skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was in that tax bracket for half my adult life (often did not have enough money to eat chicken and rice at home and just went hungry). I had to do my own taxes because I couldn’t afford an accountant and TurboTax starting taking the piss on their dark pattern pricing schemes. All of my friends at the time were also very poor, it was a giant recession and we worked in restaurants that weren’t getting customers. We got paid $2.65/hr so if we actually had a “good week” our paychecks were $0 (actually negative, honestly, but paychecks bottom out at $0) due to taxes on tips.

Now I’m even more confused. Accountants were genuinely expensive and none of my peers in my economic class could afford one.

At the risk of repeating myself: how did you file taxes for the first decade of adulthood? If you were too poor pay an accountant like I was…how did you misunderstand how to calculate taxes owed for ten years, but still arrive at the correct amount to pay? Did the IRS often return money to you saying that you over-paid? Did anyone ever try to correct your misconception?

I’m trying to understand this in more detail than just “memorize the fact that 50% of Americans were lied to by (someone?) about taxes, and also just blindly accept that there is some magic unknown to me which allowed them to not be affected by that misunderstanding through most of their adult life”.

You were in poverty when you had this misunderstanding. This other commenter bought a house while they had the same misunderstanding. (So, “being poor” isn’t the experience you both had in common while holding this misconception and can’t explain it for both of you). I’m trying to understand how that misunderstanding never affected either of you. I’m trying to understand how neither of you ever had to read about how to calculate taxes owed.
>UI and UX designers had their heyday in the 1990s.

But also back then, anyone could and did call themselves a UI/UX developer because it was trendy to do so and paid well. Most weren't actually good at it.
It's inflation as perceived by the average person, basically increases in daily expenditure on required goods and services like food, gas, utilities, rent or mortgage. Have you even been reading what I wrote or are you just spouting shit you copy pasted from somewhere else?
I think it's time for an independent UX ratings agency that assigns an objective score or ratings code. There could be a few different basis measurements such as ease of self-discovery, speed, simplicity, honesty (lack of dark patterns) and reliability.

I'm sure metrics like this are studied to death by those actively in the UX field itself, but we don't have an established ratings agency that publishes them. If I'm buying a car, I'd like to know that it's rated F and know what to expect, just as if I see a movie is rated R.
Not exactly a new thought exercise... it's basically a communist takeover of a single given company.

A better, imo, plan would be to convince the most impactful engineers to join you in creating a new, competing company in a location where non-compete agreements aren't binding.
Are You a Workaholic?
Can we direct link to the actual chat site?
> the left side spoke operates the adaptive cruise control system, and mistakenly brushing against the "resume" button could re-engage cruise control to whatever speed it was last set, causing the car to accelerate

Why does the resume button exist at all?

In my 2018 Toyota if you break while having cc on then cc is disabled, end of story.

And if I turn it back on it's set to my current speed. It's not adaptive though. But still, if you break it should be gone. No coming back to the previous hidden state.
New carbon storage technology is fastest of its kind
Of course they won't. The investment in the Heavy Press Program was the initial build, and just citing one example, the Alcoa 50,000 ton forging press was built in 1955, operated until 2008, and needed ~$100M to get it operational again in 2012.

The investment was made to build the press, which created significant jobs and capital investment. The press, and others like it, were subsequently operated by and then sold to a private operator, which in turn enabled the massive expansion of both military manufacturing, and commercial aviation and other manufacturing.

The Heavy Press Program was a strategic investment that paid dividends by both advancing the state of the art in manufacturing at the time it was built, and improving manufacturing capacity.

A GPU cluster might not be the correct investment, but a strategic investment in increasing, for example, the availability of training data, or interoperability of tools, or ease of use for building, training, and distributing models would probably pay big dividends.
You can also wait a bit for someone to upload quantized variants, finetunes, etc, and download those. FWIW I'm not making a claim about the legality of that, just saying it's an easy way around needing to sign the agreement.
The reason for Meta making their model open source is rather simple: They receive an unimaginable amount of free labor, and their license only excludes their major competitors to ensure mass adoption without benefiting their competition (Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, etc). Public interest, philanthropy, etc are just nice little marketing bonuses as far as they're concerned (otherwise they wouldn't be including this licensing restriction).
I used to work in internal IT at a Fortune 500 working with different departments in the company to turn Excel spreadsheets and Access97 tools into web apps with real databases. The problem is that the companies/departments where this is the case all have their own workflows and business processes, and 99% of the time are completely unwilling to consider change. It'll be really challenging to develop software that can be sold to multiple companies even when they ostensibly do the same thing.
Shift in India's Vulture Population Linked to Half a Million Human Deaths
Covid virus during pregnancy increases risk of bad outcomes dramatically, but a lot of patients have the wrong (reverse) idea, and therefore refuse the vaccine. Refusing the vaccine is probably a contributing factor. (Source: wife is OB).
>The source-code to Ad tracking platform is useless to users.

