skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, we cannot learn anything about reality from language alone. This is 'the intentional illusion' or you could call it 'the aboutness illusion'.

As in you think you are learning a speed limit for a road by looking at a sign with a speed limit on it. But the sign itself is just some shapes, and no aspect of its structure has anything to do with speed, roads, or speed limits. Literally, everything here is arbitrary convention; and under arbitrary permutation, the sign can mean the same, and share no properties with any other permutation whatsoever.

Rather it is by being-in-the-world you have acquired a direct understanding of roads, speeds, limits, rules, laws, society, etc. And alongside this all the while internalizing arbitary conventions by which we signify these things.

A stop sign could look like anything at all. We just decide to use arabic numerals, red, white, a certain eye-hight, etc.

The meaning of the sign is something you are reconstructing prior even to being cognitively aware of the sign you're looking at. The meaning of these conventions is a mental reconstruction made possible by your direct familiarity with the world these conventions are related to.

You first act within the world by building a rich conceptual understanding, you then associate arbitrary conventions with this understanding, and then can make inferences about this world by reconstructing a novel conceptual understanding given by these signs.

There is literally nothing at all in speed signs that has anything to do with their meaning.

This isnt a speculative observation. It places a very hard limit on what the entire field of statistical AI can do, let alone LLMs. Any model created by empirical risk minimization, or fitting-to-historical-data, lacks any relevant capacities. It has only one: drawing a data point from some inferred distribution over historical cases.

In any case, this isnt a speculative exercise. Statistical AI will be forever "limited" to a fixed computational budget for computing predictions over historical cases, with necessarily limitations this involves -- this is only an engineering problem where these cases aren't representative of the kinds of queries people have.

eg., they will fail under relevant counter-factual permutation of the conventions of the language/domain/topic, etc. -- see, e.g., https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.02477

Applying the lessons of the above paper, note chatgpt3.5 gets the evaluation of python wrong under permuation of its syntax: https://chatgpt.com/share/7df48393-9cb8-41f4-a84e-d21b680702...

..whereas ChatGptv4o does not. This suggests to me that there's been a very large amount of prompting by users since 3.5 trying to create novel programming languges in this way.. hence 4o, having been trained on subsequent user prompts, its "better" at this task.

Of course nothing important has changed between v3.5 and v4o in terms of what the model is, rather there is more query-relevant data to sample from.
Obvious answer is to fire immediately. Huge red flag if you cant fire someone under these circumstances.
Hello old aquantance! Might you have gone by another handle during the Shuttle years? I don't recognize this one, though maybe I've flipped a few bits since then.
Isn't the point that by sharing with weather.gov (which I personally think is a great idea), you're in effect giving it to weather.com?
Samsung Workers in South Korea Stage First-Ever Walkout
I get the sneaking suspicion that you don't actually do this shit. ChatGPT isn't an expert coder sitting by your side. It's not even remotely close. Go ahead and get ChatGPT to walk you through how to implement even a non-novel CFD analysis that won't get you laughed out of the room. Get it to help you port an Ada Ravenscar runtime to an exotic (or even a not-so-exotic) processor. Try and have it generate non-trivial ladder logic programs for industrial controls. Try to get any help from it at all when doing microcontroller programming that isn't just "read the manual".

My question for you is -- what exactly do you do? What programming could you possibly be doing that is so trivial that you actually believe that ChatGPT is capable of solving these things?
Remember there is lot of incompetent people being interviewed. Majority of people being interviewed do not get hired. Some of it must be because incompetency, and they keep trying to get hired. So occasionally some of them do pass through the filter and this is one of the results.
I should have used the title "The American mind cannot comprehend this diagram" but let's tick to he rules!
That destroys higher life, but tough microorganisms survive until the runaway steam greenhouse sterilizes the planet.
Detecting a PS2 Emulator: When 1*X does not equal X
Generally you do both and rank the combined results

This is also why generally you don't get a vectordb and instead just add a vector index to the DB you are already using

Re:semantic vs synonym, that's really domain dependent. As the number of hits go up, and queries get more interesting, the more vectors get interesting. At the same time, vectors are heavy, so there's also the question of pushing the semantic aspect to the ranker vs the index, but I don't see that discussed much (search & storage vs compute & latency)
Not many people have read my novels because they are extremely dense and technical near future stuff, but I've made interesting friends from writing those books. In fact, one contact I made basically paid for the whole two year investment in writing the novel.

I know a very successful writer of thrillers and he said that the technical content of the books would have to be completely stripped down to maybe what's contained in a few chapters of my book in order for it to be mainstream accessible.
AI Will Become Mathematicians' 'Co-Pilot'
I love Clojure and CLJS but unless you're already familiar with those ecosystem I'd not recommend them for a solo dev starting a new project.
The Infantry Handcart
I love how the demo video operates on a corn kernel. First they did surgery on a grape, now they did surgery on a corn :)

It’s a bit surprising to me that this came from Sony. What a group! They create top of the line gaming consoles, digital cameras, and… surgical robots?!

