skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stanford was in the VC business long, long before. It's been told many times but Frank Terman set up much of the infrastructure to enable this back in the 1950s, building Stanford Research Park which housed Varian (microwaves and other RF), HP (some digital electronics stuff), and Lockheed (some bomb stuff). And that work built off the incredible investments into California infrastructure by the US military during WWII (https://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-va...), which followed some amazing investments in education, transport, and housing since the beginning of the gold rush.

But, in all honesty, if you want to identify single factors that truly contributed to Google not just surviving but thriving, I'd point at Jeff Dean. When he joined, Google was unable to update its index due to the design of the indexer. Jeff (along with Sanjay, or as many of us know him, "The Wise One"), built seminal software that enabled google to grow rapidly - not just updating the index faster, but doing search quality on logs, early ad experiments, and more. Obviously, other people played critical roles (Silverstein, /proc/bogdan, SRE Lucas) but IMHO if they hadn't had Jeff and Sanjay, google would have died back in 97 or 98.
Rappi
Totally unrelated, but is your username at all a reference to the marvellous indie game “The Marvellous Miss Take”?
> you have to cut-paste a task into a different todo list

I wrote a template for my Daily Note which includes a Tasks section. Underneath the list of tasks for the day, I use a Dataview to create a collapsable "Backlog" section, which selects all uncompleted tasks from my Daily Notes folder with a created time before the current file. It ends up looking something like:

### Tasks
- [ ] Task 1
- [ ] Task 2

>[!todo]- Backlog
> #### 2024-03-18 (1)
> - [ ] Uncompleted task from 2024-03-18 Daily Note
>
> #### 2024-03-17 (2)
> - [ ] First uncompleted task from 2024-03-17 Daily Note
> - [ ] Second uncompleted task from 2024-03-17 Daily Note

The cool part about this, aside from being able to show/hide the Backlog, is you can mark a task as done from the Backlog section, and it will update the original Daily Note file, and remove it from the Backlog section.

Here's the Dataview query I'm using:

>[!todo]- Backlog
> ```dataview
> TASK WHERE startswith(file.folder, "Daily Notes/") AND !completed AND file.ctime < this.file.ctime AND file.link != this.file.link GROUP BY file.link
> ```
I think the UX was the main reason people flocked to Google - an empty white page with a single search text entry and a button.
IMO this still doesn't change the fact that Excel is a 2D grid. Dealing with multi-dimensional data will always be tricky in that paradigm. Also, you'll still have cell references, no version control, no access control, ...

Excel is an amazing product and I'm sure people will still use it in 10 years. Our thesis is that for financial planning (and various other number-crunching use-cases) our building blocks make more sense.
A clock + challenge response is likely one of only a couple solutions to this problem, but the challenge is the "valid time" would need to be on the order of nanoseconds, not seconds to beat the relay attack mentioned in the article.

This might be doable but the authentication path would need entirely separate and dedicated circuitry.

Or maybe a cryptographic stream that is like a cumulative handshake (incremental streamed challenge/response?) that can offset some of the processing delay.

Any solution would need to be faster than nanoseconds because that's how long it takes light to travel a meter or two.
HIV in cell culture can be completely eliminated using CRISPR-Cas gene editing [pdf]
Author here.

Rig will do this too. You can statically list dependencies.
> as well as Project Kuiper satellites for its primary commercial customer, Amazon.

ESA subsidised by Jeff's hatred of Elon. And millions of taxpayers, of course.
Practice French Conversation Skills with AI
I've been learning French for over 6 years now, but I still cannot carry on conversations with native French speakers.

I built an AI that I could converse with in French. It can also provide me with instant grammatical feedback.

It is a bit slow but could save me from spending time on finding French natives to talk to.
We have released a few bits actually! https://causal.app/blog/scaling is one of my favourites (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32000400)
Seems like the easy way to get close to a 0-inflation policy. How would you get close to a situation where the price going from $10 to $11 indicated that the real price of a sandwich had risen?
it will not happen with LLM, so it's a complete unknown what could be next and when
You're making it sound like everything that's needed for modern AI is computing power.

