skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We have airing cupboards in the UK. Cupboards with shelving that keep the hot water tank, so it's built around using waste heat from that to now and then dry damp clothes. It's not a one-to-one replacement for full clothes drying, but it's a nice complement to it.
>See the previous point. No one would use Etsy if they had to make a whole video and go through an automated process for an item that might sell once per year.

I am not entirely sure of this claim. My own experience with artisnal craftspersons is that they will tolerate higher levels of inefficiencies precisely because they are not operating at scale, and being artisnal makes their cost of revenue really really wonky.

>Because that costs money and most Etsy sellers sell very few things. We're not talking thousands or hundreds or even dozens per months. We're talking single digits per month. Per store. Not per item. With 7 million stores.

I agree with this though, and to direct this at the parent post, that is a LOT of operational overhead. Like, a mindboggling amount you will require Amazon's levels of profit and scale just to properly pull this off. Do not underestimate the sheer amount of labor it takes just to run even fairly simple operations that deal in the lot counts in the low hundreds. Doing this for tens of thousands of potential transactions a day across millions of sellers is asking for trouble. This is why Etsy has sellers outsource this to UPS, FedEX, and the Postal Systems.
While the text touches on many points I would immediately sign, the paragraph starting with "Because engineers are human beings who often form an emotional attachment to their creations, ..." is really out of place.

The cause of complexity is not emotional attachment, these are decisions being made. The decision to add feature after feature and punt on maintenance for example is something that has little to do with emotions. There is a lot of agency that engineers, SWE and SRE alike have in shaping how things are. However there can be good reasons to abandon simplicity. The real trouble here is not psychology but that as a profession we are really bad at measuring and estimating the effective cost of maintenance. Part of that is considering measures to improve simplicity and maintainability as cost that comes without gain and somehow less important than features, and then just accept giant rewrite a few years later. A continuous portion of upkeep would likely be more economical and real engineering has always included an aspect of economy - cost vs benefit.

IMHO the loaded accusation of emotional attachment might be rooted in an "us vs them" attitude (SRE vs software engineering) that should have no place in a sober discussion on the value of simplicity and it diminishes an otherwise great text.
> This is exactly why banking regulations (e.g., FDIC) were invented.

When it comes to this kind of stuff, there's a large and sometimes-glossed-over difference between: "These laws/regulations are bad" versus "there's no real reason for these laws/regulations to exist."

The latter is frustrating to hear, since it is less a philosophical disagreement and more of a "those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it" problem.
2024 Virtual Creatures Competition
Here is mine - it's pretty short. I think it reflects what I use and don't use, so I'm not sure it's useful to you!

# remap prefix from 'C-b' to 'C-a'
unbind C-b
set-option -g prefix C-a
bind-key a send-prefix
bind-key C-n next-window
bind-key C-p previous-window

unbind C-a
bind C-a last-window

unbind A
# Default C-a ,
bind A command-prompt -I "#W" "rename-window '%%'"
unbind k
bind k confirm-before "kill-window"

bind Escape copy-mode

# start counting from 1
set -g base-index 1
setw -g pane-base-index 1

# vi keys scrollback
setw -g mode-keys vi

# Style
set -g status-bg black
set -g status-fg white

# Make current tab visible
setw -g window-status-current-format "#[reverse]*#I:#W*"
yes! I'm gonna die on the hill called "it's only popular because of its cool name". Like a few other curious things in tech. Maybe I should make a site collecting them.

MTs state is also comically large, making it very slow to initialize - which has been a recurring source of performance problems in my professional life.
I (the author) have been using it for several months now and haven't really experienced any dissatisfaction.
I can visualize algorithms but I have to do so deliberately. Unlike the parent poster I don't always think in internal monologues either.

Sometimes it's a keyword/concept thing where I'll think of the main items and I get a feeling that I know how to fill in the blanks. I haven't actually visualized or verbalized what would fill those blanks though (and sometimes the feeling is wrong).