I’m trying to think of a similar conglomerate in the US, but nothing comes to mind. I wonder why Sony has so much diversity of industry.
ArcGIS also has an online edition that doesn't need any desktop software, which is highly capable and costs nothing for individuals, no matter how much data you throw into it.
Very similar to programming micro controllers, a lot of setting registers to arbitrary values to toggle certain bits high or low to enable/disable device functionality or set some interrupt or other. You needed the data sheet as well as the code to work out what was going on.
Hey everyone! Thank you so much for posting and upvoting this. Just wanted to say I'm the primary author here and happy to try and answer any questions anyone might have! Feel free to ask away here! This is a very new project and we have a lot of ground we are hoping to cover. Thank you for the support!
You have to learn how to prompt tools like Copilot. A few tricks I use a lot:

1. Write comments saying what you want the next lines of code to do

2. Write function definitions with clear function names and type annotations on the arguments - this can result in the full function body being provided if your definitions are clear enough

3. For repetitive code (like parameterized unit tests) provide a couple of examples and then use comments to hint at what it should write for you next based on those examples

4. Sometimes it's good to temporarily copy and paste a chunk of code in from elsewhere. For example, copy a CREATE TABLE SQL statement into a Python file when you are writing code that will interact with that table - or even an HTML page when you are writing out the HTML for a form associated with that table
I definitely wouldn't guarantee it. But I think at least extending the possibility seems reasonable, given the fault.

If they're outright fired, that says something to the existing team too, and especially in smaller shops where each head holds valuable knowledge, I'm not sure that's the company-benefiting message to send either.

Plus if the individual chooses to leave, "I think we all noticed that so-and-so wasn't a good fit for the senior role. We extended them the opportunity to realign to a different level, which they declined" is a message I'd feel more comfortable presenting to the team.

"We're not going to immediately shitcan you..." is a powerful truth for retention in small teams/companies.

Especially coupled "... but we expect you to perform to your level, and we will address things if we see someone underperforming."

I do agree with other comments that do-nothing and ignoring the problem will be cancer to building a high-performing team.
This answer is such a cop-out. I know Rails very well, but I'm still a million times more productive in Phoenix than I ever was in Rails. Sure, it took some time to learn Phoenix and get up to speed, but if I could go back I'd have made the switch much earlier.

What is the advice here exactly: "never learn anything new"?
Huh, that title smells of tabloidization. I know about this incident, the "mid-air explosion" have to do with an uncontained disintegration of 1 turbine (with shrapnel flying that breached the wing, luckily not the fuselage), but the title makes it sound the whole plane exploded...
Cicero's Republic: The Cyclical Theory of Constitutions
People pay for Hulu. It got stuffed full of ads.

People pay for Prime. It got stuffed full of ads.

People pay for Netflix. It -- surprisingly but shouldn't have been? -- got ads.

Some services even try to eliminate the paid ad-free version. (To ensure ad audience demographic includes people that buy things?)

It's not clear that people don't want to pay for subscriptions as much as providers don't want to leave ad money on the table.
Don't worry it's ok if you don't want to use Recall, someone will just get that information by hacking your provider anyways.
"spin more conspiracies".

So... Explicitly fabricated conspiracies shall not be conflated with "conspiracy theories"? Whatever attachment you have to either would make you a conspiracy theorist.
https://archive.is/La3Io
Chinese agency working with Russia has been trying to source drone jammers
It's because:

• GraalJS is today based on an AST interpreter, which are less efficient in general than bytecode interpreters. V8 starts by compiling JavaScript to an internal bytecode, interpreting that, then JIT compiling the hot spots. It's the same architecture as the JVM except that the bytecode isn't considered to be a stable or documented format.

• The Truffle JIT compiler is slower than V8's because partial evaluation adds overhead. Slower compiler = more time spent in the interpreter = slower warmup.

• V8 is heavily optimized for great startup time because web pages typically don't live very long.

The first problem is being tackled by adding a bytecode interpreter infrastructure to Truffle itself. In other words, the Truffle library will invent a bytecode format for your language, write the bytecode interpreter for it, then partially evaluate that to create the JIT compiler! It can also handle stuff like persisting the bytecode to disk, like .pyc files or .class files do. Moving all the stuff needed to implement fast languages into the framework is very much the Truffle way.

