realized product including all the tedious stuff. And it’s nothing to do with hobbyists, this exact codebase is the same one that keeps billion-dollar businesses running.

What are the equivalent projects of equal professionalism and completeness in open hardware world? Maybe Open Compute Project?

Or does the jump to “hobbyists” indicate there is very little like that, in other words virtually all serious hardware is not open?
Unfortunately, while the service claims that free tier latency may be between one and five minutes, it sets a one minute timeout and fails if it takes longer.
Cache is king for gaming because of the sheer amount of data needing to be processed. Anything ALU limited in games is categorically not being cache or memory limited because of how memory speed starved modern CPU cores are so making the cores stupid fast only takes you so far. Especially with the insane power budget these chips ask for.

Games need to do a crazy amount of branchy unpredictable work on an enormous dataset so they're very often limited by memory latency which is alleviated most readily by more cache and prefetching. It's why the ECS pattern is so popular as of late from a performance standpoint because it encourages more logic to be written as iterations over dense linear arrays which are just about the best case for a CPUs cache management and prefetching logic.

Factorio is probably the best example of this because it's a game where performance is entirely CPU limited where AAA games more often used in benchmarks are much more dominated by GPU time.
This is the kind of weird shit I come to HN for.
No. The land would be taxed whether it has improvements or not, and in fact would be taxed the same amount whether improved or not. That's how such a tax incentivizes improvement - if you're paying the tax either way, you want to do as much as possible with it to get your money's worth.
I think you mean "untyped", which is only as true as you make it. Type annotations have been mainstream for many years now.
that's like saying the 18th century was more "civilized" because we settled squabbles with dueling pistols. people are still people and we are just about as civilized today as we ever were. which isn't saying much.

the analogy holds for programming languages as well as it does for anything else involving people.
no it empathizes the importance of training smaller models for longer, like the Mistral "overtrained" models
For your trouble, you save some extra bytes with 85 vs 64.
The benefit is that you and your loved ones don't sicken and die with age.
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.

What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.

I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.

My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
Software it's not what you think it is (2023)
That sounds really interesting, in a way I cannot begin to comprehend.

Can someone please translate into more common vernacular?
You may enjoy the book How To Invent Everything[1], which scratches the surface of recreating everyday inventions/conveniences in a satisfying way.

1. https://www.howtoinventeverything.com
A lot of those 4000% markup stories are apparently not real, but rather accounting artifacts; they're cases where, like, a wrench bills out at $20,000, but what's actually happening is that the procurement was for a whole stealth bomber, and the cost gets spread across all the line items pro rata.
The turbo model is particularly bad.
This JBIG2 "myth" is too widespread. It is true that Xerox's algorithm mangled some numbers in its JBIG2 output, but it is not an inherent flaw of JBIG2 to start, and Xerox's encoder misbehaved almost exclusively for lower dpis---300dpi or more was barely affected. Other artifacts at lower resolution can exhibit similar mangling as well (specifics would of course vary), and this or similar incident wasn't repeated so far. So I don't feel it is even a worthy concern at this point.
Bats of the Midnight Sun
Over 35,000 startups shut down in India in 2023
>But VW is banking on something Rivian doesn’t have, a backstory. An avid fanbase in America fondly remembers Scout.

"<1" of them, actually.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
Wow, that 450k number really is large when you compare it to the number of software engineers in US to be roughly 4.4m (by 2022 estimate [1]). I think the former may include professions/roles other than software development, but it's a chunk o change for sure.

[1] https://qubit-labs.com/how-many-programmers-in-the-world/
Any lossy compressor changes the original image for better compression at expense of the perfect accuracy.
They watched Breaking Bad too much :-)
"I pitty the fool" - Mr. T
Just hide behind a large planet and hope they can't distort 3D into 2D.
The 1% who actually work on AI don't use terms as generic as "AI". Way to reveal yourself as college undergrad who read a couple of popular science books, downloaded MNIST data and thinks they are "experts".
i'm astonished that no one has created a well-functioning dumbphone that has what most people would agree upon as essential - things like maps, 2FA, encrypted messaging, tethering, android auto/carplay, etc.
Totally. Multiple agencies were aware of the plot in full or in part, and it was utterly down to mismanagement of national defense.

The “inside job” has always really been distraction from the mundane truth it was a massive fuckup by the people in charge.

So I’m very open to the possibility there are a lot of adversaries walking around the permitters of US bases with little drone kits having a blast.
Not so much in FPGA ... although I'm not sure top end FPGAs would beat Nvidia TPUs even with this algorithm, and even if cost were not a consideration.
Property tax is mostly the structure though.
> These are not requirements for intelligence or any physical process

That you know of. There very well could be a connection between subjective experience and intelligence or physical processes, eg. identity theory.

> The only conclusion I can make is that there is indeed a non physical reality.

No, there are plenty of other options, like that every physical process has a subjective quality to it, or that the perception of subjective qualities is flawed and so the conclusion mistaken, among others.
Just came here to say: bill mill is an awesome human and I'm glad to see his work appreciated here!
At least we have a long runway?