skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just reread this after seeing it on the shelves of a coffee shop bookstore I frequent.

I remember originally reading this sitting on the floor of a library while on a solo trip through England as a teenager ... I spent the rest of the summer reading everything by Greg Egan I could find. He's my favorite author and I can honestly say I think his books have had more influence on the way I think than any other author.

Re-reading axiomatic after all these years brings with it a surge of memories from the younger me. It's awesome to have this kind of talisman that provides a powerful connection to the states of mind of my youth and the things I thought as I grappled with these ideas, so many really for the first time. There is very little literature that goes so far and deep into the experience and philosophy of thought as Greg Egan.

Amazing that this was written in the early 90s -- and still has a better sense of life with recent and upcoming technology that most stories written much more recently ...
I don't have any insider knowledge, but maybe IBM could get its hands on a lot more legacy code for weird arcane systems than GitHub could? It would make their models more specific than those trained on 50% Python at least.
Show HN: Deep learning framework from scratch, trains GPT-2 in 3 days
I wanted to share Tricycle (https://github.com/bclarkson-code/Tricycle), a deep learning framework I built completely from scratch from Autograd to a GPT.

I wanted a library that is fast and feature rich enough to train actual models while being simple enough that anyone with a bit of python experience can understand what is going on.

The biggest milestone so far is training GPT-2 (124M) on 2.3B tokens in just under 3 days on my GPU (RTX 3090).

So far, I've added the following to Tricycle:

- An automatic differentiation engine

- General matrix operations with einsum

- Standard network layers (Dense, ReLU, GeLU etc)

- Transformer blocks (MultiHeadSelfAttention and MLP blocks)

- Optimisers (SGD, AdamW)

- GPT-2

- etc

The project is still under active development, I'm in the process of adding mixed precision and multi-gpu support with the goal of scaling up to larger models.

To see it in action, the best place to start is train_smol_gpt.py which will train GPT-2 from scratch.

Let me know what you think!
> Perhaps not that much [more].

From a quick search, the atmospheric density on Mars is ~20X lower than the top of Mt. Everest - the "dying zone". (And with the lower gravity, you'd need whole lot more than 20X, to get the same atmospheric pressure on Mars.)

20X'ing even a small planet's atmosphere is a big-ass ask. And if humans can only live inside pressure suits, or pressurized habitats on Mars - then "some plants can grow on the surface" is "that's nice, but...".

Hmm... Earth is much bigger than Mars, and has overheating problems. Gasses cool when they expand, per pV=nRT. In theory, if we exported a bunch of the Earth's atmosphere to Mars, we could kill 2 birds with one stone.

@xkcd, you want to take this?
I see a lot of recommendations for Irssi and I have to throw in a suggestion to replace Irssi: WeeChat. It can be configured to look and feel very similar to Irssi, but

- it uses more sensible defaults,

- it is actively maintained,

- judging by the list in TFA it has twice the number of users, and

- it is built on better practises making extension etc. easier.

(That said, if you're not interested in a text-based interface, The Lounge does look really good. But I've never tried myself.)
Maybe he is Siri!
Anthropic and Menlo Ventures Partner on $100M AI Fund
Moderna wins $176M to develop bird flu vaccine amid outbreak
Say you have concepts/items/cards A, B and C, with

A -> B -> C (C encompasses B, B encompasses A, keeping the notation from the article).

As I understand it, the article advocates for showing C first, then you can assume that you also know B and A to at least some part, and save yourself the repetitions for these.

Intuitively, I would have guessed the opposite approach to be the best: Show A first, suspend B until A is learned (by some measure), then show B, etc.

That means no repetitions to skip, but also you get less failures (and thus additional repetitions) that occur as follows: you are shown C, but don't know B anymore, and thus cannot answer and have to repeat C.

If you are shown C before B, you kinda make C less atomic (you might have to actively recall both, B and C to answer it), showing B before C makes C more atomic, as you will have B more mentally present/internalized and can focus on what C adds to B.
> the productivity boost seems to be eaten up by unrealistic project plans and expanding scope

This is what happens with every improvement in software, doesn't matter if its better hardware, improved tooling, increased libraries or simple more programmers. The increased expectations always create more, not less demand for programming. The only thing that a change in tooling does is a change in skills that are in demand and features that are demanded.

The juniors probably are most helped by these tools. I find the benefits a mixed bag. Even as a better autocomplete it (github copilot) frequently makes the most trivial grammatical errors such as unmatched parenthesis, which a 'dumb' autocomplete would never produce. And sometimes the code looks so good, it is easy to overlook that one insidious semantic error and is now costing you debugging time.

