skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> when comparing that advancing by a given number is a period, it's much more efficient to advance both sides to minimize the number of 1 bits

I’m missing something here… what do you mean by “advance both sides?”

> an informative period failure is 15 = 6 + 6 + 3. Doesn't this conflict with something in the article?

You’re talking about, say, P(x) = x^4 + x^2 + 1, for a four-bit LFSR? This will have three nontrivial cycles, with length 6, 6, and 3. Rather than talk about this specific polynomial / specific set of taps, we can consider that the initial (non-zero) state is in one of those three cycles. There are three possibilities for the length of a cycle:

1. Maximum period 2^k-1. In this case, 15.

2. Period which is a factor of 2^k-1, such as 3.

3. Period which is not a factor of 2^k-1, such as 6.

We can distinguish these case by picking an initial state and then doing a series of checks, where we advance the LFSR by N steps, and then see if it is in the initial state again.

For exactly the LFSRs with maximum period, the LFSR will be in the initial state after advancing 2^k-1 steps, but it will not be in the initial state after advancing (2^k-1)/p steps for prime factors p of 2^k-1. In the case of a 4-bit LFSR, we check N=15, N=5, and N=3. The cycles of length 6 will fail the test because they will be in a different state after advancing 15 steps. The cycles of length 3 will fail because they will be in the same state after advancing 3 steps. The end result is that the LFSR with cycles of length 6, 6, and 3 will be rejected, no matter which cycle the initial state is in.

> tradition makes people produce LFSRs with very few taps but if you're doing it in software there's no real reason you have to do anything other than keep them even and use the end bits.

The reason I was looking at this in the first place was out of a kind of retrocomputing interest, and using something like 0x100001b as your polynomial for a 24-bit LFSR can make the implementation slightly shorter / faster, on some older CPUs and with memory constraints.

It was easy to find a lot of handwaving and code / numbers copied from place to place, and I wanted to know how to generate the polynomials / pick the taps in the first place. The program I wrote just goes through the polynomials in lexicographic order, so it’s not actually trying to pick the fewest number of taps, but it will prefer sets of taps where the taps are all clustered on one side.
While it’s certainly accurate insurance is a regulated industry, nothing you listed explains why it’s a good idea to allow government to set or approve rates vs. ameliorating those social concerns through other means.
Have AI-Generated Texts from LLM Infiltrated the Realm of Scientific Writing?
I actually experience CEVs easily without any drugs at all, something that’s happened all my life. I can even influence it to some extent. IE if I close my eyes and focus I can create more and more intense closed eye visuals without falling asleep. When I was a child I used to do this for fun when I was bored.

So yeah, it’s definitely not a hard and fast rule about CEVs.
putting my conspiracy hat for a moment but:

what if this was Iran pre-emptively leaking plans early?

Eid al-Fitr is on April 11th, the end of ramadan.

I believe we will see Iran making good on its threats this month.
That's assuming it's not done already with their mission of being open completely forgotten
I do have access to good models, but you are the one making far reaching statements about LLMs.

Please preface your future posts on the topic with “I’ve never tried any decent models, so I don’t know what I’m talking about”.
Even if you know the probability of an event precisely, you still don't know if it will actually occur. And even if you know it will actually occur, you still don't know when, so insurance still provides diffusion over time.
I am confused
Brutalist Web Design advocates for some simple rules which this thing doesn't seem to follow.

It has more Javascript and the back button doesn't work. So, compared to this, the original Hacker News is actually Brutalist.

Maybe I don't get it.
Yes, if you want the video game analogy to play for people who don't know squat about video games, Mario is the safe choice.
Premiums is what I’m referencing, yeah.

So, it’s a complex thing but the state has a vested interest in drivers being insured because of state / federal funding for roads, infrastructure and all of that.

The original intent was to stop humans from being greedy assholes and to provide a stick for when they messed up. Without the states involvement, insurance would likely go the way of used auto with “buy here pay here” lots which is a net negative for the state & society as a whole.

They want to make sure that “fair” prices are set so that there isn’t an overly disproportionate amount of people who need the insurance not having insurance. In reality, the less risky drivers do for all intents and purposes help off-set the cost of the more risky people but all of that is hidden in the premium logic.

At the end of the day, what has happened though is the state’s regulatory group overstepping their bounds (in my opinion) and ignoring good faith proposals with data showing why rate increases are needed which leads to situations we’re in now.

Having been in that world (I left it) I can honestly say there has to be some regulations or regulatory body because a lot of these folks spend so much time looking at numbers (actuarial science in general) they forget the fact there are humans behind those numbers.
The ability of private citizens to make an impact on our politics. We like to talk about our legislatures or Congress in the abstract, but the reality is you as a citizen can get things moved in the direction you want, and you don’t have to be wealthy to make it happen. It’s not easy, it takes a ton of time, but if you get involved, good things can happen.