But going back in the '70s with a bunch of 4090s will not help them much, as they wouldn't have enough data to do very meaningful things.
Availability of data and computing power went hand in hand, it's not just a matter of "they didn't know better": they couldn't do much else to begin with.
Indeed.
The CLR from its inception implemented a lot of features for helping native inter-op. I would guess that msft did make the effort simply because of their large legacy c/c++/win32 code base.

It's a shame really that msft stewardship of the .net/clr was so lacking. Of all the modern virtual machine clr us pretty much up there
Do you even understand what super compilation is? If you understood it, you wouldn't be thinking of a "couple hours every month". Supercompilation on Chrome would require more than a million hours of CPU time.
Seeing patterns clear as day is, in fact, bias. My condition heightens my biases and makes me confront how flawed reasoning about the "obvious" is. I wouldn't have brought it up if I thought you might try some weird ad hominem about how anxiety makes me immune to "real science". I haven't been attacking you. I just don't think your methods are sound. I don't know what your quote is coming from either, because I didn't say "seeing things that aren't there" either. I said reading more into things than are there and seeing patterns where they don't exist. This is the basis of things like numerology, homeopathy, racism, and many other human failings. The obvious, "clear as day" things can be actively dangerous.

How about your data? Like I said before, I'd be happy to see the data. You've thrown some numbers off the top of your head, but I'd rather see the raw gathered data.
> They deprecate their own hardware after about 5 years.

It's officially considered "vintage" 5 years after it is last sold, but that doesn't mean it won't receive OS updates. Apple considers hardware to be obsolete 7 years after sale ends, but is still likely to receive security updates for a while longer.

Their phones enjoy an even longer support window than their desktops/laptops if you consider security updates, the iPhone 5s (2013) just received a security update last year.
>This could lead to configPath looking like somepath / (note the space), which expands to sh save.sh somepath, which will happily remove everything.

Obligatory classic:

https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/commi...
He's saying they've already done the science. It's only humiliating if you've staked your ego on a particular theory. If your interest is only in getting to the truth, it's a reasonable point of view.
“the culture of Christianity” is not solely defined by evangelical Protestantism. Protestants make up 37% of the World’s Christians and, within the US at least, evangelicals make up roughly a third of US Protestants (according to Pew research). So, according to this poorly written title from NPR, “the culture of Christianity” is defined as what roughly 10% of Christianity follows. Wow. Makes the rest of the article just a little suspect…
Interesting, after reading this I went to go check my anonymized glassdoor profile (yeah, I would never risk getting fired by giving this company my real name) and discovered that all my reviews were deleted.
Cillium is a CNCF project and Apache 2 licensed. Isovalent and their enterprise product were bought by Cisco.
How do you know the statement is true if you have not proven it to be true?

Proof of true statements and discovery of new true statements go hand in hand. This is also because the proof tells you something about why the theorem is interesting. Generating multiple true statements given a set of assumptions is not very interesting per se.

But yes, something like, "in your situation, this is an interesting conjecture" would be nice in a proof assistant. Maybe AI will get us there.
I don't shut down my computers.

From a hardware perspective, it seems to be high temperature for a long time (>70C, >55C if it's passively cooled) and thermal cycling are the two mechanisms that cause hardware to fail. Neither of these are true for a computer left on when idling.

Where I am from, 1 W 24/7/365 is approximately one dollar per year (~10 cents per kWh). I have a Mac Mini M1, now, but I used to have an Intel MacBook Pro and before that, a 300W workstation.

The MacBook Pro took about 30 watts idling, so about two dollars a month. I probably lose more than that on exchange rate fluctuations.

The 300W workstation took about 300 watts idling, so about 20 dollars a month. This is rightfully significant, and due to this concern, that computer was replaced. However, if I did not have the option, 20 dollars a month is a perfectly reasonable price to pay considering the hundreds of tabs, programs, daemons, and other misc things that I always had going on. I treated the computer as an extension of my mind that doesn't sleep, and I would pay $20 gladly for this feature.

