skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Even prisoners get phone calls.

If they're both lucky and fortunate and if the weather is nice and assuming there's not more than 500 people to 3 phones. Source: dealing with it right now.
Oh cool. I'm not firing any of my employees then. I'm just saying, "Hey, you can continue working here as long as you work for free! No benefits either, haha! You're totally not fired though - just gotta work for free! Definitely don't try to file anything with the unemployment office because it won't work! You're totally not fired!"

> Also, terms of full-time employment often are contingent on not working full-time at another company -- this is a pretty standard clause

This is also not in any contract that I've ever signed and I've been in SV for a decade.
You might enjoy the analysis in the article.

https://www.arnaldur.be/writing/about/large-language-model-r...

There is an expandable box with all the questions, colored by correctness, and question 6 has a bunch of responses. Below the box is a summary of the results.
It depends how quickly it happens, and how well they are paying attention. We all know those accident prone drivers who are never "at-fault" - just very bad at avoiding them!

However, the human has the major advantage of having a brain and being able to understand the consequences and potential outcomes of something in real-time as it is unfolding. I doubt most autopilots would understand the situations I mentioned - certainly not unless they were specifically pre-programmed/trained into the system. Would an autopilot even see what is going on inside a car if a driver is bending down below dashboard, or fighting with passenger, for example?
Perhaps, but I think Google still has a much stronger incentive than Apple (or Microsoft) for the web to be a viable platform. I don't think they would allow Chrome to languish the same way IE did. Instead it's more subtle moves like nerfing ad blockers.
Let's hope monolithic kernels are indeed an historical artefact, and over time microkernels will replace them in most popular OSes.

A few % performance hit? (if that) Who cares. Security & reliability is where it's at these days.
The idea that Sony is already going to launch a mid-cycle “Pro” refresh of the PS5 seems like madness. Do they really want to further divide their customer base?

There are so few exclusive games to play on a PS5 it’s hardly worth it. I say this as somebody that owns “everything.” My Xbox and PS5 collect dust most of the year.

Likely going to stop buying consoles after doing so for 30 years. The PC and portable space is far more interesting and has better priced software.
Will fine-tuning LLMs be relevant?
Are we just going to use foundational models off the shelves, or will fine-tuning still be necessary?
Seems like openai isn't into a rush to allow fine-tuning for gpt-4 to all users.
Google has stated that their vision is "bigger models" (that's the whole update for gemini they came up with at the i/o event they held imo), believing that bigger context windows is the way to go.
Llama does some interesting stuff with smaller models.
What's your take on the whole thing? Will we need to fine-tune AI in a few years from now, or will we just dump tons of documents and that will do the job?
I see "Q/acc" in the authors twitter name, which I guess is a sign of allegiance to some modern Silicon Valley movement or ideology like how "e/acc" is Effective Accelerationism. Anyone know which one this is?
That's a 404, sad.
Why just human? Perhaps microbiomes are more mix and match. Maybe we can adapt some of the cellulose breakers to our systems, and make veganism more viable.
Sorry but understanding code snippets is not what makes maintaining old code difficult. Its understanding why it is the way it is within the context of the rest of the code base. If something is so completely decoupled an AI can futz with the code with out any problems within the rest of the code base a human can also just toss the code and write new code.

AI doesn't help us maintain large code bases still.

Programming as theory building!
Ads are intrusive, and in some cases, overtly harmful [1]; Especially YouTube. YouTube does have stated guidelines about these things (as well as scams, malware-advertisements, etc.), but these aren't effective, as seen in the article; They're just words.

AdBlockPlus (ABP), famously has criteria for "Acceptable Ads" [2], which provide some commonsense criteria for what ads should be acceptable. Some discussion indicates that ABP is blocking many ads on YouTube [3]. QED It is not reasonable to assume Youtube is adhering to this reasonable guideline for ads.

And so, if ads can be harmful, and the platform ignores reasonable steps to address objections to advertising, all we're left with is forcing a behaviour that works for us.

[1]

Profiting from Hate: Platforms’ Ad Placement Problem

https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/profiting-hate-platforms-...

[2] https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads

[3] https://blog.adblockplus.org/blog/whats-happening-with-youtu...
AI-Friendly Programming: The Kotlin Story
Apple is reportedly building M2 Ultra and M4-Powered AI servers. We will see what this end up looking like, but I'd say that the M2 Ultra is a very competitive product. Even if it's not really the same kind of architecture, it might very well be a better approach, or a good enough alternative.
GitHub Copilot Re-Enables Itself After Being Disabled
Just a timeline of how Musk predicts that FSD will be solved in the next year every year since 2015: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/.

