skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
CycleMarks – bookmarks scheduled to reappear in a feed
Ernest Shackleton's last ship found off Labrador's south coast
In a world where everybody builds from source or downloads from a trusted build service
A mental model of GPTs that's pretty successful at predicting their behaviour at the limit of large scale is an N-Gram model trained on a much larger internet than the real one. If you search the real world's internet for the text

```
You are a helpful and harmless AI assistant.

What do you think about the following text?

Joe drove Sue to university. Afterwards he drove home again
and drank a tea with her in the kitchen.
```

It would be exponentially unlikely to show up even once. But if you could keep re-rolling the internet from whatever probability distribution generated it, eventually (and I mean eventually- every additional token in the prompt will require ~10,000 times more re-rolls of the whole internet) the whole prompt will show up, and you can just grab the next word. An N-Gram model trained on that massive multi-internet will answer the question in a human fashion. (likely, copied from a human writing science fiction).
In my experience, the tooling that causes the most friction when it doesn't work is also the most likely to be abandoned, community supported, or only supported by an India team (requiring an overnight for each round-trip communication). Directors and VPs talk a big game about prioritizing developer productivity, but when it comes time to staff a support channel, prioritize a bug fix, or choose who to lay off, it always turns out that they were lying.

Thriving as a SWE in a medium-to-big company is not about algorithms and data structures, it is about coping with and recovering from environment breakages, and having the skills to diagnose and fix the environments that you were forced to adopt last quarter and by this quarter are deprecated.
I dont understand this article. Is this some tech writer feeling frisky because he wasnt a naysayer?
So what I gather from what you’re saying. A will to learn has nothing to do with intelligence. But then you go on to state that it revolves around general or domain specific intelligence. Then what is general intelligence. You’re moving the goal post back into undefined terms.

I am not stating that intelligence is the drive for more intelligence. I am saying that intelligence is that act of collecting more knowledge. Setting bars like:

> I would just describe this as intelligent but less than average human intelligence.

I know some people who appear dumber than dogs because they believe after schooling is complete they have everything they need to operate in life. Are these people below human intelligence?

Intelligence is restrictive to your exposure to knowledge. All knowledge can be aggregated to a domain. You could state “general intelligence” is a primary school education, but not all primary schools deliver the same education. So what is it?
Adjacent, and you've probably seen it before, but you and others might be interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_psychoactive_drugs_o...

This is fascinating stuff.
That seems like a dicey proposition. While "gender critical lesbians" do exist, I believe that they are a smallish fraction. The position of most gay organizations is that trans women are women.

You don't have to date them, but you do that by saying "no trans women" in your profile. Excluding them would drive off as many lesbians as it attracted.

Further... trans people are still a tiny minority, well under 1%. So you're going to get hammered by the Base Rate Fallacy, excluding more cis women than correctly rejecting trans women. (Especially since trans women are going to self-select to not even try.)

The underlying source of this is the Daily Mail, a right-wing British newspaper. It sounds like it's trying to score some kind of political points with right wingers -- who are not exactly known to be a great target market for lesbians. This sounds like a poorly considered idea that is dead before it even gets started.
With a 4K display and HDR, we can actually do really decent CRT emulation. It seems a bit ridiculous to need 4K/HDR to emulate 40 year old display tech, but you need the resolution to do the aperture grille in a way that's small enough to work, and you need HDR for that phosphor glow.

The Retrotink 4K has been pretty eye opening (and eye-watering, given the $750 price tag) in terms of where we are with CRT emulation these days.
It’s a bad solution for the wrong problem
We had a hell of a time getting a fix for a CERT advisory deployed because we were several versions behind and there were breaking changes in the way. The idea of rushing a change to make a system more robust is absurd because all of the rushing is your surface area for regressions.

Our solution was that at least once a month we had a story to upgrade deps. But as each new person got the assignment they would immediately ask the question, “but upgrade what?” I didn’t have enough information at that point to care, so I told them to just pick something. Our dep pool wasn’t that big and any forward progress was reducing the total backlog so I figured they would pick something they cared about, and with enough eyeballs we would collectively care about quite a bit of the project.

Now part of the reason this ranked a story is that we were concerned about supply chain attacks on this project, so it wasn’t just a matter of downloading a new binary and testing the code. You also had to verify the signature of the library and update a document and that was a process that only a couple of us had previously used.
Had a friend who did something similar in the early aughts before remote work was a thing in order to buy a townhome outright without any mortgage. He had a day job as a developer until 3:30pm. He would then come home, shower, eat dinner and then head off to a night data entry job for another company until around midnight or so. His main job was salaried, his data entry job was hourly with bonuses for how much he could get done.

