skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Use LabView as a calculation engine to do experiments. The advantage is you get system-like diagrams.
There's a relatively straightforward trick that you can do here. If you've got a transform that turns a circle into an ellipse with the relative radii and orientation that you want, then:

1. Apply the inverse of that transform to your path.

2. Stroke the path.

3. Apply the transform to the result.

This way, the path stays in place but the stroke is transformed to give it a calligraphic look.

With a JavaScript Canvas, you can just set the transform after defining the path, but before stroking. JSFiddle example: [0].

(This was something that I tested in my tiny, single-header <canvas>-like 2D rasterizer library for C++ and my Javascript port of its test suite [1].)

For Inkscape, I think you can convert an object to a path, apply the inverse transform, do a minimal simplification to bake the transform into the path, stroke it, and then apply the forward transform. It's a bit clumsy, but I bet someone could easily create an extension script to do it.

[0] https://jsfiddle.net/y7m16wa0/

[1] https://github.com/a-e-k/canvas_ity/blob/main/test/test.cpp#..., https://github.com/a-e-k/canvas_ity/blob/main/test/test.html...
Tired of the "shock" headlines like this: a dollar an hour isn't good or bad unless you know the context and local cost of living. Seems like that's a decent wage for those parts of the world?

The actually objectionable bit is that these jobs traumatize people over time, and desensitize them to the disturbing content they watch as a part of the job. Would I choose this over spending my day out in the heat, trying to sell food, snacks, or other wares, subject to the risk of pedestrian accidents or violent theft? Maybe?

Ideally there could just be better jobs available all around, but some people who live there might consider this at least somewhat better than some of the alternative jobs they'd otherwise be working.

Our current way of building models requires a large training data set that is already tagged/classified by humans. Unless the technology somehow improves so this is no longer necessary, these jobs are necessary. One bright spot is that once these models are trained, then humans can be out of the loop, which is certainly better than not having the models at all, and having to employ people, in perpetuity, to watch all of this content and directly make moderation decisions.

But perhaps the question we should be asking is: should we just completely do without, and never subject people to these kinds of jobs, no matter what the purpose? Maybe video, photo, etc. sharing on this scale just shouldn't exist if we have to put humans through miserable work in order to do moderation. But I don't really see this changing. So if we continue to employ people to train our AI models, can we get to a point where our future models can be used to bootstrap/train more sophisticated models, without the need for further human classification of the training data?
Sounds like the type of labor-intensive scheme that suits a developing economy. If labor is abundant and capital is scarce, what you don't want are capital-intensive jobs (e.g. semiconductor fab operator) even if the wage is 100x higher. Once everyone is employed, the bidding will begin and wages will rise. [1]

Training AI is also way better than undermining Western democracy... [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-sector_model

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/13/facebook-...
They probably don't see money in it as most people don't know who he is.
The things we think we'll learn about cognition will only benefit a few people. Rhe rest of us still have to live our lives, if we can, pretty much the same as we always have.
Deepmind did not invent transformers...

https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805
Read for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7afrique
Your posted suggestion, of defining the best outcomes as immediate job success, would solidify a market practice of lowering fences between town and gown (viable during only the past 3 or 4 generations) as the only viable way forward for educational bodies that intend to survive.

Because I agree with your general statement that market situations lose relevance once legislated, I think the principle more naturally extends to mean:

It is better to consider how to keep universities, whether research institutes or liberal arts universities, as a distinctive part of "the whole spectrum of techniques by which one generation transmits its insights and abilities to the next," Prof. Edsger Dijkstra's words. Not enshrine a set of commercial principles by which every piece of a spectrum must play.

Immediate job success is a fickle master; it would be a shame to LinkedInify any society. In 1996, Dijkstra said, [0]

> The University with its intellectual life on campus is undoubtedly a creation of the restless mind, but it is more than its creation: it is also its refuge. The University is unique in that on campus, being brilliant is socially acceptable. Furthermore the fabric of the academic world is so sturdy that it can absorb the most revolutionary ideas.

> But it is not only a refuge for the restless minds, it is also a reservation for them. It does not only protect the restless minds, it also protects the rest of the world, where they would create havoc if they were let loose. To put in another way, the fence around campus is essential because it separates two worlds that otherwise would harm each other. The fence ensures that we have relatively little direct influence on the world "out there", but we would be foolish to complain, for our freedom to be as radical as we like is based on the fact that, for at least the first 25 years, industry and the world-at-large ignore our work anyhow. Currently, there seems to be a world-wide tendency to try to lower the fence; the effort strikes me as ill-directed.

He had also been writing similar things in 1986 [1] and 1994 [2].

[0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~vl/notes/dijkstra.html

[1]
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD09xx/EWD988...