It's absolutely not useless for developers looking to build a competing project.

>The supposedly "good" and "open" people like Google or OpenAI, haven't given their model weights.

Because they're monetizing it... the only reason Facebook is giving it away is because it's a complement to their core product of selling ads. If they were monetizing it, it would be closed source. Just like their Ads platform...
Cynically I think this position is largely due to how they can undercut OpenAI's moat.
isnt this the purpose of LLCs?
My people have a saying, "cheap shit"
Honest question. As far as LLMs are concerned, isn't open weights same as open source?
I actually think this is one of the rare times where the small guys interests are aligned with Meta. Meta is scared of a world where they are locked out of LLM platforms, one where OpenAI gets to dictate rules around their use of the platform much like Apple and Google dictates rules around advertiser data and monetization on their mobile platforms. Small developers should be scared of a world where the only competitive LLMs are owned by those players too.

Through this lense, Meta’s actions make more sense to me. Why invest billions in VR/AR? The answer is simple, don’t get locked out of the next platform, maybe you can own the next one. Why invest in LLMs? Again, don’t get locked out. Google and OpenAi/Microsoft are far larger and ahead of Meta right now and Meta genuinely believes the best way to make sure they have an LLM they control is to make everyone else have an LLM they can control. That way community efforts are unified around their standard.
You might be right you know. I can't edit anymore but please mentally strike out that first paragraph.

I did read a lot into the '??' punctuation which might not have been intended.
the training data is the source.
Finasteride works great.
> an economy full of people who can't help get the economy back on its feet

Because they're infantile, used to picnicking and playing their guitars, and devoid of industrial skills like lathe operating or CRUD app development?

> You can't pour money into an economy without a productivity offset without inflating it.

Isn't this even more egregious in the case of bank bailouts? Shouldn't that money have evaporated?
This is really cool! Any plans to add Deno support? This would be a great fit for environments like val.town[0], but they are based on a Deno runtime and I don't think this will work out of the box.

Also, when trying to run the node example from your readme, I had to use `new dom.window.DOMParser()` instead of `dom.window.DOMParser`

[0]: https://val.town
Why CrowdStrike-style chaos is here to stay
The health insurance would be from TriNet (not a single-employee business). There are similar collective businesses.
With Lisp the paradox of choice is especially unwarranted since moving between lisps is even easier than say moving between dynamically typed scripting langauges.

Learning Guile for 4 weeks and then do CL for 2 leaves you no worse than doing CL for 5.

If you care about practical first and foremost, CL and Clojure both beat Guile by a landslide.

Guile is marginally prettier and more fun.

Clojure has perhaps the strongest FP emphasis and you may view the JVM more favourably than I do. Rich Hickeys talks are a gem whether you pick Clojure or not.
Mirror https://archive.is/Eg5pd
You also can't use it for training or improving other models.

You also can't use it if you're the government of India.

Neither can sex workers use it. (Do you know if your customers are sex workers?)

There are also very vague restrictions for things like discrimination, racism etc.
This kind of thinking will lead you to ideas like algorithmic probability, where distributions are defined using universal Turing machines that could model anything.
Yeah makes sense! I haven’t felt the need for this feature personally, but it feels like it fits with the language pretty well to me. The big issue with default values (as far as I’m concerned) is for them to always have a default value, and this doesn’t change the opt-in nature of the concept.
That's kinda the point - there is an argument that one should not be baking arbitrary shell command execution into database server at all. Such execution will lack critical security features - setting right user, process tracking, cleanup, etc..

If you need to execute commands on database server for admin work, use something designed for this (such as ssh) - this will keep right management and logging simple, only one source of shell command execution.

If you need to execute commands periodically, use some sort of task scheduler, running as a dedicated user. To avoid 2nd connection, you may use use postgres-controllable job queues. Either way, limit to allowed commands only, so that even if postgres credentials are leaked no arbitrary commands can be executed.

Inboth approaches, this would have allow high speed, localhost-specific transports instead of local shell.. if postgresql would have supported them.
I agree that 405B isn't practical for home users, but I disagree that it defeats the purpose of open source. If you're building a business on inference it can be valuable to run an open model on hardware that you control, without the need to worry that OpenAI or Anthropic or whoever will make drastic changes to the model performance or pricing. Also, it allows the possibility of fine-tuning the model to your requirements. Meta believes it's in their interest to promote these businesses.

I'd think of the 405B model as the equivalent to a big rig tractor trailer. It's not for home use. But also check out the benchmark improvements for the 70B and 8B models.
The strife is more obvious with the Hugo than Locus/BSFA/Nebula because the Hugo has an intentionally open voting membership. Anyone with interest and the cost of a membership may vote. Voting blocs have to be public attempts to sway popular opinion. That very nature of it forces it to be public drama.

