skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Finetuning LLMs: how to get the most out of an online course
> Where's the paradox?

Exactly. I propose that the paradox is in first-past-the-post voting, a 5% swing leads to a 100% change in representation. How can that be?
Developers aren't compensated for any extraordinary achievement, though. Unless they own a notable share of the company. So, why should they give everything and get nothing back? How is that fair

Get nothing?! What a strange way to view a paycheque.

"Hi, you're only paying me, but that's not enough to expect a solid work ethic. Instead, I'll make sure my work is just passable. Want more, and now you have to pay me more!"

Where I come from, "extraordinary achievement" is just "doing your job".

(Are you advocating something else? I'm not suggesting free overtime, just doing the best job you can.)
Yea. I saw the feature but not sure how effective it's..l I better not waste my time on this idea.

Thanks
Show HN: Stromzeiten – Plan Your Electricity Consumption Efficiently
If we read for the joy of not understanding, why don't we write books that are optimized for sounding interesting and clever but have no real meaning?
I like it, of course, but don’t Gmail and similar services offer this ?
My father was a field biologist. His specialties: grizzly and polar bears. I've sat on both after tranquilized whereupon basic data is taken and radio attached (1970-1980 tech). Hemingway would have killed to his buddy. He then went on to build and run a naturalist lodge -- all this in the far far north west of Canada. Accessible by bush plane only. As a guest you could ask about flora, mammals, birds, fishing, moose, bears, Dall horn sheep, plants, birds of prey, ecology circles etc and you'd get a good answer. I got to see all this up close over my summers. When you spend that kind of time where mother nature is that unmessed around with ... well I understand now why some people are partial to land being left alone and probably why city people will never get it. There's a connection to it. I wrote all to to say: there were no tvs, no camera crews, no shows 6pm west coast 9pm est. You were there cause of passion. Because of a decision. And frankly, that's the better way.

Cowboys and corporations naturally collide: Ian Tyson

I think this background is why I've never been fully happy in Corporate America. The petty control -- where's your badge? -- even though I worked at the damn place for 10+ years is something I'll never understand. Petty beurceatric control to "help you" ... I miss the old days
https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

If you want to write good software, get it in front of someone who will actually use it as soon as possible.

Get it in front of many people who use it as soon as possible.

No matter how smart you are, you can't anticipate every user need. Let the users tell you what they need.

To do that, you need to ship.
From my view this is neither predictable nor stable as mentioned by OP. I can't imagine how this can be "boring". I think boring also means not making decisions with impact
The fascinating thing about the Munich gravel plain is that it's really just a (very slightly inclined) plain - it's almost 100% flat, and the gravel is covered by a (relatively thin) layer of soil, so you could easily mistake it for the typical "lowlands" alluvial plain, and you'll probably be surprised to learn that it's at a height of ~400-700 m. So you don't really have to worry about the gravel moving - but it's still there...
Not my intent to assign blame, it just sounds like a toxic workplace. I've been there!

The better places I've worked were more focused on compromise, experimentation and taking shared responsibility for risk.
> The fact that this power user class of young people hasn't found any other use cases for LLMs

Why are you assuming they haven't? High school writing assignments and homework are the majority of the problems teenagers face daily, but they're also having fun with it, and why wouldn't they try it on new problems as they come along?
Well it's not a book of rules.
VR requires too much setup. I have a PS4, bought a used PSVR set and realized I needed a camera that I did not have. Realized instead of buying a camera, I could upgrade to a ps5 and buy the new headset that did not require a camera, bc I prefer not to have my living room look like a lab. Then there is the social aspect of it.

You can't interact with people around you the same way you do if you play with, say, a console controller. VR is an all encompassing activity that you have to dedicated time for, instead of having it casually just exist around you. Then we have the cost. Only some people can have it, so it will be a lonely activity most of the time when it could be so much more.

I can afford it, but every time I am in front of a new set, I consider my life with it and say "maybe next time". Finally, I have not really explored them, but I have a feeling the experience is limited by the content that exists.

