skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first symbiotic event was a million times harder than the 2nd or the 3rd. The first time the host had the extremely hard task of dealing with any DNA and RNA produced by the guest during it's life and death. The host had to evolve stuff like a cell nucleaus and sex to live through it and alternative splicing to deal with the fact that all it's genes were damaged by selfish genetic elements that came from the guest. Integrating any later symbionts is still hard, but not nearly as hard.

It's possible that the first symbiosis that let to the origin of the eukaryotes is not a one in a billion years event, but one in a trillion or one in 10^20 years or ever rarer. That is it may be that in a billion planets with simple life forms only one "creates" complex life like animals. It can be the great filter that leads to the Fermi paradox.
No doubt we'll see this transplanted into GM crops for reduced fertilizer need.
I don't think clear metrics to optimize would be bad. I mostly find work to be entirely opaque in what it wants from me.

The only time I know clearly is when the deadline looms. But the majority of the time everyone around is me cosplaying productivity.
> Compare this to how humans and LLMs learn, they both have no problem with inconsistent information.

I don't have time to fully refute this claim, but it is very problematic.

1. Even a very narrow framing of how neural networks deal with inconsistent training data would perhaps warrant a paper if not a Ph.D. thesis. Maybe this has already been done? Here is the problem statement: given a DNN with a given topology trained with SGD and a given error function, what happens when you present flatly contradictory training examples? What happens when the contradiction doesn't emerge until deeper levels of a network? Can we detect this? How?

2. Do we really _want_ systems that passively tolerate inconsistent information? When I think of an ideal learning agent, I want one that would engage in the learning process and seek to resolve any apparent contradictions. I haven't actively researched this area, but I'm confident that some have, if only because Tom Mitchell at CMU emphasizes different learning paradigms in his well-known ML book. So hopefully enough people reading that think "yeah, the usual training methods for NNs aren't really that interesting ... we can do better."

3. Just because humans 'tolerate' inconsistent information in some cases doesn't mean they do so well, as compared to ideal Bayesian agents.

4. There are "GOFAI" algorithms for probabilistic reasoning that are in many cases better than DNNs.
That would require Bytedance to want to sell it, which isn’t going to happen.
It’s simply human nature. Teachers can either lie to themselves and you about it or mitigate it. What more could you possible want from them as humans?
This is basic human empathy from a very small group of insiders. I mean, this is their job. Do you think they all go around work being dicks to each other all day every day?

Besides, it cost him nothing.
> And you see that as a reason enough to prevent millions of users from choosing their browser?

"Only works in Chrome" will prevent millions of users from choosing a browser; Google already fucks with Firefox in spots, because they can. Anyone who built websites in the late 90s / early 2000s remembers the IE monoculture.
No, it really is unconstitutional for Congress to encroach on the enumerated powers of the executive. Just look at the recent SCOTUS cases around the setup of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to understand how consequential this constraint is.
Intro to Temporal Architecture: Workflow Engine [video]
Modeling Boundedly Rational Agents with Latent Inference Budgets
Start a tiny business, no matter what it is. Sell stuff you make on Etsy, spend a weekend writing a tiny e-book about a topic you know well and publish it for $5, whatever - literally anything that requires you to define a product and then find customers for it. Bonus if the business involves creating the product (rather than buying it), but that's not required.

Any experience selling something that you think solves a problem - and getting used to failing and iterating, not avoiding or worrying about that - is worthwhile.
Explaining C Pointers until I go insane [video]
In my experience depression is in most cases basically a variant of burnout.

When people get stuck in a routine (job, city, hobby, political view, whatever) where they're focused mainly on the outcome rather than the process. Extreme long term thinking.

Alienation, that sort of thing.

It's common to say it's "under diagnosed" in places where people live more natural lives but I think this is correlation rather than causation.
I've heard some people use a ublock filter to hide them. I don't mind them too much, for me they seem to be only shorts from subscriptions.

But yeah, I spend 90% of my YouTube time in the subscription feed.
Nice! Markdown output would be an awesome addition
Thinning Out My T-Shirt Collection with Elo's Rating Algorithm
This post in toto is about erosion, not sea level rise, but both are related to AGW factors; increased total energy trapped at the lowest land | sea layer by increased insulation of the sky above also increases storm energy and general kinetic energy of the water.

There's increasing shear cutting action for erosion, increasing height reach in storms and more slowly and steadily in mean sea levels.

