skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was pushed on us and all the good developers left and the train was derailed. There seems to be a group of people who think they can use process to make orgs great. In reality great orgs just have great people.
It will be a crazy world when a company has to pay a camera manufacturer if they want their logo to be legible in any photos taken...

Surely there's a Black Mirror episode...
So they are doing the "bait and switch" like Google did for market share and in the end Facebook controls the "best" model? This sounds horrible.
I dunno about this - at least here in the UK, London (jam-packed with that demographic, including me and most of my friends) is the fittest, least overweight part of the country, with among the highest life expectancy.
Photos that have undergone such processing should not be admissable as evidence in court.

...and from an even more dystopian angle, although this may be a "bug", it shows just how easy it is for them to selectively change how things appear if they wanted to.
I'm sorry, why would an AGI be interested in programming? My kids are AGI, and they're not interested. I think there's a real moral conundrum when we say "programmer AGI" because, I think, we're implicitly talking about terminating every non-programmer AGI, to meet our labor force whims. Replace "programmer" with intellectual task of your choice.
Most iOS users just buy every new device the day it comes out. Easy.
Who would create the weights that balance this system?
As I said, it’s probably not the only issue but it’s a big one. As the comment I originally replied to said, Europe has homeless but the rates are much lower. Legally guaranteed housing would I think pretty clearly make a huge difference in the US.

You have to do it well though. In San Francisco we have homeless shelters that are so clearly alienating that people choose not to go. If you wouldn’t accept the housing we’re offering to others then it might not be a suitable solution. But if the homeless rates are much lower in Germany than in the US, it seems things like guaranteed housing probably have a lot to do with that.
Did I point you to this already?

https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.h...

Did you read it? Do you accept it?

Propositions are ideas, i.e. they exist in a different ontological category than material objects like earth (note no quotation marks). The word "earth" (with quotes) is an idea, one that happens to refer to earth, i.e. the material object referred to by the word "earth", which happens to be round. The words "earth is round" (with quotes) is also an idea, one which refers to a particular property (roundness) of a particular material object (earth). That idea falls into a subset of the more general concept of ideas which we call "propositions" because they have a particular relationship to the states of material objects, i.e. "the earth is round" (with quotes) is true because the earth is round (no quotes).

Material objects are made of atoms; they cannot exist without the atoms that comprise them, but their existence is more than just the totality of the existence of their constituent atoms. All of the atoms that comprise the earth existed billions of years before the earth came into existence. Earth did not come into existence until the atoms that comprise it arranged themselves in a particular way.

Ideas are not made of atoms, they are made of information. Just like material objects, ideas do not come into existence until some information that encodes that idea arranges itself in a particular way, i.e. until they are thought of. A proposition that hasn't been thought of is like a poem that hasn't been written. Saying that an unthought-of proposition is true is like saying that an unwritten poem rhymes.

Consider the words "Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father." Do those words stand for a proposition? Is that proposition true? Was it true before 1977 (keeping in mind here that the Star Wars story ostensibly happened "a long time ago")? Would Rene Descartes be able to recognize it as a true proposition?

It's really hard to talk about ideas. With material object you can point at them, poke them, prod them, weight them, shine lights at them. You can't do any of those things with ideas. All you can do is refer to them using representations like "the earth is round" (with quotes) or "la terre est ronde" or "Die Erde ist rund" or "地球是圆的". It is the act of referring to them in a way that some being can recognize as referring to a proposition that causes the proposition to come into being, just as the act of composing a poem causes that poem to come into being. Unwritten poems do not rhyme, and they do not not-rhyme. They simply aren't. Likewise, unthought-of propositions are neither true nor false.
Very few people hoard wealth. You imagine wealthy people like Scrooge McDuck with a room full of gold coins. It's almost always invested in stocks which helps companies grow or in bonds which helps finance public works.
I agree wholeheartedly with this:

> In biology class, biology wasn’t presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing. We were nowhere acquainted with real biologists, the real questions they had, the real experiments they did to answer them. We were just given their conclusions.

So - not just for biology - what are some good books or other learning resources that encourage questing, curiosity and wonder?

The first one that comes to mind is Feynman’s Lectures.
This resonated a lot:

> Enormous subjects are best approached in thin, deep slices. I discovered this when first learning how to program. The textbooks never worked; it all only started to click when I started to do little projects for myself. The project wasn’t just motivation but an organizing principle, a magnet to arrange the random iron filings I picked up along the way. I’d care to learn about some abstract concept, like “memoization,” because I needed it to solve my problem; and these concepts would lose their abstractness in the light of my example.
It's the smartest possible play.

The leader always wants to be a monopoly. The distant runners up can catch up the most ground by playing nice, being open source, and working with other companies to erode the market share that the leader wanted to lock away.

