skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft is dead indeed. Windows went straight downwards since Windows 7. All their products are not good. Can't remember a single MS software or service I'd use. They bought some companies like GitHub which are doing good, but that's not MS and they couldn't even buy OpenAI.
This is just a puff piece for yet another lifestyle/marketing-based luxury food service that you see advertised all over the place. They're trying to sell their meat as a luxury item at luxury prices, shipping it in small parcels across the country vs the economies of scale of the larger industry. Works for wealthy people, impractical to participate in for everyone else.
I don’t think so — the Phi training plan was to pull answers from textbooks and have GPT-4 write questions for the answers, thus ensuring high quality completions. They then trained on this data, fairly indiscriminately. This is about quality of training data, but it’s much more general in that it’s an approach that can target broad scale web data using a small / cheap model to ‘sort’ and prioritize.
They can’t exactly trumpet their victories though. You only hear about some of their failures
Nadella is extremely effective and aggressive in his moves. He always impresses me in that regard.

While Ballmer built a solid cash foundation - he would never have done a move like Linkedin or Github acquisition. And I would not be surprised if Github acquisition was a part of the plan about AI.
Given the track record they got, I'm confident they will.

But what I really hope is that they'll tackle the user app shipping problem eventually.
> A security audit should have caught this issue

Is there a culture of "security" at MS?

No, and there never has been.

"threat intel" is the group of people ideintyfing foxes, BY BEHAVIOR. They don't get their data out of thin air, it comes from threat detection and incedntd responses.

Your making the argument that MS is structured like a TV police department, sure, but the intel team is like the fbi/cia... they have a much larger perview and scope and have to because of their work.

Missing these sorts of thing in your own back yard isn't a statement of confidence.
> What I found especially frustrating was when a worked example solved a special case with a unique approach, and the general case required a much more involved method that wasn't explained particularly well.

That was the bane of my University degree. "And, since our function f happens to be of this form, all the difficult stuff cancels out and we're left with this trivial stuff" and then none of the problems have these "happy accident" cancellations and you're none the wiser on how to proceed.

The statistics book we used was an especially egregious offender in this regard.
processing.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2024/january/concentrat...
What is your degree in?
No, instead they have subinterpteters with all of the massive overhead that brings re: data sharing. And even fewer CPAN modules are remotely thread safe than PyPi modules, probably in absolute as well as relative terms. That’s a low bar.

As a result, threaded Perl code or frameworks are extremely uncommon, even relative to Python.
Yes because getting your child taken away is a more immediate visceral sort of injustice than (usually unknowingly) damaging their mental health. Most parents would have their kid fucked up than not at all even if the chances of losing your kid are lower. Idk ymmv but that’s what I’ve observed
> This is like asking to simplify basic math for people who can’t be bothered to learn long division, thinking this will somehow allow them to do calculus.

Oh dang, you kinda sorta had me until here. This sways me towards @Perseid’s point. :P Math education is full of unnecessary mental friction, and it pushes lots of people away. We know that finding better, simpler ways to explain it does, statistically, allow more people to do calculus. Long division is a good example, because it’s one of the more common places kids separate & diverge between the ones who get it and the ones who don’t, and there are simpler alternatives to explaining long division than the curriculum you and I grew up with, alternatives that keep more people on the path of math literacy.

We can see similar outcomes all over, in civil and industrial design, and in software and games, from cars to road signs and building signs to user interface design - that making things easier to understand even by small amounts affects outcomes for large numbers of people, sometimes meaningfully affecting safety.

The numbering of centuries is admittedly a simple thing, but maybe it actually is unintentionally elitist, even if you don’t think condescendingly, to suggest people shouldn’t complain about a relatively small mental friction when having to convert between century and year? Yes most educated people can handle it without problems, but that doesn’t tell us enough about how many more people would enjoy it more or become educated if we smoothed out how we talk about it and make it slightly easier to talk about history. This particular example might not change many lives, but it adds up if we collectively improve the design of writing and education traditions, right? Especially if we start to consider the ~20% of neurodivergent people, and ~50% of less than average people.

