skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At the root of it is a lot of "yes man" behavior, and I don't think it's just academia. But I think academia has a stronger history and stereotype of allowing people to be weird.

It's essentially the bureaucrats taking over. Putting metrics on things that can't be measured well and treating those as if they're the answer. Saying "good enough" or "something is better than nothing" when they don't apply. Because it's easier to deal with that than the chaos and uncertainty of innovation.

I think this is also something silicon valley lost. We definitely stopped dreaming. Stopped building the future we wanted and instead just started doing work. There's been a lot of stagnation. It's not just about making things smaller
That's what Warren Buffett calls "moat". These are the companies one should invest in.
I'm all for self-deprecating humor but this is more confusing than funny.
They could be faster as LLMs will create 1000 exploits for every vulnerability in 5 minutes and then those that work are massively used in 6 minutes. No time to install security updates in time.

Of course we could create 1000 security fixes in 5 minutes, then create 10k exploits with LLMs, run functional tests and attack all 1k with the 10k and hopefully you have a tried fix in 30 minutes.
I am pretty certain I am a Weird Nerd.

I have good reasons to consider myself neurodivergent (and others do consider me such). There are definite divergences that have caused me problems. I have what people consider "superpowers" and what people consider "difficulties".

Not certain I am autistic. Might have been considered mild or (the then-termed) "high functioning" as a kid in the 80s.

But on the other hand, I don't think it's necessarily wrong to put me in the same broad category as autistic people, because I have the same issues in the context of the article -- with being conventionally "ambitionless", having relatively little grasp of (or instinct for) power games etc., and needing the kind of support that others often do.

That category needs a name. (In the UK we'd traditionally go for "boffin", which is broadly a term of affection, but it's a little harder to spot a boffin these days because of casual clothing at the office)
Being a professor at a research university is really multiple non-overlapping jobs all at once: managing your research group, bringing in funding and publicity, helping run your department and research community, and teaching classes. PhD programs really only prepare you for the nuts-and-bolts of research, and maybe teaching. Only if you're lucky, your advisor was thoughtful enough to make proper introductions to help you get started on funding and prestige out of the gate.

It's not surprising that lots of people opt out or wash out of this system because the expectations don't match the formal preparation for it.
I am assuming you are in the US. Is the low return on solar due to high installation costs, particularly labor? At least in Texas, this is the reason commonly given by people. My friend installed it all by himself. He has a large yard with limited tree cover so he didn't have to install it on the roof. He told me he saved thousands even after accounting for his time.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040920001241/http://www.spy.or...

It also used to redirect to military websites at one point in 2005.

So what you are saying is not true.

Also some history on what the site actually was:

http://www.cultural.com/web/security/bulletin.boards/spy_org...
For anyone interested, here's the list for the last month or so:

https://gist.github.com/digitalresistor/03ea1b8798c519a71f06...

Edit: moved list to Gist.
That's not the suggestion though. It's that a lot of high performers in STEM tend to be "Weird Nerds" and by selecting against that type, you alienate a large number of potentially great researchers.

Not selecting against weird nerds doesn't mean selecting against "socially well-adjusted Nerds".

In fact, the article says that a person can in fact be exceptional at politic and science, despite their tenets being antithetical in many cases.
This is cool. When it's in 'all operators' mode it's challenging!

One thing that I noticed is that there's a timer. Depending on your target audience, you might want to make that optional.

My son is 7 and finds the timer on Zetamac creates unnecessary stress. So I made something simpler for him that just shows a fixed number of problems (with no time limit), and uses a cookie to track the streak length: https://math.twilam.com/
> Weird Nerds (I called them autistics, but people really hated that^2) [...] But it’s also hard to believe someone like her could ever become the most pleasant interlocutor at a dinner party, or the most socially adept and organized manager.

The part about "organized manager" is surprising. If we're going to stereotypes, I would've guessed that a manager who was autistic would likely have being organized as one of their strengths.

Regarding "socially adept [...] manager", I've worked with two software engineering project managers who were autistic. They were both very different (one amiable, and had much better than average understanding of human behavior and emotions; the other came off as making an effort to tolerate people). Both were not only well-respected, but liked, and were effective at difficult work&people-herding jobs.

Even with the manager who came off as not really liking anyone by default, and even on a very difficult project, almost everyone on large teams respected the project manager (excepting one person, who couldn't stand something about the project manager, or the nature of the project). And I didn't hear the grumbling like I'd normally hear about a manager who was unfair, incompetent, or dishonest.
If you propose to use a TSV parser that does not handle escaping then that sounds very unsafe to me. Do you also want to skip checking for escaped newlines? Or escaped backslashes?