It is one thing to cherry-pick flawless drives on a sunny day and upload it to YouTube while having someone behind the wheel ready to take over the glorified driving assistant system. It is another to run a commercial driverless service open to the public 24/7 in one of the biggest urban areas, knowing that riders will record everything, assuming accident liability, and keeping a nice safety record without someone behind the wheel.
Hey everyone, I'm currently reading Chaos Monkeys and the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, both were very good sources and gave me an insider's for the sorts of mindset people in the valley have.

Are there any other good resources like PE's Meta and Amazon engineering culture series? Specifically I would love to learn more about Google, Microsoft, and Netflix. Not really looking for a business analysis, but rather an insider's perspective on how these companies worked.
Impossibility of Neuralink Compression Challenge
What do you use to generate your SDK?
As an aside, I’ve always wondered - residencies famously overwork newly minted doctors - they’re allowed to work up to 80 works, and for incredibly low salaries considering the education level required.

Given that they have this valuable resource for an incredibly low wage - where is all the money for residency going? Why do hospitals require such a large subsidy to fill the gap?

This isn’t an accusation that hospitals are misusing the money - I genuinely do not understand the costs that go into residency here.
Monolithic kernels also have these fast paths. It's how GPU drivers work under Linux - your process submits command buffers directly to the GPU.
Also, the article doesn't state it outright, but the implication is that they only stopped bad actors after they had already been using their services, with no indication of how long they were using them for.
What about the fact that you are moving faster when on top of a mountain than in a valley due to the rotation of the earth and being farther from the center of rotation?

Does this also have an effect on your relative time?
> Are you able to organize that on company time? Are you guys clocked in during your meetings?

I've approved or started (or both) this sort of thing on company time before, at more than one place.

For context, this was typically early stage R&D, and many/most of the employees had some academic background, though that ranged from "decades ago" to "we just hired you after a masters degree".

In this setting, it's a pretty natural continuation of the common "journal club" approach in academic research groups. It spreads the effort around, helps the team stay on top of new work, and generally improves professional development - if done well. It does take a bit of effort to keep fresh.
Thank you for commenting. I am thinking about creating an automated scraping and then storing result in Google sheets. Something along the lines... But I feel like I don't know how to do it. I guess I just have a fear of failure. I work better in a guided environment and by guided, I mean for only one single practice or project, I just needed someone to guide me through the stuff.

But you're right, I really need to do it myself. Nobody can help me but me.
Many organizations would rather pay 3 people $120,000 each instead of paying 1 person $300,000 to do the same work, for a variety of reasons. Some good, some bad.
Do ISPs and modem vendors roll their own OTA infrastructure and signing key management, or contract it out?
Larry Page was an ardent supporter of Levandowski and this evidence illustrates Waymo’s core safety culture: that they’re above regulation and above the law. Same mindset illustrated in Google’s anti-trust trials.
A comment is a nice addition, but the very least is to ensure that your test suite properly covers cases where changing one and not the other will introduce a problem. This not only ensures that both are changed, but that both are changed in the way they need to be. A comment alone may prompt you to change both (if you ever read it - I bet a lot of developers don't), but you may not notice when you fail to change them in the same way, which is no better than not changing one.
Had to scroll a long way to find this, I suspect this is far more important than any technical issue.

Having an "owner" is a strong incentive/coordination point to get stuff done. You need the right owner, but the 95% of projects that don't get it right, we don't hear about.

We hear all the time about how code structure mirrors org structure. A distributed project encourages fiefdoms, a centralized one asks for a taskmaster with final say.
You can buy an M3 Max with 128GB memory.
Good response, I think "Feature Creep" might capture some of that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_creep
>We’ve terminated accounts linked to covert influence operations;
>no significant audience increase due to our services.

I can't help but find this extremely funny. you mean to tell me that massive operations trying to use your service didn't actually gain anything from using your service?

OpenAI wasting time and resources shutting them down and the bad actors wasting time and resources using chatGPT no benefit.

It just reads like a massive waste of time for everyone involved.
Yea. I usually pay 2.5x-4x of profit multiple and mostly for small software businesses.
Based on the Reuters article, The Israeli company STOIC put many ai-generated comments on social media posed from Jewish, African Americans and concerned citizens praising Israel's handling of the war in Gaza.
That all requires a lot of hardware support that probably didn't exist at the time, and is probably still esoteric today.
> Next year, the IRS plans to open the program to some taxpayers in all states and Washington, DC.

This is great, which means it covers states with income tax as well.
I wonder if the moire materials can tuned as a dynamic metamaterial to absorb or dump a lot of charge, based on their rotational geometry. That charge plateau seems like a quite powerful trick
Yeah, it sounds like to me the ban is on the exact opposite set of devices that it should be in your situation.
If you got in at $5 in 2015 and it's now at $1000, that's a whopping 20000% return!