> They do it because they never bothered

Why should people have to bother, if it’s not necessary? Your argument that some people are lazy might be deflecting. Is there a stronger argument to support the need to continue using this convention? Being able to read old history might be the strongest reason, but why should we waste energy and be okay excluding people, even if they are just lazy, by perpetuating a convention that has a better alternative?
Why bring personality into this? Paul Graham made certain observations, conclusions and predictions about a very successful company - to the point or not. That is not evidence of a causative agent in terms of a massive ego.
Check out Jason Ladanye. He’s a magician who uses shuffle math to place cards exactly where he wants them to be in the deck. Both impressive and scary.
I'm not like the other girls

(commenting on the internet can be fun you know ;-) )
Every company is on the way down if not for a few luck hits.
It was Fedora rawhide, now Alpine edge, just working on one or two pieces of software I use that still need Glibc (Ardour DAW and the Swift compiler).
Dirty Writes
> Salesforce, and LinkedIn, which they bought after they were monopolies already (and owners only sold exactly because of the fear of saying no, which the article paints very well)

Microsoft didn't buy Salesforce.
You are really onto something here. LLMs aren't really perfect. Good catch.
You forgot the best part about Ballmer - Ballmer Peak[0] and ofc "developers developers developers"

[0] https://xkcd.com/323/
Great, improvements in efficiency will lead to greater resource consumption due to Jevons Paradox[1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Well at that time Microsoft really felt like IBM. Though ironically right now Google feels like IBM.
Why hello there!
> Software is an easier, less professional job

Are you in software development?
Curious to learn more about how you did this.

But I agree with your sentiment- we often surrender to the idea that ruthless evil has taken control without even trying to engage civically.
I'm assuming by system you mean OS, which is a terrible, terrible idea. Dev stack and system libs should not coexist, especially because system libs should be vetted by the OS vendor, but you can't ask them to do that for dev libs.

> I have to create a new conda environment for almost every ML paper that comes out

That's how it's supposed to work: one env per project.

As for the rest, it's more telling about the C/C++ community building the things bellow the python wrappers.
Regexes without capture groups are about 90% less useful. If you do not include backrefrences, you still have a regular language, and a matcher can have a guaranteed reasonable run time.

Thankfully, gawk has capture groups, which makes it a very useful tool, unlike the awk shipped with macOS by default.
oh, I misread

> I also happen to know the founders of Instant, which bills itself as a graph-based Firebase

as "to be one of the founders"

Regardless.
Don’t forget their Fire Phone.
Modern science can adjust narratives based on human brain responses, e.g. papers from public research started a decade ago could inform LLM feedback, https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2012/04/departm...

> FY2012 budget states a plan to “initiate investigations into the relationship between… neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, emotion-cognition interactions, and narrative structures.”
Perfection is not the problem. An obvious test case of intelligence is to formally model something like algebraic topology in a formal logical calculus like intensional type theory with identity types. Even though all the commercial labs have ingested all of nLab, there isn't a single commercial model that can use logic to perform arithmetic operations.
MSFT is up something like 10x in the last 10 years. Incredible.
Mojo N-Body Example
While it's true that memorization can help improve your skill, it's not a given.

There are lots of folk who can remember all sorts of details but never seem to be able to figure out how to put the pieces together.
Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!
Office for iOS wasn't _built_ under Ballmer. Outlook for iOS was _bought_ under Nadella, in the form of the startup Acompli.

The rest of the office-for-iOS suite took heavy inspiration from that, and didn't take a decent shape until 2016-2017.
Show HN: I made a looper for YouTube clips
Initially, I was interested in using YouTube videos to learn languages using the simple shadowing technique. It sounds fancy, but it's simply listening and repeating. However, I found it pretty inconvenient to use the vanilla YouTube player to replay video parts. Especially when I needed to do it several times. Later I figured out that it's pretty handy to also practice instruments, given how much material is in there. Not just for mimicking songs but also for better following tutorials.

So the idea is simple, you can save clips you want to practice to loop as many times as you want and come back the next day to practice the same clips

I hope it is useful for some other folks!
Part of the problem is the big guys and the little guys have to do all the same inspections and such which end up being way cheaper in bulk.

There are ways around it and if you’re rural enough and consistent you can get down to “close to non-sale prices”.

But you can never beat the sale prices as they’re often literally subsidized.
> where core infra is on shore but less critical teams and back office is distributed

Nowadays, even core infra and IP is being developed and PMed abroad depending on the segment of the tech industry you work in.

Much of the cybersecurity industry is notable in this regard, and a lot of the newish (2015 and later) startups in Enterprise SaaS have adopted this kind of a model organically by treating all employees globally equally after a fair CoL adjustment

Google Pay and Google Drive+Docs are notable product lines that was almost entirely developed by engineering abroad.
Either disable Javascript, use reader mode or a browser like Dillo or Links/Lynx.