The second problem is harder to solve. There is supposedly a thing called (I think) the second Futamura projection, where you partially evaluate the partial evaluator, but IIRC that's very hard to actually implement and for server-side use cases, less important.
I mean, yeah, there are certainly plenty of business models that rely on people not understanding what it is that they're buying. If you want to make your living that way, I can believe it's not that hard. But that doesn't mean that money can't be made by selling to intelligent people and attempting to educate the less informed. I know how I prefer to spend my short time here on Earth.
Not just California, basically every state and local government in the US with GIS department works off their ESRI subscription.
This is actually what we are working on adding next! We are working on code crawling and a vector search for better context gathering. Stay tuned for some more info on this
> breakdown in internal communication where HR was under the impression we wanted to hire at any cost despite us giving the candidate a mediocre rating.

One way that breakdowns can happen is if people are too subtle in their reviews. For example, damning with faint praise, or being overly constructive. Lots of people aren't good at reading comprehension, and even less good when wading through the piles of communication noise that many companies tend to generate. Combining free-form text with unambiguous "multiple-choice" options on the interview reports can help (e.g., interviewer writes constructive things about growth potential, but clicks the "lukewarm" or "not for this role" radio button).

Another way is if different interviewers had very different impressions, and one interviewer's takes precedence. (This can also happen the other direction: false-negative. As a team lead, I gave a very strong recommendation to hire this one very determined designer-y frontend engineer. But another team lead, who would have temporary loan of the hire before my team's project spun up, proceeded to Leetcode-haze them. I wouldn't say the candidate bombed it, but rather that the company bombed it. The company really didn't want to hire someone who got a strong negative, so they said no. Rejected candidate instead went to a different super-cool engineering-driven company, and I soon saw them featured in a tech demo video of that company on LinkedIn, explaining to customers this neat new product thing they built.)

Other ways?
Well, not calling for help when needed makes them a very dangerous junior. I don't know by the post if they are a good person.

Could they have also lied on the interview?

I would consider personality as a strong factor in keeping them, and if the company has room for a junior.

Lowering the salary is a hard requirement though.
It is your responsibility to look after your team as a whole. Sometimes that means taking decisions that negatively affect a single individual.

Your team members want to work with other great people who can help them deliver success - after all, the feeling of success is one of the most rewarding things a job can give you.

I’ll also add that letting someone go (constructively) can be a net positive for them, if you can put them on a path for greater success in life elsewhere. Struggling to deliver for months or even years is also not a good use of their time.

It might feel harsh, and it’s definitely a very difficult conversation to have, but I think if you remember that your responsibility is towards the team as a whole it can help you emotionally accept and navigate the situation.
Maybe they shouldn’t be looking for the smallest particle.

If space can be divided down to infinity then maybe there may be always smaller bits as you go deeper, but nothing as fundamental they’re wishing to find. Eventually they need accelerator larger than the Earth and maybe it still doesn’t satisfy :)

Instead why not trying to understand the pattern of division so they could predict what comes next.. With all the data so far I would imagine they could succeed in that, maybe with help of AI, and that might save them huge construction effort, time and money.

But what do I know.. just wondering out loud!
Change your GitHub background with Math hack
I really like React Create App on the front end with AWS API Gateway connected to AWS Lambdas. I use AWS Cognito for user login and AWS DynamoDB for my data store. Hosting is dirt cheap to start and scales well if your app takes off. The downside is that you're coupled to AWS.
code here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MathisHammel/MathisHammel/...
It may not be immediately obvious, but firing them asap is probably less disruptive for them:

* They still have an up-to-date resume

* They may still have warm leads for other jobs

* Employment with you is probably short enough, they can just leave it off their resume entirely
If it statistically saves lives?

It's the same as allowing full self driving cars which on average are safer than human drivers but sometimes accidentally drive into a fire truck because they couldn't train an image classifier to more accuracy than 99%.
I agree with this sentiment. I know half a dozen or even a dozen programming languages (some more than others obviously) and my first project is almost always a web project. Not every language has a decent streamlined / full feature web framework (I really havent found one for Rust yet that has everything OOTB) so you have to build your own pieces (which I've done with CherryPy, though learning Django was a boost, imagine had I never tried Django as suggested above), but now and then new projects emerge. ASP .NET is fantastic, but if a project requires libraries I cannot find for .NET I may opt for Python altogether, which is part of why I with IronPython got more love and attention from Microsoft more directly. With their backing I could see Python on .NET being much more prevalent. Jython is basically in a weird limbo state, and I doubt Oracle will ever have the brain cells to invest in open source in a way that pays them back endlessly.

The real take away is, there's always new web tech you've never heard of that makes you infinitely more productive.

Blazor is peak web development for me right now. The ability to design components and not have to leave C# for UI logic is amazing.
What's the rationale for the downvotes? The line of thinking I've highlighted is very widespread, and it's flawed.
Yep. It's win-win; both parties have something to gain.
YouTube Picture Downloader
I don't think they ever went beyond the first projection (has anyone?) and they don't seem to use Futamura projection anymore.
Someone should convert an unused warehouse or shopping mall into a real-world backroom maze escape game.
Part of my stack selection process these days is considering how well LLM tools like ChatGPT and Claude "know" the stack in question.