[2]
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD117...
I've heard of `isolatedDeclarations` in TS 5.5, but this post left me with more questions than answers because it conflates so many distinct things (TS 5.5, Deno, JSR).

I'll try my best to break it down succinctly:

1) Historically, .d.ts generation is slow because it requires the full TypeScript type checker in order to correctly handle all cases (e.g. exported functions with inferred return types)

2) However, if types were to be fully explicit, then .d.ts generation could be performed without a full type checker (i.e. by a faster compiler via mere syntax transformation)

3) The isolatedDeclarations flag causes the TS compiler to trigger errors when any exports would require inference in order to generate .d.ts

4) Thus, the isolatedDeclarations flag can be used to guarantee compatibility with faster, simpler .d.ts generation using syntax-based transformation

5) A consequence of simpler .d.ts generation is that it can be trivially done in parallel, which can be helpful for large monorepos
Much of what she outlines is a systemic problem with modern civilization.

The biggest issue, and I see this as a consultant to top engineering and C level leadership is that no one wants to make decisions. You can't be accountable for the decision you didn't make, or so their theory goes.

We have big projects, led by committee that become their own organism and then everyone just goes with the flow.
Regular strawman is stealthily changing the thesis, this is doing it in the open and pretending you're doing it in good faith because you're so much smarter than the other guy.
read the repo notes there is a screenshot in the vein of xenosystems tex:
A very similar thesis was put forward by Galbraith in "The New Industrial State".
If you are interested in optimizing the project further, I can suggest you rebuilding SQLite with Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO). I collected as many as possible materials (including many related benchmarks) in my repo: https://github.com/zamazan4ik/awesome-pgo . Regarding SQLite and PGO, I have the following link: https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/19870fae957d8c1a
Yeah it’s interesting.

There’s nothing to the video that takes advantage of the video format except the characters. It’s a series of slides with a voice track over it.

Generally, YouTube math videos (as a genre) have some form of animation or figures but I don’t think this is any more effective than the transcript and equations as a paper unless one finds the characters helpful.

With that said the actual content was well written.
>the big guys (a 4 company cartel) get to use literal slave labor to do the butchering, processing, and packing.

If this is truly the case then there is a large reckoning coming for everyone who currently benefits from this. That includes consumers. It just seems impossible for the current arrangement to last.
You should learn Supercollider, starting with Eli Fieldsteel's tutorials.
I lost it after a few years of 40 hour weeks. It came back almost instantly when I switched to something else.
> Every time this topic comes up, people delightedly mention the German Tank Problem, but I have never, not once, seen anyone post an actual example of when a modern business got rekt by a competitor using knowledge gained from monotonic IDs.

At $previous_job (payments provider), the sales engineers would often spot merchants using sequential order IDs and mention it to the account managers.

Rekt? I guess not, but knowing what percentage of their business we processed was extremely valuable information when it came to renegotiate the contract.
Great write up too.
I suppose they are referring to the use of hashes to verify that the content of a file hasn't changed.
I've done this a few times here in Washington state. It's a healthy fun way to get outside and explore geology.

Placer mining is one of humanity's oldest technologies. It doesn't have to be environmentally destructive like 19th century California.

I had success by joining a local prospecting society, which provided guidance and access to dozens of actual claims.
Ask HN: Have you run Microsoft Word in headless mode?
Have you or your organization run Microsoft Word in headless mode? How do you do it, and why?

For example, "a node.js server on a Windows machine that takes a file, saves it onto disk and runs a Visual Basic application on it which itself starts Microsoft Word headless to [perform some operation]" [1]

I need to manipulate Word documents that include accurate page numbers for elements like Table of Contents and List of Figures. These dynamic elements are populated on first open by Word (with user approval)

I'd like to automate all of this, and potentially manipulate the resulting .docx afterward.

From my initial research, doing this well requires processing by Word's layout engine.

I need this to be available as a web service to another application written in Python.

Other solutions I've considered include using LibreOffice in a headless mode, or a commonly mentioned but high priced solution [2] Aspose.words.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17425712

[2] https://products.aspose.app/words
Show HN: A free minimalist daily habit tracker
Hello.

I was looking for a simple and clean habit tracker. I went through a few apps but felt they were missing something. I also had some time on my hands, so decided to make my own and share it in case anyone else likes it.