What you are proposing is not using TSV, but a format that completely bans newlines or tabs in any data. There are certainly uses for such a format but to make it non-risky to use you'd need strict validation on the input to the encoder and make it very clear that it is not TSV, since it does not follow the rules of TSV encoding/decoding and will not produce the same data as a proper TSV implementation.
DNSBLs have been effectively the same as turning your mailer off, for at least 15 years.
Academia is just messed up because the path to the top is to become an absolute expert in some topic, (PhD, postgrad), then become a performer/people manager/grant writer/office politics master (professor). It is really dumb. You are rolling the dice twice for expert level skills, and the second roll comes after huge personal investment.

Not really sure what the solution is. Maybe a huge increase in the number of national labs, as a vent for those who hit the first roll but fail the second.

We also need a vent for people who are good at teaching but not super focused on research. Drastically increase the community college system, IMO, and start paying the instructors enough to have nice middle-class lifestyles. Stop making people-people and weird nerds compete for rare grants and let them both do the things they are better at.
I want to share this with my daughter who needs some practice with these, but the timer just causes anxiety. Could you add a mode with unlimited time but three "lives"?
I came across some of these in Tokyo recently as well. Super annoying, and I'm 40. I thought I'd be immune by now. I assumed they were intended to drive away cats or rats or mosquitos.
I meant as a human.
I duno on some of that. Until I was about 39 I was a "weird nerd" and then my wife (Dr of special education) finally convinced me to talk to a Dr and get get tested for autism. Turns out I'm ASD 1, would have been Asperger's in the past. Autism has a very wide range of ways it shows itself.
Introduce struggle sessions for supervisors of scientists like her. Clear the cruft quickly. Careerist ciminals have no place running research labs.
My fun was to try to get the widest underwater part with the narrowest top showing above.
Yes, good point, thanks. I was thinking of the high end of disciplines with strong ties to industry, mainly STEM and business, but that's actually just a very small, although prominent, part of academia.
My grandfather self published a memoir some 30 (ish) years ago. Unsurprisingly he never really managed to shift many of the thousand or so hardbacks I believe he paid to have printed. I think a lot of it was catharsis? I also know that the published versions leave out a lot of stuff that he thought was too sensitive or reflected badly on the Air Force etc.

He's long since passed, and I have a stack of 20 or so left (many were destroyed) from "inheritance". Our current strategy is to take one with us to every hotel/b&b we stay in, most of which have a library shelf, and leave one there. Maybe they never get read, maybe they do. Feels better than sending them to burn!
It's not like that at all.
If you want to argue that one can't define value then I am out.
If you admit "value" has well understood meaning then utility function of wealth is just how much value one can derive from it. We usually measure wealth in money for convenience. I really don't know why you are so against it. There might be a lot of nonsense associate with it but the concept itself is pretty simple and useful.
Personally I understood what the phrase "next generation" was supposed to mean, that it's a new and better way of doing things, a new paradigm. But I guess it's a bit overused, like the word "simple", that people have a cynical reaction to it. Anyway, I think the concept is refreshingly clear, it looks like it has a lot of potential. Congrats on launching!

Nit: I'd change "Working in progress" to "Work in progress", it's more common to see the latter wording.
EĿlipsis: a language independent preprocessor is released
Personally I use the same approach to piku, but instead rebuild my Nixos config on push. My projects use nix flakes, so I get both something that I know will run on my server and on my local machine with the full development environment. No containers needed technically, but I use systemd nspawn to run the software in its own sandboxed namespace.

My entire server is then managed declaratively, so if I want to add a new project, it’s like 3-5 lines of Nginx config and push, that’s all. Something goes wrong? Just revert the commit.
they're right, but it's also almost 30 years old, and incorporates some unpleasant political compromises, as well as some failed experiments. you can do better, but unless you understand why the stl is one of the greatest accomplishments in computer science, you won't
A vast number if scenarios advocated by Yudkowski and adjacent people are anti-physics and rely on the world as we know it to operate under vastly different principles than we think right now. I think there's zero reason to think AIs will somehow find cheat codes to reality. Hence my "if ever".

Do I believe we will eventually get auto-exploitation? Yes, I gave a lot of input to a friend of mine that (many years before the LLM craze) then had good results automating heap layout search. For certain classes of vulnerabilities and targets we will get auto-exploitation, and for some we already have them (even without AI or LLMs, unless you classify tree search as AI).

Do I think we will get anything resembling the OP I replied to? No, that's pure (nonscience) fiction.
Thank you very much. I really appreciate these kind words. I'll text you through Linkedin for more information.
The problem with this argument is that it leads to the conclusion that all change is pointless. If your body is who you are, and you can’t control it, then it’s best just to accept whatever you’re given.

That’s contrary to most of human history, where we specifically try not to take what we’re dealt.

