skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> the only realistic impact of picking a sub-optimal algorithm is slightly higher CPU utilization rates and background tasks taking a bit longer to finish.

At FAANG scale this couldn't be further from the truth. Let me give an example from my own work. With a tiny bit of rewording, it could cover at least two other examples I have worked on as well, at multiple companies, so I think it generalizes well enough.

A global control system needed to generate its control signals algorithmically because it had to optimize an objective worth billions per year. The dataset had grown to take over 8 hours to process, which was just barely tolerable in fair weather, it became a batch job. This was doubling every year, mind you.

Sometimes tactical changes were required on short notice, e.g. a datacenter outage required failing over to another datacenter and re-calculating the optimal way to meet those objectives, not just for resource costs but user experience. Here it was bad enough taking 8 hours, and nobody wanted to see it double in the following year.

In a few days I rewrote this tool to give the same optimal results in under 5 minutes. Now every time a tactical change is needed, it's no big deal at all. There's no doubt this saved millions already, and as the dataset continues to grow, taking 15 minutes would still be a lot better than taking 24 hours.

Another case was even more extreme but harder to compare. Re-generating all control plane data from management plane intent would have taken at least several days with the old algorithm, but this was so impractical that nobody ever did it and we never had a number for it. I made it take less than a second total, completely changing how the entire architecture, implementation, operations, observability, scale, availability, latency, etc. hinged around the new algorithm. It was the single biggest improvement to a large platform that impacted the entire company, and it's a big company.

I have several such cases. Sometimes they're offline tools that occasionally end up in the critical path of an operation during an incident, sometimes they're in the critical path of serving user requests or in a control system affecting the availability and user experience of other user-facing services. None of these were "slightly higher CPU utilization rates", they were a quantative improvement to performance so great that it made a qualitative improvement to what was possible.
to me this seems essentially like 'screen/tmux without the multiplexing features' which is useful because most of us do 'terminal multiplexing' via our window manager and we're really just using screen because we want to detach the process from the terminal session (e.g. as a glorified nohup wrapper). another similar tool is `nq`.
ChatGPT is unavailable for some users. Web, Mobile and Desktop
When making a blog for your small town, don't forget to use Wordpress so it gets full of malware!
Apple just corrected the M2 iPad Air's core count
Hurin would be the most famous counterexample.
The Reason for the Current AI Hype Wave
> At which point do you announce the mistake to a screen reader?

There is a standard for this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...

But I would suggest just having the validation in addition to the current behaviour.

> Where do you shift focus?

You don't?

> There's so much research that shows the opposite.

There's research that shows that a "tomorrow" button is bad??
That matches with recent material I've read on vectorized workloads: memory bandwidth can become the limiting factor.
Using Kamal to host multiple Apps on a single server (2023)
Just 3D print the biggest benchy ever out of wood filament and sail away
What are the practical implications of a conclusion of the hypothesis, in either direction?
Koloradka originally was tsarist Russia reward. Later it was revived by soviets in WW2, but not used much after the war. Then Putin revived it as a symbol of continuous history of tsarist Russian empire, USSR and his regime. Nowadays it's a symbol of modern Russian imperialism with a historical flavor.

In those parts of europe where both tsarist Russia and Soviet union were occupiers and now Putin is a threat, koloradka is pretty much on the same rank as nazi symbols.
That sounds like a database, how is that not a data structure? And to that data structure the cafe is just a bunch of values, which he listed. That is how you see things like a data structure would.

Definition of data structure: "More precisely, a data structure is a collection of data values, the relationships among them, and the functions or operations that can be applied to the data".

Maybe you would want more generic data structures, but it is used accurately here.
> How do you study mind-altering drugs when every clinical-trial participant knows they’re tripping?

Are there really no protocols for research in which participants can tell whether they have received a certain drug or not? I mean sure I think that double-blind is best for research, but are there really not other cases in which they deal with the patients knowing?

Edit:

> By striving to cleave the drug’s effects from the context in which it’s given—to a patient by a therapist, both of whom are hoping for healing—blinded studies may fail to capture the full picture.

Okay I see the issue is that patients not being blind to the treatment is (thought to be) necessary for the treatment to work. Okay yeah so that means it's hard to make the participants blind in anyway. Still I'm surprised there aren't approaches to deal with this. Of course it might mean by definition double-blind trials aren't possible, but then again maybe that's not always appropriate. I can see the pandora's box being opened by allowing drug studies to bypass these restrictions though so I guess I see why people don't like it.

Later in the article:

> In an email, an FDA spokesperson told me that blinded RCTs provide the most rigorous level of evidence, but “unblinded studies can still be considered adequate and well-controlled as long as there is a valid comparison with a control.” In such cases, the spokesperson said, regulators can take into account things like the size of the treatment effect in deciding whether the treatment performed significantly better than the placebo.
Seems a bit rich considering that OpenAI itself is an avid and leading contestant in that reckless race. I would even go so far as to say they started it.
I mean it was pretty obvious with their eyes darting then several lines of code appearing in the code editor.

