skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A child or unintelligent person may make errors when attempting to engage in reasoning -- applying the wrong deductive rules, or applying the right ones incorrectly, or applying them to invalid premises -- but LLMs are not even attempting to engage in reasoning in the first place. They are applying no deductive rules, and have no semantic awareness of any of their inputs, so cannot even determine whether they are correct or incorrect.

LLMs are simply making probabilistic inferences about what "words" (tokenized particles of language, not necessarily individual words from our perspetive) are most likely to appear in relation to other words, based on the training data fed into them.

Their output often resembles reasoning simply because the training data contains large amounts of explicit reasoning in it. But there is no actual reasoning process going on in response to your prompt, just probabilistic inference about what words are most closely correlated with the words in your prompt.

If you're getting what appear to be reasoned responses to "novel" prompts, then one of two things is likely happening: either (a) your prompt isn't as novel or unique as you thought it was, and the model's probabilistic inference was sufficient to generate a valid response without reasoning, or (b) the response isn't as well-reasoned as it appears, and you are failing to notice its errors.

If you want to genuinely test an LLM's ability to engage in reasoning, try throwing a complex math problem at it, or a logic puzzle that trips most people up.
Hey HN,

I was inspired by DesignJoy to package my services this way. It's a better deal for both parties as I'd have a more steady stream of income and you would have clear pricing fast project cycles, and unlimited requests for changes and tasks.

By removing the friction associated with agencies or hiring developers, you no longer have to waste your time, and can spend it focusing on your business :)

- Abdulaa
Anyone knows where the claim that the Nuvia licence was server-specifc comes from? This seems to be a bad copy-pasta from the Reuters article (which does not claim this), and no company ever claimed this AFAIK.

Edit: the answer can be found in the court documents, here Qualcomm's Sept 22 answers to Arm's claims: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.798... ; the gist is that Arm claims Nuvia's licencing fee was higher than Qualcomm's because it was negotiated with the intent of making server chips. Qualcomm admits as much:

> Defendants further admit that NUVIA and ARM intended the licensing fees and royalties set forth in the NUVIA ALA to apply to future server products, not products for other markets
Earliest manuscript of Gospel about Jesus's childhood discovered
Maybe risky ventures aren't for them.
I see no reason why Google should pay for linking to the Internet Archive. Google pays Wikipedia because Google Search displays Wikipedia content separate from link results, but they aren’t displaying Internet Archive content with those links. And it’s exactly the purpose of the Web Archive to provide access to content that isn’t available under its original URL anymore.
Except you didn't? You paid for all-you-can-eat-on-a-phone, and 5 GB extra. So it's a dormitory with unlimited dining hall, but you can only take one plate a week outside of the dining hall.

For the provider, the point of this design is that there's only a certain amount that people are willing to download on a phone or eat in a dining hall. For the consumer, they don't have to count their data or their servings as long as they follow a simple rule - they get predictable billing.
Perhaps in the narrow definition of "trenches" your first statement is true. However, a ".. war of maneuver from start to finish ..." is certainly not true. I suspect the combatants in the house to house fighting in places like Stalingrad and Leningrad, did not consider that as "maneuver". Nor did the Americans & Japanese soldiers at Okinawa.

Certainly there was much more maneuver in WWII - blitzkreig - but it lasted a long time and armies were not in constant motion all that time.
Didn't see the reply this late, hopefully you will see mine.

He did indeed use quaternions but it's not easy to find:
https://archive.org/details/atreatiseonelec02maxwgoog/page/2...

Unfortunately these equations are not quite without mistakes (I remember a missing dot for a time derivative) compared to the component form. They're correct in the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Maxwell's_equations...

If you replace S.∇ with ∇· and V.∇ with ∇× you essentially get the vector calculus version of the equations.

Thank you for extracting the core ideas out of this lengthy text. But I'm still wondering where this very concise present-day formulation with just 4 equations was first written down, even if you can somehow find them scattered around in the book. I found something about Hertz but didn't try to follow up on it, i think he may have only considered a vacuum.
The problem is that word use is power-law distributed, so that the most common ~200 words in use are extremely over-represented, and that goes for phrases and so on.

It takes a lot of skill and a long time to develop a unique style of writing. The purpose of language is to be an extremely-lossy on-average way of communicating information between people. In the vast majority of cases, idiomatic style or jargon impairs communication.
An expert system is just a system based on repeated application of declarative rules. CYC was certainly an expert system - the ultimate scaling experiment of expert systems. I believe CYC also had a variety of inference/reasoning engines in addition to it's set of rules.

The rules (some prefer to call it a world model) in an LLM are deduced, via gradient descent, from the training samples, but are still there. The transformations effected by each layer of a transformer are exactly those it has learnt - the rules it is applying.

