skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Please don't hate "these people" or any general group of people.

For starters, many of the counties that "vote for the Republicans" are like 60-40 or 70-30 splits, so somewhere between a third and a half of the people living in those areas voted Democrat. And of course, many don't vote at all if they know their state is locked in for a given candidate regardless.

Second, there are myriad issues that due to America's 2-party system ultimately get grouped into relatively arbitrary bundles. If you have to choose between two bad options, you might choose the one that's less immediately bad or less guaranteed bad or less severely bad, even knowing that the alternative is future-bad, maybe-bad or slightly-bad.

Third, just have sympathy for all people in all walks of life. Especially the marginalized. You likely don't have an understanding of their day to day struggles or how those inform their decisions and coping mechanisms, and even if you are right and they are wrong, please take a moment to consider how your privileges may give you the education, time, energy, resources and context to come to different conclusions than other people.
The article is wrong in at least one important respect. Debits do not always increase the balance of an account. Accounts can have either a natural debit balance or a natural credit balance.

Credits actually increase the revenue account, which is a pretty important one!
You're assuming a single property and a rational Landlord.

Imagine the Landlord owns 10 properties and sets the rent to $2k/mo on all of them with 1 property remaining empty. Maybe that last property could be rented out at $1.7k/mo but from the landlords perspective that puts downward pressure on the rents of his other properties.

If one of the landlord's existing tenants moves into the cheaper property it's even worse. He loses $300/mo and now has to consider reducing the rent on an additional property. Should he find a new tenant at $1700/mo, he still feels like he's losing because he believes the rent should be higher.

From the landlord's perspective, it's better to squeeze if he has sufficient cash flow. Especially given the belief that lowering the rent will negatively impact the value of the property.

While you're correct that mortgage and tax are fixed costs that need to be met, you haven't considered that landlords have multiple options to offset those costs. When interest is low they'll use equity release and interest only mortgages.
From the related article:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/avi-wigderson-complexity-theo...

> ... if a statement can be proved, it also has a zero-knowledge proof.

Mind blown.

>Feeding the pseudorandom bits (instead of the random ones) into a probabilistic algorithm will result in an efficient deterministic one for the same problem.

This is nuts. AI is a probabilistic computation ... so what they're saying - if i'm reading this right - is that we can reduce the complexity of our current models by orders of magnitude.

If I'm living in noobspace someone please pull me out.
debian stable no longer has python 2. debian's pypy package has its own fork of cpython 2 in order to be able to build itself. numerous other projects are doing similar things

debian's versioning system for packages doesn't really contemplate needing to install old versions of a package because the maintainers are deliberately breaking new versions of it, so in 'bookworm' debian 12.5, the only cpython available to install is python 3.11. so if you want to 'not upgrade python' you are going to have to take on the maintenance burden of the old versions yourself; debian isn't going to help

some other package managers handle this kind of situation better (nix is notably excellent at it) but that doesn't really help with the maintenance burden of keeping up with security fixes
People used these platforms willingly. I stick by my 7th grade complaints about iPhones and Facebook, but most people didn't agree and still don't.
Just Use Postgres for Everything
BPP is the complexity class for decision problems that a randomized algorithm can solve in polynomial time, in the sense that on every input (worst-case), the algorithm is right with at least 2/3 probability (over its own randomness).

One example is deciding whether a given number is prime. For a long time, we knew randomized algorithms like the Miller-Rabin test that are correct with high probability. That is, we knew PRIMES is in BPP. But we didn't know a deterministic algorithm. In 2006, a deterministic algorithm was discovered, proving that PRIMES is in P.

One of the central open problems in Computer Science is whether BPP=P. That is, for any problem we can solve with randomness (in the above sense), can we solve it without randomness? Among many other contributions, Wigderson's work has made a ton of progress toward this problem.

The general idea is to try to "derandomize" any randomized algorithm that runs in polynomial time and is correct with 2/3 probability. We will feed it inputs from a pseudorandom generator (instead of true random numbers). If the PRG is really really good, then we can get a deterministic algorithm by running the original algorithm along with the PRG.

Now, if we can prove certain problems are hard, then we can also prove that such really really good PRGs exist. This is basically because telling apart the PRG from true randomness would be a computationally hard problem.
In a past job I built a code search clone on top of Kythe, Zoekt and LSP (for languages that didn't have bazel integration). I got help from another colleague to make the UI based on Monaco. We create a demo that many people loved but we didn't productionize it for a few reasons (it was an unfunded hackathon project and the company was considering another solution when they already had Livegrep)

Producing the Kythe graph from the bazel artifacts was the most expensive part.

Working with Kythe is also not easy as there is no documentation on how to run it at scale.
Yes, startups struggle a lot with distribution... I've been thinking and experimenting a lot lately. I also launched a couple of products on various platforms: the last one is a distribution/marketplace.