Now I have a Mac Mini M1. I haven't measured the wall power but "powermetrics" says the CPU, which is the only actual part in the computer, taking 600 mW (0.6W) idling. Absolutely no reason to shut this down ever. Why would I even consider that.

Unless you have a GPU, and a relatively modern system, most desktop PCs (dell, etc) probably take about 15-20W to run. A GPU adds about 20-30W of idle drain. Depending on what you do with your computer, the question is simple: Would I pay $1/W/24/7/365 per year to keep all my stuff open? If it's too high, can you reduce the idle power consumption?
Pros/Cons of the "drive by" code fix?
A question for HN: I'm in the habit of making small changes, as I see them, in code - usually fixing documentation strings and comments, occasionally refactoring code or even adding missing tests.

These "drive by" fixes, as I call them, are often not related to why I've created a branch and PR on some codebase, they're incidental.

I feel like if I tried to put them aside and address them later, they would never get fixed. The work of tracking them, checking out a fresh branch, making those changes, and getting them reviewed, merged, and released - outside of "real work" on the codebase - seems too difficult.

This applies to many open source projects I work on, as well as many of my current and past companies' internal code.

So is this a common habit? Is it something I should embrace, or something I should avoid?
No physical computer is a perfect Turing machine, thanks to random noise.

Analogue computers can always implement a Turing machine to within the bounds of that noise (and that's how transistors, which are really analogue devices, get used for digital signal and information processing).

A computer that used infinite-precision real numbers would be more powerful than any Turing machine, however unlimited-precision real numbers in the physical universe are prohibited by the holographic principle and the Bekenstein bound so we can't have them.
I really love the infinite nesting. I’m curious about snoozing on recurring tasks. After using OmniFocus I feel making tasks disappear and review are really important useful features to me.
RAFT is amazing!!
Again, my intention wasn't to downplay the importance of the EPA's ban. My intention was to point out that natural sources of pollution remain, as natural sources of pollution is something I have been fascinated with for a long time. For example, certain tree forests can emit sufficient unhealthy levels of hydrocarbon smog that the smog becomes visible in the air, kinda like Los Angeles before catalytic converters. But I certainly think eliminating man-made smog is a great thing, even if tree-made smog remains. And again, I have come to see now that my wording to the effect of, "An EPA ban on pollution X can't prevent natural sources of pollution X" has been interpreted as a statement logically identical to "EPA bans of pollutant X are pointless because natural pollutant sources of X still remain." But those two statements are not, in fact, logically equivalent. And again, I need to better learn that humans frequently suspect implications and insinuations in words that the speaker did not intend.
This part of his answer:

> A key part of their design was to not allow direct sending of commands — only bits could be sent. This means that (other) software inside each physical computer has the responsibility to interpret the bits, and the power to do (or not do) some action

seems, at least on a basic reading, to contradict this famous little argument (or maybe trolling?) he had on HN with Rich Hickey where he seems to be suggesting that one shouldn't just send raw bits, but also a little interpreter along with the data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11945722

Maybe this is an inevitable consequence of always speaking so abstractly/vaguely, but it also makes it difficult to know what exactly he's suggesting the industry, that he is so routinely critical of, should concretely do next.
The job market is tough enough that Avi Loeb getting tenure means somebody else didn’t. The young scientist seeing what Loeb can get away with because he is powerful might conclude they want to leave the field.
Yeah, it's nice to go faster, but "faster" will not outrace P != NP.

In all seriousness, I'm hoping that "Lyapunov computing" will get some more theoretical attention, because it is very easy to simulate extremely complicated dynamic systems (not constraining yourself to linked oscillator systems), but quantum computing has sort of sucked the air out of the "alternative computing technologies" ecosystem. In any case, the circuits have far outpaced the development of theory in this area.
Nvidia Wants to Replace Nurses with AI for $9 an Hour
I have heard from someone who tried it that FogBugz, Fog Creek's main (only?) product, wasn't very good.
> No? Are you confusing what you described—which is the aim of price-level targeting—with fixed-price policy?