It’s useful to ask yourself: why should vaccines be "allowed" (or "accepted" or "they’re good") but body change shouldn’t be? They’re both as artificial as a Twinkie.
That might not avoid the problem here. Wills can be overridden by documents such as the one in the article.
I have long been eager to leave Pinboard. This is the first viable alternative I've seen: written in reasonable languages, storage through Sqlite and not some burdensome db server, self-hostable without any docker BS. Very promising!
I learned this too late in life. You basically have 2 choices.

Either you spend your time working for someone to increase the value of their asset. You get paid a salary, sometimes a very decent one. This is what society trains you for.

Or you own assets.
> Why play with them and not just cut them out completely? By keeping them in group your only enforcing their unpleasantness.

The people who actually ruin the game and make it not fun to play, we do cut them out.

But other people, well - I guess the threshold for playing a cooperative game with someone is different than the threshold for inviting them to a party at my house. Plus, at D&D, they spend a lot of their time inside a character who may be more interesting and pleasant than the person rolling the dice.
who do you think economists also listen to?
Which means that the fix is to change the media not the metrics. That's the gist of the argument - if your improvements of "reality" aren't making people happier, you're changing the wrong metric. In this case you need to change the media, not crime stats.
Depends. The kind of exercise you're thinking can be done vigorously and for a long period -- or, for some people, it could be a quick 5-10 minute thing that feels vigorous but really doesn't involve that much muscular effort.
Proposed tallest tower in U.S. clears OKC Council zoning approval
Ah, I saw that! I need to review this video.

I'm basically just throwing crap at the wall and seeing what sticks; the money investment is basically zero, aside from occasionally watering the pile. And the time I spend on it is time spent outside, in mostly pleasant weather, working with my hands.
The way filter lists work on the site means you can easily decide to never see posts or users from threads. The "Profile Labeller" [0] labeller already has a specific filter for threads users.

I'm just annoyed you're still limited to less than ten of them at a time.

0: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:i65enriuag7n5fgkopbqtkykhtt...
doesn't work for people that want them "federated"
Not sure what you guys are trying to say here but I have seen, with my own eyes, large enterprise software systems that end up being so fragile it makes you laugh. The incumbents in this space make dinosaurs look like spring chickens by comparison.

There are millions upon millions of dollars being spent on stupid, outdated software that simply does not work. The main thrust of my original comment was that - "you thought open source was impressive? wait until the rise of AI powered open source". I think the highly arcane world of enterprise software is similar to being a travel agent in the mid to late 90s.
Exhibit J has a lot more of those: https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/Lawsuit-Document-dk...
> The industry has really changed though. It is much easier to hire social well adapted people who can code at all than to hire a bunch of people with social problems who can code really good

If you have no financial constraints? In what world do you spend massive amounts of money to mitigate people being "weird"?
You... seem to get a lot of spam! Just out of interest, across how many unique local recipient addresses is this, and how did you determine these messages were illegitimate?
i had to be in a confinement center designed by a nerd who put a computer where it shouldn't belong, im sorry thank you for sharing your story
I agree we shouldn’t do direct air capture instead of reducing CO2 emissions in the first place, but 420ppm is already too high, we need to remove CO2 from the air somehow.
I would suggest you check out some of the things on reddit's rpghorrorstories subreddit.

Of course, we're only seeing one side of a narrative, and the stories are obviously written for an audience that expects something - but it can be rather enlightening at just how bad some people can be, and just how much some other people can put up with.
You'd still need escaping/encoding of those characters since they can appear in a record.

There is no escaping of this fact, if you have a storage format you need to be able to store records of that format within the format, so you need some form of encoding/escaping.

It doesn't change much which character we choose for TSV/CSV, tabs, commas, special purpose ASCII/unicode control codes. We still need escaping to store discrete text records within other text records.
> I noticed as part of a separate discussion over on /r/math that AFAICT there is nothing in PA that distinguishes successor and predecessor until you get to the definition of multiplication. Is that right? Is it noteworthy?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. "PA without multiplication" is basically Presburger Arithmetic (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presburger_arithmetic). One of its axioms (as in PA) is that 0 has no predecessor - but clearly every number, including 0, has a successor. So that's a way of distinguishing predecessor and successor functions.

I believe that when you look at nonstandard models (which basically look like N + any number of copies of Z), the order isn't fixed in those copies of Z (unlike N), so you could swap predecessor and succesor within those copies, but I haven't really looked into that all that much.
All of us have to get real and demand immediate speed-up of LLMs, Gene Therapy, etc. Absolutely nothing else matters.
Or $2.50 / million tokens if you run it in batch mode (results in up to 24 hours, though in practice much faster than that): https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/batch/getting-starte...
He never said that, he just pointed out a statistic. You choose to assume that. Please top braking HN rules by assuming bad faith.

