skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.17493

There's some cursory indication that in the long tail, training LLMs on LLM-generated data causes model collapse. Kind of like how if you photocopy a photocopy too many times the document becomes unreadable.

This isn't really surprising though. Neural networks at large are a form of lossy compression. You can't do lossy compression on artifacts recovered from lossy compression too many times. The losses stack.
It seems like she has a background in EE and physics, but almost all of her work is policy oriented and not actually hands-on building things, at which point, "when all you have is a hammer" seems relevant. From the article:

> [Interviewer:] It’s almost predestined that you’d be in this job. As soon as you got your physics degree at Caltech, you went to DC and got enmeshed in policy.
I was terrified when you lumped Sapolsky in with those other guys, but if this is the worst you’ve got then I’m breathing out a sigh of relief.
I sure haven't seen any of those "plenty good" results yet - current SOTA seems to be about as useful as semi-coherently gluing together random Google results. Good enough to perhaps replace a minimum-wage worker, not good enough to provide actual value when you care about the quality of the result.

This paper seems to suggest that significant advancement in domain knowledge acquisition and retention is exactly the problem, as you seem to need exponentially more data due to a lack of generalization. What's the point of a model which can perfectly quote Shakespeare if you're a programmer trying to refactor a proprietary codebase and it fails to make a link to whatever garbage it picked up from StackOverflow?
>robotic animals that's not in the movie at all

Although I haven't played the game or read the book, the movie features a robotic snake, and there's dialogue about real snakes being very expensive. It seems reasonable that this would apply to other animals too.
>I've never considered this to be taboo either, it's bloody obvious. Is there some sort of hidden context here I'm not getting?

There is. So the problem comes in when you start looking at something like say a particular minority racial/ethnic group and then picking some statistic that is higher or lower than the average over all people and associating that statistic with bad outcomes like violent offenses, lack of conscientousness/underachievement, etc. So for example, if you're saying that violent offenses can be attributed to heritable personality traits (rather than environmental/circumstantial) in those groups of people, you're basically right back to the old and not-so-old eugenic and racist arguments about human behavior.

It's likely that there is some effect there, but the question is to what extent is that useful information in terms of education/discussion or setting policy goals and stuff. Also, there is good science to support significant effects of environmental factors, so it's not like we're missing a lot. (It's not hard to imagine that the same personality trait that tends to produce aggression could manifest VERY differently for someone raised in an environment where physical violence was common and necessary to survive, vs someone upper middle class, or someone in the CEO private-school class of people.)
Sharing with friend and family is not "serious theft". It is benevolent and what people do with books and DVD, without industry people becoming insane about.
Sounds like you want an RSS reader instead if you only read it for the news.

There are also some x to fedi proxies.

No need to pay for something that makes you feel bad, as far as I read your comment.
> I disagree with your limitation of 'not used to promote tyranny' - that is not a limitation present in the wording

I didn't mean to imply that that is the only regulation citizens should exercise over each other's use of arms. Obviously citizens should also be regulating each other's use of arms to prevent private crime, since that is also a threat to the security of a free state.

> They've delegated that regulation to their state or locale, by means of voting and legislation.

First, no such delegation can violate the 2nd Amendment, since the Constitution, as amended, is the supreme law of the land. It limits how much citizens can delegate.

Second, what happens if the government they have delegated to becomes tyrannical, and stays that way despite changes in voting and legislation? What is the citizens' last resort? To resist the tyrannical government using their own individually borne arms.

In other words, any such delegation can always be revoked, and the citizens have to have some last resort way of making the revocation good if the government refuses to accept it.

> And then they get told they can't.

Nobody has told them that. See above.
Most reagents and kits for molecular cloning will be fine at -20°C.
The animals are mentioned briefly in the film, but in the book, they are a major plot point. Decker mostly wants the money because he wants to buy a real animal.
> A "Steam Deck" matches none of those for example.

That usage is from cyberpunk. It's from Burning Chrome (1982) by William Gibson. "She took a little simstim deck from her belt and showed me the broken hinge
on the cassette cover". What he's describing is similar to the belt pack of the Apple Vision headgear. Gibson's headgear is a headband that transmits into the brain, not clunky goggles.
> Musk's competitor to OpenAI (x.AI ?) has raised $6 billion at a $18 billion valuation.

This shit blows my mind.