The way MOST non-bootstrapped see it:
- Launch on Product Hunt
- Raise VC money.
- Invest in Ads.
- Hyper-growth.

Why this vision is flawed in my opinion:
- Product Hunt votes don't prove PMF.
- Early Ads are a waste of money.
- Conversion needs tuning first.
- Hyper-growth isn't always the answer, it strongly depends on your GTM timing & market maturity

Get rid of VC/angel money and it'll take x10-x100 longer to expand.

I'm building and growing a new platform https://microlaunch.net/ to overcome these reasons. My goal is to provide a healthy way to grow without compromising early founders' margins.

I feel like the famous Pareto 80-20 rule totally applies to this situation: putting 80% effort into your distribution will feel like a 20% reward. It's a quite hard game.

Do some of you relate to this take? Please share your experience too.
What a great innovation. Polystyrene is not great when introduced to the body, so I hope there is some consideration of safety here.
That is the range of ages for which they found an increase but the biggest increase is in the 30-34 age subgroup. The report is not hard to skim, the overall picture is rural populations particularly in southern states are dying much more of "natural" causes like heart disease and cancer, and that divergence from urban populations started in the mid 80s. There's some speculation in the report as to why.
Yes, and on top of that, they're shy now.
Tbf, the more nuanced wording in the SI article is the "most dominant fighter" and most "dominant athlete in [her] sport"

https://www.si.com/mma/2015/05/12/ronda-rousey-ufc-mma-fight...
LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
I think it's a fantasy that there is not significant prejudice at the end of the pipeline, where we are. Everyone seems to have that fantasy about themeselves, their organization, their community, etc.

The answer starts, as with every problem, by looking carefully in the mirror, with fresh eyes, as if there was a stranger staring back. Then look at your own organization, your own community, etc.
The current engineering ecosystem is largely private, and it's poorly functioning, costing us way more money than just hiring engineers as public employees rather than paying a contracting firm to do initial and final design on each rail system segment.

Just go look at the RFPs and responses each municipality has four expansion of their current system. It is all outsource to private industry, at great cost compared to doing it inside government.
Eh, bash is pretty damn portable
SF Voters rejected Proposition A in 2022 [1], which would have included funding to upgrade Muni's control systems (among many other projects). We'll eventually have to find the money somewhere else when the system fails.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-voters-narrowly-r...
Nimble: A new columnar file format by Meta [video]
jlink is very much out of date. jpackage is the new way to do it. I use jpackage for all of my builds.

Pointing to the 2 most recent projects I have, my Microsoft Paint clone starts up ~0.25 secs, and my Checkers clone is the same.
No money was created or destroyed. The "cash gifted" account would have a corresponding entry in the recipients books reflecting the cash received. Unless he's delinquent about updating his books in which case it's implied but not realized. Few (unmedicated) individuals are going to track every transaction to that level though.

If it was important to account for the cash donation, the company would require a receipt in exchange. If it's part of a coverup the receipt may be for something unrelated but at least the books are in good order.
Was she like that before her brain got scrambled?
Main why startups struggle with distribution
Yes, startups struggle a lot with distribution... I've been thinking and experimenting a lot lately. I also launched a couple of products on various platforms: the last one is a distribution/marketplace.

The way MOST non-bootstrapped see it:

- Launch on Product Hunt

- Raise VC money.

- Invest in Ads.

- Hyper-growth.

Why this vision is flawed in my opinion:

- Product Hunt votes don't prove PMF.

- Early Ads are a waste of money.

- Conversion needs tuning first.

- Hyper-growth isn't always the answer, it strongly depends on your GTM timing & market maturity

Get rid of VC/angel money and it'll take x10-x100 longer to expand.

I'm building and growing a new platform microlaunch.net to overcome these reasons. My goal is to provide a healthy way to grow without compromising early founders' margins.

I feel like the famous Pareto 80-20 rule totally applies to this situation: putting 80% effort into your distribution will feel like a 20% reward. It's a quite hard game.

Do some of you relate to this take? Please share your experience too.
I’ll stop short of calling comparisons to standard SQL disingenuous but it’s definitely unrealistic because no standard SQL implementation exists.

What does this “last” operation do? There’s definitely a LAST_VALUE() window function in the databases I use. It is available in Postgres, Redshift, EMR, Oracle, MySQL, MSSQL, Bigquery, and certainly others I am not aware of.
You can exercise all you want (not saying its not good for health, in contrary!), if you eat consistently crap unhealthy food and too much of it it doesn't matter long term (both consistent problems in US population as viewed from literally anywhere else in the world, for past few decades).

