skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Scoring 96 percentile among humans taking the exam without moving goal posts would have been science fiction two years ago. Now it’s suddenly not good enough and the fact a computer program can score decent among passing lawyers and first time test takers is something to sneer at.

The fact I can talk to the computer and it responds to me idiomatically and understands my semantic intent well enough to be nearly indistinguishable from a human being is breath taking. Anyone who views it as anything less in 2024 and asserts with a straight face they wouldn’t have said the same thing in 2020 is lying.

I do however find the paper really useful in contextualizing the scoring with a much finer grain. Personally I didn’t take the 96 percentile score to be anything other than “among the mass who take the test,” and have enough experience with professional licensing exams to know a huge percentage of test takers fail and are repeat test takers. Placing the goal posts quantitatively for the next levels of achievement is a useful exercise. But the profusion of jaded nerds makes me sad.
> Give politically incorrect answers and cause other kinds of PR problems?

If by that you mean "will explain in detail how to make chemical weapons, commit fraud, automate the production of material intended to incite genocide" etc.

You might want to argue they're not good enough to pose a risk yet — and perhaps they still wouldn't be dangerously competent even without these restrictions — but even if so, consider that Facebook, with a much simpler AI behind its feed, was blamed for not being able to prevent its systems being used for the organisation of the (still ongoing) genocide in Myanmar: tools, all tools including AI, make it easier to get stuff done.

> I don't think it's reasonable to take "lobotomised" to mean the models had more general capability before their "lobotomization," which you seem to be implying.

I don't like the use of the word, precisely because of that — it's either wildly overstating what happens to the AI, or understating what happens to humans.

And yes, when calling them out on this, I have seen that at least some people using this metaphor seem to genuinely believe that what I would call "simply continuing the same training regime that got it this far in the first place" is something they are unable to distinguish from what happened to Rosemary Kennedy (and yes, I did use her as the example when that conversation happened).
It is a lossy compressed index. It has an approximate knowledge of law, and that approximation can be pretty good - but it doesn't know when it's outputting plausible but made-up claims. As with GitHub Copilot, it's probably going to be a mixed bag until we can overcome that, because spotting subtle but grave errors can be harder than writing something from scratch.

There's already a fair number of stories of LLMs used by an attorney messing up court filings - e.g., inventing fake case law.
I was thinking "naïve" in the sense of "just not knowing some normal things about the world." It's definitely my, "WAIT--fireflies are REAL??" reaction that makes me laugh after the fact.
they remember old.reddit and digg. before that idk
Elon Musk without the showmanship is basically nothing
Would be cool to build one into a baseball hat.

Or even put an array of car parking proximity sensors into that hat. https://www.kit.edu/kit/english/pi_2016_003_feeling-spaces-w...
See also "being less wrong" about stuff. Particularly in a business context.

The idea that a leader (or just a group of people) can have some ability to hit the jackpot straight out, or to know the one true way of doing anything fully-formed, seems to me to be the root cause of disappointment.
Skip the conference calling feature
Yes, the default implementation of hashing in Rust is designed to be cryptographically-safe at the expense of speed. You can get a large speedup by replacing it, e.g. https://nnethercote.github.io/perf-book/hashing.html .
I absolutely got it wrong, thanks for the correction.
Like forgiving student loans.
If we're talking real-world languages, the code is perfectly well-defined. It's undefined behaviour in Abstract C, the C of the Specification, which to my knowledge nobody has ever implemented, but Quake 3 was not written in Abstract C. It was written in Visual C++ 2003, gcc 2.95, and some other specific C implementation.

The code snippet that the article claims is C:

int32_t compute_magic(void) {
double sigma = 0.0450465;
double expression = 1.5 * pow(2.0, 23.0) * (127.0 - sigma);
int32_t i = expression;
return i;
}

which, as far as I can tell, is perfectly well-defined Abstract C.
I think the real question is more - is the language of category theory really worth it here.