Just like A16Z giving Adam Neumann $350M to do a WeWork for residential (what???) that had a "valuation" of $3B before the company had done a day's work.
Good point. Better point: zoning wasn’t a thing for… ~340 of years. People could largely do what they want and co-located uses was the name of the game. Central planning doesn’t fucking work.
You lost me on the Elixir analogy. Elixir is great . I'll concede Elixir would not be well suited for a 3D physics engine or for writing hardware drivers.
Cynicism is perceived as more intelligent [0]. I personally find the HN brand of discussion to be difficult to bs my way into. But no matter your level of competency you can always find something to criticize and feel you've contributed. I wonder if academia or even "more intelligent" discussion in general would be counted as more negative.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/014616721878319...
The book actually has a scene where Deckard gets captured by a group of cops, who administer the Voight-Kampff test. My memories are vague, but I think they accuse Deckard of being an android, but the cops are actually androids. Or something.

Anyway, it is IMO incorrect to say that the book did not suggest Deckard might be an android, and likewise, the movie only hints that Deckard is a replicant.

Phillip K Dick's writing was all about mind-fucks and the difficulty of knowing what is true.
People can do a lot more than we give them credit for. Humans are fucking tough, creative, and persevering if you teach them to be. I worry that the people screaming the loudest about how we have no free will or no ability to even make choices because of physics and neuroscience are handicapping the next generation with a sort of learned helplessness.

It is true that there are serious limitations on what I can or cannot do, but taking action and choosing to cast off the traits of parents that you don’t like or think aren’t productive is possible. You can change and go beyond your upbringing.

You are a product of it, but you can decide to be different, I’m living proof. It’s just hard.
That was such a faithful adaption of Scanner Darkly, it was like reading the book again. I agree that a similar adaption of Do androids dream of electic sheep would be amazing. I'd also like to see the same care and attention given to some of Dick's other novels and shorts. No one has quite been able to capture We can remember it for you wholesale, and the twist at the end. I enjoyed Minority Report, but it wasn't quite up there with the story.
Ah so it's open as in open for commercial partnership, got confused there for a while.
https://www.bome.com/products/bomenet
Could We Build Jurassic Park Dinosaurs
It's like when that first Motorola came out with a locked bootloader, or maybe the second one, I think the first was trivially crackable. I remember that year, all of the people claiming it was just a matter of time. And nowadays, among other reasons, custom roms are largely dead because people want access to PayPal, Netflix and their banking app.

It's grim. I hope to win the lottery and leave the industry before the term "computer" has lost all meaning.
Can a CSV contain binary? I'm just thinking of the massive file size explosion of stringy'ing integers and floats (like those used for lat/lng coordinates for example)
What makes you think his promotion of the book was particulary motivated by making money rather than any other reason an author might promote their book?
I hear you, and I understand, but I feel that is important to remember that we all have experienced different things in life that ultimately combine to shape us as who we are.

[How did I do here at both passing and failing?]

Joking aside, it's the but in the first sentence of a reply (verbal/written/formal/informal/semi-formal/whatever) that usually gets me:

"I hear you, but..."

"Well! That's definitely one approach, and I certainly don't want to invalidate it, but..."

"I'm not a racist, but..."
I don't think we talk enough about the state of the world. Is our society creating the conditions for a life worth living?

You can look at an individual and say, "Find meaningful work. Explore your passions. Connect with others." But when this advice becomes so universal as to be meaningless, we have to ask: why are we placing people in a river of loneliness and drudgery and telling them to swim against the current?
Cannabis research is highly politicized. Researchers go in that field with an agenda. That's at least my experience with that field.

Most weed users will nitpick research that shows weed is safe and good for you while most detractors will find research that says the opposite.

I don't know the science but at least to me it "feels" like the weed benefits have been pushed a bit too much too widely lately (legalization lobby) and we are now seeing a huge backlash. I'm seeing the same trend happening with Mushroom/Psylocibin (about to get legal so a ton of research/articles to make it look perfectly safe).
Because he can and there is no adult in the room to evaluate the consequences of drastic decisions before making them.
I think it's easier to take arguments more seriously when the statement doesn't generalize across an entire generation.
I hate when people say quietly as if everything is some sort of CIA operation that is being covered over by the government.

It's not that exciting.
I got a 10L dewar on amazon for something like $200 a couple years ago. Certainly has paid for itself in party entertainment.

FWIW, lots of these steel cups that are popular these days are vacuum flasks and cost practically nothing.
I use msn.com since they show wsj articles for free.
The US economy pumps assets and dumps exports, yes. However, weakening the dollar would dump assets and pump exports. That's the opposite of what the US has been up to for the last 50 years and it's the opposite of what the US is up to today. Your understanding of macroeconomics needs work.

Hint: if your analysis does not involve US counterparties, it can only ever be correct by accident.
> where can't you discuss it?

Publicly, in academia, generally anywhere?

> What do you want to discuss

The topic at hand? The 'cycles of abuse' thing I mentioned earlier? GWAS with behavioral predictions and their usage in increasing the power of non-genetic behavioral studies? All sorts of things about genetic basis for behavior?