Some of the supported features:

Streaks based, track and beat your longest streaks

Fully useable offline

Freezes (similar to Duolingo's streak freezes)

Visual map for tracking consistency

Pause the app when you need a break or will be away

For anyone curious about the tech stack:
- React for frontend
- Dexie cloud for storage and syncing
- Vercel for hosting

Link: [https://rdht.vercel.app/]
But you can do that, obviously not with this syntax. It’s non standard but I have built programs that install all dependencies as a first step. It’s pretty trivial.
There are tons. These are just examples.
Isn’t your search engine functional?
Corruption, people are less educated, possibly more prone to violence etc. Still, I believe it will lead to a more developed economy than they have right now.
This is part of a proud American tradition. “Pills from the gas station that might kill you” is a staple in all 50 states. For example tianeptine, spice/k2, mystery erectile pills, bath salts, now 4-aco-dmt etc.
man posthog is one of the shittiest companies there is out there.
If that's true, why is google willing to pay so much to be the default?
The PG quote is a hot take.

Yes, writing can be a productive focusing mechanism, it can also provide you with good reflections. But so can meditation, so can a good walk. It's a tool, not a requirement. It also has it's own downsides in that it forces you to think a certain constrained way, and while that is also one of its strength, it does limit your ability to think creatively.

Similar to how using ChatGPt to draft writing or code, there is a strong biasing effect pushing you towards something non novel.
Google Maps does stroke expansion in WebGL 1 vertex/pixel shaders. The vertex shader converts a linear path-segment "instance" into a quad with correctly beveled/extended endpoints, the pixel shader does some normalization and distance-field-esque math (there's no actual distance field texture) to produce analytically antialiased line segments with circular caps.
> It is only recently that scientists have unlocked the secret behind the lizards’ perplexing mobility and begun engineering synthetic materials mimicking their abilities.

I wish there was a law saying pages that use relative dates must be timestamped. Anyway, Wayback Machine says it's been around since at least 2014.
I just read this covering the history of Kenya’s colonialism and independence. (Mercy, from the article, works for a Meta office in Nairobi, Kenya)

https://www.britannica.com/place/Kenya/Kenya-colony

What about the last 60 years free of colonial rule connects to the current state today? Do you think these corporate interests stem from Kenya’s Building Bridges Initiative?

I ask because I recently listened to a podcast about China’s Belt and Road Initiative winding down in Africa. I was surprised to hear this because they had committed to a large infusion of capital with some future trade partnerships (tens of billions at least). It was set to be a massive boon for much of Africa after the US reduced its economic aid in the region. Their reasoning was (economic woes in China aside), they found too much was unstable, specifically legislatively and socially. Permits and licenses drug out where most of the time it was difficult to know which official was in charge of which responsibilities. Also, they would build a facility that would be repeatedly attacked and destroyed by warlords in the area. I believe they said it was common to lose workers to independent gangs.

Just wondering if you could expand on what you said so I can connect the same dots. I’m not understanding your critique.
I find it a bit odd how this article conflates content moderation for social network with AI training. Of course there is a relationship there but these are not the same thing. The article gives lots of examples of trauma caused by content moderation and then blames it on the needs of AI. If anything, if we could satisfactorily train an AI for content moderation then humans wouldn't need to be in the loop (as much) so it's a weird thing to just put these ideas together like that, and is clearly just trying to feed the current zeitgeist of "AI bad".
> Considering a gecko foot has an area around only 100 mm2

Is this measurement for some kind of large-sized gecko? Geckos in Hawai'i have significantly smaller feet, maybe 20-40% this proposed area or less.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_dust_day_gecko
In similar systems I built, 123456 is never a system selected OTP. It gets guessed too often, if it was generated, we would never know if the user got the code or just guessed.
This is not true. If the people weren’t providing some positive ROI then the execs would be drooling over the money saved from cutting them.
Speciation of archaic humans is an attempt at applying discrete categorization to continuous phenomena. It's like looking at a rainbow and trying to figure out where red ends and orange begins. Also interesting is Homo Longi, which can be argued to be Denisovan, or maybe not, depending on where you want to draw the lines on the raindow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_longi
I have been told nothing about the 'Chickenpox bomber'. This is the first time I encountered the term, and I think I'll quit while I'm ahead.
Hey - one of the industry standard time stretching library is "elastique" by Zynaptiq (licensed, not open source). Used by Ableton, FL Studio etc.

If you want to peak into some source code - you can look into Rubberband library:

https://breakfastquay.com/rubberband/

Rubberband is one of the time stretching/pitch shifting algorithms used in Reaper. You can download reaper trial and listen to the results with different parameters to see how you can tweak the code and if that gets any results you're happy with:

https://www.reaper.fm/
There is a housing surplus but not for people who can't afford home
VCs say they are founder friendly; Detroit's Ludlow Ventures takes it further
My citation is that I'm stupid and got them confused with BLM.