I think pretty much all of the senses can be used to do some form of thinking. I can imagine songs in my head, touch, feelings etc. Rarely are they useful for problem solving though, but some of these are nice for falling asleep in unknown environments.

Oh and then there's the thinking where nothing seems to happen. I stare at a piece of paper and after a while I know what to do next. How did I arrive at that conclusion? I don't know, but it definitely wasn't verbal, visual, aural or anything else. This tends to not solve complex problems like math, but it basically tells me what I should do to try to solve it (usually verbal or visual).
That's basically "let the firmware try to sort itself out", which might work if there was temporary corruption in the FTL metadata and it knows enough to try to recover that by doing some sort of block-scanning, but if there's further damage beyond that, it won't have any effect. Still worth a try, however.
Considering they are running in thousands if not millions of homes, I hope they are anyway checking everything
>In the UK dryers have never had an exhaust.

I wouldn't say never, my home in England had a dryer with an exhaust hose in the 1990s.

But since the 2000s, they're not usually seen.
Yes — and thank you for this work! Java functional interfaces were the only thing I was wishing for in the Clojure/JVM story. They will help me simplify code that interfaces with FoundationDB.
I think he means an electrically heated drying rack. Usually attached to the wall. Sort of like a heating element but you can easily hang your clothes on it.
I’m actually currently doing research into this to see how far LLMs can model state machines so this is totally up my alley! Thank you for sharing.
Okay, that's pretty cool
> I don't see how LLMs can do that.

If it's in the training data, then it should be able to do that. That is to say, a comment's points matter. and the subreddit it's on. and who said it, and how the rest of their comments do/where they are. The LLM could annotate the unredacted reddit dataset with metadata as to where to rate it on the words used, the accuracy of the information, the sarcasm quotient, the hilarity quotient, how condescending the comment is; all of that an LLM could generate metadata about and feed into itself to get better and better.
I guess the (unanswerable?) question is whether they lack abstractions in general or merely lack the specific abstractions. Based on what we know about the stages of infant brain development, they clearly possess the ability to create abstractions so my intuition would be that they can form abstractions, they may just not be culturally useful (i.e. idiosyncratic and thus not helpful in communication).

Children are literally taught "this is a triangle, here is an object shaped like a triangle, can you see anything else in this room/picture that's shaped like a triangle" (along with squares, circles, etc) and it will initially take them a while to recognize objects having that shape, even when it seems "obvious" to adults. This makes sense given that "things shaped like a triangle" is not a useful category during childhood development otherwise and instead mostly useful as a cultural aid (i.e. something you can reference in communication with others and establishing a basis for discussion of more complex shapes like pyramids).

Just like "basic" shapes, "logic" is something that's mostly useful on a cultural level even if most people are likely not explicitly taught the basics of formal logic at an early age.

To go back to the example: if you tell me all bears in the north are white and Greenland is in the north but I've never been to Greenland and all bears I've seen are brown, it's still a good heuristic to assume that bears in Greenland are brown because I don't know if what you're saying is true on a literal level. Maybe Greenland is not as far up north as the place where bears are white or maybe you just saw a white bear (or another white animal you mistook for a bear) in the north and therefore incorrectly assume that must be true for all of them, or you're simply an untrustful and unreliable foreigner who might be lying to me. Real-life conversations don't occur in a cultural vacuum, they're exchanges between individuals with personal histories and relationships.

In other words, while abstract logic is culturally useful (i.e. it is a tool), real-life communication between individuals is not a game of abstract logic. Analysing language purely by its literal content (or "text") ignores subtext, context and meta text, all of which are crucially important. Expecting someone to engage with you on a purely logical plane and to ignore all of that, when they're not accustomed to doing so, seems extraordinarily silly. Given that the bears annecdote according to a sibling comment is nearly a hundred years old, I doubt the outside "researcher" took any of this into consideration.
I've seen a Mersenne twister in the wild, implemented in Excel VBA. The small differences in numeric behaviour caused the author to re-implement basic numeric operations like additions.