I dream of a VR experience where suddenly all content I currently enjoy on flat screens will automagically be VRified. But I am pretty sure that will not be the case. Only a very limited collection will be VR native.

But I want it all to be, or almost all, before I go all in.
She fought the bear whilst it was attacking her boyfriend. She didn't run when he told her too, but stood there smacking the bear on the head with a frying pan like something out of a Tom and Jerry cartoon.
I believe Mark is referring to this series of three classes:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/basic-modeling

https://www.coursera.org/learn/advanced-modeling

https://www.coursera.org/learn/solving-algorithms-discrete-o...

They are indeed excellent and highly enjoyable.
Please stop posting low effort LLM summaries of HN text posts. It doesn’t add anything to the discussion and is literally spam.
> And then someone else starts giving away shovels for free.

Ah, I see -- it's more like a "level 2 gold rush".

So a level 1 gold rush is: There's some gold in the ground, nobody knows where it is, so loads of people buy random bits of land for the chance to get rich. Most people lose, a handful of people win big. But the retailers buying shovels at wholesale and selling them at a premium make a safe, tidy profit.

But now that so many people know the maxim, "In a gold rush, sell shovels", there's now a level 2 gold rush: A rush to serve the miners rushing to find the gold. So loads of retailers buy loads and loads of shovels and set up shop in various places, hoping the miners will come. Probably some miners will come, and perhaps those retailers will make a profit; but not nearly as much as they expect, because there's guaranteed to be competition. But the company making the shovels and selling them at a premium makes a tidy profit.

So NVIDIA in this story is the manufacturer selling shovels to retailers; and all the companies building out massive GPU clouds are the retailers rushing to serve miners. NVIDIA is guaranteed to make a healthy profit off the GPU cloud rush as long as they play their cards right (and they've always done a pretty decent job of that in the past); but the vast majority of those rushing to build GPU clouds are going to lose their shirts.
AR might be a different story, if the tech gets small/good enough.
Ah I remember that I wasn't able to use the Bluetooth mouse and keyboard to control my Mac when screen mirroring. Hopefully they've fixed that now
You are trolling. Australian Government revenue was AU$755.8 billion in 2023, net assets of AU$790 billion and a budget surplus of AU$18 billion in 2023/24.
This reads like an AI generated text :/
I'm sorry to hear that.

I had a similarly shitty first job, although I was lucky to be in France, which was very strict worker protection laws, so "working day and night" was 'only' 10 hour days. However, after like 8 months there I was able to get another job - it doesn't take much experience for recruiters to start reaching out on LinkedIn aparantly.
Makes me think that probably a lot of unattended shell scripts out there should use -q in case someone has a .curlrc altering the behaviour of curl, and thus breaking the expectations of the script.

Maybe even should be a shellcheck rule.
People will still need purpose, which for better or worse is often provided by their job.
I highly disagree. 99.99% of peoples SaaS ideas aren’t innovative.

It’s more about the people, their resources, their experience.

I’d say this is a misinformed opinion, maybe from lack of experience.
> Close your eyes and picture the design of a news article on the web.

For people with aphantasia: yes, there are actually people that can make/see pictures when eyes closed. Or even use their brain as CAD software.

As for us, sorry, can't do it.
Since my test e-mails from a throwaway don't seem to go through: What checks does this perform? Since the policy pages don't name third parties like virustotal I assume it runs some OSS tools on your side?

Regarding the privacy policy and ToS: How do you see people using this in a corporate setting vs. something local? Most suspicious e-mail I encounter can't just be sent to random third parties.

sidenote: Some of the text is gray on gray and barely visible, e.g. on the main overview page when logged in and your policy pages.
Wouldn't AI posthuman singularity be a pathway out of subreplacement fertility?
Good news - once you work at a large enough company, this flips to "your job is to finagle your way through a million different safety and security checks at every step in order to write a few lines of code and get them shipped before a pivot and/or re-org makes them irrelevant to your new managers goals".
I have a (completely overkill) Ubiquiti Dream Wall that lets me VPN in using WireGuard. I do have a Raspberry Pi that runs (among other stuff) a script to ping a service on hosted server that keeps a dns entry updated in case my IP address changes, although that's rare.