I won't be replaced by AI, but I might be replaced by a younger dev who is able to get more value out of these newfangled tools than me.
Is the filename still gtag.js?
I don't think so... It was part of the download menu for me
Hey folks, ParadeDB co-founder here. Cool project! Just thought I'd chime in and clarify a few things:

1. pg_sparse is deprecated. pgvector released native sparse vector support with the `sparsevec` datatype, and ParadeDB no longer maintains pg_sparse. It has been this way for several months already.

I'd love to see a benchmark re: Tantivy. You claim that pg_search is much slower, but Tantivy is state-of-the-art for full-text search performance and the ParadeDB performance is robust. You can see our benchmarks in our repository README, where we compare ourselves to Elastic.

4/5. ParadeDB is Postgres by design. If you are adopting Postgres, which many are, then ParadeDB can be installed directly as an extension via logical replication on a read replica. This removes the need for ETL to a non-Postgres system, which drastically reduces operational burden.

Of course, if you're not using Postgres, ParadeDB is not designed for you and a tool like Infinity seems like a viable option alongside other standalone search engines.
Four-Billion-Year-Old Zircons May Contain Our Earliest Evidence of Fresh Water
The surprisingly simple way cities could save people from extreme heat
Organs and tissues of free-swimming whale sharks imaged using ultrasound
It's just a more effective google, now that google has basically become completely useless to get results which aren't 'seo optimised' (full of rubbish). Its value is still mostly in generating boilerplate.
As I read these comments, there is plenty of outrage at how Google keeps invasively tracking us. And rightly so. But I wonder about the other side of it: in my SaaS business I made a point of not using any tracking whatsoever and not letting Google peek into my users' behaviors. So, no analytics, no Google Fonts, no tag manager (obviously).

But I don't think any of my users noticed, and I don't think any of them care.
>Not sure how that would play out for cases that were declared a national cyber threat

Employees were working for Kaspersky's US office long before Kaspersky was labeled a national cyber security thereat by the US gov.

How is it the fault of those employees that they get caught in the political crossfire and now find themselves unemployed. After all, Kaspersky ia a very large company and the workers at the US office weren't the ones responsible for the issues Kaspersky has with the US.
This is wrong on so many levels. It is either incredibly naive or unscrupulous, neither of which is a good recommendation.
Show HN: I am spending the day playing Play Rock, Paper, Scissors against you
Player value correlation is indeed a thing. So too match ups in the next game, player playing out of position, etc. I haven't experimented but you are probably right that a model that could use factors like these effectively would outperform what I described.

But they aren't critical to building a model that will beat your mates and land you on the single-digits top%.
Even in messenger-type apps there's a weird setup. With iMessage, if you're in a group chat with yourself and other people (B and C): if C sends a message and B reacts to it, you still get a message about B's reaction to C. Drives me crazy in certain group chats I'm in.

Signal, for some reason, notifies of reactions to your message on desktop but not on mobile (at least iOS).
They are good for 'hey can I get this crap done in a sprint'. Once someone starts measuring it for 'how good a team is' that is when it falls apart.

One teams points almost always do not equal another teams points either.

Agile has a TON of anti-patterns that look good to do and are enticing to do. But in the end are self destructive. Usually making it about the process instead of 'I have X amount of work and Y number of people how much can I get done in Z time'.

For example velocity. I measure it so I do not overcommit. Trying to do 50 points when 20 is the norm and something will happen that we do not want. But now that you have a measurable number some manager will want to brag on it (that is their job to brag about you). In the end being put on some spreadsheet to be presented to some other manager. It becomes a score to measure you against other teams and an anti-pattern. As actually testing if something is being productive is hard. But numbers you can get all sorts of them out of agile, leading straight to anti-patterns.
In my opinion open source software is usually not a ready to use product. More often is a library, a framework or a product prototype that need to be tailored, installed, configured, expanded and maintained by other developers do be useful and produce value. So I see it as just an agreement between developers to share efforts on build base software tools on which grow own private business. It we want to compare it to a traditional business is like a group of farmers that agree to share for free the best of seeds each one produce. So that everyone can grow a better harvest every year. So the business is not in the seeds and seeds producing, but in what you grow from that seeds.
And since actual ISP customer service is actually this terrible much of the time it wouldn't even set off alarm bells.
LLMs are to a programmer what a rhyming dictionary is to a writer.

A good poet says complex things using few words. A bad poet is someone who conveys something simple using a lot of words.
I have tried using LLMs on the legacy C++ codebase that I work on, and the only thing it could reliably do was generate code for unit tests.

When I fix bugs, it's usually not helpful because I need to debug and track down where the bug is.

When I develop new features, it occasionally uses the wrong lock, or makes up APIs that don't exist. I find it gets in the way more for development.