It's certainly distance from shore (and geology) that provides security here rather than height .. the UK famously has 100+ ft cliffs eroding away into the sea and taking houses with them, that's been ongoing for centuries but is accelerating of late.
> Why put in all that effort when the map won't even show it though?

Just select a different layer, the "Transport Map" renders bus routes: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#layers=T
I somewhat assumed there would be commenters suggesting the human angle as a retort. That's why I prefaced with both "this is what the teacher expects of me" and "understanding that educational staff is already often overworked." It just seems to me that the current systems aren't sufficient, and acknowledging that is what leads people to improving those systems. The above commentor suggested what they do in academia as workarounds to what the study showed, and I'm saying even that is not sufficient.

It seems like you're agreeing with me, but jumping to their defense with "people are fallible." People are fallible, that's why we build systems to take human elements out of it. Recognizing where humanity has soured something is key to that.
It's been many years since I last read it, but I seem to recall Kaczynski defined surrogate activities as those beyond what one would feel substantively deprived should they be without. He gives the example of pursuit of social fulfillment like romantic affection to be not a surrogate activity, since we're programmed to feel deprived without any at all, but being a sex addict to be one.

If you combine this with his notion of the power process, surrogate activities ultimately unsatisfying in the context of that. Modern man lacks the ability to fulfill the power process, and surrogate activities is the result. Kaczynski draws arrows from the fact that that man lacks autonomy and fulfillment of the power process, to surrogate activities, then to various societal problems (of which he enumerates many).

So, the point isn't that surrogate activities is the terrible end state to be avoided at all costs, it's what results when they're load-bearing at a societal level.
Do you think that depression is more likely to be diagnosed in developing nations? There’s a number of presumptions here, not sure which you disagree with specifically.
One of the notes in the postmortem was that if it were Kotlin, it would've been caught by the nullability checker.

It wasn't, though, and much of the core Android code won't compile with nullability checks because it was written before @Nullable/@NotNull annotations were a thing. Pre-2010 Java code basically has to assume everything is nullable. My point is that LLM-generated code often doesn't, because it's trained on StackOverflow code where the author either doesn't care or had implicit knowledge about which variables could be null and which couldn't. Hence it generates code that is valid in most situations but can lead to a crash when used in situations where its data dependencies may be null or uninitialized. Exactly the stuff of security nightmares.
My biggest complaint is that there is a hardcoded result limit. And it searches for that whole limit, then renders the result. So if you have a lot of messages you can't use the date range thing to refine the results. And if you want one of the recent ones you still need to wait for the UI to lock up and return all of the results.

The results themselves are good enough.
According to https://blog.chromium.org/2024/02/optimizing-safe-browsing-c... the PDF viewer is still sandboxed, which would suggest they're either still using NaCl or they've moved to WASM.
Model training will continue until morale improves.
They embedded Lua into the NetBSD kernel for scripting frequency scaling and network packet filtering. Their packet filtering example ran a 100Mbps connection at 96Mbps, which indicates the performance hit isn't extreme.
When someone asks how to make a yummy smoothie, and the LLM replies with something that subtly poisons or otherwise harms the user, I'd say that would be pretty bad.
Question: what / how were the were the discussions on to not include leaderboards, streaks, etc? What what was the primary motivation behind the game? From your comment, it seems play to play rather play to win?
Does to not have agency imply the workers are fungible, replaces left cogs in a machine, unlike in other domains where “stars” exist and thereby have agency?
Sure there’s a tension, but one difference is that I know how I vote, but I don’t know how my representative votes unless it’s in the public record.

If you believe that electorates punish politicians for decisions in the public interest, and legislators’ jobs would be easier if they were less accountable to their voters, why support democracy at all?
That's correct. Humanity achieved astonishing results in technological and medical advances. But at the same time, humans still struggle with happiness.
Without exaggerating too much, because I certainly don’t take this side, either:

Is an angle grinder safe? A tablesaw?

A car whose owner who uses the radio knobs, more than the steering? (Haha, unassisted driving, I mean! Walked right into that one.)

Etc, all of my examples have easily defeated safety mechanisms for an outrageously life-ending device ;)
Ending the universe is, while poetic, needlessly megalomaniac.

Making some subset of people quarrel endlessly would already be dangerous enough, as prophesied in https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
But you see, now we know that GP knows how big Google's repo is, a detail from which we are perhaps to conclude I suspect, falsely, but who knows) they are or were employed as an engineer there, despite making an argument that seems well below the common sense threshold even to a non-engineer, Google or otherwise.
I think it is rational that students can feel entitled to that.