Even the way I'm getting responded to here indicates that people are searching for a 'gotcha' - it would be much worse in actual academia.

I don't really understand the motivation for denying this taboo exists.
I'd say having a "stable middle-class" parent is the worst starting point to become rich. It's a sure way to become a similarly boring middle-middle class person - that is, a strictly conformist, risk-averse, boot-licking serf.

Kid of a rich person will probably become rich because they inherit cash. Kid of a poor person may become rich because they are ready to take risk and usually have good social skills. That, or they may die trying or end up in prison... But there's no good pathway to become rich if you come from a boring middle-middle-class. Too little money for elite uni or other ways to "hack" it, too little money for risk taking ("starting a startup because you always have something to fall back on"), and inherited attitude against risk-taking. Dead end. You just take up a mediocre white collar job and count years till retirement.
Twitter is actually pretty great
Writing tests after the fact is way harder than writing code to be testable. You're pretty much guaranteed to miss edge conditions, which tend to be the cases LLMs often screw up.

The rampant optimism is just weird to me.
This includes one of my favorite details, which is the coded message sent to confirm the ascent:

>Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement

Wikipedia[1] has the breakdown, as well as the rest of the code for other individuals[2]:

>Snow conditions bad" was the agreed code to signify that the summit had been reached; "advance base abandoned" referred to Hillary and "awaiting improvement" referred to Tenzing.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_British_Mount_Everest_exp...

2:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_British_Mount_Everest_exp...
... aka the Trump Test. "Are you willing to take a bullet for me (even if I'm the one firing the gun)?"
Also:

>> your noisy children are bothering the neighbors through the walls at all hours

Paper-thin walls are a construction issue.

I've been living in apartments in cities my whole life, and now I'm raising my kids in a large city. There are several families with small kids in the same building. Noise is rarely a problem, because walls between apartments are thick and sound-insulating.
I largely disagree due to social mobility.

If you look at the differences between people who escape poverty and those that don't, you will find major differences in Habits and capability.

If you look at people who drop in social class and those that dont, you will also find differences.

If starting wealth was all that mattered, and human behavior had zero impact, you would see no mobility. I guess one could chalk mobility up to random luck, but this flies in a the face off massive amounts of data correlating performance with outcome.
I never claimed he did? I was just responding to your incorrect assumption
In Rust [0]:

#[derive(Debug)]
pub enum Example {
Foo(i32),
Bar(&'static str),
}

let mut ex: Example = Example::Foo(42);
println!("{ex:?}"); // Foo(42)

let ex_ref: &mut Example = &mut ex;
*ex_ref = Example::Bar("hello");

println!("{ex:?}"); // Bar("hello")

Given a mutable reference to a value of enum type, you can replace it with another variant. Or you can swap it out with any other value of the same type, even if the variants are different. This is most commonly used for Option<T>, where you can insert or remove the contained value as long as you have a reference.

The limitation here is that for as long as the mutable reference is live, no other code can access the value. So when you do change the variant, you can't have any other references sitting around that point to the removed subfields.

[0] https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...
>We see some evidence in studies that wealthly grandparents are strong indicators of wealthly adult grandchildren.

Seems just slightly obvious, though I'm sure the studies are more nuanced than this
Good! I like him. I'm an American capitalist so I'm not going to critisize a guy for making a buck.
When we learn the grammar of our language, the teacher does not stand in front of the class and proceed to say a large corpus of examples of ungrammatical sentences, only the correct ones are in the training set.

When we learn to drive, we do not need to crash our car a thousand times in a row before we start to get it.

When we play a new board game for the first time, we can do it fairly competently (though not as good as experienced players) just by reading and understanding the rules.
This is trivial to model by making your type `T | null | Missing`.
America is too expensive. The entire economy has been shifting away from creating new useful things and towards what I think of as extraction. A couple examples:

- Car companies paywalling hardware and software features while selling data (including GPS location, speed, etc.) to data brokers.

- Netflix raising subscription fees in spite of the fact that they've cancelled so many original shows and lost so much of their leased catalog.

- Grocery stores and fast food restaurants firing cashiers and replacing them with unreliable self-checkout kiosks (pushing the work off onto the customer while continuing to charge them just as much, if not more).

- Wendy's adding "surge pricing" and replacing drive-through workers with an AI that's barely 80% accurate. (So they'll charge you more just because and still fuck up your order.)

There are other examples, these are just the ones that are fresh in my mind right now.
Most people are unaware of the separated twin studies and it shows.
This is where I like to cite Dijstra's "Go To Statement Considered Harmful".

What a lot of people miss about that paper is that he wasn't just talking about goto statements. He was also making a more general observation about how more powerful and general programming language features are not necessarily desirable, because they tend to adversely impact developer productivity.