Monads as a concept is basically just a fancy version of a wrapper class (if you in OOP land). Do we really need the cognitive overhead of advanced mathematics to explain that?
Yeah. I expect only the best craftsman paired with the best businessmen will survive. But there’s a decent market among the affluent for quality furniture and most commercial furniture for high traffic environments demand pretty high end and durable stuff.
FWIW, MDF with a veneer is a higher quality than MDF with paint. Also, you can tell when there is a veneer by looking at the edges and corners.
You might increase the probability of getting a correct answer for your region, but imo you decrease your awareness to allucination.
Overall you can still get a wrong answer
> In other words, it matches the people who cull the rules from texts already written, but who cannot apply it imaginatively.

Where did you find that in the article?
Anecdotally, my mother was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer (despite never smoking in her life). It had already metastasized to her brain by the time they caught it. I read the clinical literature, and she probably had about 3 months to live.

BUT: her cancer had a druggable mutation. She took Tarceva, then Tagrisso. She lived 7 years, before an aggressive lymphoma finally ended things.

The side effects were not pleasant. Her hair and skin got weird, and she had extensive digestive problems. But I am immensely grateful to the researchers who developed these drugs and allowed her to live long enough to see her first grandchild make it to kindergarten.
> there is the unpleasant whiff of colonialism here [...] reinforced racist tropes [...] widespread notion in the West that much of Africa didn’t have a history

It is indeed unpleasant – that people resort to this cheap rhetorical kick in the teeth of using white-shaming as an argument itself.

Especially when the author touches on an important topic. Because doing it this way – by slipping in intent – contorts cause and effect.

Yes, the dichotomy of history and prehistory is an underrated one. Yes, it deduces prehistoric cultures as dull. But this includes the pre-history of the alledged racists!

The matter at play here is not the interlined plot to plunder and subjugate the world, but our inability to recognize that the written word is just a small appendix to our every-day culture, till this day.

Even today we barely notice how much of our behaviours and rituals can be shaped in complete abscense of any written and oral communication. Nobody tells the Copenhagen cyclist to cycle much more considerate (with regards to other cyclists, drivers and pedestrians) than a Berlin cyclist. But they still do.

When judging cultures, it's the insignificance of the written word that us writers fail to see. And thus today's richness is just as hidden as the richness of the past.
That is very appreciated! Sorbet is shamefully underrated. While there are some weaknesses in the tool (which are fixable), the criticisms it typically gets from the community are unwarranted/unfair IMO. For example, I've heard that it makes the code too verbose. But in my experience, inserting T.cast or T.unsafe is more of a shortcut and often a code smell, and lately since becoming more fluent with it, I'm rarely using casts anymore (though its unavoidable sometimes if you want to avoid T.untyped usages).

I think it has a solid foundation and puts Ruby at the top of my list of good languages if coupled together. It is very performant compared to other typed analysis tools in my opinion.

Please join the Slack community and ask questions if you have any. I'm not part of the Sorbet project or the companies that sponsor it, just an avid enthusiast. https://sorbet.org/en/community
So embedding space itself is interesting. It's more than a step to an LLM. That's been known for a while, back to that early result where "King" - "Man" + "Woman" -> "Queen". This article, though, suggests more uses for embedding spaces. This could be interesting. It's a step beyond viewing them as a black box.
Spoiler: Shameless plug, but might be helpful for people

I understand most of the commentators, as well as OP, are probably looking to not spend too much time and money on their hosting infra. While that makes sense in the beginning, there might be a point in your successful journey where you want to hand over your operation duties to someone skilled and focus on building software because your business starts depending on safe and well-maintained infrastructure.