As we are talking about avoiding procrastination, Offpunk it's a fine Gopher/Gemini/HTTPS/RSS client/reader with offline syncing support. You can just batch-download everything and then you can read everything without even being online and be fried with notifications.

https://sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk/

If you use GNU/Linux or BSD (IDK about mac, maybe 'open' can work) you can use sxiv/nsxiv with this by slightly editing the source code and replacing 'feh' with 'sxiv'.
>the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced

This is just saying throughput is increased, yes? The time to train, and thus iterate (i.e. dialing in hyperpaprams) will decrease.
> Because users have a flow that they like

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx82407j1v3o

Some of these solutions were never good, but build a momentum of “we’ve always done it this way”.
Relacy is notable for being the only one in c++ that knows what a fence is, at least last time I looked.

It told me a structure might not make forward progress on some thread interleaving. I.e. if only one thread ever runs, the others don't do anything. That's true but uninformative. I wasn't able to coax it into using a vaguely fair scheduler to get more useful information out than that.
Maybe locally produced items are priced as luxary items?

I mean I buy lamb from my farmer neighbors at nice prices, but the local butcher shop is really expansive selling the same meat.

Dunno if they give me a friend price though.

Locally produced gravel is at least cheaper than big brand gravel ...
Funniest thing about Swing is that if you theme it (because you need to), you can make it look just as out of place (but modern!) as any Electron GUI.
I don't know what that means. There is nothing "mental" happening in the circuits of the computer or the function graph which is implemented on top of it.
Yes, interesting article and battery design, but the university PR folks certainly overplayed the "problems" with lithium. Not unusual.
What are they now? Undead?
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40892991
You really are deluded if you think the Russian government is "democratic".

>But not the colonial british government before 1962? Can you show me on reuters article calling the colonial british government 'authoritarian'?

And even if the British government before that was authoritarian, does that remove the details around the current government being extremely repressive? How about addressing that before going directly to whatabout ism with what might have been the case over 50 years ago?

Finally and generally, just because a given website receives financial support from some U.S. organization doesn't automatically make it propaganda or free of ethical journalists. The details of what they report and how do matter, so does it's factual accuracy, regardless of funding.
Background here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40227280

We got the cameras rolled back even further; we now, by municipal policy, don't trust the Illinois LEADS stolen vehicle hotlist, so cameras can no longer be used to stop "stolen" cars (too many of the stops we were doing were mis-listed), only cars with stolen license plates (for which there is no innocent explanation). We're also the only muni in Illinois that won't automatically share camera data with out-of-state LEOs.
> bastions of unbiased investigative journalism is just such a precious thing

Making them targets for influence. A circle of propaganda life. The soil must be tilled.
Post acquisition. Part of the agreement was that Quebecor was going to put a lot of money into building new infrastructure.
Flet doesn't seem to have a Treeview. I find that actually few cross platform GUI toolkits do. Qt, Swing, Wx, but the trendy ones?
No impact on poop.
I found TFA highly informative, and thoroughly enjoy how the author's mind works, along with the playful presentation.

This reminded me of
"The Gervais Principle: The Sociopaths, The Clueless, and the Losers".

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Discussed here 15 (!) years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296

@yosefk or anyone else- do you have suggested related reading?
You can't take the extreme tail end of the distribution of interests, aptitudes and abilities, that is, people who pursue an academic career in mathematics, for the entire distribution of people who are taught or need to use mathematics at some point in their lives.

Twenty years ago, when I was in college, I remember a classmate had problems installing the particular software we needed to use. The teacher told her that the only solution would be to install Linux on her laptop. All the other students had managed to install that software on their Windows laptops.
The teacher was either one step ahead or 25 steps behind.
Nice, reminds me of https://github.com/veltman/clmystery which was very fun when I played it (~10 years ago)
Man tits from soy. Nothing else
I saw your other message in this thread. Life changing arrests? Are we discussing the same topic? My previous statement stands. There are definitely more parks geared towards kids in suburbia today vs. 30-40 years ago.
I didn't know about upserts incrementing sequence. That makes sense. I don't think I ever used upsert, but that's a good reason to use bigint id (or at least make update count a factor to consider), thanks for pointing out.
As I said, the matter of consciousness is a shared experience. By denying its concrete reality due to difficulty of communicating this experience you open the door to nonsense such as LLMs being "conscious" because then people like you line up to claim "define consciousness".

