skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We can, if the evidence has the right shape, say: Either there is no god, or some omnipotent or near-omnipotent being is deliberately screwing with us to try to make us draw wrong conclusions.

The existence of that caveat is not peculiar to the question of the origins of the universe, or life, or humans; nor is it peculiar to questions involving gods.

You do a bunch of physics experiments and think hard and conclude: electric charge is made out of little bits and the size of each one is so-and-so-much. Strictly, you should add "or some omnipotent or near-omnipotent being is deliberately screwing with us".

You find your spouse in bed with someone else and conclude that they are unfaithful. Strictly, you should add "or some omnipotent or near-omnipotent being is deliberately screwing with us". Er, perhaps I should have chosen a term other than "screwing with", sorry.

Someone's accused of murder and they go to trial. The prosecution pulls out eyewitness reports of the murder, emails from the accused saying how they were planning to kill the victim, etc. The defence has nothing but handwaving. The jury finds them guilty. Strictly, they should add "or some omnipotent or near-omnipotent being is deliberately screwing with us".

You can add that caveat to everything: literally any conclusion we draw by any means could be invalidated if some omnipotent or near-omnipotent being is deliberately trying to get us to draw the wrong conclusions.

But we don't, in fact, bother adding that caveat all the time, because there would be no point, and because to most of us it doesn't in fact seem very plausible that an omnipotent or near-omnipotent being is deliberately screwing with us. (But of course maybe we just feel that way because said being is messing with our minds.)

And, of course, it's especially self-defeating to offer this sort of objection to science specifically when it conflicts with revealed religion. Because if you're taking the "God is deliberately trying to deceive us" hypothesis seriously, you'd better take it just as seriously when it's applied to your religion's scriptures, or its allegedly inspired prophets, or any personal revelations you may think you've had, or any of the other specifically religious sources that religious people get beliefs from.

(Does the evidence have the right shape? All the above is much less relevant if in fact the available evidence points in the direction of, say, a 6-day creation 6000-ish years ago. Or, more modestly, in the direction of there being a benevolent god who intervenes in the world from time to time. It looks to me as if the evidence fits much better with a no-god hypothesis than with any sort of theism I know about, other than versions of theism that deliberately make the same predictions about the world as atheism does. Obviously I might be misinterpreting the evidence, or seeing a misleading subset of it, or something; but note that those are entirely different arguments from the "well, you wouldn't be able to tell if God were deliberately trying to mislead you" argument you've settled on.)
> the vast majority of people who work in offices just push papers, go to meetings and other mindless bs

I know this to be true for many working in software engineering. Conversely,

> writing code is way more than reading and implementing syntax, it's actually making the design work or solving very tricky bugs.

This can be true but is not always true. I think you were right when you said

> take any given <sales|tech|branding|marketing|HR> idea you want, it doesn't "just work", the devil is in the details

:)
Eh? Tools and machines are just accelerants. Computers are generic tools so they accelerate anything and everything including oppression.
> what detectorists find is 99.9% of the time just crap

That's a bit of a disingenuous argument though. To a first approximation, no-one's out to find ring pulls and bottle caps. The fun is feeling like you might win the lottery, encouraged by reports of people who do. If it wasn't for the 0.1% no-one would be doing this.

> "archeologists should push for more sensible rules"

...like what?

The thing that is of value is the site with the artefact in place. Digging up and sending in the artefact on its own with no other information is like scraping all the paint off a painting and sending the scrapings. Yes, your paint detector found some paint, and for once it wasn't junk. You've won the lottery. Great! Awesome! Bully for you! I bet it felt wonderful. But it's too late. You've already destroyed the thing that made it interesting, valuable and important.

A rule that fails to discourage this destruction is not a "sensible rule". Sure, once the destruction has happened, it's better to have the anonymous paint scrapings than to have nothing at all; but the archaeologists will still grieve when they receive that package, just as you would grieve if someone broke something important to you - even if you weren't previously aware of its existence! - and sent you some of the broken pieces; and they will push back on any change that might in any way encourage more people to pull this crap.

> because they don't and won't carry out any research in these places anyway

Until the site is destroyed, it's possible it will be identified and researched. Once it is destroyed, this can never happen.
We have to complain about people who are exploiting all of us, instead of looking at the people in the kindergarten look at people like Elon musk stealing billions
If datadog does indeed buy gitlab, this sounds as if its on-prem days might be over soon. Are there any viable (open-source) non-cloud alternatives?
Did you know? WebP is pronounced "weppy"
Another fun one for godaddy: 'forgetting' to email you about a renewal, letting it lapse and then charging you literally double to "reactivate it" when the DNS stops working.