If you're looking for something between Heroku and AWS (both in terms of pricing and scalability) but based on K8s, with direct access to skilled platform engineers and personal support, you might want to check out https://www.ayedo.de/cloud/
I guess it is the same thing with other archeologic artefacts. Here in germany, if you find something old and remarkable, you must report it and you will get nothing, no matter how long you searched. So most of that stuff is happening illegal and underground, which means that most findings never make their way to the researchers and the public, like this here allmost did not:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disc
Where do the friends and loved ones come from?
I've mostly been on the "user" end of buggy internal company code. It's always a scary day when the interns start, because we finally have someone who will have the time to "fix" the bugs in the code--but half of them we have been using off-label as "features" to solve other problems.

Whenever I start at a new company, I make sure to ask not just what breaks the system, but how the system breaks when it breaks. One person's broken pot is another person's cutting tool!
CSV injection is an OLD trick! It's one I learned 20 years ago from someone who, was at the time, older than I am now.

> Honestly if there was a way to Auth (even basic Auth or Bearer) via classic Google Sheets, you could create a monster so easily.

Excel/sheets is an IDE for accountants. They make monsters over there all the time!
Thank god for that!
Indeed, a dimwitted article. The author seems keen to uncover ‘racist tropes’ and so on: ‘Challenging the notion of history’ appears to be the preferred route.
Thanks for the reply. Huge fan of honeycomb and the feature. Spent many years in observability and built a some of the large in use log platforms. Tracing is the way of the future and hope to see you guys eat that market. I did some executive tech strategy stuff at some megacorp on observability and it’s really hard to unwedge metrics and logs but I’ve done my best when it was my focus. Good luck and thanks for all you’re doing over there.
Corruption merely makes things much more expensive. That is not really a concern to a country that can issue $3T in debt every year. Nor is “decadence”: within a decade SpaceX could do it on its own, without NASA.
There was once a time when nobody used C++ in production.
It's extremely common in dynamically typed languages to deserialise JSON without a spec. What you're asking for is basically XML and it's definitely nicer to get at least basic types (string, bool, int, etc.) "for free".
(On an irrelevant note, the Stanford Barn, where those pictures were taken, has gradually been closed off to the world. It was open to the public until COVID. It's still there, and there's a Stanford equestrian team, but road access has been cut and all mentions of the barn removed from directional signs.)
I worked as a sysadmin for a whole year before learning tab->autocomplete in linux
As you pick up your coffee be sure to thank them for their body’s water. It is a sign of deep respect.
It is mostly cheap trash, especially these days. You admit it yourself - honeycomb, particleboard etc. Saying "some" things are not high quality is being very very charitable

There used to be a better mix of cheap, mid and slightly upper mid. And they often pulling crap like swapping out for cheaper materials but calling it the same model name
I worked on this and host it on my site as well where it's not parceled up into bits and pieces. Have to thank Bartosz Ciechanowski. Learned a lot from his code and approach.

https://lvenneri.com/nuclear_reactor_explainer
As far as we can tell, Stegosaurus died out about 145 million years ago, while Tyrannosaurus showed up about 72 million years ago.

There's more time between the last Stegosaurus and the first T-Rex then there is between the last T-Rex and us right now. A little off topic, but it's kind of mind-blowing to think of just how long the dinosaurs were around.
Do I? How did you come to this conclusion?

If majority wants to use Ctrl+C to copy, and the rest want to use Alt+M or don't care either way, then the most sensible thing to do is have Ctrl+C copy by default, and make a setting for the rest, which is exactly what is done here.
In principle many things, but you're mostly restricted by what you can meaningfully physically build with off the shelf parts. Prototyping with a bunch of wires on a bread board is one thing... Sticking that on your wall is another. And most off the shelf dev kits have very few useful sensors/actuators on board.

The cannonical thing is an environment sensor (so a temperature et al sensor). Unfortunately, often a larger HVAC system will integrate with sensors through some proprietary protocol (even Thread based systems like Nest don't necessarily work with just any thread-based sensor, but you could of course hack something with Home assistant).

One of the maintainers has been using it on the side for a plan monitoring system.

All of these require some sensors beyond just the dev kit, which are typically pretty bare bones.