> If the definition of consciousness is simply ...

No one is defining consciousness. You are simply referred to what is expected to be a common shared experience. Then the question is posed to you: please explain to yourself how (merely) a structure is affording the phenomena of what you experience. Physics only please.

This is sufficient to dethrone any purely structural notions. Which is huge, actually. And informative.

Insisting on "what is the definition" allow for various nonsense, hand waving, and large claims regarding the nature of some mechanism.

> Ho hum, I’m bored. These discussions are just pointless.

QED. That's because you insist on missing the point. Naturally it makes for boring discussion. Choose to not engage in such discussions if not contributing anything beyond the red herring of lack of definition for consciousness.
The headline and some of the supporting quotes talk about eating locally-produced beef in Montana and the environmental benefits.

But then, apparently, the entire point of the company is to ship meat around the country in a copycat fashion, primarily outside of Montana, contributing to CO2 and plastic emissions? The story doesn’t make any sense.
Bill Kristol, Bret Stephens, Robert Kagan, Joe Biden, Hilary Clinton, Madeline Albright, Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, all the neocons and neoliberals, generally would consider themselves in the 'center' between the left and right, and at the same time have never seen a war or foreign intervention they didn't like.

It is an enormous misconception that because they aren't considered 'extreme' right or left they are more rational. Both the extreme left and extreme right in the USA are more anti-war than the center and it's a huge problem in US politics.
Please do also remember that law dates to a time when everybody was on indemnity health plans covered mostly by the mills and manufacturing plants.
I stopped when they had issues getting it into Canada, then decided to drive across the border to get it instead. I stopped because of too much soy side effects.
Yes, that's why I stopped.
When I wanted to make a python application to separate a song into the source instruments I used this: https://www.coursera.org/learn/audio-signal-processing.
I studied signal processing as a Computer Engineer student but I didn't really get it at the time, with that course I understood what I could do in practice.
> from this obviously bad take

This is like saying your evaluation of my property, back when it was in bad shape was wrong... because after renovating the entire thing and fixing its issues, I got a different price.

From the linked article:

> Is there some way Microsoft could come back? In principle, yes

So, of course if you manage to change the input, you'll get a different output.

Today's Microsoft (WSL, Edge, Bing, Azure, VSCode, copilot, etc) is so different from 2007 you wouldn't even recognize it as the same company. Just like what Paul Graham has said they needed to change if they were to survive.
Then it should be mandated; but that's not really a public versus private issue. It would have to be mandated in the public context, as well.
> all of its institutions are openly occupied by the very ideologues they were formed against.

Examples?
This is really interesting. I wonder what other known cellular structures are left out of biology textbooks because their functions are unknown?
The author should read HN. Then he would learn that AI is going to eliminate massive numbers of jobs.
Looks to be an interesting article, but I dont understand which side that comes down on or how it fits into the big picture.

A big gap between farm price and wholesale would support the idea that farmers could be competitive by cutting them out. Indeed, it sounds like more are because farmers (or feedlots) are creating new processors.

Alternatively, if huge processors are hyper efficient, then what is going on in Switzerland? Why could I buy local meat and milk that was half off the market, and even cheaper than the US from farms?
Musk suggests late Twitter disclosure was a mistake, seeks to end lawsuit
Because they're poor. Same reason people in Idaho eat Oregon potatoes.
I don’t want to buy a device that can run any code, even if it’s apparently (hacking or force can be a factor) by my own choice. Especially for a device that I also use for contactless payment.

I want full confidence that I can buy a second hand device without any malicious software installed (even if I’m not smart enough to know how to properly and fully reset it). And I want people that buy my second hand phone to have full confidence in that device so I get a good resale value for it. Maintaining this resale value is also important to avoid e-waste, since if people don’t get a good price for their phone it just gets left in a drawer.

Apple provides this product. So I buy it. If you don’t want these guarantees for a device you’re buying, just don’t buy an iPhone.

I think we’re going about lack of choice completely wrong. Yeah, it may be hard to get certain apps that don’t rely on iOS or Google Play Services. So legislation should target that problem instead: government and key public service apps should be published in an open app format that can be run on any device that implements the open standard.
This is a followup article to that one. That said, I feel like we don't need both on the front page at once...