It was used in a Mone Carlo simulation implemented on data in excel sheet. The thing was 4K lines of VBA and was extermely slow: It did its simulation over 8 hours for a few 100K iterations.

Someone had given it to a 'High performance excel developer' company (!) and they ran into their limits. I reimplemented it in single threaded C in the evening, and it did its thing in seconds. But that was not acceptable, as the end user could not adapt the VBA anymore.

So I dumped only the Mersenne twister in a DLL, imported that in VBA, and it gained 10% speed, basically all time spent in the RNG. I suggested moving other parts to C, but they didn't want to break ties with the excel programmers and nothing came from it.
WOW WEEEEEE!

big slaps on the back all round.

Three cheers!!

Did they find any terrorists or dangerous criminals while they were intruding upon innocent people's privacy.
What a non-story. I hate it when news outlets do this.

TL;DR: there's security issues with mobile networks that are being exploited and there's technically difficult solutions no one wants to implement.

No detail or analysis or anything interesting.
This is my favorite interaction I’ve seen on HackerNews and this made me smile.

Maybe I’m just a hopeless romantic, but like, follow up on this. You’ve got to email OP if this is how you feel and if you’ve got his email, you’ve got to reach out. I mean, sure it’s a little unorthodox and strange, but yah, you gotta go for it. Fuck it, we’re all weirdos - we’re on a site called HackerNews ffs. Who gives a shit? You can never know if you don’t try. So try! Life is so damn short.

One beautiful part about this crazy life thing is that we put ourselves out there and risk disappointment so that we can look at our selves in the mirror at night when we’re old. So that’s pretty damn cool that you posted this and I hope it works out. That’s very brave.

When you are old what will you regret? Not trying to be with the people you care about - people say that time and time again on their death beds. Even if it’s not romantic love there are other ways you can enjoy the company of people you care about. It is better to risk the transient shame of failure than to suffer the permanent shame of never trying, so, kudos for having the stones to try.

I don’t want to turn this into a thing about myself, but look, I’ve had a rough few fucking years. I developed a chronic illness a few years ago (and became visually impaired), this winter I slipped on ice and I had to get surgery while in my last semester of grad school, and I’ve had to totally rebuild my career from scratch into this new programming one during a tech hiring desert. I’m fucking tired - but I’ll tell you this, even though I’m tired, I just want to say, life is really short. It can be over so fucking fast, so live in a way to minimize your regrets and try to make connections with people whose company you enjoy. Anyway, I’m cheering you on. Go out there and try to enjoy the company of others in spite of all the shit that makes us want to curl into a ball and ignore the world. The antidote to hikkimori pits of despair is defiance of the world that wants us to ignore each other. Fellowship and love is a bit of a revolutionary act on its own.

Good luck! o7
People tend to get attached to certain methods/ways and then defend that no matter what.
Which jurisdiction are you referring to? The internet is not above the law.
Are we reading the same link?

From: www.sciencealert.com/scientists-reveal-why-you-should-never-take-pebbles-from-the-beach

It is a law enshrined in the 1949 Coastal Protection Act, curbing historic losses of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of sediment from beaches by people extracting "free" sediment for building materials.

commercial level activities are mentioned early on as the very raison d'etre for these laws existing, and

> There are extensive areas in the Solway Firth

doesn't appear at all in the sciencealert.com version linked, nor in the original at https://theconversation.com/why-you-shouldnt-take-pebbles-fr...
Depends what you need and how/where you implement it.
For example, if it should pass BigCrush https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestU01 or PractRand https://github.com/MartyMacGyver/PractRand

Just a page with SmallCrush and BigCrush examples, not to be taken as an endorsement for their PRNG: https://www.pcg-random.org/statistical-tests.html
...by American standards.

Coming from another culture, nobody even remotely think this is a thing.
Staff (Military)
I was just curious as to how a Staff Engineer relates to Military Staff.