It took him about 18 months to hit his goal, while still paying all his bills and rent. The one thing he said was it took a huge toll on his health/mental wellbeing and said he spent another year getting back into shape and getting healthy again.

The other interesting thing was he said he got a lot of perspective about why people chase money and how it can be really unhealthy.
Yeah, tv shows are tough. I should caveat that I'm talking mostly about movies. I find a _lot_ more 265 content for tv shows. I also am generally on usenet rather than torrenting.
A welcome decision by all
UUNA TEK 3.0 High-End All-in-One Pen Plotter Drawing Robots
It seems none of these projections are expecting people to start living to 120 or longer, which seems like something that could happen in the next 50 years.
Is there any chance it's also a carbon monoxide detector, and is actually detecting elevated levels?
Apple suspends work on next high-end headset, to focus on cheaper model
Ah yes The Tenant Farmers Association's (TFA) famous first equation..

Wait that does't sound right, Trifluoroacetic acid? Trusted Financial Advice? Tropical Forest Alliance? Two Factor Auth?
OSS alternative to FigJam / Miro with local storage
Heh.

The arms race continues.
The world is finite but the amount of resources are astronomical.

In the United States 75% of the population lives on 2.7% of the total land area. And in the last century we figured out how to harness unlimited energy, produce as much clean drinking water as we could ever need, practically unlimited food production, raised the quality of life for the average human a thousand times over, not even getting into the fact that we are on the cusp of cheap, reusable access to space. I would consider the human population unbounded.
We live in a finite world, but almost all of humanities improvements have come not from using more stuff, but from using the same stuff more efficiently. To be clear, I'm not saying that we aren't using more stuff, we very obviously are, but merely that the majority of improvement in quality of life has come from increases in efficiency. There is no indication that we are anywhere near the end of those efficiency gains.

To your point of housing: that is the most clear example of a thing that is artificially constrained by policy. The reason there are housing shortages has absolutely nothing to do with resource constraints and everything to do with terrible policy decisions.
Ongoing discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40718983 Apple Reportedly Suspends Work on Vision Pro 2 (macrumors.com)

2024-06-18T15:31:18 (~28+ comments)
Surgeon general wants tobacco-style warning applied to social media platforms
It’s automation at best. It’s not AI.
Indistinguishable from Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips (2013) [video]
This is wild, I was just complaining about smoke detectors to "the group chat", to the point that someone sent me the link to this topic asking if it was my throwaway that created it.

My thing is, why the hell don't they ever seem to have a visual indicator of low battery? You have to sit there and wait for it to chirp to triangulate which one is going off. It's absurd.
Chat GPT / Copilot productivity hacks you use in your day to day job?
Zephyr's Native Simulator with Offloaded Sockets
Not a CLI tool, but I recently started using https://klogg.filimonov.dev/ klogg (which seems to be a successor of glogg) more and more often.
If you google for "TFA meaning", which I'm sure you did, you should have seen the first result, which is a link to hackernews where someone is complaining about TFA not being defined.
I have a weird feeling your asking the wrong questions
"But his ideas that animals are conscious in the same way humans are have long been shunned."

...except by every single dog or cat owner ever.

Seriously, I've never understood how anyone could interact with or observe animals for any length of time and not perceive obvious signs of conciousness.
Perhaps you aren't from Canada. Our judicial system has turned into quite a joke over the last decade. It's not unusual for even hardcore criminals to not be prosecuted, or to be charged and then have the charges thrown out due to failure to provide a timely trial.

The correct thing to do here is what is done when any other serious potential crime comes to light among MPs. Release the names, have their respective parties kick them out so they sit independent and then proceed to trial. What has been done is completely untenable. Any party that signs the security clearance agreement to see the names effectively can't act on that information because it would disclose the confidential names. Whoever these people are can't be allowed to hold any serious position either until/unless their names are cleared in a trial.
I also worry about those things. China (and Russia, and Iran) are definitely trying to "erode and nullify the West"; I worry about they succeeding. I worry that, at least in part, they are succeeding.

But as the saying is, "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." The West could erode itself, too - by giving too much ability to spy on citizens to the powers that be. The more power, the more it can be misused, and the more incentive to get in power it gives to someone willing to misuse it. I also worry about that danger.
They not only build big, they also build fast.
Funny how this goes in the US. Sounds like a better system, curriculum-wise. In Europe, in many cases, one would need to fully start over.
You’ve been conditioned.
Emulator101
The factors that successfulness of parents predicts successfulness of children is "woo woo".

It is not some fundamental property of the universe. It is that way only because people believe it to be the way things are. We could stop believing. It is just religion. But it seems nobody wants to, "the left" included.