Happened to my company, I moved DNS to porkbun immediately after reactivating the domain. Wasn't a cheap one either so that cost was especially unwelcome.
> Tech companies… decide which salary percentile they want to compete at. Do they want to compete at the top of the band (95 - 100 percentile) or at 75th percentile?

> … It's a vanity metric for the company. Facebook could choose Cisco as a peer and pay way less, but they don't because they can afford to.

“They can afford to” is what lets them offer high compensation relative to other companies. The “choice” they make is to fill their hiring funnel with extremely motivated candidates, and this lets them pick and choose from that labor pool.

Many companies choose to not fill their hiring funnel like this.

The reasons for wanting a large pipeline were explained well in another article, but in short: These companies are competing in a global market and need “best-of-breed” solutions.
There do seem to be posts.

I’m not sure of the activity level of HN at the time it occurred.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal...
Are you imagining a scenario where the interviewer writes "invert a binary tree" on the whiteboard, refuses to elaborate and leaves the room for half an hour?

In real life they would either give you an example so you can better understand the requirements or expect you to come up with an example yourself and ask clarifying questions until you're on the same page as to what "invert" means.
Honestly I think the real issue is non-technical recruiting/hr have gotten way too involved in filtering and selecting candidates, so dipshits or liars end up getting interviewed at all. When technical eng management are actively involved in looking at a candidate, I rarely see these terrible ones show up and waste time.
historically, hunger and fear.
> Don't you agree that we (as an industry) should be working to reduce the number of footguns in the world?

Sure. The problem is everybody and his brother have an idea for what that looks like. There's no universally agreed-upon consensus of what a footgun actually is, which makes it rather difficult to remove them. I've been creating software for over 40 years now and the only constant truism I've discovered in that time is people will find reasons to bitch about something. Some people hate braces. Some people hate wordiness. Some people hate parenthetical statements. Some people hate math and "mathy-looking" languages. It goes on and on. And that's just syntax! We can go down several rabbit holes WRT how to handle errors.

Meanwhile, according to the latest TIOBE index, Python is the #1 language, followed by C++ and then C.

As I keep saying, you don't have to like Python, you don't have to use it, but you should be able to whiteboard it. And whiteboards don't give two fucks about whitespace.
Modern Luddites: On Being a Digital Minimalist Family in a Tech-Saturated World
I only have one thing to say to this man, “hey! Quit stealing my moves!”
Don't have any interesting references, sorry. My reasoning is mainly one of simplicity and power. In SQL you need to think in terms of tables, inner joins, outer joins, foreign keys etc. whereas datalog you do everything with relations as in prolog.

Not only is it conceptually much simpler, it's also a "pit of success" situation as thinking in terms of relations instead of tables leads you towards normal forms by default.

Add the ability to automatically derive new facts based on rules and it just wins by a country mile. I recommend giving Soufflé a try.

I haven't worked with GraphDBs enough to comment on that.
What’s the llama.cpp CLI equivalent of `ollama pull`?
The promise of a permanent poorly-educated underclass that provides cheap labor, plus no pesky environmental or financial regulations. Pretty much oligarch heaven.
No, I'm talking about the section 174 update.

Great explanation here.

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/
> If an LLM was capable of logical reasoning

the prompt interfaces + smartphone apps were (from the beginning), and are ongoing training for the next iteration, they provide massive RLHF for further improvements in already quite RLHFed advanced models.

Whatever tokens they're extracting from all the interactions, the most valuable are those from metadata, like "correct answer in one shot", or "correct answer in three shots".

The inputs and potentially the outputs can be gibberish, but the metadata can be mostly accurate given some implicit/explicit (the tumbs up, the "thanks" answers from users, maybe), human feedback.

The RLHF refinement extracted from getting the models face the entire human population for to be continuously, 24x7x365, prompted in all languages, about all the topics interesting for the human society, must be incredible. If you just can extract a single percentage of definitely "correct answers" from the total prompts answered, it should be massive compared to just a few thousands of QA dedicated RLHF people working on the models in the initial iterations of training.

That was GPT2,3,4, initial iterations of the training. Having the models been evolved to more powerful (mathematical) entities, you can use them to train the next models. Like is almost certainly happening.

My bet is that one of two

- The scaling thing is working spectacularly, they've seen linear improvement in blue/green deployments across the world + realtime RLHF, and maybe it is going a bit slow, but the improvements justify just a bit more waiting to get trained a more powerful,refined model, incredible more better answers from even the previous datasets used (now more deeply inquired by the new models and the new massive RLHF data), if in a year they have a 20x GPT4, Claude, Gemini, whatever, they could be "jumping" to the next 40x GPT4, Claude, Gemini, a lot faster, if they have the most popular, prompted model in the market (in the world).