Using libraries that have been around for a few years and have accumulated a lot of training data is a huge productivity boost here, because LLM tools can both write code that uses them and usefully explain and debug them when they go wrong.

It's weird and a little uncomfortable to have this as part of my selection criteria, but if I want to maximize the rate at which I can build things it's honestly a useful rule of thumb.
This (as a few others have noted) is the purpose of a probationary period.

That cuts both ways, of course -- while I have only seen one person who "failed" their probationary period, I have myself left a job during my probationary period when it turned out to not be what I'd been promised. That's what the probationary period is for.
Most (all?) drugs have some side effects for at least some people. These things are decided on a case by case basis.
The author writes "CP/M 2.2 had no mechanism for resizing files", but that is not exactly true.

CP/M had a submit-command, which would read a text-file containing a list of commands and write out a file named $$$.SUB to the A:.

Later when the CP/M booted (via a cold start, or a warm start which was triggered by pressing Ctrl-C) it would be processed.

The $$$.SUB file was processed in reverse, and it would be assumed to contain N entries of 128 bytes each. The last record would be read, the command be executed, and the file would be resized down by 128 bytes.

So given input like:

FOO
BAR
BAZ

The CP/M command-processor (i.e. shell) would run "BAZ", truncate the $$$.SUB file by 128 bytes. Then it would do the same, executing "BAR", truncating down, and then running "FOO", truncating down to zero, and erasing.

How do I know this? I wrote a CP/M emulator and had a devil of a time working out the behaviour, but the CP/M "Close File" call will truncate a file is some values of the FCB tell it to. Since CP/M itself used this I can only assume that user-programs did too.
The Texas supercollider was also 90 km when the Americans canceled it 30 years ago. Perhaps there is a threshold circumference above which governments just won't pay for these.
Last time I drank ayahuasca with huambisa/chaliponga (contains 5-meo-dmt) I vomited every 5-10 minutes for about 4 hours. It was horrible, and I had to ask for help because I couldn't even get up and refill my water bottle. Chacruna is more gentle and smooth.
I think a lot of people deal with this exact situation because some developers stumble into this field and "get by" for awhile until they get hired at place where their BS is obvious.
Their bionic eyes are now obsolete and unsupported (2022)
The official RCA is deprecated. Is there a fork you recommend?
This argument is wrong. Matt Stoller has written extensively on this:

https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/icymi-scotus-...

In short, the law’s intent has been perverted. The idea that these providers are simply neutral carriers of content evaporates the minute they decide what you do and don’t see and how much of it.
I was in a team where this happened. Management stuck their head in the sand for the longest time, while the morale of the team started tanking, as noone wanted to work with this person, who needed a lot of attention and never seemed to improve, even after years of trying.

My recommendation would, for his sake and yours, to let him go sooner rather than later. Working in the wrong position is also going to tank his self confidence and will do him no favours.
Are you going just by these statistics?

It's nice that 60% of Viennese people have access to cheaper (not cheap!) housing in a capital city, too bad for those who couldn't get there either because of overdemand or being just outside the bracket, and too bad for those who can't afford to live in Vienna at all.

I'm not sure what's interesting about the income inequality index - that just means you can't get rich there to pay the actually large taxes so the state wouldn't need to take the bulk from slightly less poor people instead of the actually rich people. Switzerland has a worse inequality index rating and yet better social services while having lower taxes.

HDI is entirely uninteresting in this discussion - that's simply because Austria-Hungary industrialized early, it has nothing to do with the socialist policies there. The neighboring countries like Slovenia or Czech Republic have 1/4 tax rates and HDI is similar, even though both lived through many decades of communist destruction and in case of Slovenia also wars, while Austria was on the western side of the curtain. And of course Switzerland again.

People from Czechia and Slovenia used to come to Austria to make some money, that's not the case anymore - now I see many Austrians coming here, especially higher earning people like software engineers. Socialism destroys itself through this kind of brain and capital drain.
If you can, please report those issues to https://github.com/latex3/tagging-project . It is expected that devs can't account for all cases.
"Elon Musk is a brilliant luminary"

Is Elon personally RLHFing this thing?
And prescription medications don’t have rare but nasty side effects?

If these things are unpredictable it’s likely because they simply haven’t been studied in a medical context. At the very least it’s reasonably clear that long-term and debilitating side effects are generally exceedingly rare.

More people than you probably expect die from tylenol.
I find it somewhat funny how there's sometimes these news about Japan trying to tackle the birth rate problem in various ways, yet remaining extremely conservative in the work culture. What good is the dating app if you have to stay at the office until 11pm every night because that's what your boss does?