The reason I, as a user, prefer structured control flow statements over goto is not that I believe they are powerful. It's precisely because they are less powerful. The resulting constraints on how the program can be structured make it easier for me to read and reason about existing code. That makes maintaining code easier. It also makes optimization and static analysis easier. And it makes writing tests easier, too.

I have similar feelings about ADTs. The reason I prefer them to other ways of doing composite data types is not that I think they're more powerful. It's that they create constraints that tend to reduce the semantic complexity of the domain models people create in programming languages that use them. And that makes my job easier.

The corollary to that, though, is that I'm not actually all that hype about adding ADTs to existing languages. For reasons that are similar to how the mere availability of structured, reentrant function calls is small consolation in a codebase that's already riddled with goto statements. The real win doesn't come from using ADTs, it comes from not having to worry about all those other confusing overpowered things that aren't ADTs.
This is conjecture. Why are the people on the fence choosing the dark side? Why does a lack of free will preclude the possibility of any kind of consequences?
Congrats on the launch.
I'll take a closer look soon and only played around a bit.

Would be great if you could extend the documentation.

If you're not open sourcing the app, what about at least open sourcing the documentation?

One thing I'd like to extend is on https://www.grafychat.com/d/docs/intro

3. Configure Ollama server to make sure it allows connection from grafychat.

That's not very helpful. Something along the line
Set the environment variable OLLAMA_ORIGINS to "https://www.grafychat.com" and rerun "ollama serve". Use your custom host if your using the self-host option.

```sh
OLAMA_ORIGINS="https://www.grafychat.com" ollama serve
```

Is not that much more text but makes it way easier for people to go and try out your app with ollama.
as i mentioned in another comment, what bothers me the most is that heritability is used as an excuse for not changing certain traits and and as a reason to demand the right to continue bad behaviors
> that's a bit of a big ordeal if you already have a 15 year old codebase that's written in Java.

JetBrains has prioritised compatibility with Java and it shows. Of course, there are some gotchas (such as nullability or checked exceptions which don't exist in Kotlin), but you can really mix Kotlin and Java code relatively freely.
"Haskell is the best imperative language," (C) various software engineers.

Also, algebraic data types can be seen as hierarchy consisting of abstract base class and several final children classes. So it is an inheritance model, just restricted one.
> You can “exit” now

The actual change here is minor in code and function but Big in implication. It signals that the development finalt after decades of EVERY SINGLE NEW USER going “Why can’t it…” the first time they hit this strange behavior, the old stubborn developers finalt let go of the battle to die on this molehill and made a nano sized step towards an easier world for the end users.

Considering how much Python is valued for being easy to use, it’s incredible it took this long for this to happen.
This illustrates two ways of teaching

I’ve experienced both, each at a different university

In one, professors would teach one thing then ask very different (and much harder) questions on tests

In the other, tests were more of a recap of the material up to that point

I definitely learned a lot more in the second case and was a lot more motivated. It also required more effort from the professors

The two methods also test different things. The recap one tests effort and dedication, if you do the work, you get the grade

The difficult tests measure either luck and/or creativity and problem solving under pressure. It’s not about doing the work, it’s about either being lucky or good at testing
I've recently played with the Overture Maps datasets which are in .parquet and I agree that there is a learning curve.

One thing that's nice about .parquet is typical Macs come with 128/256GB SSDs and you can query 300GB of parquet in S3 without needing all those files on your local hard drive. Some of these queries are also surprisingly fast but I haven't looked into how it works.

Edit: Having used MySQL and Postgres, I actually think DuckDB is better than either.
If you’re dealing with non trivial data sizes and if you have an analytics use case and you’re using CSV, you’re already doing it wrong.

You bring up partitioning — that can help performance but with Parquet, you can get performance they is far better than CSV even without partitioning because it only has to read the headers. And no, no one really needs to know about row groups (sure you can eke out more performance but few people do). All this is to say all your points are non starters. There’s no need to know all this and even the least optimized parquet dataset is better than CSV in every way.

The only use case CSV might be good for is ETL into an actual database like Postgres which is what you’re doing in your article but that’s actually only a very small part of the analytics pipeline.

Parquet is actually not that complicated but I always meet people who only know CSV and they feel anything more complicated is beyond them. Don’t be that guy.

Shoehorning everything into CSV creates costs downstream like high storage costs (CSVs are much bigger), and no type safety means you have to validate types with a bunch of non standard rules creating a lot of technical debt.

I’ve always managed to work with parquet with either DuckDB or Visidata (and occasionally Pandas or Polars). Visidata lets you peek into parquet like Vim lets you look into CSVs.

I don’t miss CSVs at all.