I’ve just started reading the O’Reilly book The Staff Engineer’s path.
See Neovim v0.10 changelog for how they use hyperlinks/OSC 8: https://gpanders.com/blog/whats-new-in-neovim-0.10/#hyperlin...
Only three weeks ago did we load my Electone FE-70 into a van so my mate could take it. I rescued it for free but we had to lift it down four flights of awkward stairs like Laurel and Hardy. Outstanding instruments, enormous fun, they look fantastic and they’re worthless. If I could have brought it here when I moved I would have. Such fun to play with the rhythm tracks and accompaniments. So many buttons to play with.

If the lids closed flat, at least I could have justified it as a table…

Link to an image of this beast:
https://www.ggbmusic.com/museum/index9faa.html?i=119
Or it is simply an observation that when the heart stops, the body ceases to be conscious. The functioning of the brain was not visible without modern tools.
We definitely can. If you go on an elevator and it starts descending you should definitely feel that.
Maybe this came from being hungry a lot.
It's an absolute bullshit statistic. There is no way they have established ground truth to evaluate accuracy at this scale.

$100 says they've taken the numerator of 'people we detained where it turned out we dun goofed' over the denominator of total people scanned.
This. The seo effect on google is just gonna be transferred to reddit, which as of now has very little account fraud detection. Good luck to Reddi's t&s team
Zero days capable of nuking the OS are not going to be found in random apps or malware. Anyone with that kind of ability will be using it for nation-state targeted intelligence ops, not wasting it on random individuals.
I’m not sure which country you are from. But not in every country you get a “service” from a bank. I know in Canada banks are terrible (oligopolies) and the UIs are from the early 2000s with insanely bad security practices, like 4 digit passwords and SMS-only 2FAs.

I’d gladly use and even pay for good UX in Canada.
As other commenters already suggested I think it just comes down to what your actual day-to-day job is. In some companies you have dedicated data engineers whose job it is to understand these complex logging systems. But despite the complexity they may still derive value from it since they are deeply involved in writing SomeQL queries pretty much all day.

At my place of work we do not derive much value from our ELK installation, because we do not interact with it every day. But since everyone is used to grep, awk to some extent from other activities, these are the tools that are used when incidents/bugs happen and the cause has to be found.

As with all the other stuff out there, ELK etc. may simply not be for everyone.
Live CCTV offenders here on Airstrip One

John Lewis,

Co-op,

Tesco,

Sainsbury's,

Waitrose,

Next,

Marks & Spencer,

Boots

Primark
Tony Blair wanted to do exactly that with psychological profiling of kindergarten children.
Mike Davies, Intel Labs: 'We're reaching the boundaries of basic computing'
It can however be found here: https://www.solwayfirthpartnership.co.uk/solway-review/produ...
If your baseline is Xtramath - when did you last try to use chatgpt to solve problems at that level? Certainly seems like they work
The tokens don't have to be related to the task at all. (From an outside perspective. The connections are internal in the model. That might raise transparency concerns.) A single designated 'compute token' repeated over and over can perform as well as traditional 'chain of thought.' See for example, Let's Think Dot by Dot (https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15758).
>> It could scale it's cognitive ability very quickly by taking control of a lot of compute all around the World and then do cyber attacks with pace never seen before.

"Scale its cognitive ability"- that's another huge assumption, based I believe on a misconception about the relation between "scale" of modern systems (data and parameters, and the compute needed to train them) and their cognitive ability. The cognitive ability of current statistical machine learning systems has not improved one bit with scale. What has improved is their performance on arbitrary benchmarks that can't measure cognitive ability.

We know this exactly because for performance to improve, more and more data and compute are needed. If cognitive ability was improving, we'd see performance stay constant, or even improve, while the amount of data and compute went down. That would imply an improved ability for inductive generalisation, learning correct, broad theories of the world from few observations. That is not happening. The needle hasn't even budged in the last 30 years and the more things scale without any improvement in generalisation, in cognitive ability, the pace of progress is actually going backwards.