That said (and I'll take my lumps for it,) Antifa basically came up as an anti-Trumpist reactionary movement, so still leftist. Probably all wanted Bernie.
Then name some. I only see blogs and the one mainstream publication you mentioned.
The Nintendo Switch Is Bringing Out the Big Guns Against Piracy
Upflation' Is the Latest Retail Trend Driving Up Prices for US Consumers
> We usually think of neurons as the only cells in our body that produce intelligent behavior by communicating in large networks. Neurons are constantly communicating with each other in the form of electrical patterns on their membrane and neurotransmitters, which are chemicals that transfer messages between cells. But it turns out that cells throughout the body have the exact same building blocks for such communication. They do the same communication, but slower. Levin and company call this the bioelectric network, as distinguished from a neural network.

https://www.bitsofwonder.co/p/a-revolution-in-biology
Is it odd?

AI being trained for content moderation for social media...

Social media seems to be downstream from training AI to recognize and categorize content.
One reason is that Apple specifically blocks their users from selecting a custom Spotlight search provider on iOS. Google is probably willing to pay whatever it takes to lock themselves in as the abusive and immutable default provider.
If you're interested in this, let me also plug the High Performance Graphics 2024 conference where this paper was accepted and will be presented at the end of the month. It'll be co-located with SIGGRAPH 2024 in Denver, CO. Come for HPG, stay for SIGGRAPH.

Here's the full program: https://www.highperformancegraphics.org/2024/program/

(Disclosure: I'm on the HPG conference committee.)
I worked on tooling and organization of those queues for several companies
so I am very familiar with the topic. This article is a bit misleading and contains mostly half-truths

- Queues with gore and violations pay more than regular queue. You can be paid $X/hour for marking traffic lanes or roughly $1.5-1.8X for looking at somebody getting killed. This is personal choice and some people handle it better than others. If you have high empathy, you should absolutely not do it. On the other hand 5% of population are psychopaths with inhibited empathy and they do not care. This is similar to real life jobs - what you see in queues is not that different from what police see day to day in downtown SF or South Chicago.

- Same goes for sexually-explicit/porn queues. If you are 18 year old male you should absolutely not do them - it will fuck up your sexuality (similar to watching porn 8 hours/day). You will also burn out in a couple weeks anyway. The most success we saw was with 50+ year old women working from home - some worked on those queues for years.

- From the article you will notice that Africans worked on African countries queues/moderation - so it's not even imperialism or whatever where they worked on rating rich-countries content. They rated their fellow Africans.

- Africa is not that big in content moderation. Reliable coachable people are hard to find and infrastructure is not great. Salaries are also pretty high - I am not sure where they find workers for $1/hour but we paid significantly more. India does way more moderation, people are more reliable and overall it's much easier to work with Indian BPO.
I don't think this is an accurate representation of LLM understanding. The significance of answering questions given in Base64 is that it can give an answer without writing out the human readable form first. That means it is understanding language in a non-language tokenised form.

This does not extend to being able to manipulate text and words well, such as string reversal or word scrambling, but it handles input in a wide range of permutations that are not conducive to tokenisation

Unnatural Error Correction: GPT-4 Can Almost Perfectly Handle Unnatural Scrambled Text https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.18805
How long do you think it would take to index it?
Ha, came here to post about Ladayne. I’ve been watching all his 2-minute shorts and I still can’t wrap my brain around the mental/mathematical skill, or the astounding precision of his fingers.

Another takeaway is the jaw-dropping amount of practice he’s put into it, and his total dedication to perfection (zero mistakes allowed, ever). He speaks at length about this in interviews, and in fact part of his act is to explain that it is not magic at all, but his full commitment to mastering the craft. Something we can all reflect on.
A workshop on evolutionary systems design
There's a Dutch card game called Rikken that intentionally incorporates bad shuffling. It's a trick-taking game, so the cards get clumped by suit during the hand, and you shuffle very lightly between hands. After shuffling, the cards are dealt several at a time to each player, so players tend to get much more suited hands than with a well-shuffled deck.
It's real.

Maybe it's surreal in part because it's so far removed from the end users receiving the benefits.
"If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it."

Apparently, even writing it down didn't help the author with this flawed deduction.
For every sufficiently successful single-language ecosystem, there will be people trying to use a different language, turning it into a multi-language ecosystem.

Also, for every sufficiently successful multi-language ecosystem, there will be people trying to get it to support one more language.
I don't like violent rhetoric whether they mean it or not, and vote to see less of it.
This is true (i.e., the struggle is productive) only if the struggle allows for students to develop the intuition of the subject required for synthesis.

Even then, before you get to that point, you have to prime students for it. Throwing them into the deep end without teaching them to float first will only set them up to drown. This does typically mean lots of worked motivating (counter-)examples at the outset.

It's a big reason why we spent so long on continuity and differentiability in my undergraduate real analysis class and why most of the class discussion there centered on when a function could be continuous everywhere but nowhere differentiable. Left to our own devices and without that guidance, our intuition would certainly be too flawed for such a fundamental part of the material.