I'm so glad to see this happening. I'm terrified of a single company winning all of AI. It's starting to look like this won't happen and that OpenAI is simply stretched too thin.

If this pattern holds, OpenAI may wind up as a footnote. Their inability to open up and work with others means that competitors and would-be collaborators will choose the open alternatives.

Meta can win that mindshare and be the friendly facilitator and rails that an entire ecosystem of business is built upon. OpenAI will never be that. They're not "open" enough.
Becoming a more self-directing Staff+ individual contributor (2023)
First ever electric semi truck rides into Mexico with SDG&E
There's some nice ideas here but the reasoning / breakdown could be better "defined".

I highly recommend reading Crucial Conversations if you want to learn how to systematically have these conversations that seem "confrontational". As a recovering introvert, it was super useful to break down these social interactions and understand the mistakes that I (and most people) make. It was part of management training at Facebook; I found it also helped me in many contexts outside of work too.
You click the filename twice to rename. More efficient than two clicks and a menu perusal.
Newton remarked that what colors leaves green would always be a mystery to all but our great Creator, Jesus Christ, the father.

Turns out, its chlorophyll.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
Value delivered or increase of value per unit of labour is very murky to measure, but something to think about. In some sense Amazon improving efficiency of retail could be a good thing in general improving the purchasing power of average consunmer.
> typing and tools are not the most important aid to quick code production

I think they are in an indirect way. Being able to touch type reasonably fast prevents the action of typing distracting you from your thoughts, or lagging so far behind your thoughts that it makes it harder to keep your thoughts clear in your mind.

Maybe something similar with good tools.
Amount of taxes paid is a benefit to society? Does that mean anyone who uses deductions is less valuable to society?
When I took biochemistry as an undergrad, it was taught by a somewhat eccentric professor who instead taught it more like "History of Molecular Biology". And it was super interesting.

But all the premed students hated it lol

Besides that, every other bio course I ever took was just rote memorization (except ones taught in math/engineering departments). Bio 101 was maybe the hardest class I ever took because it was so damn boring to memorize all those random facts.
The restriction is that Bitcoin can't grow faster than total wealth forever. I.e. you can't grow total wealth by 3% and grow Bitcoin by 4% forever.
Not a bad idea! Congrats on the launch.

One of my first projects (about 20 years ago) was a free photo uploader like Imgur but before Imgur.

I was so concerned with “profitability” that I watermarked every image people uploaded. People fucking hated it. What I learned is don’t be so commercial when you’re starting out. Services usually cost a lot less to run than you imagine.

Yes you’ll get a burst of traffic when eg posting to HN, but it dies down after 2 days, then you’re back to 0 traffic (and no costs) or, you have traffic, and non-zero costs, and can tell your users “I’m going broke, time to pay”, and they’ll be mostly sympathetic and understanding.
What are the homelessness rates between Germany and the US? Germany has good publicly funded medical care, schools, and housing. It may well be that lack of US investment in the same is in large part responsible for the I suspect huge differences between the two.

You can look at Germany and say “they didn’t completely solve the problem so we shouldn’t try anything they are doing” or you can recognize the huge strides their efforts have made towards this complex issue, and consider how we might do the same.
I'm a fan of Dennett (and the other horsemen) - Dennett's critics are almost all Christian apologists since he's widely known as being an atheist author. I'm not a critic at all.

But I can still disagree - I disagree with Dennett on is his dismissal of mental states and experience. Before you deny this again, here's direct evidence:

Interviewer: "This is the difference between having a phenomenal quality of blue instantiated in my brain and having the quality of blue represented by my brain"

Dennett: "The latter exists and the former doesn't"

Timestamp linked: https://youtu.be/eSaEjLZIDqc?feature=shared&t=763
I loved biology in high school. I had one of the most boring teachers ever, and literally slept through class half the time, but then I would go home and read the text book for homework assignments and I found it totally fascinating. It was kind of running gag that the teacher could wake me up and ask me a question at any time and I always knew the answer, to the amusement of the other students. But my secret was just that I found it interesting and easy to absorb.

I don’t really like the idea of blaming others for one’s lack of curiosity about a subject. There are a lot of factors that determine how receptive we are to learning something - current interests, life experience, how developed our brains are, etc - beyond just the way it is taught. I have a much deeper appreciation for geology now than I did in school, for example, and I’m fairly certain that I’m the one who changed, not the way plate tectonics are taught.
Social media platforms don't "win" on their own merits. They win due to chance network effects. TikTok isn't special, and it would likely cycle out of the public consciousness along with a new generation that picks the next hit network, like Facebook and Instagram.
Every attempt to algorithmically boil down a complex economy into a single number does more harm than good. Figure out your own priorities and decide for yourself.
GPT-4 and Opus are better for complex/precision tasks, and Haiku is cheaper for everything else.