Some of the Chinese controversy about the Chengdu's WorldCon last year was as much about that natural sway in attending membership simply by being hosted in a controversial country like China no matter what else happened. It's called WorldCon for that reason and that sway in voting membership was always somewhat intentional to keep the Hugo Awards worldly and diverse. Some people were always going to have issues with a Chines WorldCon, even if they didn't also end up very publicly making mistakes.
Not to mention the influence of companies like Intuit, which has been pushing against convenience in tax filing for decades because its entire business model relies on people being unwilling or unable to file by themselves: https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
So many comments here are just anecdotal experiences pretending to be absolute statements.

Web design used to be filled with ridiculously detailed and "over" designed websites that rarely were hyper-focused on clarity or efficiency of communication. It's only recent years where that has become such singular focus, and in turn has created a sentiment that UI and web/app experiences have lost their charm.

Many of the currently popular marketing site designers in the design community do come from UI/UX and web-design backgrounds, and they are popular because they design over-the-top big-text animation-filled websites that catch your eye.

The core of UI design is not "clarity". That is one adjective you can aim for, and you will find a wide range of opinions on what it means and how to measure whether you were successful or not. But "user interface/experience" does not imply it HAS to be an efficient one. Some UI/UX is designed for delight and delight alone.

The person you are replying to got into the industry with the same attitude most UI/UX designers I know had starting out. The people who approach it with your attitude have mostly been engineers. In the end most meet somewhere in a happy middle.
Look at govdeals.com for stuff from universities, they seem to sell a lot of their surplus hardware there.
Scott wasn't an anarchist either - hence "Two Cheers" instead of three. He worked for the CIA in the 1960s, self-identified as a "crude Marxist" at best, didn't believe it was possible or necessary to eliminate the state - which he described as a rare but potential force for good - and was a frequent donor to the Democrats.

http://barcelona.indymedia.org/newswire/display/536292
Llama’s code is open source: https://github.com/meta-llama/llama3/blob/main/llama/model.p...
How do you find such things? In person or online somewhere?
Alot of getting hired into these roles depends on your upbringing/perceived social class by the people at the fund, the school you went to, how you present yourself, whether they want to work with you, how trustworthy you are, etc. The technical pieces are pretty far behind.
> We’re releasing Llama 3.1 405B, the first frontier-level open source AI model, as well as new and improved Llama 3.1 70B and 8B models.

Bravo! While I don't agree with Zuck's views and actions on many fronts, on this occasion I think he and the AI folks at Meta deserve our praise and gratitude. With this release, they have brought the cost of pretraining a frontier 400B+ parameter model to ZERO for pretty much everyone -- well, everyone except Meta's key competitors.[a] THANK YOU ZUCK.

Meanwhile, the business-minded people at Meta surely won't mind if the release of these frontier models to the public happens to completely mess up the AI plans of competitors like OpenAI/Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, etc. Come to think of it, the negative impact on such competitors was likely a key motivation for releasing the new models.

---

[a] The license is not open to the handful of companies worldwide which have more than 700M users.
Windows UI Library
I'm complaining about this on every post here, it's really tiring. Why don't they learn. I hate capacitive controls on pretty much everything.

As a German I'm aware we're falling behind on many fronts regarding technology and innovation. So obviously our automotive industry also was late with taking EVs seriously, and instead of trying to be innovative and deliver a solid product it's mostly "let's copy tesla and try to one-up them". So you get crap like this because touch controls are so modern wow.
While running a small business can be incredibly fulfilling and teach you a ton of adjacent skills that you wouldn’t learn as a SwEng at a FAANG (sales, marketing, …), I find it infinitely more stressful than regular employment.

There’s just so much more responsibility resting on your shoulders. Holidays have never felt the same since I left employment in 2011.

No regrets here, just saying this path is not for everyone and not as accessible as you might think.
> And on a sidenote why are there no beautiful AND well working email clients out there?

I'd say Thunderbird is a pretty good email client
cool! i want this for safari please. is that an easy port?
You can fine tune the models, and you can modify binaries. However, there is no human readable "source" to open in either case. The act of "fine tuning" is essentially brute forcing the system to gradually alter the weights such that loss is reduced against a new training set. This limits what you can actually do with the model vs an actual open source system where you can understand how the system is working and modify specific functionality.

Additionally, models can be (and are) fine tuned via APIs, so if that is the threshold required for a system to be "open source", then that would also make the GPT4 family and other such API only models which allow finetuning open source.
Show HN: Causal Cities: Tracking policy changes across US
Same here, have used trunk for over year and find it very easy to work with. I use it with egui and it has made distribution of my stuff really easy.
Interview with Mark Zuckerberg released today: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2024-07-23/mark-zucker...
CrowdStrike is a publicly traded company; no one is coming after the founders or the CEO for money they have cashed out via stock sales, prior to the event. So it's not a great example.