You can build a two factor auth device with the nrf52840 dongle (OpenSK is built with Tock), which requires basically no extra peripherals.

I've used the nrf52840dk to control a garage door, which similarly only need a couple wires.
I think you need to try working in tiny startups, if any of your skills would make that work. There, gaps in resumes and random ends to employment are expected. Nobody asks about mine, and I end up taking a full year off every 4-5 years whether I want to or not (but I usually do want to).

No, my normie friends don't get it at all, and everyone ALWAYS asks me "how the job search is going" even when I've told them every week for 6 months that I'm not trying to get a job, but trying to hold myself to their norms was a lost cause for me anyway.
I am not suggesting that the generative aspects would be useful in drafting motions and such. I am suggesting that their tendency towards false results is harmless if you just use them as a complex index. For example, you could ask it to list appellate cases where one party argued such-and-such and prevailed. Then you would go read the cases.
Those are about distributed consensus, making sure participants come to the same conclusion about something and nobody has the wrong answer.

Distributed snapshots are trying to do as little work as possible to get a consistent view of the distributed computation, without forcing the heavy cost of consensus on it. For example, node A is sending a message to node B, we don't care if we capture

- 1: A before it sends the message, B before it receives the message

- 2: A after it has sent the message, the message, and B before it receives the message

- 3: A after it has sent the message, B after it has received the message

No matter which of those states we restore, the computation will continue correctly.
For software, prehistory would be design discussions before any code was written or there was anything in the ticketing system.
What’s up with the diagonal lines in the graph backgrounds?
You can assume that the collection doesn't have good coverage, but what I'm saying is the constructs in the C++ language are there to make it have good coverage. Pair this with some Clang sanitation (like banning raw pointers) and you'd have to go out of your way to make it unsafe.
It’s enough, just make sure you’re not trying to fly an airplane or prevent the detonation of nuclear weapons using a database, it’s the wrong tool for the job.

If you’re storing doubly linked lists in a DB you’re doing it wrong.

Updating doubly linked lists can be done at about 200 million ops/sec, single threaded, not sure why you need multiple threads updating the list at the same time, exactly what are you doing that can't be solved by putting a ring buffer in front of a single thread that updates the values, doesn't need locks and is cache coherent.
back in the days, one always had to have 2 terminals open to work with ROOT: one to work and the other to 'kill -9 root.exe' thanks to CINT happily completely destroying your TTY.
Unscalable, Hand-Crafted Lists of Links
I was asked by a pro. documentary maker (who I met on the plane flying in to London) to get some B role for a G&R concert he was filming (with his spare video camera).

I was given the camera and sent in to the mosh pit to film from that perspective. After the show I gave the camera back to him. He said, "where's the footage?"

I had been "filming" looking through the view finder, but I had forgotten to press record.

Gutted.
I wrote a implementation in MMIX:

% Constants
FISRCON GREG #5FE6EB50C7B537A9
THREHAF GREG #3FF8000000000000
% Save half of the original number
OR $2,$0,0
INCH $2,#FFF0
% Bit level hacking
SRU $1,$0,1
SUBU $0,FISRCON,$1
% First iteration
FMUL $1,$2,$0
FMUL $1,$1,$0
FSUB $1,THREHAF,$1
FMUL $0,$0,$1
% Second iteration
FMUL $1,$2,$0
FMUL $1,$1,$0
FSUB $1,THREHAF,$1
FMUL $0,$0,$1

This implementation makes an assumption that the original number is greater than 2^-1021.
Or a link to <https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/AAAAAAAAA!>
Spamhaus or another IP reputation provider will contact your hosting provide or ISP and warn them that either:
- You need to follow their best practices (which practically for me meant paying for a subscription)
- Or your upstream net block would be marked as untrustworthy (which basically blocks email delivery from that IP range)

You can imagine what your hosting provider or ISP will do with this.