I want to believe in upward mobility; that someone born with limited opportunity in the US can get ahead. I shift my feelings on this almost weekly.

The importance of software. Thirty years ago I believed that technology would change our world in positive ways. Now, I’m less certain that software is in many cases necessarily, useful, or beneficial.

Personal responsibility. I’ll counter some of the posts in this thread. Yes, personal responsibility is critical, but there are so many systems working against the average person over which they have no control. You can work hard, get an education, stay off vice, save for a rainy day - and still end up penniless in a gutter, if the wrong hand gets dealt to you. And the system doesn’t give a shit, and your neighbors will spit on you and say you should have taken more personal responsibility for your actions.
This sounds pretty cool. I think there is some kind of gap in formal modeling for languages that are interleaved with each other. Like, it's more or less straight-forward to describe, say, javascript and HTML(5) as ASTs, but things get hairy when you embed one language into the other, e.g. HTML attributes that contain JavaScript or JavaScript strings that contain HTML. Maybe this could help?
I would say that Turkish is just "normal". Very typical. Often used alongside Japanese or Cree in linguistics textbooks as an example of how a "typical" language works. Fully regular affixes (what you call modular concatenation is known as agglutination in linguistics). And it has a heavy focus on verb modality.

Japanese and Mongolian grammar has many syrprising similarities to Turkish (all those languages are unrelated as far as anyone knows). "I was made to read it repeatedly" can be one word, a verb with the right suffixes.

The Indo-European languages with their irrgular suffixes and inflections are actually unusual. Many languages have no irregular verbs, for example. Most that have irregular verbs, only have a couple. For some inexplicable reason, many Indo-European languages have dozens and dozens. This is a major outlier.
Hey, author of the post here. I've had quite a bit of feedback on the post from some people with a lot more Qubes experience than me - there are definitely some issues with it - e.g. you can install software from non-default repos in Qubes without setting a netvm for the template. We'll publish an edited version soon in case anyone else stumbles across it.

"Qubes is awesome, but it's no substitute for an air gap." - agreed - for some stories an actually air-gapped machine is essential - if nothing else just because it's very easy when messing round in Qubes manager to add a netvm to the wrong Qube.

However, of the stories we receive coming through SecureDrop system, many don't have the risk profile of something like Snowden - e.g. a local politics story that GCHQ aren't likely to be too fussed about. For these cases, it's helpful to have an environment which is secure, but has a browser available for e.g accessing our CMS or doing research.
How Google Lost Ground in the AI Race
There are accidents on the highway, planes crash, fires in buildings, etc. Let's reason about Jia Tan - a problem, not a danger to all of FOSS - not, like everything else these days, just embrace ignorant fears.

It's cool to destroy social trust, to deny it and abandon it. The counterargument is right in front of your nose - the incredible, infinite, world-changing world of FOSS. Think of all those amazing projects, social trust working over and over and over.

You're going to throw all that out over one guy? The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Last insurance quote I got asked about trampolines, playground structures, dog breed, known risks like aluminum wiring or polybutylene piping, whether all doors had deadbolts, distance from nearest fire hydrant, and probably a dozen other things like this.
"Memory unsafe languages" is maybe one percent of one percent of the problem.

As always, nobody actually gives a damn about "security" and uses it as a pretext to push something unrelated. (In this case, Current Year's stupid fad programming language.)
Minimum insurance in California only covers the same $35,000. $15,000 for injuries to one person, $30,000 for injuries to multiple people, and $5,000 for property damage.

It's completely insufficient, but it's not nothing. A reasonable person would carry much more insurance.
I agree that using upscaled graphics in PCSX2 make them more playable on a modern large TV (Looking at you Gran Turismo 4 in 8k60fps) but I think - because the games _were_ designed to be played on old CRT TVs with scanlines - using an older TV makes the games feel much better. I'm planning making a retro corner with an old TV and older consoles instead of just playing on scaled up emulators.
I think that EBS is the difficult engineering problem that they purchased instead of built from scratch here. Writing binary records to a file and reading them all into memory is not going to be a time sink that prevents you from finding product/market fit. The $120,000/year burn rate on Aurora they had seems alarming; an alarm that strongly implies "we didn't use the right system for this problem".

My guess for "why didn't they use something off the shelf" is that no existing software would be satisfied with the tradeoffs they made here. Nobody else wants this.
Teachers are using AI to grade essays. Some experts are raising ethical concerns
Don't be absurd. By your standard, cat, grep and a file form a database. Sure, if you interpret literally what a database is, that fits. But once again, it's not what people have in mind when they read "we cut cloud costs by writing our own database".
Seems like.

186,000 km/h will cover the sun’s diameter in 7.5 hours.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28diameter+of+sun%29%2...