A better example is simply having your business evaporate overnight while you have a building/offices to pay for, employees to pay, etc. Which happened to someone I know back in the early days of Windows NT: his servers and desktops that he built, worked under NT but then a service pack for NT 3.51 broke everything; overnight his contract with a large local hospital went away; that a few months later the next service pack fixed the issues, meant nothing to his former customers. He went from making the equivalent of $250K today to approximately zero.
Definitely! It's a great idea and something I've been trying out. So far I've tested typical bounding volume hierarchies and spatial acceleration structures in 1-d (e.g, some of the cache friendly quadtree designs applied to 1d, r-trees, k-d trees) but they weren't able to outperform my simple ordered map yet unfortunately.
They likely don’t know every country’s tax code and instead of confidently spreading misinformation like the above commenter, this commenter is being careful to only state facts they actually do know.
What about distributed training on volunteer hardware? Is that feasible?
> A GPU cluster might not be the correct investment, but a strategic investment in increasing, for example, the availability of training data, or interoperability of tools, or ease of use for building, training, and distributing models would probably pay big dividends

Would you mind expanding on these options? Universal training data sounds intriguing.
There's already at least one project that attempts this:

https://github.com/exo-explore/exo
You make it sound so easy. I've ran small businesses for most of my career and I've never made more than a quarter of what I currently make working as a contractor (ironically, for a business I once started, now owned by someone else). And most of the time I earned 5-10% of that.
No. But I do want to limit the amount we reward NVIDIA for calling the shots correctly to maximize the benefit to society. For instance by reducing the duration of the government granted monopolies on chip technology that is obsolete well before the default duration of 20 years is over.

That said, it strikes me that the actual limiting factor is fab capacity not nvidia's designs and we probably need to lift the monopolies preventing competition there if we want to reduce prices.
Yet more spam from me:

Clojure - thread-last: https://clojure.org/guides/threading_macros

CL - The loop macro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4tmF_1nZng

Guile - Ideal for SICP: https://github.com/zv/SICP-guile?tab=readme-ov-file#language
>If we're having to say that the only reason someone ever would work a specific job is because it's an alternative to homelessness then that's on the job at that point.

I think that is a major motivation for most work and I question if it is as bad as you think it is? Is it really that unreasonable that someone do something they don't like to get shelter, food, and healthcare?

>But would I continue working my SWE job for my current salary, easily.

Would you do it if your take home income was reduced by 50% to pay other people who choose not to work?

How small would the difference between working full time and full retirement have to be before you considered it?
That's not the training code, just the inference code. The training code, running on thousands of high-end H100 servers, is surely much more complex. They also don't open-source the dataset, or the code they used for data scraping/filtering/etc.
if you refuse a higher paying job because you would like to work for something you're passionate about, you are explicitly valuing your passion at at least the delta between the job offers.
Maybe its Stockholm syndrome after ~4-5 years of TypeScript, but I like knowing "this method call is going to do I/O somewhere" (that its red).

To the point where I consider "colorless functions" to be a leaky abstraction; i.e. I do a lot of ORM stuff, and "I'll just call author.getBooks().get(0) b/c that is a cheap, in-memory, synchronous collection access ... oh wait its actually a colorless SQL call that blocks (sometimes)" imo led to ~majority of ORM backlash/N+1s/etc.

Maybe my preference for "expressing IO in the type system" means in another ~4-5 years, I'll be a Haskell convert, or using Effect.ts to "fix Promise not being a true monad" but so far I feel like the JS Promise/async/await really is just fine.
The work that you do is also different. The level of engg at your avg startup never evolves beyond CRUD shit shovelling. At FAANG its a different story at virtually all levels.

For example at your avg startups you worry about which latest GraphQL technology to learn. As Staff at a FAANG you realize how the graphQL engines work and can pretty much critique the design choices made in each. A Staff at avg startup is more like L5 at Google or L6 at Amazon.

Having said that, relaize that if you become that good at the craft, its better to found a tech startup. Take the example of DGraph if you are looking for a blueprint. You have got founders advantage because of your deep expertise. And tbh, its in the Faang's interest to keep you on the payroll.
Your comment made me dig out my BHS, since i had not counted in Hebrew since my Masters 20 years ago. Biblical Hebrew also spells out numbers, but in a slightly mixed order of the 2 systems: six and forty thousand and five of hundreds (Num 1:21), nine and fifty thousand and three of hundreds ( 1:23 ).
Hope people realize Google will shutdown its domain service eventually
That is just the inference code. Not training code or evaluation code or whatever pre/post processing they do.
Show HN: Slab – A programmable markup language for generating HTML