Good 7B/8B models are still really useful but let’s not be hyperbolic.
Fluorescence microscopy is a great tool for this!
I guess many here can think a lot 5D chess business strategies. For me it is just Zuck trying to reach greatness, down in history his name will prob pop up when people think about who brought LLM/AI/AGI? to the masses.
It is beyond mere flaws. The thing is idiotic and an abomination.
I am not convinced. Reading the whole article it seems that Bayer is moving to a system better known as QBR, mixed with OKRs and most likely some sort of agile model.

There is no no-hierarchies. Working in a 3 month cadence on an organizational level puts a lot of pressure on all people. Usually QBRs work top down and there is more monitoring along the process.

What sounds great is more or less success theatre as well as inflexibility. No one wants to lack behind in a QBR report. Risking 4 times a year being red flagged in a report sparks fear.

Also approval processes and idea sharing are the first victims of such reorganizations. No one risks a 2 week sprint for some improvement sprint or working on technical debt in tech for example.

I’ve seen this within a company with 100k employees worldwide.

People will regret QBRs.

Usually companies want to get rid of the costs of middle managers, which are usually elder than normal staffers. Also companies want to include younger folks, because they are on average cheaper per resource from a controlling perspective.

Young guns without leadership with delivery pressure by an even older senior management layer means having a large gap and divide between them.

Senior management adds so called assistants to their staff, the hidden layer.

I watched a lot of mobbing at the lower level as a result. Fear of tumbling over mistakes aka receiving a bad performance review is rampant when you need to report all the time results.

Mixing teams every QBR sounds fun, but isn’t. It means even more being in constant competition. Who is the most flexible employee and most successful under different circumstances?

Large organizations are hard to manage. People will very soon miss their middle managers to cover things up in a human way.

QBRs don’t help if there is a clear product strategy missing.

There is no perfect system, but QBRs are some of the most toxic form of working and collaboration that I have witnessed so far.
It is not only a security threat for the US. It is a world wide security threat, because it is used by so many governments. Somehow all antitrust agencies in the world seems to have forgotten that Microsoft has a monopoly in office IT.
Check out vtk.js (and VTK proper) as a fairly mature implementation of this. I haven’t kept up with the development but it was pretty far ahead when it came out years ago.
Sometimes you knew you shouldn't have written it and then did so anyway.
There are two aspects to effects as a language feature- first there is the runtime behavior, and then there is the type system. Ruling out categories of effects is the job of the type system, and you don't have to commit to (or avoid) any particular runtime approach to use it that way.

This is related to the vagueness of your two categories. While exceptions, yields, and awaits don't really make sense without a handler, all that matters to the type system is which operations an expression might perform in addition to producing a result of their primary type. Handlers only interact with the type system in the sense that they remove an effect from their handle-ee expression.

So even in a language that committed to coroutines as its approach handling effects at runtime, the type system could still track and rule out effects like divergence or system calls. (For what it's worth, nondeterminism, state, etc. can all also be defined in terms of handlers. And at the same time, though, unsafety is not an effect because it is not entirely captured by "can this expression perform operation X.")
There is renewed enthusiasm for agentic architecture based on language models. Some research papers suggest this approach might improve the performance of LLM-based applications.
The recent paper “More Agents Is All You Need,” authored by Junyou Li, Qin Zhang, Yangbin Yu, Qiang Fu, and Deheng Ye, argues that the performance of large language models (LLMs) scales with the number of agents instantiated. The authors describe a simple sampling-and-voting method that not only complements but also enhances existing, more complex methods used to improve LLMs. The effectiveness of this enhancement correlates with task difficulty. The team conducted extensive experiments across various LLM benchmarks to confirm their findings and to explore the properties that contribute to this phenomenon.
Traffic Message Channel
«Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.»

— Betteridge's law of headlines (https://w.wiki/3b$V)
Odd. My Pixel 6 is really quite a good camera. The stock app on GrapheneOS is great when you just want to take a quick photo, and OpenCamera is full featured and very useful when you want to tweak the settings and fiddle around with various options.

I never have anything weird.
I knew I shouldn't have had my wisdom teeth extracted!
Life is cheap, we know, but it sounds more like the board will receive a bonus increase, not like engineering.
Exactly, a free standalone AI is an unsustainable product.

You can't offer it for free, unless you make money in another way.
It's more than that: https://bsky.app/profile/without.boats/post/3kql3yr3goc23

> Btw this is the beginning of me trying to shift away from blogging about rust to blogging about PL design in general. I find that I have very little to say about Rust that I haven’t already said.
Soon Jeff will have ten yachts and his job each day will be choosing which yacht to use once he has automated himself out of work. It will be gruelling.
> what are some good books or other learning resources that encourage questing, curiosity and wonder

Children. Best before they enter a school (or anything resembling something similar).
Also Meta is in the business of sharing content. Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and WhatsApp are all about sharing content.