For C# and .NET core, I found IntelliCode to be pretty useful.
New tech aims to keep polar bears and people apart
In many cases yes. Elitism is often good, and populism is often bad.
> But why should that matter, and even if it does why would you draw the line there? Zelda etc. hardly demand a high skill level in terms of twitch FPS-like mechanics; whether you will win a given fight is determined far more by your character's progression (both equipment and "stats", even if you only have one stat in Zelda) than by the player's skill level.

Different Zelda games have different difficulty curves, but the difference is there really is a skill curve to Zelda games. If you mistime your attack, it hits the shield. There isn't a way to make Link stronger, you just have to get the timing right. In an RPG, there is no way to get better at casting Thunder through player skill. You just have to get more levels or a higher magic stat.

These are very different core gameplay experiences and to me it's what separates action games from RPGs. Obviously there are games that do both - Diablo is a classic example of an Action RPG. I'd say the FFVII Remake is mostly an Action game but it has RPG elements due to its origins.
Smart devices helped me unlock hidden health wins
I don't use an LLM in isolation. I use it alongside reading material, books, papers etc.

Since I'm using it in involved studying sessions, it is totally sensible to cross-check most of what the LLM outputs, since that's part of the learning process anyway!

In my experience learning design, some math, basic android dev with local and private models, they are very reliable if you use them "in the loop" (ie, as part of a process).

During programming, it's extremely easy to verify what the LLM says is correct by running code.

For math, this is a bit more difficult, but so far it's only been surface level math. I know that LLMs are good at teaching concepts and ideas in math, but not at _doing_ math. I don't fully trust an LLM to teach me more advanced math because I have no way of verifying what I learn is

* Correct

* Relevant

* The "right" way of learning it

For design, which I'm currently studying a lot for work and personal projects, it does well. I'm using Claude to help me solidify my understanding by asking it to critique my summaries and quiz me on topics. I know Claude is correct because I'm using it to solidify my understanding and how topics interrelate, but not to learn new topics. I already sort of "intuitively understand" these topics, but am training myself to go a bit deeper.

They work really well, and I really do understand the skepticism, but in practice it's unwarranted.
Such a huge quality of life improvement for technical writers who rely on Gsuite collaboration features while editing Markdown docs. Thank you!
TheLounge is fantastic. I've got it on a pi in the basement on a battery, and I just VPN into home from anywhere. Been running 3-ish years I think.

It works surprisingly well from mobile browsers, too.
I'm curious, why would you say "applications don't map too well onto HTML"?
My own experience is that it _might_ speed up juniors (and even that, I'm not convinced about). But juniors make up a tiny part of the overall throughput, I am easily 10x faster to do anything than they are. So a 10-20% productivity boost for juniors is pretty much negligible for the company.

For myself, everytime I try to use chatgpt it completely fails to be helpful, for the same reason that stackoverflow also fails: the problems I have as a senior are too specific or too complex. Every single time, querying an LLM ends up being a waste of time.
Would be cool if there was a big warning icon with "ACCOUNT LOCKED: STATE ACTOR" like for cheaters on chess websites
Anecdotally I agree with the 10-20% increase. Using Cursor.sh, so much less time wasted on menial tasks or reading documentation.
$60,000 fine… who can imagine why these were anonymously donated… probably dug them up in his backyard
I also don't have numbers, but I'd opine that you need that (top 5% every round) AND you need to be to have a few big rounds where you greatly outperform almost everyone. Getting those big rounds means taking some calculated risks.
Lots of old code not on GH that they could combine with what is on GH…
It appears that criminals really are stupid, and thank goodness for it!
A decade ago I used to be quite active in several of these popular channels, but I remember them having on the order of 2000 joined nicknames. Has this changed, or am I misremembering?
Well, from what I can see ChatGPT can already write much better bash scripts than I do, so...
Collaborative editing of Markdown docs in GitHub / GitLab can be a pain. This is a huge game changer for technical writers. Admittedly not the biggest crowd, but hey...
GitHub "community" is just awful. There are people trying to get real work done in that thread, but then there are all these random bystanders piling up to throw in their comments which range from useless to actively harmful and distracting.

And it's not an isolated case, this happens pretty much always when some issues attracts attention on GH.

Can't we respect the project and give the people there space to work, and leave the peanut gallery commenting to reddit/hn/twitter/whatev.
I'm starting to develop a gag reflex each time I read "AI" in a headline. After cryptocurrencies and NFTs this is the current attractor for the world's most idiotic ideas.
"Like" is being too generous when we know what, why, and how they do what they do.
Find the Maxwell's demon?!