Of course, this doesn't mean I've discovered 100% of the cheaters, just the obvious ones.

> Also, I'm curious: do you think having them discuss their solution in depth would have been a good countermeasure?

To some degree. But not everyone communicates as well as they code or vice versa, and then it comes to what you're trying to qualify.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking as well. It's obvious why something like this would be appealing; stuff like shipping containers are abundant and cheap and modular, so it seems like a no-brainer, but I think a lot of people forget that building codes actually exist for a reason.

You need a foundation if you don't want your home to sink, unless you want to larp as the unabomber you'll need electricity and plumbing installed, in the case of shipping containers there's a risk that the paints and metals inside there aren't really meant to be inhaled by humans for prolonged periods of time (which is not an issue if you're only in there for a few minutes a day to load and unload boxes, but might be an issue if your plan is to sleep there). There's a cool novelty to some of this stuff, and that might be worth it for some people, and I don't really want to tell people how to spend their money, but it just doesn't seem worth it to me.

This isn't to knock prefab homes as a concept, there are plenty of really good ones and they're not necessarily overpriced, but those are basically still just regular houses with pre-cut and pre-measured materials, and there's no delusions that it'll lead to a house being built overnight.
I know things evolve over time, but it's very nice to see something "hacker" in the classical sense on the front page here.
Vitamin D for Disease Prevention: Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guideline
>One related problem I see is that Computer Science tends to be under-estimated by other engineering fields.

If Bachelor of Science computer science grads were that much more extraordinary, they wouldnt be working side by side with non-degreed programmers.

Chem Engineer here, I wrote random forest once. My coworker with a CS degree, all front end work.
Karabiner Elements is still great on Macs (and also Keyboard Maestro), PowerToys isn't powerful, but how is Linux stellar, what's as powerful as Autohotkey?
LLMs can learn self-restraint through iterative self-reflection
Perfect example. Maybe that word salad in the middle means something to someone, maybe it’s even right, but it’s basically uninterpretable in an academic context.
Elon Musk reportedly diverted AI chips from Tesla to X
Ah, OK, makes sense. Thanks for the clarification!
What became of a Bay Area prodigy
Use Markdown in Google Docs, Slides, & Drawings
Search UNH/Elevance/CVS/Cigna/Humama/Molina/Centene profit margins on macrotrends.

These are all publicly listed health insurers, so all their financials are public. It is not a very profitable business, as pretty much all insurance business.
this you are completely correct. just anything to show me why this is awesome instead of just the math!
Radical suggestion (maybe I'm too British): health insurance not being tied to employment or work whatsoever?
Some do remember. Some just used some obscure grandpa's paper as a getaway card into a better-off country. With many of those grandpa's papers being forged.
A few hours ago, there was also an incident at https://status.openai.com/incidents/rs49lmsh6xxw.
Right, that case is a little more useful to analogize the way Japanese uses kanji (Han characters) with local Japanese inflections (okurigana) to adapt the Chinese writing system to their local inflected language. We write the word ‘second’ using the Arabic symbol that connotes the concept of ‘two’, followed by an irregular English inflection to make it ordinal. Is ‘seco’ a ‘reading’ of the 2 symbol? Kinda sorta?

Also helps you appreciate that Japan is not completely insane for having seemingly completely unrelated number words for different contexts, even though they write them with the same numeral. Turns out, so do many western languages (although generally only for ordinal/cardinal, not for the endless range of counters Japanese has)

The fact that as a native English speaker this seems like not how you actually read or write numerals at all - no, of course 3 doesn’t ’read’ as ‘thi(r)’ - also suggests that there is a less mechanistic way to understand the relationships between hanzi and words than learners often try to apply (we want to find the ‘rules’ that must underpin these things), and that the way native speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese or Japanese think of the relationship between these symbols and the words they are writing is much more organic - and that’s okay.
Reminds me that secret messenger for criminals. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield

Edit: Nevermind, it’s the subj.
I agree on all points.

I think where automation would really shine for this tech is to incorporate conduit, plumbing, doors, and windows to the wall construction. I'm imagining something like a massively scaled-up pick-and-place crane carriage on the printing gantry. So the print head sweeps out of the way, parts and other sub-assemblies get placed where needed, crane sweeps out of the way, then printing resumes.
No payout?
Excess deaths are likely related to the effects of lockdowns. The lack of exercise and mental stress suffered by the elderly over the course of the pandemic was huge.

Check out Sweden, they had limited/no lockdowns, very high vaccination rate and low post pandemic excess deaths.