As with CYC people seem to be hoping that some external scaffolding (better inference engine(s)) will rescue LLMs from just being a set of rules to something more general and capable, but I tend to agree with Chollet that this active inference (reasoning) is actually the hard part.
Until it doesn't
One of the reasons I used to swap out the OS on my android phone. Back then I used CyanogenMod (now LineageOS) and they weren't able to track when I was using tethering and when I was just using my regular data.
TerraPower starts construction of Natrium reactor in Wyoming
I've been thinking about the equity split amongst early employees. Our startup is reserving 20% of equity for early employees. How about a division by 2 every time? First employee gets 0.5 x 20%, second employee gets 0.25 * 20%, etc.

Early employees are better rewarded for the risk, but later employees (e.g. #10) will get basically nothing. It's all about tradeoffs
Long-Term Maintenance of PCRE2
If you're reading nonfiction, it means you're wasting time reading a lot more words when you could have just read the prompt.
> Russia is currently spending over 7% of GDP on its military. The EU averages around 1.5%.

GDP of Russia was about 2 trillion USD in 2023. GDP of EU was about 18 trillion USD.

1.5% of EU GDP is still double the russian military budget.
It always baffled me that the US government had a program to send everyone free COVID tests, but they didn’t have a program to send everyone free N95 masks, so we ended up wearing random materials that were far less effective.

With all of the mandates to wear a mask everywhere I at least would have liked to wear one that worked well. You would have thought if they could produce 6 free tests per household per month, they could produce 6 free N95 masks per household per month.
The most common endgame for a startup is slowly running into the ground until the money runs out and you eventually shut the doors. Failing your way into a happy acquisition isn’t really something to expect as a contingency, I don’t think.
They have a stack trace, and I assume they can build it much like a debugger
To me this seems less about the account having no tweets and more about the account being auto-blocked by everyone on Twitter. Since apple uses this account for ads, if you block the account you no longer see ads; I think this results in Apple's ad campaign on twitter reaching nobody.
Much of the US refuses to wear masks. If masks only prevent the virus escaping but not entering, then it is only the selfish segment of society that is being protected.
sounds like what typescript does, I'm not clear if the Elixir approach is different from "structural typing" (as TS calls it) or if they're rediscovering the same thing. Either way, I'm happy it's the way they're going
inability to work without frameworks, inability to write clean code, inability to use only JPGs or PNGs, inability to create backward compatibility.

for me, the highest degree of skill is when a site looks just awesome and at the same time can open in a browser from 20 years ago in exactly the same way and without errors as in a modern one
Oh my mistake, thanks, I’ll fix it as soon as I can use a Mac.

Edit: fixed, now it should loops properly :) thanks again!
Earlier in the video they say it could be used to cool microchips.
In countries where public healthcare is a thing, why wouldn’t trying to limit the spread of something like Covid (that would inundate healthcare facilities) be part of a government’s business?
To be fair men in general are more likely to have facial hair. Facial hair absolutely impacts the effectiveness of masks.
They don't work at a restaurant because a Middle Eastern airline is ready to snap them up readily. The average salary of a junior flight attendant in the GCC starts at around that range but jumps to about 50% within a few years. Plus they get to travel a lot more as compared to in the US.
The study says it had 44 volunteers, 43% of whom were female.
I dunno. An outlet I used to follow for about two decades has entered such a steep nosedive in article quality in the last two years I don't bother any more.

I don't really care whether that's because they're using AI/LLMs or because the last two competent tech journalists left.
As long as you have a sturdy SUV with a big steel grill on the front, I don't see the issue.
The borrow checker within
Not quite true for an LLM chatbot with RLHF - it aims to provide the most satisfactory response to a prompt. AI detectors are snake oil to begin with, but they're super snake oil if people are smart enough to include something in their prompt like "don't respond in the style of a large language model" or "respond in the style of x".
128-Bit numbers are absolutely humongous and just by virtue of being a primary key means they get duplicated for every single relation. So if you have your user ID, for instance, as a 128bit uuid, any table and column that references the user ID is now also a 128-bit uuid. It's not a problem if you have very small amounts of data. But once your tables start to grow it will become misery to work with.

In my opinion, the best pattern is to have just a regular bigserial for primary keys to use for internal database relations since postgres is extremely good at generating and optimizing PK sequences (You're taking away all that optimization just because you want an enormous random number to be the primary key).

Then just have a uuid field for application-level identifiers and natural keys. You'll save yourself a whole lot of headache with this pattern.
Eh, eventually AI will write like humans but currently most of the time it's very much apparent what was written by AI. English is my second language so it's hard for me to pinpoint the exact reason why but I guess it's more about the tone and the actual content (a.k.a bullshit) rather than grammar / choice of words.