I built the service to keep the dns entry updated myself, so I'm sure it's not as secure as it could be, but it only accepts pings via https and it only works if the body of the POST contains a guid that is mapped to the dns entry I want it to update.
I was under the impression that arithmetic codes are guaranteed to be at least one bit less efficient than Huffman codes per input block. What makes you say they have better compression ratio?

Are you thinking of pre-defined Huffman tables that aren't adapted to the input? Because the latter ought to be as good as it gets.

(I agree with the other benefits. Since arithmetic coding tables are built in a streaming fashion rather than constructing the codebook up front, they are more memory-efficient while working.)
It's Never Just a Something
You've hit the nail on the head about trust needing to be earned. I didn't assume that this was on you or it was your fault. It just sounded like a bad situation. Also based on what you're saying manager also doesn't trust you or at the very least you don't share the same values.

That said it was quite a cynical interpretation of my comment and aggressive reply, so I'll leave it with that.
I recently read 100 Polish books in 100 consecutive days to see how much of the language I'd learn (I also listened to the matching audiobook of each book). To make meaning of the text, I relied on quick look-ups, context clues, and the audiobook's narration (inflection, pacing, etc.). At first, I hardly understood anything and didn't know any Polish vocabulary, but somewhere around book #50, I started recognizing words and phrases and even experienced language automaticity.

Many language experts say you should be able to comprehend about 90%+ of the vocabulary in your target language when you read, but I think that's completely unrealistic. Read as if you're fluent now, even if you don't understand a word of it. You will eventually learn!

For those interested in my experiment, I wrote a book about it called "BLITZED: What I Learned Reading 100 Books in 100 Days in My Target Language": https://a.co/d/0bKrjq44
Ask HN: How popular is retro computing?
PC compatible from XT onwards, Mac classic & PPC, Trash 64, Amiga, NeXT, Sun, SGI, AIX, etc.

Are there any conventions, marketplaces, or swap-meets of note?
I own this photo book, and I can't recommend it enough. Full of glimpses into life in the KWC, interviews with loads of its tenants.

If you find the idea of the KWC even vaguely fascinating, you could do worse than ordering this book. (No affiliation except as a very happy customer!)
FTC investigates PC manufacturers who scare you away from your right to repair
one command can list all it's options with tool -h?
that scene from Office Space where he talks about "I do just enough not to get fired" may be relevant here.

There is something to be said for 'if you're going to be a rational economic actor and you have a salaried job, the optimal strategy is finish your job's tasks as fast as possible and work on a personal project which you control the upside to with all your extra energy'.

From a purely economic point of view, spending any effort beyond the minimum at a salaried job is a waste of effort - the expected value of that extra effort is nil, unless you own significant stock. This may be why many tech companies offer equity as part of their compensation.
Fydetab Duo: hackable Linux tablet powered by FydeOS
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betrachtungen_eines_Unpolitisc...

(1918)
I follow RL from the sides (I have dabbled with it myself), and have seen some of the cool videos the article also lists. I think one of the key points (and a bit of a personal nitpick) the article makes is this:

> Thus far, every attempt at training a Trackmania-playing program has trained the program on one map at a time. As a result, no matter how well the network did on one track, it would have to be retrained - probably significantly retrained

This is a crucial aspect when talking about RL. Most of the Trackmania AI attempts focuses on a track at a time, which is not really a problem since they want to, given an individual track, outperform the best human racers.

However, it is this nuance that a lot of more business oriented users don't get when being sold on some fancy new RL project. In the real world (think self-driving cars), we typically want agents to be way more able to generalize.