Who eat more healthy? More intelligent (since they grok how important it is long term, despite less initial appeal compared to more stronger basic fat&salty&sugary taste), more wealthy (so they can afford it compared to processed junkfood prices pushed to absolute minimum).

Who cooks for themselves from raw ingredients (which ends up being healthier food in general due to many factors)? Again same as above, you need to either have it hardcore baked in your culture like say Italians or French have, or just realize facts, and have some money to afford the extra time (and not juggle 2-3 shitty jobs trying to stay afloat and hovering just above burnout).
url to the platform: https://microlaunch.net
> but I have to wonder if, at certain frequencies, normal emotions become harmful

I think if I had one criticism of social media it wouldn't be that it emotionally harms people, but that it intellectually harms them by distorting how common or representative certain things are.

I've spent about 20 years of my life in debate communities online, and by far the way I'm most likely to be wrong about something is by not realising I have a biased perspective. Social media is absolutely awful for this. I've seen myself and most people I know go down some rabbit hole online where they start to subconsciously believe something is far more of a problem than it actually is because they're following and interacting with other people who share that bias. So on HN you might expect that people's thoughts on technology to not be representative of society in general, but would you expect the articles shared here about economics to be unrepresentative and biased? It's these highly correlated, yet much less obvious biases that people seem to unconsciously absorb.

I think the only thing I disagree about what you're saying is that exposure to stuff like warfare and genocide is harmful. The world is a pretty brutal place if you venture out of North America or Western Europe. For example, about a month ago my girlfriend went to Egypt with some female friends. Prior to her leaving I spent several weeks warning her that as a young blonde English women that she was going to be harassed and that she needed to be careful because Egypt is a dangerous place for women – especially people as naive to the world as her. But she didn't understand and thought I was just being racist and exaggerating what men were like there. But to be fair to her, why would she understand? Every muslim and every person from the Middle-East she's ever interacted with in the UK has been fine. And the travel videos she watched all painted a rosey picture biased by various factors.

Anyway, I won't go into details, but she returned from that holiday terrified and has now said she won't go to any muslim majority country again after getting into multiple dangerous situations with men. I actually think she is now over reacting, but this highlights the problem of having unrepresentative experiences.

I see this bias constantly from people in the West because we live in unusually safe conditions and promote the most unrepresentative examples of people from different cultures in our media.

Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that I think most people probably would benefit from seeing how unsafe and horrid the world is, but social media doesn't do that unless you explicitly seek it. It focuses far more on things like police shootings and serial killers which are statistically extremely unlikely events and unrepresentative events.
sure I read it. however if that concept of ultra lightweight cars was sustainable, more nations would do it, wouldn't you think?

what's done instead is recuperation of break energy as electricity.

the concepts looked good on paper but they didn't work out as well in practice.
Indeed.

Extra fun, I asked gpt-4-0125-preview *:

Explain this regex: [a-zA-Z0-9\.\-]+\.([a-zA-Z]{r,63})

And part of the explanation was to fix the bug. Well, almost, it removed the () in the process, but it did know what was wrong.

When your AI's error can be explained by someone else's AI…

* Why this model? Because the https://chat.openai.com is currently throwing me the error: "You've reached the current usage cap for GPT-4. You can continue with the default model now, or try again later. Learn more" even though I've selected 3.5 in the popup, and my earlier attempt to use ChatGPT to give myself a PAYG chat interface to all the models was done when gpt-4-0125-preview was the best one available.

https://benwheatley.github.io/YetAnotherChatUI/
They have baseline transformer of max size 6B in tables. Other models are trained on very different data and probably differently.
Please speak to your superiors and let them know that this corporate style rings poorly on hackernews. See if they can at least let you speak more personally, less press release. It may go a long way towards improving perceptions here. Or at least credibility.
Investing $1B in digital connectivity to Japan
The "strange hole near Mexico City" example in the Github repo's README is another volcano.
> To understand how awful it is, you just have to ask two questions

Those are rookie questions. What about when the data contains newline/crlf? What if the data contains the quote character and newline?

And why is the file mostly Windows-1252 encoded except some fields that are sometimes, at random, UTF-8 encoded?
Fine - please fix email threads in the android email app. I feel what OP is saying when a basic feature expected of any email client is still absent. I say this as a multi-year, mostly satisfied customer.
Yes but generating that index would be expensive
i believe it is undertrained, at minimum
Patent expiration into the public domain is already “the ruling class seizing inventions” in the same sense (in the sense that it isn’t — in both cases, the goal is to make nobody profit from the patent any longer; not to transfer the profits to the government.)

Patents only exist as a concept, as a way to construct an equitable compensation for invention, to incentivize invention, that allows the market to determine what the total compensation over the legal lifetime of the patent should be, by licensing it or refusing to at given prices.

