skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good point. I think this changes the story a bit. It's not exactly that PE is predatory. If PE were unlocking the value of assets held by an underperforming company, the transaction could be explained as the creative destruction of capitalism making room for something better to hold those assets.

In this case, it's more like private equity wasn't as smart as Red Lobster's owners, so now Red Lobster's owners have extra capital to allocate in the economy. Which is also arguably good.

If you liked the restaurant, of course, none of this is much comfort. But if nobody with a ton of money thinks Red Lobster is a good use of capital, from either a financial or sentimental perspective, it may go the way of the dodo.
Right before the AIM shutdown, I managed to log back into my account from the early 2000s.

A crazy time capsule of bad user names. Big shame aol never figured out how to monetize it. AIM could have become what slack and teams are today.
On a technical basis yes. Finance rests upon a foundation of people emailing around spreadsheets and trust. Much better than new innovative cryptocurrencies that are just a trojan, wallet address typo, or exit scam away from losing your savings.
How representative of the overall population are marathon runners? Let's be honest here, this is not at all representative of the average person, who is at no risk of over-hydration.
Seems genuine, but it's so weird to expose your personal family matters like this. I always wonder how I'd feel if my parents were bragging about how good they were to me on social media as they would parent me. It feels like it cheapens things because now it's not just about the family, it's also because you want clicks on your profile.
A couple of months ago I brought a cabin on a trailer which is to become my home office in the backyard.

I managed to get it off the trailer and onto some skids yesterday. This weekends job is digging a trench for a network cable from the house.
Not even close to "as active". Defender will scan everything, even windows own updates. It is the reason why Windows machines perform poorly and why battery life is a joke on that platform. It's intrusive and doesn't care much about resource use.
Wails <https://wails.io>. I wanted to use Go but wasn't as familiar with native UI as with HTML/CSS/JS, I tried out most of the other popular Go UI frameworks too though they didn't feel as comfortable to use as Spot's React-like model.

Wails is still pretty epic as well though.
> But you can control how much dressing you use

Can you? If people could control what they eat, we wouldn't have the obesity problem in the first place. I would argue it's harder to control how much you consume something (let's say alcohol) than not consuming it at all, so relying people to dose their dressings based in calories is a losing proposition.

Also I think people go for the bigger size not because they're asked but because it's priced a stupidly small amount higher so people go "wow, why buy a small dose of poison for $2, when I can buy a gigantic amount of poison for $2.10? I get way more poison for my money with the second option!". TBH, I'm pretty pissed at pizzerias for trying to get me twice as much pizza as I need by making 2 pizzas literally the same price as one. Just sell me one pizza (which is by itself my whole day's worth of calories already) a person can eat for a reasonable price. Please.
Getting away from the computer and working on some analog hobbies.

I have a bunch of Warhammer models to put together and then paint.
… who’d PE sell the land to?

Was it… themselves, in some roundabout way?
I have heard of generalization vs memorization, but the article you shared is very high quality. Thank you.

I do not think that SOTA LLMs demonstrate grokking for most math problems. While I am a bit surprised to read how little training is necessary to achieve grokking in a toy setting (one specific math problem), the domain of all math problems is much larger. Also, the complexity of an applied mathematics problem is much higher than a simple mod problem. That seems to be what the author of the first article you quoted thinks as well.

Our public models fail in that large domain a lot. For example, with tasks like counting elements in a set (words in a paragraph). Not to mention that they fail in complex applied mathematics tasks. If they have been loss-minimized for that specific calculation to the point that they exhibit this phase change, then that would be an exception.

But in the financial statement analysis article, the author says explicitly that there isn't a limitation on the types of math problems they ask the model to perform. This is very, very irregular, and there are no guarantees that model has generalized them. In fact, it is much more likely that it hasn't, in my opinion.

In any case, thank you again for the article. It's just such a massive contrast with the MBA article above.
No, this isn't true. First they no longer own it; we don't know what the sale terms were. Second (and more importantly) PE is a term-based play; if you do it right you get both the returns over the life of your fund by directing more revneues to payouts, aggresively cutting costs and eroding long-term investment (like commercial real estate) AND you sell at the right time to generate a multiple return (before all those unfavourable leases start to impact financials). Red Lobster 18-24 months ago could have sold at a premium to the $2.1B purchase price.
I can't pass up this opportunity to mention "How Round is Your Circle". It's nerd shit about geometry applied to, among other things, steam engines.

There's a chapter or three about planimeters, the introduction to which is the hatchet planimeter.

Worth a read if you're into geometry and Industrial Revolution stuff, and honestly, probably worth working through with pencil and paper, though I never have.
He was also gaining more weight than the laws of thermodynamics allow based on how many calories he was supposedly eating. Alcohol has a lot of calories.
These allegations of Hamas violations of international humanitarian laws—even if true—does not devalue the lives of Palestinians, nor does it give Israel an excuse for further violations.

https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies...
> how do people randomly connect to talk now?