Most of the RL techniques we have do rather well in these kinds of constrained environments (in a sense they eventually start overfitting on the given environment), but making them behave well in more varied environments is way harder. A lot of beginner RL tutorials also fail to make this very explicit, and will e.g. show how to train an agent to find the exit in a maze without ever trying it on a newly generated maze :).
Apple's Longevity by Design
There exists an array-based, in-place algorithm for this, reducing the need to allocate trees and chase pointers.

I mention this only because, when I learned the tree-based approach at uni, I simply wasn't aware that there was another way to do it, and I'm wondering how many of you that's true for as well.

While the tree approach is intuitive and illuminating, it probably makes more sense to work with in-place arrays, since the situations when you care most about compression are probably the situations when you have a lot of data and want to run fast.

In-Place Calculation of Minimum-Redundancy Codes
Moffat, Katajainen. 1995.
http://hjemmesider.diku.dk/~jyrki/Paper/WADS95.pdf
check out https://roadmap.sh/

Good place to start
Are you saying they are underestimating the number? Or are you saying that the number isn’t high enough to warrant action? Your comment isn’t clear.
Totally! Same problem existed on Google as well whose systems have penchants to arbitarily lock users out of their accounts if they ever detected flimsy "suspicious activity" in these.
Zahns Construct
the counter quote to that is John Carmack, who was originally a fan of the "it'll ship when ready philosophy", saying he 'largely recanted from that now' when discussing Rage on the Joe Rogan podcast.

Or Duke Ellington: "I don't need time. What I need is a deadline."
Relax - they're all broken: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/arrows-impossibility-th...
6 hours of on-and-off casual chatting while working, making dinner, playing with kids, etc. Total time spent in front of keyboard was at most half of that. And would be half of that still, if I had more experience guiding GPT-4o/Aider diffs out of stupid ruts - experience which I gained through this short project.

Also: 6 hours is a lot if you sit down to it and know exactly what to write. Not when you half-remember how the game works, don't have uninterrupted focus time for it, and deal with executive function issues to boot.
To clarify, I was basing the "some 30%" on the wage change distribution histogram that comes somewhat further down in the article from the statement you quote.
I wonder how this will/would work with trans people. I hope it is done with suitable sensitivity and sensibility.
If that is your experience with companies and managers, you have to choose your jobs more wisely. In good companies managers were engineers at some point as well and know what is important technically and motivationally.
Sony Music Goes After Piracy Portal 'Hikari-No-Akari'
“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
- Douglas Adams
Quickly had a look in the KERNEL31 source. The LDOPEN.ASM file contains calls to a routine called MyOemToAnsi, which does the character set conversion. In turn, that function either calls the actual conversion routine in the keyboard driver, or does nothing if there's no keyboard driver yet (boot phase). Didn't find the keyboard driver part, probably not part of the actual kernel so it makes sense that it's not there. Anyone knows where to find one?
What do you mean by “not shipping on the choice you made to ship”? Do you have an example?

Really fascinating thoughts.
No, Office Space depicted a horrible office environment, most are not such. And minimalist work ethic is a poor one, regardless of hand wavy, trumped up, rationalizations.
The rejoicing was definitely not universal. It really felt like the NeXT folks wanted to throw out pretty much the entire Mac (except keeps its customer base and apps) and any compatibility had to be fought for through customer complaints.

Personally, MacOS X bundles (directories that were opaque in the Finder) seemed like a decent enough replacement for resource forks. The problem was that lots of NeXT-derived utilities munged old Mac files by being ignorant of resource forks and that was not ok.
> The definitely-most-popular Creator price point is 100,000 "characters" for $22, meaning, according to the FAQ, 100 minutes of audio listening costs $22. Not sure why they can't just say "100 listening minutes" or whatever.

Because this part of the product is per minute, but the other (and earlier) one is charged per character of text.

> Though I just noticed they also claim that the 100k characters is ~120 minutes of audio but 30k is 30 minutes of audio. I'm not sure where they're getting their numbers but it looks like they're either being dishonest about the former or underselling the latter.