Why is that? Because they are a benefactor from it? Because, as you suggest, their racist ways have "made them dumb"? The youth population – those able to offer the most future value and thus responsible for maintaining the status quo – by and large "lean left". It is not a "those other guys are to blame" situation.
For a while, it didn’t make sense to replace a CPU. Screens and hard drives were advancing around the same speed as CPUs (if not faster, the biggest advances in laptops until pretty recently were OLED screens and NVME drives).

CPU competition picked up a while ago when AMD got their stuff together, but it takes time to turn the boat around, if it is actually turning.

On the other hand we didn’t see laptop CPU replacement as a really mainstream thing during the 90’s/early 2000’s era when things were really going crazy.

On the other other hand, everybody knew desktop PCs were the way to go for performance back then, so tinkering with laptop performance would have been a somewhat odd thing to do.

Hard to speculate about or even measure, because people who tinker with hardware are in a pretty small niche already.
FASTBuild: Distributed build system for Win, macOS and Linux
A laptop with an e-ink screen option would be totally neat for those of us that consume primarily text-based content
It's an exceptionally terrible one.
I think the self can come and go. I don't think a blacked out person is always unconscious, but they do seem to lack a subjective self while sometimes still being clinically awake and engaging in complex behavior. When the subjective self comes back online later, it makes understanding the self easier for them by creating contrast.
WTF? Who said animals aren't conscious?

Edit: reading below, the answer appears to be: God.
This is your human interpretation of what it is doing. Another interpretation could be that it has seen similarly structured sentences in other logic/lateral thinking problems so it raises the likelihood of words that have to do with logical inconsistencies and then out of that vocabulary the highest likelihood words are those that come from the nearby context.

I would posit that this interpretation is significantly more likely since instead of interpreting “afterwards” as “after Sue’s class finished” it interpreted the sentence as a lateral thinking problem probably because the training set had many lateral thinking problems in it that were used to test the model’s “reasoning” capabilities.

This is the danger of trying to anthropomorphize LLMs, they are not thinking and there are clear limitations to the abilities of this architecture: https://youtu.be/MiqLoAZFRSE?si=iRhg_UJIokKseU7K
You are correct. I should have said that Framework didn't build the board. They made its creation in that form factor possible.
EV Startup Fisker Files for Bankruptcy, Aims to Sell Assets
T-Mobile drags New Jersey borough to court over school cell tower permit denial
I feel most of the effort in the last 2 decades to "bring technology to classrooms" has either been ineffective or even negative.

No, Chromebooks and iPads are not needed for most things, and while we all like to pretend that we are using them for "studying", most of the time spent on them is wasted time that stifles creativity. Whenever you bring it up, someone points out the example of Timmy from Grade 4 who made a beautiful digital sketch on his iPad or something, conveniently ignoring the other 99 students who basically wasted hours on the computers with no intellectual stimulation.

We probably need fewer electronics in the classroom, and even for stuff like taking notes, kids should be practising the motor skills of writing with their hands.
I think it's a parody of the original:
https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blac...
> Agile supports some uncertainty, but often a mile is taken when an inch is given.

An inch or a mile, over time and with local information only it has you running around in an ant mill pattern[0]. I've seen my share of such projects going nowhere fast.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill
First I'm hearing of the programming language, but Futhark is the name given to several forms of the Old Norse runic alphabet, not made up wholesale or derived from other less-serious names.
Looks like you’re right! Earth is within .3% of being a sphere, where ball bearings are within .01%.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_circumference]
Windows 11 has pushed the use of MPO for windowed games and video display.
Chat control: EU attempt to bulk search private messages and destroy encryption
I give her my old iPhone that's already paid off when I upgrade (and that I can put parental controls on.)
You can't really blame Americans for not expecting parliament to do anything, especially since we don't have a parliament.
'Glowing' plants could help scientists predict flash drought
This is an unnecessarily derisive comment.

I know if I like the taste of a new dish without being a great chef. And so can people know if they (and their friends) will buy and use a $3k - or $1.5k - VR headset.
Dan Luu wrote a piece called "Against essential and accidental complexity".

https://danluu.com/essential-complexity/

Basically what he says is that an essential-looking complexity can be solved by the technical advances.

And I like his take more than the ones that cite this quarter century-old piece as if it were a bible, even if there is a truth in it.
Ubicloud (YC W24) is hiring a founding engineer for "managed Kubernetes service"
Thankfully some key people in the civil service understand the dangers extremely well & listen to the advice of the same voices we listen to :)

It's really disappointing that Sweden are behind this as they have some extremely talented people only they aren't being listened to.
If you have two workloads with very different operational profiles (e.g. low latency low volume vs high latency high volume) you could also process each workload in a different copy of the system, sorta-kinda the hot-path/cold-path pattern.