I don't know if it's a bubble or not but I'd at least sell off like 20%, enough to recoup my initial investment and a generous return, and let the rest ride. Point being, it doesn't have to be a binary decision.
Law enforcement industry partnerships weird me out a little bit too. Cases like this are maybe a little more innocent: https://www.wired.com/story/big-pipes-ddos-for-hire-fbi/. But then you have Spamhaus compiling literal dossiers and sharing them with police and pressuring hosts into sharing information to help with their extrajudicial ROSKO investigations. Or the "Shadowserver Foundation," which ostensibly exists to stop botnets, yet also for some reason hosts the seizure page for Liberty Reserve.
I refuse to believe good things like this can happen anymore, so this is obviously hallucination.
in consumer OSes, the 5% (or lower) performance hit of a microkernel is a big deal

This does not feel like it should have been true for a long time. Computers are just stupidly fast now. In the 90s, sure, performance was way more important to prioritize, but I would love to see the needle swing the other way to getting a more secure and robust OS. My system already squanders so many resources on Electron JavaScript nonsense. Why not let the OS take up a few more cycles to give me hard security guarantees.
that made me laugh
> But there is no income threshold – unlike the existing Free File Program, which is currently only available to taxpayers who earn $79,000 or less. That program is provided by an alliance of eight different private companies and has historically had a low usage rate.

Free File Fillable Forms is free to everyone, though it isn't a guided wizard like this new system sounds like: https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...

I've been using it for years, have never paid to file taxes. Claiming this new system makes filing taxes free is just false.
Ask HN: Do you fine-tune LLMs at all?
If you do fine-tune LLMs at all, what for? Will RAG be enough for most use cases?
Could you clarify, then?
How do you integrate with vLLM?
Postgraphile is great, until you need to debug row level security. Or when you realize you need another tool to make the query type safe.
What are your software book recommendations in general?

I often find that the material in the classics (programmatic programmer, mythical man-month, etc.) are so ubiquitous that I don't get much from actually reading them.
> Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), an accountant and senior member of the House Financial Services Committee, told Axios in April that he wants to go "way beyond Direct File," calling for a "self-populating form."

> "Why in the heck should you have to fill out your return when the government has all the information. They know what's on your W-2 form before you do. They know what's on your 1099 … Do you know how many mistakes people make?"

This is what I’ve wanted forever, which means the tax preparation lobby will be spending a fortune fighting this.
I’m not saying people didn’t use this font for a terminal but it’s not a font designed for terminals it’s designed to optimize the strike of a typewriter. Using it on a modern terminal is anachronistic at best, but using it to provide the content of a tweet in an image is bizarre.
I do not. As far as I'm aware, SML is much like C in that despite being a relatively simple language, there aren't many toy implementations floating around.
I’ve always found that duplicating and editing over-DRY code is easier than fixing code that’s under-DRY. I strongly prefer working with people that care about DRY code and accidentally go too far than the reverse. Additionally, the worst problems I’ve had in inherited code have been due to duplication and insufficient abstractions leading to logical inconsistency.
I had such dreams regularly for a decade or so after graduating. I’d probably have them even now, but I no longer see any dreams I can remember. I have also never “not studied” for the exam, and graduated with honors. I attribute this to the fact that I grew up in a small town in the ass crack of the world and after somehow getting a spot at a “hard” technical school thought I was an impostor. Indeed I still feel that way even though most of my friends who I thought were worthy did not do nearly as well, either there or IRL afterwards.
Why not? I have KeePassXC for TOTP, jmp.chat for SMS, and email for email. That covers all MFA requirements I have needed so far.
This is great news. I used it this tax year to file the form for an automatic extension, saving a trip to the post office and the cost of a certificate of mailing.
With $1 million, I would first ensure that my family's financial future is secure by paying off any outstanding debts and investing in their well-being. After that, I would set aside a portion of the money for personal savings and investments to generate passive income. Finally, I would invest in my own personal growth by pursuing educational and entrepreneurial opportunities that I'm passionate about.
Please re-read this part of my post:

> Say you're driving down the road and there's a bit of construction, there's a guy holding SLOW/STOP sign directing traffic.

Here's a picture of a guy holding a hexagonal SLOW sign. They are very common. https://nj1015.com/how-slow-should-you-go-through-constructi...

LIDAR cannot tell you what's on that sign. It cannot read any sign, nor any road markings, nor streetlights, blinkers, stop lights, etc. If you believe that cameras are not capable of being used as input due to dynamic range or any other reason, then that's fine, you just believe that self-driving is impossible (lidar or not). But to believe that one can safely drive using nothing but a completely blank and unlabeled 3D scene (ie, LIDAR-only)? That's pretty crazy.
I remember an interview with Chevy Chase who said Dan Aykroyd was an expert at this and he said he was able to read cue cards out of his peripheral vision when they were at SNL so he could read lines without turning his head in the direction of the car holder. Chevy said he never met any actor that could do it as easily as Aykroyd could.
I didn't say that.