Insofar as an equitable compensation / patent “value” can be determined analytically on a one-off basis, you don’t need the patent system; the government can just buy out at that price, and the same goal will have been achieved.
Since the speed of light is a constant, mass increases towards infinity as it approaches the speed of light, and time slows for the matter relative to matter with lesser velocity, does that mean that matter accelerating towards a black hole increases the mass in the region and further increases the magnitude of the effect on the spacetime curve?

Is the mass of the black hole perpetually "falling" through spacetime at near the speed of light?

Would the region around an "active" black hole appear more massive when it is consuming matter vs existing in a vacuum?

A big object going really fast would be almost stopped in time, while at the same moment be almost infinitely massive which is increasing the gravitational effect. The combination of these effects is what makes such a big "dent" in spacetime?
Sure, using your users as QA is a fine business plan and instills confidence. We should extend this to other expensive industries (healthcare, law, civil engineering, etc.).
Mortality is strongly correlated with wealth and physical activity.

Wealth is a proxy for better healthcare, diet and education.

City people are generally richer and walk more.

Rural residents are poorer and drive everywhere.
The vast majority of our time was spent figuring out the model architecture and large-scale distributed training, and step 2 (starting now) is scaling everything up. Prompt understanding and audio quality will get significantly better once we swap in a larger text embedding model.

Thanks for the feedback re: DAWs, though! That would be really cool. Maybe we can tag tracks based on the effects applied to them to allow this to be more controllable.
they're also just less capable models. like just adding attention on top of an RNN made them a lot better
The problem is 1 person creating 10,000 accounts. Solve that and you will be rich.
I live in a neighborhood like this. Our house was built in 1947 and the other original houses are either the same or a simple variation. Of course, most of the original houses on the street have been torn down for large, mostly unique houses.
What's the coercion here?
It is a single screen with about 5 input boxes and a drag and drop interface.

Probably a bit of hyperbole to put this into a category of "best looking software"
> I’ve never touched Ruby but it also sounds like we shouldn’t discard RoR in terms of productivity.

RoR is insanely productive.
I'm not an art educator, but I am a fairly recent graduate from art school, and am familiar with the curricula of other art programs-- and that's the perspective that I'm speaking from. YMMV of course. Reasoning about objects symbolically is very different than reasoning about the way real world space and forms present themselves in 2d. The "copy the portrait upside down" type of exercises are great for casual self-paced learners: they help break naive habits, get people excited because they see the composition and intent that other people created coming out in their work, there's built-in guard rails to make sure they don't stray too far, and the references are commonly available and therefore easy to get crit on online, or just evaluate it yourself... but I think they take up a lot of time for what you get out of them, and it's really easy for people to plateau taking that approach.

I also went to culinary school some time ago and worked as a chef-- there's a similar split in culinary art. If someone told me they were sick of making boring weeknight dinners, then sure, finding and following fun recipes and maybe doing some creative experimentation is a good place to start, and surely some people that start that way end up really learning how to cook eventually. Exposure to variety is also helpful in developing aesthetic sophistication. But without deliberate guidance towards theory-focused information, most hit a hard plateau with that approach, and there's a good chance they'll stay there. If they'd read a beginner-friendly technique-focused book like Michael Ruhlman's "Ratio" instead of trawling recipe sites for aspirational dinners, they might have seen less improvement in the quality of their dinners for a week, but in a few weeks they'd be miles beyond the first cargo-culting cook because rather than knowing a handful of recipes that work, they'd know how they worked.

If someone said they were looking to get into art, generally, then there's no way I'd recommend even touching still life for a while. If they're like "I want to learn oil painting on canvas" then I absolutely would.

P.S.

> Now this may be because I am, at best, an intermediate artist

So you're probably a pretty competent artist. ;-) Genuinely mediocre artists talk about their capability like they're Van Eyck.
(of course, this doesn't mean we are in the clear -- a polynomial-time algorithm is alarming)
Violence is part of the human condition. I find it bizarre and disturbing that some people are so cut off from this reality that they want to artificially eliminate violence altogether.
Our variations feature will be nothing like Suno's (which just generates another song using the same prompt/lyrics). Since we use a diffusion model, we can actually restart the generation process from an early timestep (e.g., with a similar seed or even parts of the existing song) to get exactly what you're looking for.
It’s probably not overt corruption. It’s probably because in this kind of large system, there is a strong demand for validation and assurance at all levels, which is usually achieved by hiring experts* to write reviews, recommendations, and reports that hold up in court.

* They must be experts, otherwise how could they get away with charging so much, right?
You might find it interesting to know exactly what is (and is not) in the POSIX shell. The description of the colon : operator is there.

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V...

Most of the familiar userland utilities are at that website, accessible as a (somewhat crude) Apache index:

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/

Any POSIX-compliant system is required to implement the functionality described there.