Source: I ran a URL shortening service from 2004-2007 and this happened to me.
> C++ is commonly used in contexts where object lifetimes and ownership are inherently unknowable at compile-time

What specific contexts are these?
> Dragon’s blood is a plant resin that may help with a variety of health concerns, including skin ulcers and diarrhea.

> Dragon’s blood is a natural plant resin. It’s dark red in color, which is part of what gives dragon’s blood its name.

> The resin is extracted from many different tropical tree species commonly called dragon trees. These may come from the plant groups Croton, Pterocarpus, Daemonorops, or Dracaena.

> The plant resin has been used for thousands of years for distinct purposes. There are records of its use among the ancient Greeks and Romans and in India, China, and the Middle East.

- https://www.healthline.com/health/dragons-blood
I would say all configs should be treated as castable strings. That's why for config files I much prefer the INI format.
People are still doing this and although results may vary significantly from person to person, there is actually utility to it. One friend of mine was saved from electric shock during his work on multiple occasions, thanks to his extra sense.
Bioproofed neodymium implants can even be sourced from shady Chinese vendors at a very low price, indicating a certain level of demand.
The only hurdle is finding someone willing to operate on you; some tattoo shop backroom is often a solution...
Want to let you know that I just spent an hour playing around with glicol. It's really something, and very cool that you even included a collaberative editor. Have you shown it on HN yet? I think lots of people here would be interested
This hits a little too close to home right now. Only a week ago have I felt that I did a few things to actually make an impact.

And this only because it seems that the CEO noticed I can spin up prototypes to validate ideas before passing them to the actual devs.

I've worked with him for a total of 3 years however, and during that time, most of the time I felt like I was tinkering without making a real difference.

The only time that a bigger project was implemented that I had the lead on felt like a fluke and it was after probably 6 months of working on it.
Rust is not about memory safety
It absolutely wasn't, primarily because the XML data model is so mismatched with the object structures you find in programming languages.

It does at least support comments though. Biggest flaw in JSON by far.
That phrasing of the question is not bad at all, just needs an open minded person to answer it
Please just go and try the lumentis library I mentioned - that is what was used to generate this. It works. For the library docs I showed, I literally just wrote a zsh script to concat all the code together into one file, each one wrapped with XML open/close tags, and fed that in. Just because you weren't able to do it doesn't mean it's a novelty.
I took a sample CA bar exam for fun, as a non-lawyer who has never set foot in law school. Maybe the sample exam was tougher than the real thing, but I found it surprisingly difficult. A lot of the correct answers to questions were non-obvious -- they weren't based on straightforward logic, nor were they based on moral reasoning, and there was no place for "natural law" -- so to answer questions properly you had to have memorized a bit of coursework. There were also a few questions that seemed almost designed to deceive the test-taker; the "obvious" moral choices were the wrong ones.

So maybe it's easy if you study that stuff for a year or two. But you can't just walk in and expect to pass, or bullshit your way through it.

I agree with you on legal writing, but there appears to be a certain amount of ambiguity inherent to language. The Uniform Commercial Code, for instance, is maddeningly vague at points.
Ukraine War Rips Veil Off of US Weapons Superiority
https://looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo...
Some of the neutrons from spontaneous fission will hit other uranium atoms and cause non-spontaneous fission. Maybe enough to amplify it ten times?
I've been playing with https://huggingface.co/microsoft/trocr-base-handwritten which has been pretty good so far. I want to take it and fine-tune on my own handwriting. For equations, I either use mathpix or just type them manually.
I am allowed to care if I am in any way responsible for its future maintenance, or become dependent upon it in my own project.
No. The auditors aren't actually handling your transactions. You can have N auditors sign off on code. And there's also battle-testing it in practice. Comparing that to literal middlemen -- telephone switchboard operators, banks, etc. -- is a category error
> A culture without writing doesn’t produce a written record of its history

But it can transmit an oral record, which seems to be the author's point. Paper, skins, and stone are not the only mediums for language.
Nuclear material left in "Swap Shop" at UK Hacker camp emfcamp