Most of the time AI slop reads like a soulless corporate ad. Probably because most of the content the AI was trained on was already SEO optimized bullshit mass produced on company blogs.
I'd very much like a tool that would detect and filter out also those from "my internet".
I have create an issue with your suggestion.
https://github.com/neoneye/ARC-Interactive/issues/67

Seeing the examples while having the editor visible. That's a good idea. I haven't explored this direction, since I had my phone (with tiny screen estate) in mind.

Drafts for a such a UI are much welcome. However I'm probably too lazy to code it though.
> Conceptually it seems like the average of all human texts would be distinct from any users because it would blend word choices and idioms across regions

That's only true in the aggregate. Within a single answer, LLMs will try to generate a word choice which is more likely _given the preceding word choices in that answer_, which should reduce the blending of idioms.

> where most of us are trained and reinforced in a particular region.

The life experience of most of us (at least here in HN) is wider than that. Someone who as a child visited every year their grandparents in two different regions of the country could have a blend of three sets of regional idioms, and that's before learning English (which adds another set of idioms from the teachers/textbooks) and getting on the Internet (which can add a lot of new idioms, from each community frequented online). And this is a simple example, many people know more than just two languages (each bringing their own peculiar idioms).
Haha. If you can code then you can create your own devices from scratch. People won't whine about a locked down cloud-only doorbell... they'll make their own.

Or you could do that now.
> This isn't a water hobbyists forum

And the article was not written to this forum?

> Fact is, most of us cannot, from the title, figure out if we're interested

This is a situation where HN’s “no editorialising titles” rule falls flat. Simply with the context change the title would be also best changed. I also understand why we have the rule of course.

> Explaining ROV once at the beginning would, I dare say, not have impacted the enjoyment of underwater professionals very much

Sure. There is a lot which could have been improved on the whole article with better editing.
New Concrete That Stores Electricity Could Turn Whole Homes into Batteries
> Mark sent his client a copy of the Google Doc where he drafted the article, which included timestamps that demonstrated he wrote the document by hand. It wasn’t enough. Mark’s relationship with the writing platform fell apart. He said losing the job cost him 90% of his income.

The article is a little vague, but, assuming Mark is telling the truth, and the article is reporting reasonably, then I can think of a few possible explanations offhand...

Client/employer could be an idiot and petty. This is a thing.

Or they could just be culling the more expensive sources of content, and being a jerk in how they do it. (Maybe even as cover for... shifting to LLM content, but not wanting that exposed when a bunch of writers are let go, since unemployed writers can expose well on social media all day.)

Or an individual there could be trying to hit metrics, such as reducing expenses, and being evil about it.

Or an individual could be justifying an anti-cheat investment that they championed.

Or an individual could've made a mistake in terminating the writer, and now that they know the writer has evidence of the mistake, is just covering it up. (This is the coverup-is-worse-than-the-crime behavior not-unusual in organizations, due to misalignment and sometimes also dumbness.)
>I think the disagreement comes from the way that activists insist that the best solution for treating [gender dysphoria, etc] is to "socially and heavy handedly force everyone to complete the illusion by treating transgender individuals as indistinguishable from their biological counterparts in every way".

Here we see that the term 'illusion' is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the background, and implies some kind of bias or preconceived notion of "real" vs "fake" or "imaginary". If this is what you get from advocates and activists, then I think you either receive this through a filter of some kind, or carry said filter within.

>That's not the only solution for treating [gender dysphoria, etc], just the current (and perhaps uniquely) American one, and it comes with a variety of problems the obvious of which stem from significant biological factors that make the illusion impossible to complete (sports, etc).

This is the treatment method that has consistently demonstrated the best outcomes for the people concerned over time. It is not uniquely American, as it was pioneered in Europe before taken to the next level in the US, among other countries/regions. Again, furtherance of the idea there is an 'illusion that must be completed'. This is not the case. Trans people are very aware just how much they do or do not fit in compared to the average population at large. No one needs to point this out to them, nor does anyone need to coddle them. By far, just being treated as how one wishes to be treated goes a long, long way.

In regards to sports, if the person in question has medically transitioned and has done so with HRT for some year(s) (I think 2 is the baseline minimum from studies?), then their overall performance in sports will be measurably less then their peers of the same gender in most instances. The few that excel are not statistically more significant than the few natural athletes who excel due to some developmental advantage (larger heart/lung capacity, etc) due to early or sustained training, genetic factors, etc. At least this is what the preliminary data is showing us so far. On average, the distribution remains about the same and on par with other athletes. This is almost always a talking point/dog whistle that is, once you peel the onion, much ado about nothing. Just like most all other contentious talking points about transgender folks, which do not vary significantly from the same points about gay rights, marriage equality, racial segregation/integration debates, or equality in voting and women's rights, etc, etc.
It's a difficult trade off I've found. Large tech companies are boring and slow and you deal with a lot of red tape and BS, and you feel utterly powerless in the security of your own job as economic tidal waves direct the momentum of layoffs and not your personal contribution.