>In fact it is possible for this "negentropy" contribution to be large enough that growth is fully endothermic, or actually removes heat from the environment. This type of metabolism, in which acetate, methanol, or a number of other hydrocarbon compounds are converted to methane (a high entropy gas),[25] is known as acetoclastic methanogenesis; one example is the metabolism of the anaerobic archaebacteria Methanosarcina barkeri.[26][27]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life
> Scrum tried to fix this in 2011 when “Commitment” was changed to “Forecast”

I've checked scrum guides released in 2010 and in 2011. The word "commitment" does not appear in the pre-2011 version. And, as far as I remember, the word "forecast" replaced the word "estimate" in the 2020 edition of the scrum guide compared to the 2017 edition.
Paris Mayor Swims in Seine to Show It's Safe for Olympic Races
What's with all these tantrum-y hyperbolic blog posts... "my love for the web has died"

So what / good for you / that's nice
Indonesia's 'Strava jockey' trend goes viral
You would probably get the same tokens per second with llama 3 70b if you just unplugged the 24gb GPU. For something that actually fits in 24gb of VRAM, I recommend gemma 2 27b up to q6. I use q4 and it works quite well for my needs.
If they installed stuff to block it, that would be a sign they care about it at least in part?

It's hard for me to tell the difference between a site with no ads and a site with some ads if I'm always using unlock and all. I just care that it ends up not showing me ads.
The x86_64 ISA is already fragmented like this.

There's a pile of different SIMD ("SSE") instruction sets, and it's pretty much anybody's guess what the system your program is running on is likely to have.

cat /proc/cpuinfo sometime and just look at all the stuff under 'flags'
Aren't there inherent advantages to correct and semantic code, advantages like performance, simplicity, understandability, expressivity, that could/should benefit the business?
Sure.

Assume you're writing an OS from scratch that will be used by people, rather than by servers in a data center.

Building the system to be as responsive as possible at the lowest possible latency is what you should do. Even if you're burning half your CPU cycles on busy work waiting for user input. Ignore how much more throughput you could have with a traditional OS. Users get a lot less annoyed by a job that takes 20 minutes instead of 10 than by a window which takes 3 seconds to resize.

This goes against every instinct that engineers have, because you're not optimizing for the scarce resource on your layer - cpu cycles above.

The way I got around that brain damage was to find what metric matters to the ultimate user and trace it back to the layers I had control over, then optimize the hell out of it.
which happens with and without AI to the extent of effort and state of brains of the junior dev
Nice.

What i was conveying was a comprehensive outline framework to think about "Health" which i define as "a emergent attribute" of the relationship between "the adaptive living organism" (i.e. Us) and "the dynamic and ever-changing environment we are embedded in" (i.e. everything else). It is Complex Systems Science and hence one should treat it holistically based on the specific context and not narrowly as Just-Exercise/Just-Diet/Just-Medicine etc. This is what people are missing when it comes to Health/Fitness etc. We have empirical experience from traditional systems eg. Yoga/Ayurveda/Siddha/Qigong/Acupuncture/etc. which we need to reconcile with Modern Sciences of Physiology/Genetics/Epigenetics/Neuroscience/etc. A lot of researchers have been working on this but for some reason it is not mainstream, possibly due to the cultural baggage surrounding the traditional systems. I have been studying the traditional systems listed above (plus martial arts) along with modern science for a while now and find it always enlightening to map between them and apply both of them in a holistic manner in pursuit of "Good Health".
Early Androids and Artificial Speech
I would say having a webpage on a platform counts towards having a web presence. Every FB, Insta, X, etc. page is a little “website”.
Same here. Not a very common language, deep application knowledge and knowledge about some real world domains is required - LLMs are blank.
Time variability also increases with the time estimate for a task. If a task is "about two weeks", then it might be 1.5 weeks or it might be 4 weeks.

But if a task is about 1 day, it may take 4 hours or 4 days, but it will almost certainly not be 1 month.

Points are always just a proxy for time, and work the same way. Not matter what anyone claims, as long as you use points to plan time-abound sprints, points are directly a measure of time.
The JVM will need to do context switching when reallocating the real thread that is running a blocked virtual thread to the next available virtual thread. It won't be CPU context switching, but context switching happens at the JVM level and represents an effort.
Humans are known to do that too?
What if two other aims, combined, outweighed the desire for safety?
I'm pretty sure a large number of e-mail conversations (i.e. not just announcements) end in one person saying, "OK", "Will do", "See you then", "I'm too busy, sorry" or some such response. It's very uncommon to send out an e-mail to someone and ask them to do something or consider something and then assume it has been received without acknowledgement.
> I never agreed much with it, as the games I got hooked on as a kid I did mostly because of their stories…

I have always prioritized gameplay over story, which is why I consider unskippable cutscenes to be a high crime in game design.
Latin America's Renewed Fiscal Challenges