There are people who seem to literally believe that without inflation people will refuse to invest in anything and choose to return to a cave-dwelling existence. I don't know how prevalent they are, but they turn up in these sort of threads.
Show HN: Export Claude Chats to Markdown, JSON, PNG
Here's a simple browser script to export Anthropic Claude [1] chats to markdown, JSON, and images (.png).

I wrote this script because Claude does not currently support sharing or exporting.

It utilizes html2canvas for downloading images of the chat, and a simple DOM parser for exporting as markdown and JSON.

It runs entirely locally in your browser console, so you can just copy and paste the code to download the active chat in your browser.

Of course, feel free to explore and verify the repo, or clone and build the code yourself, because pasting random code into your browser console is never a smart idea.

Hope this small script is helpful to others.

[1] claude.ai
Not possible within this century.
Ask HN: What was your wow moment when exploring LLMs?
What was your wow moment when exploring LLMs?
You should word this better. But I think Fasting helps because of autophagy, I don't think these are exactly related. I thought autophagy takes out proteins too.
Do you have some example? My kid uses "popcorn" parts to make chimney smoke, he uses "wolfverine claws" to make thatch roofs. Yes there are more parts created all the time, but you can still use them in very creative ways.
Y Combinator Co‑Founder Matching
Judge demands social media sites prove they didn't help radicalize mass shooter
Right now, when LLM generates code, its all statistically likely tokens based on training set. As it so happens, when you ask a question about stuff that it doesn't know about (i.e not in the training set), it sometimes hallucinates or gives wrong answers.

A major improvement would be if LLMs had some feedback loop on essentially what to ask itself back to validate answers, much like humans "second guess" themselves to make sure they are correct. For example, you could most likely make it simulate a computer by having a recurrent check of each individual line of code that it produces, asking the question like "If i have input x and this line of code, what would it produce", and then carrying back any errors it finds back to the beginning.

Notionally, this would look like self prompt injection, however that would likely be super slow compared to an RNN that works post tokenization/embedding and at the output of individual transformer heads.
Deep learning also learned how to play Go, not terribly interesting.
The linked docs provide more info: https://retina.sh/docs/intro
> In the end, software accessibility represents an edge case affecting a tiny fraction of users.

I'm curious: What fraction do you think it is? And what fraction do you think it should be for it to be taken more seriously?
Like finding a single sock in the dryer.
ChatGPT voice takes the cascaded approach - Whisper to transcribe speech to text, then to GPT, then to TTS. We skip the transcription step.

Latency: OpenAI's implementation is quite slow - 5+ seconds to get a reply - but even optimized solutions are far slower than this approach. Fundamentally, most transcription models do audio -> audio encoder -> text decoder. By skipping the text decoder, we are always going to win on speed, we just do less work.

Emotion: transcription cannot transcribe emotion, only the text, but emotion - eg if the user is sarcastic, angry, happy, etc - plays a big role.

Transcription errors: in a cascaded approach, any mistake in an earlier step propagates to the latter steps. Mistranscription means that the LLM will make a mistake. But the LLM's are really really smart, certainly smarter than the transcription models - they'll get it right more often.
Facebook has locked an account I've had forever (like back from when it required a .edu address) until I give them a "Photo ID".

Yeah. I think not.
Speaking of that:

.sh Saint Helena
.py Paraguay
.rs Serbia
.md Moldova
.tf French Southern and Antarctic Lands
.cc Cocos Islands
.so Somalia
.bz Belize
.ps Palestine
Mikhail reported to Rajesh Jha and I guess now he'll report to Mustafa.

Mikhail's official title is CEO of Advertising and the entire Windows Engineering org reports to him.

I just asked some MS friends who confirmed.
That's "solved" in the way that viruses "solved" life; I think we might want higher standards than that.