Meanwhile, Parker is supposed to be moving substantially faster when close to the sun.
(an) author here: paper will likely be coming out in O(month). But, yes it turns out that the method is minimax optimal for stochastic convex optimization for a wide variety of parameter settings. Of course, minimax optimality alone does not fully explain empirical success - we've had minimax optimal algorithms for decades!
Show HN: Tie-in, a relational data component library
Health insurance companies don’t care about what your doctor earns in the same way home insurance companies don’t care about the cost of the roofer. They’re going to price in whatever that cost may be and call it a day.

Health insurance has it easier too because there’s not really a concept of correlated risk in human populations. Most people do a decent job avoiding hurting themselves but when a flood comes, there’s not a whole lot anybody can do.
> The way I’ve usually “tested” it among friends/family/clients is to just ask them to imagine that there is a ball, on a table, and someone pushes the ball so that it rolls off the table onto the floor.

Note that it's possible to visualize motion of an object without visualizing the object itself. This is me. I can't hold any imagery in my head, but I can easily imagine the movement of a kickflip or a pirouette, or I can see the bouncing of three balls without seeing the balls themselves.
Yeah, sure shoot me a DM and when I’m back later at my computer I have some.

I didn’t deal much on commercial insurance btw, I have _some_ awareness of that.
I need a Jupyter notebook example!
> Why is basic insurance for ordinary people a for-profit business at all, rather than something the collective...

There are mutual insurance companies [1], including the largest insurance company in the US (State Farm). At the end of every year, if the amount of money left over exceeds the formula they have set, every policyholder gets a refund.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_insurance
HN is already brutalist. This linked site is not brutalist. This is closer to a punk aesthetic, perhaps even verging on Dadaist.
Author has clearly never worked with any folks whose commits ARE bullshit.
I wanted to know the most used Go dependencies (not most starred or most downloaded, but most depended upon), so I made a scraper to get the go.mod from a few hundreds open source project on GitHub, and got the go.mod of each of their dependencies recursively. I stored this in a neo4j (first time I had the opportunity to use a graph database!) and got my answer (stretchr/testify is the most used dependency in the open source ecosystem by a large margin).

It’s not "finished" because I still have tons of ideas for improvements, and still want to make a blog post explaining how and why I did it, and show the results in an interactive page (and also share the database with everyone).
Agreed. And I really wanted to like it. I guess the weird colors are the glitch + cyberpunk influence?
Great points! Thanks for sharing that :)
I’ve known plenty of people who had legitimate accidents not of their own fault where insurance made them more than whole, and they would have not been able to afford the replacement if they had simply been saving for the same amount of time.

If you actually feel like you could recoup of the cost of paying for insurance by instead keeping the money in a piggy bank, you are buying too much insurance. There’s a sweet spot for insurance and overpaying for too little insurance is a you-problem.
The ideal data protection law would prevent most of the data from being collected in the first place. Cybersecurity, on the other hand, is about protecting what you have collected anyway. So, maybe cybersecurity is broken, but fixing privacy is a great first step.
This is 'technically' true for a strict/literal (antiquated? heh:)) use of the term Brutalist. However, Brutalist as a term of art is being appropriated by a new crowd of retro aesthetic creators who like pixels, old UI styles and colors and glitch.

You can be generous with your interpretation by understanding, compared to modern bland slick web design, this stuff can be viewed as invoking a brutalist experience for the viewer/participant, which while differing in the letter of the previous usage, aligns in many ways with the spirit of it.

Of course, art is subjective experience and perception as well. I get if you feel differently and that's interesting! I'm sure you "get it" from where you stand. And that's perfectly valid I think. :)
Yes but less so on the rates themselves & rather do you have enough cash to stay alive without going under.

They’re obviously related but less regulatory focus on rates, more on cost of business and that.

Edit: Basically you can run at a loss (most do) for a limited period of time but have to show that you will be liquid on the other side of the losses.
The difference is you could move electricity from the sunny side of the planet to the dark efficiently and from Northern to Southern hemisphere, which would enable you to use cheap solar power for all electricity needs in summer and winter, at nighttime and daytime.

It's always summer and daytime somewhere!
"When literally nothing happens when some stupid service gets popped and loses your data they had no business collecting in the first place, this kind of thing will happen over and over and over again."

Money quote, and he's right. In Europe, the GDPR helps stop random data collection, but there is still no penalty for getting hacked and losing customer data. There should be, and in egregious cases upper management should be personally liable for civil suits by affected people.
This follows fewer of the principles on the "Brutalist Web Design" link than HN does. In particular, it's slower, has less obvious links, breaks my back button, and has (imo) distracting unnecessary decoration.