I also think that the vast majority of poorly paid, non-tenured professors and other teaching staff don't love being the targets of this harassment, since it's not their fault and largely out of their control, and it's not like they're getting the bulk of the tuition money. (That mostly goes to administrative expenses and sports programs.)

Heck, most adjunct faculty are often paid below minimum wage and qualify for food stamps.
The app is still in its testing phase, keeping everything simple. After the 14-day trial period, it will prompt you for a new activation code. You can use a different email to start another trial.
Code compiles down to machine code. Not assembly. If I give you assembly and disassembly, you’ll prefer the former.

Ok. You find it difficult to do things in C. Understood. I believe the topic is of end features, bit maintenance or abstraction.
At least technically, the U.S. can claim is has an open-ended lease on the Guantanamo Bay site via an agreement signed in 1903 with the Republic of Cuba, which has no expiration date.

For the bases in Chad in Niger, on the other hand, there is no such agreement. The right to operate is entirely "at will" and can be revoked by these governments at any time. As it appears they just did.
Which pedals did you get?
Vidalia ftw!
These comments are burying the lede, or burying the (lede).

The author said that VisiCalc was written in Lisp and I said "wtf?

Then I reread it and said "seriously, wtaf?"

I've never heard that before. Was the original Apple ][ version written in Lisp?
I never player Halo 2 multiplayer, but both me and my brother loved Halo: Combat Evolved multiplayer. Was awesome back in the day (I played it on a Mac, by brother probably on a PC).

In my opinion it was the best FPS that I played, I'd put it above Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, Doom & Marathon.

However, at some point it seems there were many aimbots in the game, which ruined the gameplay for me.
Besides opening PDFs (and despite the project's name), MuPDF can also read EPUBs, but currently this WASM viewer can't open them. They must have had to reduce functionality of the library to port faster to WASM.

But I wonder if there are any intrinsic issues with displaying EPUBs using WASM?
This was pretty cool, but I noticed that my score is impacted by open source libraries that I maintain that are just OpenAPI generated clients. It fails me on those even though the code is generated. Would be nice if it could exclude those.

Also, it would be nice if it supported Go eventually.
How naive are you? Our enemy has deployed a potential weapon in our country and over 100 million people in the US are being influenced by it. Do you not grasp the potential consequences of this? Does your thinking only go as deep as “but muh freedoms”?
> Antivirus software has to have full access to every part of your system so it can scan and remove things. Should the software become compromised, it can become the entry point...

To be sure, 3 Critical vulnerabilities patched in April 2024 are Windows Defender RCEs[1]. Insane.

[1]https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-ap...
It really depends on the nature of your work. Creative work that goes in stages would be frustrating, since your day to day is never the same.

On the other hand, if your work is a bit more repetitive, it can be a nice way to actually see your contribution change.

On the other other hand, there's the obvious drawback of competition undermining coordination and cooperation among team members, making the experience more toxic, or sacrificing quality for quantity.

Short feedback cycles are good. An employee shouldn't wait 3 or 12 months to find out that they aren't doing something right- it's bad for them and for the company. It isn't a silver bullet, though, and there are better ways to get there.
at least a bunch of the isolationist sentiment on the republican side recently has actually come from former veterans, since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had such questionable returns
I find it amusing thar about a sixth of the comments are on how couples should handle their finances. Nobody could have guessed that.
Odd article. It simply states that the effect size is too big to be believable (it calls it repeatedly "impossible," but it doesn't seem like it can possibly mean "literally impossible" or "mathematically impossible.") It doesn't give any alternative explanations or specific ways the study is wrong. And it links to a rebuttal by the original authors where the responded to a bunch of the suggestions for data error or confounding factors and found that their results remain.
I argue there is strong evidence “stars” are lucky, not legitimately exceptional, in a majority of cases (“myth of meritocracy”). Most people cannot negotiate a better deal individually for compensation, working arrangements, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy

https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/beautiful-minds/the-...

https://hbr.org/2021/06/dont-underestimate-the-power-of-luck...

Are we optimizing for a lucky few? Or the majority? That’s the philosophical question I believe. If majority votes win union elections, and organizing is the only way to seek some power against corporate interests, the action required is obvious as a rationalist. I understand that a minority will take issue with the advantage they might have diminished or lose entirely, but by definition, stars are a minority.

https://www.axios.com/2024/03/20/union-workers-wealth-compar...

https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/labor-unions...