- The scaling stuff already sunk, they have seen the numbers and it doesn't add by now, or they've seen disminished returns coming. This is being firmly denied by anyone on the record or off the record.
It was a whirlwind "survey of languages" course. After blowing our minds with functional programming via OCaml, the last segment was traditionally logical programming via Prolog. But he decided to spare us, I guess, and made me fall in love with Rust for a few years. :p (Or he sadistically meant to inflict the trauma of knowing how much better C and C++ could be but never will be, which stays with you even after you stop using Rust and return to those.)
Two ways to sell stuff: either you run ads, or someone else promote your product for you. If you don't want to do paid ads, try giving out free copies of the game to people who can review it to their audience.
That's why the demoscene was so amazing in Finland... all those unenmployed kids.
And there were helpful notices asking you not to do your business when the train is at a station.
I agree that having a more realistic mindset that we are already in a great position can help if the person's comparing themselves with others earning a lot more.

But I argue that this alone is not enough. Phrasing it merely as something we have to deal with as individuals to cope with the insanity of the current affairs is insufficient and perpetuates this individualistic thinking.

I don't believe the comment was mean spirited or anything like that, but when seeing a list of very bad realities we have today, we can't stop at individually coping with it by comparing ourselves to those that have it even worse.

I consider myself a stoic too and totally understand where you're coming from. But I'd argue stoicism is an individualistic solution that cannot really be applied to something systemic as the job market crisis
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755.372 Kelvin
What is "viable" demand supposed to mean? "Homes"/"Housing units" includes rentals. Mortgage salary ratios are irrelevant here. Do the nonviables just get to live on the street and like it? All you need to do is look at total housing units vs total families to see that demand growth naturally outpaces supply growth because we don't build enough to keep up with population increases.
There is a YC company that wanted a 4 hour recorded session of me coding up a problem they had given, with me explaining what I am doing for the entire 4 hours.
Nice try, but Trafilatura (which is the most popular web fetching library for AI pipelines) doesn't include the text in <p meta> in the output.
Cute. I'd like to see a pony page please.
Thoughts on a freemium software product (2023)
This is a great tool and you should consider converting it to a PWA so it can be installed in addition to bookmarked.

Uploaded five files ~86 mb each (opus > wav). 3 files get converted ok. Two stops at 97% in brave/win11. DevTools reports: RangeError: Array buffer allocation failed

Firefox/win 11 converted all files.
It wouldn't be instead of, rather both. I.e. Friday doesn't have full context nor does July 12th. It also wouldn't have to get rid of the other personal commentary, just not put it in the section about having reached out for comment. That said you're more than right in that nothing says the article must set out to be neutral.
Compared to a GPU like a 4090 with equal vram it probably won't fare well as others point out, however it far outperforms any CPU. On an M1 Ultra MacBook Pro I was seeing like 40 tokens/second with llama3:7B vs 9 tokens/second on various Intel servers/desktops with sufficient ram.
I think it's a different phenomenon, personally - on drugs like MDMA I get the same euphoric effect but without the accompanying sense that I've learned anything about the universe.
Qualitative research is finicky like that. What I’ve seen happen more often is a user is frustrated yet professional enough in some moment to actually provide useful feedback, but they bail when the survey has one too many questions. UXR teams like to organize questions and answers into nice little spreadsheets that ladder back to KPIs, but that’s not how an emotional person with honest criticism wants to share it. So they bail and you lose that moment. I like to do stars or thumb up/down as a pulse check, then a textbox to spill your guts. More work for me, but useful results more often.
This is adorable and made me feel good! I learned something about cats too. Thank you for sharing.
Koutnik´S Blue Collar AI
Jan Koutnik “Czeched out” in 2009 to improve recurrent neural networks and scale evolutionary reinforcement learning as a postdoc at IDSIA. At NNAISENSE, he directed the division of the company responsible for the “learning to park” NeurIPS 2016 demo with Audi, the “learning to run” NeurIPS competition win in 2017, and the Festo Softhand in-hand manipulation demo at Hannover Messe in 2019.

We take a brief look back with Jan Koutnik at his time at NNAISENSE and the beginnings of Industrial AI. Then we switch to the present. Jan explains his Industrial AI approach, why he doesn’t realize GenAI use cases and where he sees the sweet spot for himself and his new company. Spoiler: It’s all about vision systems.
So the naming is super confusing in these cases and the best way to get out of it is say "the references are passed by value", but... technically he was right. In JS everything's passed by value. It doesn't matter that those values are references. Pass by ref would mean that "function foo(a) {a='123'}; b=''; foo(b)" would change the value of `b`.

Every popular language which allows pass-by-reference makes those places very explicit (like ref in c++ and c#)
Lawrence Abu Hamdan investigates crimes that are heard but not seen
Microsoft DEI Lead Blasts Company After Team Is Reportedly Laid Off
Anti-ageing 'supermodel granny' drug extends life in mice by 25%
"As a composition tool, Scribe does not train on your inbox data — it cannot because of Proton Mail’s zero-access encryption."