Just getting online used to place you in a small enough pool that making connections was easy -- the fact that you were online in the first place gave you something in common.

Any single online platform has far too many users (and spammers, bots, trolls, grifters, etc.) to make it a good place to meet friends.

Maybe IRC would be a good idea.
So the sucker here is the bank? Can't say that I care that much about that. It's just business and the banks apparently suck at it. They can foreclose on the business and sell it off to someone who relaunches it.
The municipal wifi option in Minneapolis was just fine when we had it. Super cheap and plenty reliable.

I'm not sure what else the city has done, but having 2-3 broadband providers has been amazing. Even before they passed this bill. The offerings in the country are top notch. Our lake cabin got fiber access with gigabit before our suburban home did. We asked if they offered it and two days later they dug to our cabin and had it all wired up.

Is this municipal? No maybe not. But is it obvious that the small ISPs are fighting for their customers? Yes in both service and support. MN is doing something right.
Correct. Everything is working fine. If those individual Red Lobster locations are making money, they will continue to exist because the lenders will get paid back more by cutting a deal and continuing to operate than by closing the restaurants. If the individual restaurants are not making money then they will close, as they should. The overall demand for restaurants is unchanged in either scenario, so if they close, their place will be taken by other restaurants.
Ohhh, I thought the article was going to be about "Weird Al," as in Yankovic. I was like, what could he have possibly done to deserve that?
At least the first two are also conflated in a typical CPU’s trap/interrupt/whatever-your-architecture-calls-it model, which is what Unix signals are essentially a copy of. So this isn’t necessarily illogical.
The initial statement on this incident was pretty misleading, it sounded like Google just accidentally deleted an entire GCP account. Reading this writeup I'm reassured, it sounds like they only lost a region's worth of virtual machines, which is absolutely something that happens (and that I think my systems can handle without too much trouble.) The original writeup made it sound like all of their GCS buckets, SQL databases, etc. in all regions were just gone which is a different thing and something I hope Google can be trusted not to do.
Nice! I used to paint a bunch of D&D figurines until last year.
“If we don’t shoot ourselves in the face, then someone else with shoot themselves in the face, and then we’ll be behind in the crucial metric of number of bullets in our head!”
A story about the problem with delivering interrupts to a process in kernel mode in unix:

https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
I noticed this years ago while drunk on a bench staring at a sunny Alaska day, and have never been able to unsee it. It's completely ruined my lifelong enjoyment I would get from watching the clouds.

It's one of those things that I've sorta explained to people that I can't look at the sky too long, but never want to give them the name of it or tell them what to look for because it may ruin their sky too.
Years ago I tried archiving to optical media and after a few short years, things were failing. Like all the things.

I am of the opinion that (multiple) hard disks might be the most recoverable. I might be wrong.
You're very knowledgeable, this is great. Is there any automated tech on the market you've seen to do the spotting for you, so you can dynamically ground drones as air conditions change? Also, are you piloting all these manually (yknow, if they weren't gathering dust), is it a preset flight plan, or are you already experimenting with AI control? Would think even an LLM fed with air traffic sensor data could make the call to ground drones and switch between flight plans dynamically at this point - though I'd want it thoroughly tested and airing on the side of caution always. Also - what kind of height do you require for drone dusting? Could you get away with keeping it low to the ground, dusting only a few plants at a time at the expense of longer flight time and battery charging, but at least hopefully practically low enough to skirt any potential collision and legal issues, and potentially still entirely automated? Would think that kind of specificity also allows for stuff like dusting individual crop areas differently according to need, too.

All just thoughts from a programmer here - very cool you get to experiment with this kind of stuff in a practical setting. Hope it gets more practical soon!

Bummer the law is so slow on this.
It's a great idea.

Of course, there will be some ambiguities, but maybe over time you can somehow constrain the input language a bit, adding some structure to it, such that you can query a database in English-like syntax without any ambiguities.

That would be nice!
I’ve been collecting on and off for the last 35 years. I have a pretty sizable collection at this point.

It’s very relaxing once you make time for it. Treating it like work would ruin it for me.
It often is, but this isn't some kind of free money tree that only rich people can access. Loading up a company with debt requires a creditor. Selling underlying assets requires a buyer. If these counterparties don't offer enough money to offset what PE spent to buy the company, PE loses. And this often happens, including, apparently, in this case!
It’s easy - if you didn’t do it, you haven’t done it.

There is no point in asking others “how” they do it.