Un/fortunately (depending on who you ask), there's also a lot of automation being developed for every stage of the industrial processes from "where do we even look for the right rocks to get out of the ground?" to "here's the RAM chip you wanted to stick in your socket".
What's the super power of 35-year-olds? Arthritis?
Is it okay to apply to multiple roles as most roles seem to have a similar JD and my profile seems suitable for them?
I found it hard to parse whether you were describing JBC tips specifically, so as an FYI for readers, this is (AFAIK) how both JBC and Pinecil tips work (while still at very different price points)
Somewhat related: ijq https://sr.ht/~gpanders/ijq/
> The Fed and FDIC are separate. Central banks help with the liquidity problem. Deposit insurance solves it.

It seems you are somehow conflating “liquidity issues” with “what happens with customer's bank account”, as if bank runs were the only kind of liquidity issue that could happen to a bank, and then arguing that this isn't the case. But that's not my point in the first place!

Commercial banks need to borrow (central bank) money every once in a while to meet their liquidity needs, there doesn't need to be a bank run for that to happen, and if at that time nobody wants to lend, they are dead. Fortunately they can get the liquidity they need from the central bank directly at the discount rate, and we don't have a financial crisis every other year like what happened just before the Fed was created.
The main point he was making in that argument is that data is nothing without an interpreter. Sending an interpreter with the days is secondary. Rich hickey was saying that data is meaningful on its own. But that makes no sense.
If you work on hardware long enough you run into all kinds of things that make you realize just how little you know.

I had an interesting case around fifteen years ago. I had designed a real time image/video processor using a large Xilinx FPGA at the center of it. The system worked very well, except that it would have problems when flown on a helicopter. Actually, only certain kinds of helicopters, with certain types of cameras.

I scratched my head for months trying to solve this riddle.

Months later, while working on a completely unrelated problem, I touched the FPGA and burned my finger. It was surprisingly hot. This thing ran cool as can be, even without a heatsink.

What happened? At first I thought I had a bad board, so I swapped it out. Sure enough, it got very hot, very quickly.

Huh?

That's when I realized I was using footage from one of the helo's. For some reason my brain made the connection. I instantly knew why we were having problems with helicopter-mounted cameras and why I burned my finger: Vibration.

CMOS consumes power on state transitions, not so much once you reached the final state (low or high). More transitions per unit of time means more power. If the transitions are high speed edges (which is the case for real-time image processing) even worse.

The helicopters in question did not have motion-stabilized cameras. They were hard-mounted to the verticals of the skids and that was that. Which means that every bit of vibration from the helo made it onto the camera. Add that to the helo travelling and you have a perfect storm: Every pixel was changing on every frame at 120 frames per second. The translation was a massive increase in power consumption and heat dissipation. Hence my burned index finger and the problems we had with helo-mounted systems.

So, yeah, the power consumed by an imaging system is a direct function of the rate of change per unit of time of pixel data. A still frame consumes nothing when compared to a busy sequence where every pixel is changing. Logical, yet not obvious when you are not thinking in those terms.

You have to burn your finger (or knock stuff off your desk) to learn this kind of thing.
Very interesting, I am curious how do people reach that train of thought to a successful idea. So many great algorithms based on small twists.
Completely inefficient to chain logic through LLMs if they aren't baseline reliable.
Correct, s/some/vast majority of. Ex. major video conference software ML blur algos run at like 100x100 - the weird edge is much more about resolution of input/output than ML.
Scientists have, in fact, investigated it [1] and concluded it is a natural feature. Reading up on ancient-origins.net seems to suggest that it lets a lot of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories (ancient aliens and so on) creep in alongside credible articles.

1. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/waikato-news/news/kaimanawa-wall-...
A lot of people, on every side of every aisle, think that censorship of opinions and ideas that they do not hold is A-OK.

And here we are ensuring our models are cut in the same cloth we are. Reflections of the cages we wish to design for others.

War is peace. Oppression is safety.
i'll bite and take the action.. of course with an additional stipulation that you wield your wallet to all those daily driving osx that gets hit with this :)