They’re highly incentivized to expand the options for generating content. OpenAI and Anthropic have to make money from the generation, which raises the barrier to creation. Meta can say fuck it, let everyone create and well sell ads against what they create.
Thank you!

It's a default/habit of mine to not direct-link, carried over from other forums.
Bridges (aka "Hashi") is one of my all-time favorite logic puzzles. I recently discovered Galaxies, and I enjoy this one a lot too; I also like Slitherlink (called "Loopy" here) a lot. However this site is missing two that I like quite a bit more, which are Paint by Numbers & Battleships, both of which I originally started doing in Games Magazine and later found on Conceptis Puzzles [0] (they call PbN "Pic-A-Pix") where I bought $25 worth of credits maybe 20 years ago that have still kept me going to this day, every couple years I'll buy a week's puzzle bundle and then slowly go through them.

The other one I used to play a lot is Mamono Sweeper [1] One summer in undergrad when I was supposed to be doing graph theory research, instead I got really, really, really good at basic arithmetic by playing this game for 5+ hours a day. This is how I learned that I had no interest in math grad school and I now work as a developer in a video game-adjacent space.

Recently I made an online Pentominoes puzzle [2] and I've played it a lot also.

If anyone knows a good source of free Paint by Numbers puzzles I would love to hear about it!

[0] https://www.conceptispuzzles.com/

[1] https://hojamaka.com/games/mamono_sweeper

[2] https://pentominoes.river.me
The same registry keys exist in Home and you can find them with a very small amount of Google effort, even if you can't use the Group Policy editor.
Wow, those comments descended into racism much faster than I expected.
They won’t be selling anything by that point.
It's great PR. I hear people refer to Mark Zuckerberg as a "real engineer" and other such platitudes and it's doing wonders to reduce the stigma around Meta amongst the tech savvy minority.

Despite Meta being very similar to Google in terms of incentives, and Google nowadays being decidedly uncool. Doesn't hurt that Mark shipped something worth a damn whereas Google has been floundering for ages.
I think it's far more likely that we're the simulation of some super intelligence than the creation of a mythological deity worshiped by ancient goat herders.

But to each simulant, their own programming. Unicuique suum.
Windows 11 is a jungle of dark patterns, and I find it really disrespectful to the user as well as low class and desperate.
Why LOL? These are separate systems/networks. Even warships need boring admin things like email, internet, identity management, etc. Plus the systems that go on these ships are heavily customized not just straight out of the box.

Source: was IT on a destroyer
There isn't another book like "Gödel, Escher, Bach"; when I ordered it at 16, because I was curious after having seen it mentioned in very different contexts, reading it was a life-changing event.

Because this is beyond what your typical high school teachers can discuss, quickly followed orders of biochemistry university textbooks, and thankfully now - a few decades on - I get paid for life-long learning, grateful for each moment of awe.
I think, at a $55B price tag, yes, it would be a net positive for shareholders.

I think the other question is how likely he would be to walk away. I think at $0, Musk would likely stick it out at Tesla, since so much of his net worth, ego, identity, and brand is locked up in there. In other words, this seems like a bluff.
I think it's been well established that a high-starch diet will lead to weight gain. Starchy foods have the side effect of increasing the craving for more starchy food the more we eat them. Starches are not bad we just have to eat them in moderation along with proteins and vegetables.

Keep this in mind, and do what you will with it, farmers feed the animals they want to fatten as fast as possible, foods that are high in starch. Foods that are high in starch like molasses(sugar), grains, and oats.
On the flipside, Samsungs are also exceptionally bad at breaking Android expectations around battery management (and, by extension, background processing and applications): https://dontkillmyapp.com/samsung
Most of the pop sci books are useless for practical use cases, and similarly the Feynman lectures self select for the physics/mathematically inclined.

Biology is a leaky abstraction, it's very hard to do anything with rigor without having a strong foundation in the fundamentals. You see the same discussion on hacker news when it comes to music, people are more interested in mapping programming concepts to music notation and complaining about western music presentation than the music itself. For biology, you need need to have a firm understanding of the central dogma and biochemistry if you want to do anything beyond surface level empirical trial and error. Most people, especially the "hacker types", only have a vague understanding of the former i.e. DNA translation and transcription and that's about the limit. You absolutely have to gain an intuition for biochemistry if you want to do things with rigor, otherwise you will just be the biotech equivalent of a bootcamp web developer, fit for washing test tubes and not much else.
I'm talking about engineering, not manufacturing. I'm not suggesting not thinking, I'm saying that you cannot design every aspect of a system without learning more about the design. It's just a restatement of "Gall's law" (in scare quotes because it's obviously not an actual law). Alternatively it's the obvious way of working given the principles espoused in the agile manifesto.