Whatever reasons make you do it or procrastinate are the most relevant for you.
Are you accusing the PE fund of defrauding the buyer? If not then it's just a bad investment on their part and lucky for the PE fund, but if you are then you damn well better provide some actual evidence.
Very cool. I hope to represent my mental states in text as well as I can so that, should I die untimely, my children can extract whatever value they can from my serialized brain as they can using AI. Writing it down is step one. I keep as much as possible public so that people other than my children can also benefit. But there's obviously things that are best for my kids. Hopefully they get enough of me that they can query my ghost after my death. Or maybe they won't care. And that's okay too!
I prefer the movie Fat Head where the guy loses weight by only eating mcdonald (and walking i think?).
> It is not a systemic issue.

I kinda think the opposite. The culture that kept these kinds of problems at bay has largely left the company or stopped trying to keep it alive, as they no longer really care about what they're building.

Morale is real bad.
You're doing that either way by not having competitors to Boeing.
Show HN: My Prime Number Theory Repo
I started this project back in 2019 and just finished it. It counts primes but it's still a little rough around the edges. What does HN think?
That’s what I’m wondering, or if they got some other compensation that isn’t mentioned.
After the Boston Marathon bombing, one of my buddies (masters cum laude in history) posted a long series of socially conscious rants about white elites unfairly demonizing the suspects for being brown people. I had to explain that Chechnya is right in the middle of the Caucasus mountain range. "Oh."

They had to fudge the demographics in the 1930 census because so many people from Georgia, Texas, etc identified themselves as South American.

I knew a guy who spent weeks drooling over bargains in a UK computer magazine without realizing that £ was not a dollar sign.

My buddy in Santa Fe gets into arguments with customer support people over whether New Mexico is part of the United States.
Have used this for years. Still use it today on Linux under WINE as I just can't find anything else that is anywhere near as good.

Basically use Picard to fill in meta-data, then Mp3tag to tidy up, add the album art and tweak naming conventions to my preference when needed.
Warez on the BBSs. Go Eaglesoft!
Kind of? It is an unfortunate biological reality that we need to eat, sleep, pee, etc. I mean, we literally say "Excuse me" all the time as a matter of social etiquette; this is no different.
It's less about being "less work" and more about what GPUs are and are not good at.

Displacement maps can closely approximate the geometric detail of having 1 triangle per pixel. All the work for displacement maps happens on a per-pixel basis inside a fragment shader (in simple terms, a little program that runs for each pixel of a triangle). You can wrap this displacement map over a single, large triangle and get the visual appearance of a much denser mesh.

The alternative approach of subdividing the mesh is orders of magnitude less efficient because GPUs are _very_ bad at drawing tiny polygons. It's just how GPUs and the graphics pipelines are implemented. A 'tiny polygon' is determined from how many pixels it covers, as you start dropping below a couple dozen pixels per triangle you start hitting nasty performance cliffs inside the GPU because of the specific ways triangles are drawn. Displacement maps works around this problem because you're logically only drawing single big polygons but doing the work in a shader where the GPU is much more efficient.
As trusting as the traditional finance system is, it seems they still experience exit scams, wire typos, and countless other scams that lose savings.

Crypto has a long way to go, but tradfi hasn't solved its own problems. Until then, I guess we'd all better hope our bank representatives have a lot of friends in the industry.
FYI It looks like you can purchase that board direct from TI for $199.99
https://www.ti.com/tool/ADS1299EEGFE-PDK
Beautifully stated. I can only speculate, but I'd say the reason it is this way is due to the collective apathy/cynicism toward government. We have collectively come to expect a certain level of corruption and influence peddling. We have a high tolerance for incompetence in carrying out government operations. Only the most egregious offenders are brought to the public's attention, and in an age of increasingly short attention spans, people have forgotten by the time elections roll around.

That is, if they vote in the first place - in that example I gave above of a corrupt mayor stealing millions (Tiffany Henyard of Dolton, IL), the voter turnout was only 15%.
> Third, I don't believe in recursion as the basis of all programming. This is a fundamental belief of certain computer scientists, especially those who love Scheme and like to teach programming by starting with a "cons" cell and recursion. But to me, seeing recursion as the basis of everything else is just a nice theoretical approach to fundamental mathematics (turtles all the way down), not a day-to-day tool.

The point of substance. He doesn't believe in the fundamentals behind tail recursion because he doesn't believe in the fundamentals behind recursion.
It was a red flag when UniSuper said their subscription was deleted, not their account. Many people jumped to conclusions about that.
But who wants text-to-sql in products that they use? You wouldn't be able to trust the results. So what is it useful for? Of course you could learn to check the output. But then you could just learn SQL. I know dozens of not particularly technical people (certainly not software developers) who have learnt enough SQL to be useful over a couple of days.
The PE playbook (assuming 5 year term):

1. buy asset-heavy companies with good cashflow and add to you portfolio.
2. aggressively cut costs on long-term investments like R&D, major capital projects, and squeeze OPEX
3. at the same time focus solely on S&M. If possible get everyone on multi-year contracts that last until year 6 (often with heavy discounting on the back end)
4. shed impressive dividends over the term
5. years 3-4 make signalling investments that hint towards hockey-stick growth: (real life) examples: 1. replatform your database from on-prem to AWS, 2. move OFF aws to fixed-provisioned (I'm not making this up)
6. shop for a new PE fund to sell. Look for a 3x or higher multiplier on initial investment
7. sell, repeat, parchute in your bench of executives.