At a startup you have more autonomy and power over your personal position. I wrote 90% of the code that is generating company growth, released 2 months after a layoff. If I had taken longer to release that code or if my code didn't work the company would be in a worse financial position.

But that also means a lot of personal stress. There aren't 4 layers of middle management to catch flak for you. If you fuck something up, you are directly responsible and depending on the environment that can result in some heated conversations. I also work way harder at a startup than I ever did for a big company
About 3 to 4 years too late but cool to read nonetheless.
> Not the original poster, but It’s probably more important because you can’t force people to wear masks.

Why can't "you" force people to wear masks? Depending on exactly who you mean by "you" (the particular poster, an abstract actor (individual or organization), etc.), what you say could be true to mostly false.
How is ensuring the well-being of the people "not any of the governments business"? What other end goal could a government possibly serve?
The US’s largest expense is healthcare for older and sicker people, between Medicare, Medicaid, and the portion of health insurance premiums that subsidized young and healthy to old and sick (due to Affordable Care Act mandating age rating factors capping premiums as a multiple of 21 year old premiums and getting rid of underwriting for any health issues other than using tobacco).

Whether or not it is “acceptable” to the population is not an objective fact, although, there is always quite a bit of grumbling about increasing premiums, and the spending as a proportion of the nation’s productive output can only increased based on the population pyramid.

And I bet that applies to every developed country.
> I'm not sure how that works in other countries that have socialized medical care today

Acupuncture is paid by medical insurance in Switzerland for example, just another type of medical procedure in their books. Don't know rationale behind it, wikipedia says no clear evidence for it, but I know several people including doctors who report measurable positive differences on themselves or their patients, its just not an instant cure-it-all like some want it to be.
Kernel's Safety in the Spectre Era (and Kaslr Is Formally Dead)
Indian food is not all heavy greasy curries though, I imagine the day to day cuisine is much healthier than Chicken Tikka Masala.
Eh? I bought a Raspberry Pi last October through Amazon in the UK and it cost £62.57 (excluding extras like a power supply and case)
"I'm sorry, but I am unable to comply with that request": https://suno.com/song/50291ff1-f971-4bff-b10e-fd168161cf3c
The One Billion Row Challenge in Rust: Part 1
I think this is the right point, but it's tough.

People don't like to say "no" or "can't do it in that timeline" and other permutations of these statements. If you can't even challenge or disagree with anything, then you're doing something wrong, or you're in the wrong environment, or both.

20 years into my career and still practicing this.

One hack: I can't respond when I'm asleep! So, I head to bed pretty early (9:30-10 EST).
Complex numbers are just 2d numbers and they are mapped on a 2d plane, yeah. They are just a 2d vector. Callling them imaginary numbers is silly in the first place, 2+i is just the vector (2,1), all we mean here are the two numbers are orthogonal, i.e they are destinguished by some independent factor. The imaginary component is no more imaginary than the real component.

I mean what problems does physics solve not with just complex number but with even more complex vectors? Problems of...space-time.

Aliens in a SF book. What do you imagine? I see some kind of physical entity having geometric compomnents in some kind of space.

Context free grammers are represented by...trees where one side of a spatial relationship maps to one idea and the other to another. What is context? Things surrounding something, where something is.

Come up with any idea, it can be represented in space and time.
I did a similar thing to you. However, I do feel like cutting your teeth as a "founding engineer" at an early startup has 2 major benefits:

1. You get to see what it's like under the covers, as you said. It's not nearly as glamorous as it looks from the outside. And yes, as an early engineer, you share in a lot of the downside without nearly an equal share of the upside.

2. You get to leave. Unfortunately, the startup I joined entered a tailspin. But, my name wasn't attached to the company, and I didn't have a fiduciary obligation to our investors. I had a lot of "stake" myself after putting in years of 12-hour days, nights and weekends, but at a certain point I saw that my career was actively being harmed by staying. That "founding engineer" role on my resume got me the job I'm at now, at a level that skews higher than my YOE.

Do those two points mean you should get a fraction of the equity (or rather, a fraction of the options) as the founder? Honestly... maybe. I've now seen a few founders fail. It can really be a career-killer.
>> What if they give 1-2% and good market rate salary (~200k/y) to a founding engineer? Is that still a bad deal?

OR....you could just become a founding engineer by actually founding and keep 90% of the equity. You can get that salary with an equity raise, its worth not being the low-person on the totem pole.
That price could easily be dollars. Most places in the US have far cheaper electric rates than California. Three years ago I had a pretty similar rate in Texas. I'm in a similar boat, my 11¢/kWh plan just finished and new rates were ~14¢+.