It's just a very rough estimate, the comparison points are "about 10 minutes, about half an hour, about 2 hours". I think that would be clearer if it said ~2 hours.
When I read this I was like "Oh, that sounds like my family calendar / collaborative productivty app I am working on for months ". And in the last sentence he mentions

> I wanted an app that combines Todos, Habits, Planner, Goals, Pomodoros, Meal tracking, Fasting, Hydration, Packing, Trips, and many many more features.

Surprised Pikachu face.
You really want to look at Haiku. The only sane hierarchy for desktop OS’s. Native apps respect the hierarchy, however some ported apps create garbage .files where they shouldn’t (Haiku reserves /home/config/apps/name/… for garbage). /system is read only as a bonus
IKEA sandwich bags and sharpie, I found the colours helped me find some cables.

I grouped them by type usb a, USB b, usb micro b etc then extensions, adaptors, plugs, power, chargers (known and unknown) then audio.

I bought one of those plastic drawers off Amazon with lots of little drawers and put them all in there (labelled with chalk pen)

Then I took out a few of each, our "favourites" and put those in a small box on top.

The ones we don't often use like ribbon cables, VGA etc go in another box nearby.
If works do not test you or bring new ideas, then what is the point of reading them in the first place?

Uncomfortable nonfiction is like eating your vegetables. There is much disquieting history and knowledge that must not be ignored.

Mainstream mass public education will not teach curiosity or imbue anyone with ambition or initiative, it is something one must cultivate on their own.
In this case would it matter if they were contractors or not?

There is a way of calculating the pay for a job. It is predictable. Publish the algorithm. Want to change it? Great. Update the documentation and then publish that. The workers should be able to calculate exactly what they are owed. They can decide to leave or stay.

Only in America are people deflecting by bringing up the employment status of people when the issue is a lack of transparency designed to allow wage theft.
> In-Place Calculation of Minimum-Redundancy Codes

Or in general, refer to "On the Implementation of Minimum Redundancy Prefix Codes" by Moffat and Turpin (1997), as strongly recommended and later explained by Charles Bloom [1].

[1] https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2010/08/08-12-10-lost-huffm...
A number of reddit communities.
I might be wrong, but my understanding is that we're on a decelerating slope of perf/transistor and have been for quite a while - I just looked up the OpenCL benchmark results of the 1080 Ti vs 4090, and the perf/W went up by 2.8x despite going from 16nm to 5nm, with perfect power scaling, we would've seen a more than 10x increase.
Licklider was primarily referring to the need to suppercede punch card languages with ones with an interactive human language interface. Chiefly, McCarthy's Lisp, which he directed the Arpa/IPTOs funding towards, but it would apply to practically every language since - though in terms of interactivity still CL most of all.

That said he also lead the funding of AI, so LLMs are not outside of what he was imagining altogether, for example he wrote about the need for a busy executive to communicate with his computer like he would his secretary, etc. But he also seemed to think that interactive programming environments could accomplish this goal.

Sidenote, something that's forgotten is that Lick was a Lisp person. His archives contain his notes to SICP, and various toy programmes.
The Taxonomy for Data Transformations in AI Systems
Note that it's a discussion of the book itself and not of the book review.

This book review is interesting in that it gives a number of the best known books to learn about deep learning.
> in that most modern Macs are stuck with the same memory and internal storage

There is a reason for this: Power.

The trade off between efficiency and flexibility is very real. Apple and most other modern manufactures chose to save power. It also removes a fair bit of complexity when scaling. Go try to max out the ram on a model consumer desk top. At the high end your going to have to tinker in the bios to get that working... LPDRR avoids a lot of those issues.
I don't see a company today, in this climate, that would emulate that decision.

Why not? There are a lot of benefits from owning the tooling and being able to tailor it to do exactly what you want.
If you do have an option to switch from Huffman, rANS is now the way to go, not a clasical arithmetic coding.