Far from moving towards super AGI gods, modern AI is stuck in a rut: it can't go anywhere without huge amounts of data and compute; or, alternatively, a little man or a little woman sitting in front of a keyboard and tapping out a rich and complex model of the world, of the kind only humans can currently come up with. The statistical machine learning community has made a virtue out of necessity and convinced themselves that the way forward is to keep scaling things, because that's what has so far yielded gains in performance. But that's a bit like a bunch of computer programmers who never heard about complexity theory trying to solve NP hard problems by making bigger and bigger computers, and comparing them to see which one benchmarks best on solving TSP or the backpack problem etc. You can keep measuring that kind of "progress" forever and convince yourself that scale is the solution to every computationally hard problem, just because you don't understand the problem. And that's statistical machine learning in a nutshell.
Altman: mentions “Her” once on Twitter

The guy nobody has ever heard of: “why is he so obsessed”

Really, folks? Slow news day?
What is google fine tuning gemini with? Salt baths?
Fariated Nolege
You're downplaying what is unambiguous and obvious. Please engage in good faith.
What is kw/h?
Glad to see those valuable principles written, even if it seems we are heading in the complete opposite. At least we can try to apply them on our side business.

These were also true in the early ages of aviation:

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
A quick search showed up this RTK press release from New Holland:

https://media.cnh.com/North-America/new-holland-agriculture/...

You can see videos of rtk tractors on YouTube including DIY applications.
This tech can really help San Francisco recover.
Series B is a different from the nurturing and mentorship standpoint.

At that point a company (which is what a startup is) is expected to be able to run, but needs some additional capital to expand and execute on the strategy they were testing in Angel, Seed, and Series A.
Not so much these days given the move to combi boilers though.
I think it's safe to say at this point that it hasn't gained a lot of traction, at least outside of google.

If you are making a forward looking business decision, I'd probably avoid it.

OTOH people are actively working on it so if you are looking to get smarter or use for your own niche thing we're Carbon suits your purpose, I can think of less worthy projects to dive in to.
Linear can mean two things though: cause-and-effect reality, which, sure seems to be the case. But also - uniform dilation of the experience of time. Which, arguably, we already play with day to day in many subtle ways, and in every conversation/writing/movie/fiction as we distill the thoughts and experiences of others from vastly larger times to our own understanding in the present. We even experience this ebb and flow dilation of the meaningful experience of time as we daydream, work, rest, and sleep - time is rarely experienced with equal attention to every second. It's a dance through the day. And there certainly seem to be (chemical, or meditative) ways to consciously tinker with that effect, or to be more or less skilled with it.
Here's a video that demonstrates LIS (Italian Sign Language) after a short intro in (spoken) Italian:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79Y2a8WZDOo&t=30

It doesn't seem significantly different from other sign languages to me but I'm not fluent in any of them so YMMV. Sign languages always feel a bit "big and urgent" to me.
And for most cases that human explanation is likely with a disturbing frequency a complete fabrication after the fact. See experiments on split brain patients.

With respect to repeatability, yes, LLMs are currently frozen in time. That is not an inherent limitation, but it is one that is practical for a lot uses and a problem for some.
LiteVAE: Lightweight and Efficient Variational Autoencoders for Diffusion Models
It doesn't ban the use of LLM - it just shifts the costs of their errors back to the company rather than them being bourne by the public.

And if companies decide that they're LLMs are only viable if they get to ignore the negative externalities then a reduction in their use sounds like a good thing.
As the article points out, given the rampant levels of shoplifting in the UK (and the associated abuse of staff), all of the major retailers and a lot of their staff are going to be on board with this.

For the government and police, it's a cheap option to deal with the problem.
If you think of Steve Gibson as more of a technical minded journalist and less of a "security expert", then the show is very enjoyable. There's a lot less grave errors now than there used to be, his voice is pleasant and he usually covers relevant and interesting news.
Mankier: Browse and Search Man Pages in the Browser