I would also bet it uses JavaScript for the "hyperlinks" but haven't checked.
What is the most useful project you have worked on?
Follow up to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39942397
I worked on an army funded project designing software and simulations for a robot that had been canceled. But the money was budgeted so the work had to continue otherwise I guess someone would have had to give the money back or something?
Still haphazard. Whenever I've reported obvious spam or phishing / scam stuff in comments I've been told it wasn't a violation. Yet lots of seemingly innocent but possibly controversial content (or stuff that is against Facebook's interests) gets blocked.
There’s some libraries, numpy, pandas, and sklearn, that are written in python and highly optimized. People use python because those libraries, plus a few other tools, are python. Plus python is nice and easy to use on any platform
At least two times in my career I've (almost solo) worked on pet projects of a CTO or similar that were assigned almost no other resources and weren't really aligned with other stakeholders.

It was usually fun while it lasted but then inevitably it would just be scrapped.

Also, one time my team hired a freelancer but in order to justify him to upper management we had to invent some extra project to implement. It turned out to be all in vain anyway, since the whole team was let go one year later.
the universe is a "security shithole" unless one can competently protect oneself or have a competent protector/s do it for them.

i certainly don't feel like Apple nor Alphabet is in any vested position to protect me any more competently than i would at least want to have the option to try do for myself. how this post even otherwise tumbled down the 'iPhone versus Droid' bottomless pit is missing that point entirely.

food for thought.
> whose value would go to zero at any time

No, it wouldn't. It would go down to the value of the land (where a construction is permitted).

Nowadays, that's often more than 90% of the price.
$35,000 is also the minimum liability coverage ($30,000 for death or injury to multiple people plus $5,000 for property damage.)

In either the bond, deposit, or liability insurance scenario, the responsible party remains on the hook for whatever is not covered in advance.
> Typically you have at least two build modes, debug and release.

Legacy cargo-cult holdover from the 1980's. No real reason for it today.

> also a program without optimizations behaves the same as with optimizations

Not when you want to debug it.
Seconded. Also let’s require PG&E (the company that set the fires) to actually follow the maintenance and safety schedules they repeatedly promise to follow and repeatedly fail to follow.
Netheads vs. bellheads redux: the victory of SIP over the teleph (2023)
Gotta love reading ostensibly technical articles in the AI age.

1. Oh, this is an interesting problem

2. Asserts that it is possible to implement

3. How will it be implemented?

4. “I don’t know how but soon AI will”[1]

5. (Bonus) Recurrence of author’s own term that he “coined” in a one-minute read blog article

What is even the point? I too want stuff, vaguely. I can’t implement any of it though. What about this compiler optimization that I want? I could write an article about it because soon-AI.

There’s already plenty of interesting things you can say on this topic without invoking spooky LLMs.

1. Transforming abbreviations/initialisms/contractions back and forth

2. Transform inline numbered list to numbered list block

3. Switch between parenthetical remark and footnote remark

I don’t know, maybe those things aren’t interesting. Maybe just pedestrian. But it seems easy enough to support in a structured format and I’ve never seen it before. Why not?

Maybe I’m too Programming 1.0. I like conceptual problems that can be grasped. I don’t like black box technology.

[1] For some reason I can’t select the text in the article. The text… and I can’t be bothered to copy from the source.
cybersecurity can mean many things.

a noun, a verb, a quality, attribute, or function.

In general, I don't see the noun, verb, or function as broken (despite being new(immature) fields relatively) but I definitely see the quality, or attribute as broken because it is subject to the whims of profit and doesn't have many of the guard rails of more mature industries.

The Body of Knowledge is not firmly established therefore there are huge asymmetries between developers, offensive and defensive practicioners, and resourcing/tooling plays a gigantic part of this.
Yeah but that’s compounded by access to the information & who do you trust.

Also human nature is to look at the odds and not believe you’re going to be that 1 in 125,000 :)
Neat! Unfortunately Firefox doesn't allow rendering of the post page inside the Brutalist windows. I get the following error: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/xframe-neterror-page?as...
This is a great summary of the economic problems perpetuating lax cybersecurity and the real political reasons we continue to suffer. The answer is clear, and there is precedent in other similar fields: we need data protection laws with teeth.
I don't know, LLM's are very good at embedding subtle changes in their responses. They are also good at researching things like "best possible place to hide bugs", etc. Is it really a stretch to imagine that these technologies won't, if not now, but "someday soon" be used in such a way? I certainly don't think so.
From what I've seen, we're going to rewrite everything in memory safe languages, miss all of the corner case logic and tests, and end up less secure than we were at the beginning.
The day I couldn't write a poem
I'm in love with fairphones
California is building fewer homes. The state could get even more expensive
This definitely won’t be used for evil
I was anticipating a WebGL series of built spaces with structural properties derived from the relative comment strength, intuited subject type (from title semantics) and/or intuited per-thread social or technical properties (# links, information density, participation level, controversy level, emotionality, etc.). Perhaps arranged on a faux-street grid arranged through time and eyeballs, with the origin being "front page now".