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/workers-want-unions...
Thunderbird is frankly the only Windows email client worth using if you do any development using email. The tools available as add-ons simply aren't so readily available for other options, especially not for free.
To my mind, "real understanding" would mean an ability to make non-trivial inferences and to discover new things, not present in the training set. That would be logical thinking, for instance.

Much of what LLMs currently do is not logical but deeply kabbalistic: rehashing the words, the sentence and paragraph structures, highly advanced pattern matching, working at the textual level instead of the "meaning" level.
Man I feel for Ukraine, our problems are trivial in comparison. They are fighting for their existence. Hard to imagine the amount of trauma the population and military are suffering from on top of just the normal bullshit that gets to us all.
I wish! But no. It was written in 6502 assembly language:

https://rmf.vc/implementingvisicalc

Edit: Oh - the OP is talking about a later version of VisiCalc. Bricklin and Frankston were both MIT CS grads, so it would make sense. But at what point did VisiCalc get ported to Lisp? You're right—this is burying the lede!
MVP stands for minimum viable product. The supplements are the product. You could be selling supplements today instead of planning a website.

And maybe you have solved all the real problems of inventory and cash flow and shipping and buying already.

Because you don’t need a different approach to sell supplements. Doing what everyone else does is a known solution. But it is harder than building a website.
Elected officials should not vote their conscience, they should vote according to the wishes of their constituents
Do you think we can “see” climate change on the yearly scale though? I had assumed that would be mistaking the scale of the situation.

Like the good or bad intentioned person that tries to use current weather as proof of their climate conclusion.
> I'm not convinced that this is a problem.

There's no "THE problem." There's a ton of "problems." Just to be clear. Because many of the problems we face today are through interaction of different things, often in a complex chain, rather than a direct easy to follow causal chain.

> via old fashioned grapevine

Treat the problem as an adversarial problem. Yes, your adversary will always be able to break your defenses. Nothing is bulletproof. How you defend is through forcing adversaries to expend resources. It is very clear that forcing lobbiests to learn through the grapevine is a more costly method than simply looking at a public database. And if you aren't familiar with this concept, people lie. No one need know your vote unless you reveal it (which... might be a lie).

The point also is that it can also prevent inner conflict, among parties. You're not voting along party lines? You think you're going to get as much support from your party when it comes to your bills and campaign funds? So you have plenty of incentive to not reveal your vote, even among allies.

I agree with you in that switching to private votes won't solve the problems we have. But would it improve? I'd guess some and I'd guess it would take time for the real effects to be seen. But the other side is, would it do harm? I doubt it.
Ask HN: Why do people need more than git to manage dotfiles?
I've been putting my whole home folder under git for almost a year [1].

I haven't seen any other repos on GitHub with a similar layout. Why do people rely on GNU Stow and other complicated tools to essentially do what git does? I haven't noticed any performance problems with just using git.

edit: after posting this I found another article [2] which essentially argues the same thing but I'm curious to hear arguments against this.

[1] https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/computer/

[2] https://www.unixdigest.com/tutorials/keeping-your-home-in-git.html
Ah yes, I totally agree. I was inspecting the method as a stopgap solution (especially because it does not require retraining or any other special tricks) until researchers figure out "planning" in a broader sense. It is very inefficient otherwise, but in the meantime, is just simple sampling with a couple parameters to tune from the output softmax the best we can do? is there no low hanging fruit there?
There are plenty of just-below-FAANG tier high-paying companies that aren't spending time Googling your history outside of LinkedIn. Most of these folks will be fine and getting paid lots of money. If they make this cause their entire online personality then maybe they'll have an issue, but I have a feeling most of them will probably get back to work and move on with their lives.
Feature flagging could handle this. Often features are rolled out to a very small sub-set of users. Say 1% or perhaps 1000 groups. I often roll out features to specific user groups, and sometimes even to individual users. This specific version of the bot could have been released to NewYork based groups. That would make tracking it much easier.
I think there are at least 2 serious issues with TLS, both documented in: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/15226
Does anyone know what happened to TinyProjects? I looked forwards to reading his updates and it looks like he stopped a while ago…
Since EPUBs are just zipped HTML files, I guess rendering can be done more efficiently by the browser itself rather than by custom rendering on an HTML canvas.
that's the one I am following right now, as you said, the fact I can C-c C-c to eval code on org-babel is pretty incredible.
Assertions without cite[1; pp. 62 and 68] are less meaningful than Zuck's base salary.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680124...