Before the pandemic dad was a beast then he watched TV for 2 years and turned into a shuffling hunchback.
Ask HN: Traffic from ChatGPT outage is crashing Claude and slowing Gemini
Any other worthwhile alternatives?
Every legacy IBM mainframe application from the 60s with a web interface would like to have a word... s/IBM 3270/VT100.
Yeah I've always gotten power tripping vibes from sysadmins. They're happy to fork over data just to show that they can.
Updated by the owner now.
I see two options from this perspective.

It is always possible to inline assembler in C, and present vector operators as functions in a library.

Otherwise, R does perceive vectors, so another language that performs well might be a better choice. Julia comes to mind, but I have little familiarity with it.

With Java, linking the JRE via JNI would be an (ugly) option.
I'm going to assume that whoever's doing the stealing is being paid; as opposed to merely amassing a warehouse of tools collecting dust.

So, how is the money coming in to pay the thieves? How is the money coming in to continue to pay for the storage units to store the tools? It doesn't make sense.
This sums up what I wrote above (as well as in a longer reply to a reply) much more elegantly and clearly than I ever could. Thank you!

Edit: but I might exchange the word useful for something else… maybe not…
I am not able to use claude.ai

An error occurred in the Server Components render. The specific message is omitted in production builds to avoid leaking sensitive details. A digest property is included on this error instance which may provide additional details about the nature of the error.
Dubrovnik also had a complicated and obscure election system. Rebecca West describes it a little in "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon." Robin Harris gives more details in "Dubrovnik." Both systems were designed to control populism and election corruption. Of course, in both places only a small minority had any power at all. Notably both places were highly stable for centuries (millenia) when countries and empires all around them rose and fell.
That's what I was thinking too! I am not super handy, but I have purchased pine 2x4's and plywood at Home Depot before and I do know roughly how much this stuff costs, and it's not expensive.

While there could be, in theory, technically less human labor involved with the printing (though as someone who has spent way too much time fixing 3D printers after they break I'm skeptical of that), it might not actually save any time compared to just having a contractor or handyperson just do the actual labor.
I think it's very valuable for people who might not already now this to see an example of why it's true, as the post does:

> "What’s happening here is simple: The web application has the ability to decrypt different records encrypted with different keys. If you pass records that were encrypted for Alice to the application to decrypt it for Bob, and you’re not authenticating your access patterns, Bob can read Alice’s data by performing this attack."

An interesting question here is whether or not there's a god key that allows the administrator to decrypt all the data even if they can't authenticate as the user (or if they just have copies of all keys). Searching HN for 'lavabits' turns up some results related to this, e.g.

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-has-lavabits-back-con...
> The main threat to encrypting health information is actually dishonest cryptographers.

Wow, okay, you have me hooked.

> instead of searching for user Michael Knight in a database of cancer patients, you hash the name, use a bloom filter to determine if the hash exists in the protected data set or not

The protocol you loosely described here could be either totally fine or horrendously broken depending on the implementation details and architecture of the application. Not to mention the universal cryptography concerns; i.e., key management.

> and then tell your regulators and the public that the foreign jurisdiction research assistants hired from fiverr don't have access to your health information because everything is encrypted and we only compare hashes.

You've said "hashes" twice now, so I have to ask:

1. Are they only hashing, or are they using a keyed hash (e.g., HMAC)?

2. Are they doing something ridiculous like using MD5?

If you're familiar with cryptography at all, passing around MD5(data) is vastly different from truncating HMAC-SHA384(data, staticKey) to a few bits and protecting staticKey with an HSM.

Without more detail, I can't tell if your assertion that cryptographers are being dishonest is warranted. It's sort of like simplifying RSA encryption to "multiplying integers". Yes, that's what's happening on some level, but some essential information was omitted.
Was the song actually that good, or did your brain simply tickle the 'appreciation for incredible beauty' neurons while playing back some Nickelback memories?
"Exceptions should be used exceptionally" - I think golang `panic-recover` does exactly this.

They made using `panic` intentionally hard.

Motto: "Don't panic in your code"
Perhaps, but he wasn't constantly running a social media company.
This may work out great if you happen to have worked on Rails for your last job. However, I doubt that everyone you interview is actually that familiar with Rails but rather is pursuing any sort of opportunity that they can get. In that case, they would actually more time to brush up multiple different tech stacks than simply on algorithms.
I think you would want to be prepared to be disappointed, hah.

Honestly, IKEA have made so many cuts in quality since 2021, and increased prices, it's barely recognisable.

https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/viskafors-3-seat-sofa-lejde-ant... here's a £1100 sofa (2x the famous Ektorp). Sure, it's got a bit of solid wood, some slightly higher density foam in some areas, some cheap springs, but that's about it. It's got very poor quality fabric according to the reviews - a trend in their sofas the last couple of years.