HN rules state: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
you're just renaming things here. the expected real (as opposed to nominal) value is still zero or negative. people don't run insurers out of the kindness of their hearts.
That makes sense. I imagine that there are significant performance tradeoffs but those are probably worth it in many cases. I would be somewhat surprised if Mamba can be made usefully fast with NumPy, but it would be a pleasant surprise.
I have fond memories of watching Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, and Kevin Rose (of later digg fame) on The Screen Savers and Call For Help on the old ZDTV, then TechTV before it merged with G4. So many amazing hosts and shows got their start on that network, and many of them continue on their own shows/podcasts on YouTube and elsewhere, especially on the TWiT.tv video podcast network that Leo started. I met Leo once in SF at an impromptu meetup he announced on Twitter in the early 2010s, and he was the nicest person ever. Truly a larger than life personality and career, and you should check out all their shows if you're into IT on TV type content. They have like 10+ current active shows, including the namesake This Week in Tech and Security Now.

The closest to a show about IT support is Ask The Tech Guys, which is live in ~1.5 hours from now, and goes for 3 hours, and they have a Zoom link you can call in on @ call.twit.tv

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TechTV

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screen_Savers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWiT.tv

https://twit.tv/

https://www.youtube.com/ThisWeekinTech

https://twit.tv/shows/ask-the-tech-guys

https://www.youtube.com/TechGuyLabs

I'll never forget watching Patrick accidentally break a brand-new ~$1-2K AMD 64-bit processor iirc live on TV while Leo watched in like 2002 due to misalignment or improperly mounting the heatsink. They were experts but they still make mistakes like the rest of us, and they took it in stride along with some good-natured mockery. It was the epitome of r/techsupportgore schadenfreude.

If instead you wanted a drama about IT support, I don't know of one - the closest would probably be a tie between the equally fantastic Mr Robot and Halt and Catch Fire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Robot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...

The closest thing I know to a show about IT support would probably be the British sitcom The IT Crowd.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IT_Crowd
That's a similar but different anecdote. The one I am thinking of he specifically is talking to someone's wife while she is crocheting. It may not have been Feynman though, I CTRL+F'ed "Surely You're Joking" and wasn't able to find it or I would have cited my sources in the parent comment.
Actual Business Insider article referenced:

Microsoft exec blames Azure layoffs on the 'AI wave' in leaked memo

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-exec-blames-azure-...

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40593559)
Destroying Public Trust: Covid Realities
Metabolomics is the study of metabolism using the latest technology to look directly into cells. Metabolic rate is often measured through oxygen consumption and CO₂ production (indirect calorimetry), but this primarily focuses on aerobic processes and does not provide a complete picture of metabolism. Within metabolism, there are both aerobic and anaerobic energy pathways.
Measuring metabolic rate through oxygen consumption and CO₂ production does not account for anaerobic processes such as glycolysis (glucose breakdown), beta-oxidation of fatty acids, and the creatine phosphate system.

Researchers sometimes try to mitigate this limitation by measuring lactate levels in the blood, which can provide some insight into anaerobic metabolism, particularly in muscles. However, blood lactate levels primarily reflect anaerobic glycolysis and do not fully account for other anaerobic processes involving fatty acids and creatine phosphate. There are formulas to estimate these processes, but they are still approximations.

Metabolomics, on the other hand, looks directly into the cells and is not limited to only aerobic processes or anaerobic lactate production. Instead, it can identify and quantify a wide range of metabolites, which are the intermediates and end products of metabolic reactions. Thus, metabolic rate measurements provide an estimate of energy expenditure but do not directly assess the complex metabolic processes occurring within cells, whereas metabolomics offers a more direct and detailed view of cellular metabolism.

As such, the study published in Nature is within the field of metabolism and uses the latest technology to study metabolism directly. Therefor it constitutes our latest understanding of metabolism during fasting.
The problem is firings almost always happen in bad economies and rarely in good economies.
But polls show that around of population are flat out wrong on certain objective measures, like GDP, the S&P 500 index, and the unemployment rate[1]. If they can't get basic factual questions right, why should we put much stock in their "intuitive feel of the economy"?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/22/poll...
There is a similar parallel in the corporate world. Being involved with tech and software has never had less to do with actually being good at those things. I just remarked to my director the other day that the only innovation we have had in the org in the last 5 years was relentless self promotion, marketing, and branding. When did being known as an excellent and reliable engineer stop being “enough”.
Can't both of this problems be solved by repairing?

The body is a complex thing, but it still can be replaced - piece by piece or as a whole. Same for wiring - a lot of it is rather short and local and doesn't need complex operations for replacement.

I guess that's what you mean by huge amount of money. Can we quantify "huge"? And can we also have this expense designed to be minimal?