Should I just quote my adjacent reply that I guess you didn't see? "Even in that situation, at most you need some way to get a location at that moment when they chose to reach out to you, not tracking."

And the ability to get in contact is 90% of the benefit.
My only recommendation is Designing Data Intensive Applications.

I agree with you that most recommended books are so-so.
Yeah I'm struggling to recall any other recent instances of companies giving their "AI" (really LLM) ambitions a realistic scope. Hearing "It's useful for some specific things" from Kagi, rather than "it will be in everything and change everything" is ... shockingly refreshing.
You lie on your resume?
I think the Mars goal helps them a lot with obsoleting their best product. It was obsolete from the start - they knew this one never goes to Mars, it's just a test bed for technologies and a money maker that helps them on the way. While other companies developed their best rocket and then tried to keep it running as long as possible to recoup the investment and make as much money from it as possible, Musk was talking about the next rocket before first Falcon 9 landing.
The real danger of AI.

When people become habituated to getting a mostly correct result most of the time they will start excepting AI generated answers, code etc as "correct" despite not being able to fully understand what it is doing. Understanding what circumstances the AI might do something wrong or life threatening will eventually be classified as an acceptable risk. Given the amount of 'sounds good but is actually complete gibberish' websites I see that are obviously AI generated this may have already happened.
Ah.. I remember purchasing a Yakov Perelman's math puzzle book many years ago (as a high schooler).

Just heard about this. Let's see...
>gamma encoding applies a non-linear curve that approximates human vision

IIUC it's a similar bit optimization scheme to allocate bits fairly across the entire dynamic range. The only difference is the curve used (log vs gamma). You are right in that "log" is probably more uniform from a physics perspective (something about each f-stop getting same # of bits) while "gamma" is supposedly more uniform from a perceptual perspective (something about steven's power rule). Note that even storing things in floating point is also effectively a form of log encoding since density of floating point numbers halves when you double the range.

To me they feel more similar than they are different, which is why it's annoying that there's this completely parallel set of terminology used for photography vs video-editing and I haven't been able to find a rosetta stone to translate between the two (part of this is undoubtedly because icc color management requires digital computers, while film making existed as a field long before that)

* log-encoding :: gamma encoding

* EOTF/OETF :: Gamma/transfer function (n.b. eotf not necessary inverse of oetf, unlike gamma)

* LUT application :: ICC color space conversion

* Video-workflow (make edits directly in target color space) :: Photo workflow (transfer edits to source color space)

* NCLC tag :: ICC color profile
There's no way a 5% performance difference is the reason. These OSes were designed in an era where you could get a 5% boost just by waiting a month.

I think the real reason is they were also designed at a time when security was not as advanced as it is now, especially for Linux, and microkernels are more secure but also harder to write.
Somebody tell that to my iPad which goes out to lunch for 30 seconds when I am browsing the web and always seems to be listening to the music in its head. Or the XBOX that takes 30 seconds to sorta kind boot but really 3 minutes for all the menus to load.
For one thing, writing things in a microkernel are far more complex. In theory the isolation can mean lower impact of bugs and security issues; but in practice, the complexity means more bugs which are harder to debug. That's why you don't really see microkernels outside of embedded use cases -- the lower functionality requirement makes the complexity manageable.

You can write a rocket OS as a "proper" microkernel, but there's no way you could write a full-blown Windows OS as a "proper" microkernel.

That said, Windows or Linux can take leaves out of the microkernel playbook and apply them judiciously: KVM's architecture is arguably an example of this, where the core kernel does only the minimum necessary, and everything else is pushed to the user-mode component (QEMU, Firecracker, etc).
Is that not the case here? I'm not sure if pip has a mechanism similar to deb's pre/post-install hooks.

> Furthermore, code is often ran in (sort of) sandboxed environments like Docker during development, in which case arbitrary code on runtime is less dangerous than arbitrary code on install time.

Wouldn't the package install then also happen in a Docker container anyway, negating the problem? Or how would you install a package to your host environment and then use it from within a container?
I'm sure you've heard this many times, but thank you for sharing these blog posts. You're doing some _really cool_ stuff, and it's a treat to be able to read about the depth to which you've thought of these problems, and how creatively you've been solving them.
Efficient Diffusion Models Without Attention
Microservice architectures and the associated explosion in complexity on both ends are to blame. When it takes twice the time to build something, it is natural to hire twice as many developers. Increased complexity drives specialization.
Early Medieval International Relations: Part 1 – Notions of Nations
Monolithic systems allow their authors much greater control over software that runs on computers.
_THIS_ is the reason I and many people do not want to pay for YouTube.