I would bet if you picked up the corner of /any/ IKEA sofa (I've tested maybe 6-8), there would be significant flex. Ditto if you rocked the back.

There really is very little variance in quality in reality
>Tolkien did care deeply about the realism of his world.

Nietzsche says that we cannot take this too seriously. An Artist's ideas will never conform to reality and the gaps torture a good artist.
How to go on to handle 1B+ notification triggers reliably
WARNING: nerd sniping. lol
Exercise is excellent for staving off depression. One indicator that you may be depressed is you no longer have any motivation to do things like exercise. So while one can suggest it as a treatment, not many legit depressives are actually going to follow through.
software engineers who are more likely to want to harvest and process more personal data than the three letter agencies can possibly imagine
In light frame residential construction, the structural envelope (foundation, framing, roof, and exterior doors/windows) will usually be about 50% of project cost, if not a little more
Gaussian Blur Algorithm
When you use a GPU, you are using a different processor with a different ISA, running its own barebones OS, with which you communicate mostly by pushing large blocks of memory through the PCIe bus. It’s a very different feel from, say, adding AVX512 instructions to your program flow.
It might be because of the audience in this particular case. Apparently talking to a bunch on non-technicals, soooo we spend 8 minutes saying that by "computer" we don't mean the "tv" and keyboard, and talking about 3x5 cards...
And maybe we'll get there, I'm not a complete luddite. If we can get the entire process automated (or at least most of it), I think it would get to the point of actually saving money (though I would still be a bit concerned with the material itself).

If we could, if nothing else, get all the plumbing installed automatically I think that the value add of 3D printing might actually start being worth it. As it stands right now it kind of just feels like a novelty that doesn't actually save time or money.
The intermittent auth thing in /profilesearch is a sign that they're round-robinning the servers and misconfigured one.

Also, it looks like he hit a front-end API that drives the TR-069 backend. Changing the WiFi SSID is a long way from being able to "...execute commands on the device"
Billionaire VCs square off on AI policy
Wow! Same for me; how odd is it happening for both simultaneously?

Some conspiracy material :D

Maybe it is an infrastructure outage
The trick is that you're not just generating the song; you're generating the experience of listening to the song. Much more efficient :)
Can I get a ELI!M[Not a mathematician]?
Location: Amsterdam

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Yes :)

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toon-alfrink/

Email: news.ycombinator.com.trial916@passmail.net

Independent IT consultant and developer. My clients are SME's that don't have any in-house IT expertise, which I provide. I'll take on any job from design to architecture to product management to development. Big project? I can take full ownership and scale up by hiring remote devs, as needed. I can be your "bootstrap CTO" and help you transition into a tech company with a proper IT department.
Does he have any beginner friendly books on math I saw some clips of his masterclass but I am skeptical of masterclass in general so I am not sure about that
Former frontline IT for the docs --

There's clean, then there's hospital clean. The sterile smell sure is something. In one way, it's a comforting "home" smell, even when I show up at one as a patient.
The CPE AT&T router potentially getting hacked doesn't make much difference if you have your own router between your network and the AT&T network. Even if we removed the AT&T CPE router, you'd still be connecting to a black box you don't control that could be hacked or doing any number of inspections on your traffic.
>>People totally blind from birth taking hallucinogens don't see entities

So these people do not trip at all on hallucinogens? Sounds like rather improbable.
~70% of what you call "visual experience" is driven by non-visual cortices,
like anterior cingulate, for example. And even before the visual cortex, even
on the thalamus level, the thalamus receives up to ~60% of top-down connections from non-visual cortices. You do not need to literally see anything in order to get the information about it. Get your potato, monkey.
From employee perspective I have been mostly happy with these services.

There has been some minor issues and extra hazzle, but nothing major, and the 2-3x salary compared to local levels certainly helps offset any small issues

Employer wanting to terminate an employee or employer going bankrupt, while maybe not common certainly happens, and it is built-in to their business model. Most of these services do require deposit that covers at least 1-2 months of salary + costs (up to even 6 months of salary), which is meant for these type of cases.

That being said, I do think many of these services are at least partly skirting the laws, or at least threading on a very thin line. As far as I know, most especially EU jurisdictions don't really have exact laws for EOR specifically. In general labor laws do apply though, of which these services sometimes have quite interesting/creative interpretations. But as long as things go well and everyone is happy, I don't think anyone really cares.
I would agree with everything you said, If we ignore the fact that the company has billions of dollars in revenue and paying a bug bounty is a drop in the ocean for them.

Do you think it's reasonable to say the the ethics of what you call "extortion" should depend with how big the company is? I'm obviously not advocating for making a small company pay more than they can manage
It really depends on what you do / discover with the SBIR grant

See e.g. https://www.jamesoncpa.com/learning-center/irs-finally-issue...

Caveat, I've been out of the small lab SBIR world for 13-14 years