It might sound like duplicating your system would make it more complex, but having two systems each doing one very specific thing tends to be simpler than one single system doing very different things.
> How would thinking be determined by exterior stimulus, when we all vary to some extent to the same stimulus?

Because, and this may shock you: we are not all the same person

You make an excellent point that people respond differently to a given stimulus. This is explained by those people having had different genetics, environments, upbringings and even breakfasts leading up to the point of the test. It has been demonstrated that your metabolic state will vastly change your response to stimuli throughout a day.

I ate something different for breakfast today than yesterday because one sounded tastier than the other. I made this decision not because I have an eternal soul making randomized decisions like a roulette machine but because yesterday I craved salty food and today yogurt sounded better. I am different person today than I was yesterday. My gut, brain and everything else has been changed by all the stimulus I experienced yesterday and is now influencing my responses today.
yes i made one using a open python lib - https://github.com/fusedio/udfs/tree/main/community/fhk/pybd...
I have developed multiple multi-step LLM workflows, expressible as both conditional and parallel DAGs, using mostly plain Python, and I still don't understand why these langchain-type libraries feel the need to exist. Plain Python is quite sufficient for advanced LLM workflows if you know how to use it.

LLMs are innately unreliable, and they require a lot of hand-holding and prompt-tuning to get them to work well. Getting into the low-level details of the prompts is too essential. I don't want any libraries to come in the way because I have to be able to find and cleverly prevent the failure cases that happen just 1 in 500 times.

These libraries seem to mainly just advertise each other. If I am missing something, I don't know what it is.
"Low-tech Magazine questions the belief in technological progress"

I wonder what reversal of technological progress made it possible to run a web server on a tiny computer that only uses 2.5 watts of power, and how that "small, off-grid solar PV system" was built out of low-tech components.
Is someone under twilight anesthesia or in a deep k-hole approaching the state of being a p-zombie? I would think so. Maybe I misunderstand the definition of p-zombie?
Generative Chemistry and Accelerated DFT in Azure Quantum Elements
the longer i'm on a project, the more inclined i may be to get a debugger going, but often there's much more low hanging fruit to deal with that doesn't necessarily need a debugger to figure out.
Unless one is or becomes not frugal at all and that can create problems. I have a joint account because my wife doesn’t work, but it would be different if she had a job.
Sharing new research, models, and datasets from Meta FAIR
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/33349

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/33383
UK fintech job vacancies surge as investors flock back to London
Along the same lines:

"[..]Here’s the recipe for success, as far as I can tell: 1. You’re not going to make any money from your side projects. Internalize that, and believe it. 2. Do everything in your power to try to make money from your side projects.[...]"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39508076
How the Ketogenic Diet Improves Healthspan and Memory in Aging Mice
Seems Netflix is testing the waters of owning their own theaters.

The law preventing movie studios from owning theaters was lifted 3-4 yrs ago [1]. Sony recently bought out the failing theater chain, Alamo Drafthouse as part of this deregulation.

Seems we are slowly drifting into an era where:

“To see a Sony or Netflix produced film; you must go to a Sony or Netflix owned theater.”

It’s DRM for physical or in real life viewing.

Wonder if popcorn and other cheap snacks will continue to be expensive in these vertically integrated studio-theaters

[1] https://screenrant.com/movie-studios-owning-theaters-rule-co...
I've had this discussion with a professional mathematician. As unintuitive as it does sound, actually random independent events are more likely to follow after it has happened.

https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/411018/poisson-dis...
NixBus – Simplify Event-Driven Development
I saw Stephen Wolfram in the URL and hesitated to click at first for that exact reason. This turned out to be a fantastic write-up though, so I'm glad I gave it a chance.
UK banks' arms race against fintech startups
To do the last extra bit of math - that seems like the ball bearings would then be within .01%? Or am I missing a zero?
This looks fun. Windows-only makes it a no-go for me, but I’ll keep it on my radar.
I think once you have < and / the rest becomes much easier to predict. In a way it “spreads” the prediction over several tokens.

The < indicates that the preceding information is in fact over. The “/“ represents that we are closing something and not starting a subtopic. And the “output” defines what we are closing. The final “>” ensures that our “output” string is ended. In JSON all of that semantic meaning get put into the one token }.
As I recall, there wasn't a single thing in the leaks that wasn't already widely known in security circles. Hell, a few months before them I had IBM in my offices proudly telling me that they were the suppliers for the Utah datacenters.

I'm still pretty convinced the whole thing was a US operation, to shut up the people who would insist everyone who knew about these things was a crackpot. Could the current push for NIST 800-171/CMMC have really happened without Snowden, or something much worse?
It quite literally is the only thing we can know for sure exists

To be precise, it's the only thing I can know for sure exists. I can't know for sure if anyone else knows it.
A breakdown of Lambda School's rise and fall