"Scribe is the first mass-market AI tool that can be run entirely locally on your device, ensuring no data ever leaves your device"

God I'm so happy I moved to Proton.
I'm not that person, but the Pew Research Center says that, in 1994, 57% of Democratic voters were white non-college graduates, while in 2019, it was 30%. For Republicans, 68% of their voters were white non-college graduates in 1994, and it was 57% in 2019. The Democrats seem to have been shedding this demographic much faster than Republicans have been.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/06/02/in-changing-...

Pew also has a more up-to-date analysis of partisanship and education here:

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/partisanship...

They do say that there's a relatively recent shift in voters who went to college towards the Democratic party.

The Republican Party now holds a 6 percentage point advantage over the Democratic Party (51% to 45%) among voters who do not have a bachelor’s degree. Voters who do not have a four-year degree make up a 60% majority of all registered voters.

By comparison, the Democratic Party has a 13-point advantage (55% vs. 42%) among those with a bachelor’s degree or more formal education.

This pattern is relatively recent. In fact, until about two decades ago the Republican Party fared better among college graduates and worse among those without a college degree.
That doesn't strike me as actually being very optimistic considering that we will be living in the Eugenics Wars and WWIII part of the timeline not the exploring the stars part of the timeline.
Its a most remarkable story but how would one "scale" this type of behavior to make a difference? If you zero-in on his state of mind during the incident:

> the influences on his decision included that he had been told a U.S. strike would be all-out, so five missiles seemed an illogical start; that the launch detection system was new and, in his view, not yet wholly trustworthy; that the message passed through 30 layers of verification too quickly; and that ground radar failed to pick up corroborating evidence, even after minutes of delay

So you have a highly trained and informed person applying a mix of reasoning and intuition to guide their action rather than blindly and lazily follow instructions - or worse, be pushed around by fears, group think, peer pressure, etc. without regard to actual impact.

Clearly if the majority of people would exhibit such behaviors we'd be in much better shape, but how do we get there?
Even then, it's clearly responding some half-true stuff about unknown for movies with clear, known antagonists. It's just trying to put "unknown" somewhere into response.
Major thumbs up on the idea and the simple interface, though some feedback:

If everything is local, using “Download” and “Upload” doesn’t seem like the proper choice of words.

It’s confusing that the Download button is on a table which shows the name of the file we “uploaded”, making it look like we’ll get the same file and not the conversion.

It might be worth considering some basic options to determine quality. Nothing too fancy, but at least an idea of what the quality/size ratio will be. For testing purposes I converted an MP4 to WebM which reduced it to less than one sixth of the size but the quality was so destroyed that the time and resources it took were a waste, the file went straight into the bin.
Author here.

Can you elaborate? I don't see anything to support this claim from the link you provide.

You are correct that the completion of the phase-out of slam-door rolling stock in the UK will relate to modern safety (and accessibility) regulations, amongst other factors. But that is different to what motivated the initial introduction of remotely controlled doors, which as that article states, dates back to the London Underground in the 1920s.

While it might be the case that centrally controlled doors are mostly more safe (with some exceptions), that mere fact doesn't imply that it is the primary motivating factor behind the historical adoption trend. So it's an interesting claim, but unless I'm missing something in the link I don't see it as supporting this claim?
Mmm, I would not like to play a game in my phone if I'm with my family, I would prefer something more real and not with our devices.
I think you can take different public, for example play with friends in a casual way, I dont know, imagine you're traveling with friends in a bus and you have some freetime, I think that's a good scenario to download the app and play, because I dont expect anyone bring a table game to the bus, and probably you already talked a lot and want to try something else.
That's how I feel it, but keep researching and all my best, I hope you can raise up these numbers :)
Psychedelics weaken your emotional associations. Which can be helpful and/or unhelpful.

It's not a matter of more work.

Whatever feeling you had about this chair has changed. It use to represent a memory or a feeling from childhood. That's changed or is gone for better or worse.

That's how to perceive how it works.

If you are 'fucked' because you can't move on it will help. If you feel a lack of connections to things/people it could help form new ones or reduce what you currently have.

Removing emotional memories can be scary. Removing PTSD memories can be freeing.
A while back, I made something similar to this site's 'practice app', but bare bones:

https://math.twilam.com/

Just practice. No strategies. No config options. You just answer a set number of problems and you're done for the day. At the end of each session, you're told how long your daily streak is. No streak freezes. No login.

My target audience is my 7yo son.
'Godmother of AI' Dr. Fei-Fei Li just built a $1B startup
That's why I come here instead of other places.