Eventually you've got a bunch of companies that look like subprime-backed CDOs
A lot of people are chronically dehdryated.

A lot more than I ever realized.

There are also symptoms that turn out to be dehydration and not something you end up getting medicated for.

Making sure one’s hydrated, especially for the brain at least helps the brain and body be at its capable baseline before addressing further.

I recently started 1L of water first thing in the morning with a pack of electrolyte like a biosteel. The key is to drink at the pace that doesn’t make you pee, which seems possible in the morning. My understanding is most ppl wake up dehydrated after sleep.

It was noticeable after a few days and let me delay and eliminate the first caffeine and progressively push it to later in the morning.

Might not be for everyone but it would be surprising if more than a few people didn’t discover they might be a little dehydrated.

Caffiene is back to being a boost.
Thinking is when biological brains create new ideas from old thoughts and inputs.

LLMs can take old ideas and inputs, as text, and create text that turns into useful new ideas when a human reads them. The new LLMs actually do this in a meaningful way, bullshitting far less than older LLMs, and actually producing meaningful criticism and suggestions. The reader does not do the thinking needed to create the new idea. They just decode the text into the new idea.

So either actually meaningful new ideas can be created without thinking, or the LLM is doing a kind of artificial thinking.

Critics will say that we may as well argue that bones can think, because casting bones in a cup influences the prediction in a soothe sayer's mind. But the words created by LLMs - especially higher grade ones - are much more meaningful and thought like than bones in a cup. They can clearly advance a line of thinking in a way that is analogous to how a brain advances a line of thinking.

Therefore, it's reasonable to say LLMs are capable of limited artificial thought. They can effectively process thoughts represented externally to humans.

Maybe we should call this co-thinking, because it still requires a human as the final mile of the loop, to turn the result back into a real thought.
Looks like a prime market opportunity for a competing chain with competent management. The PE firm's loss can now be someone else's long-term gain.
to be clear, that was not a random link, it was the link on the canon website
> I really don't get a sense that this "rapid iteration" approach is a good replacement for better engineering and more care.

It sounds like you're saying you know how to design, build & test orbital rockets better than the company that in the last ~decade designed and built what is now the world's most reliable rocket, the only rocket that can be reused and that now puts more mass into orbit than every other rocket and country on the planet combined, by a very, very large margin.

I.. ah, trust SpaceX.
it's a bust-out, you identify a patsy and you stick it to them.

sometimes the company is worth more dead than alive, the parts are worth more the whole, especially when you can leave someone holding the bag, and the PE company gets paid to make them dead.

in any event the company is worth more to an extremely unscrupulous buyer than as a going concern in public markets.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4348lj
I don't understand quite how this works. GPT-4o's context limit is still just 128,000 tokens, but this post talks about "97k hours of transcribed audio".

Did this person upload the content to a newly created GPT, and is now running RAG queries against it using the GPT "knowledge" feature? https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8554397-creating-a-gpt says "GPTs for paid users are currently powered by GPT-4. GPTs for paid users will switch to use GPT-4o in the next several weeks." but maybe that documentation is out of date?

The icon displayed in the screenshots is the default ChatGPT icon though - if it was a GPT I would expect either a custom icon or an isometric box default GPT icon.

The text in the screenshots looks to me like it could be generated based on a shorter interactive conversation (providing names and basic notes about family members) that fit in that 128,000 token window, as opposed to being influenced by 97,000 hours of audio.
Very few people are long distance runners compared to most people who wake up dehydrated in the morning.

Hydration is good. Extra electrolytes and water will be peed out.
Samsung actually created such a monster. After a few zoom cameras running Android, they finally created the Samsung Galaxy NX, which was a mirrorless camera with a 20MP APS-C sensor and Android 4.2 (it was only slightly outdated on release in 2013). It's a mediocre camera (lacking most physical controls) and a mediocre android device (way too bulky and the fixed touchscreen isn't easy to use).
Regeneron ISEF winner withdraws project, returns $50k prize
I debate if PE unlocks or unsustainably accelerates. I think it comes down to should a small minority get very rich quickly, or should a going concern support a much broader ecosystem. I have seen PE "wreck" a few companies first-hand, so my selfish preference is the former.
I'm creating a UI Kit and blocks using Lit with the help of Claude 3 Opus. It is a lot of work but using code generation it is going quite fast.