skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Where I live you can not call yourself an "engineer" at all without a specific university degree.

Same here, but we're still going to call other people engineers because usurping a term already found in the common lexicon and trying to hold it legally hostage is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. The existence of a law does not imply sound reasoning.

> if you do not see the value in distinguishing the career of learning a trade and a getting a degree, I won't convince you otherwise.

If there was such benefit, professional engineering organizations would serve no purpose. In reality, it's the professional organization that brings benefit. After all, you can't take someone's degree away. But you can remove them from being a professional member when they don't abide by the "engineering code", which is where the actual benefit lies.

But if you want to call attention to the degree you hold for whatever arbitrary reason, why not simply say "I have a degree"? Why would "engineer" need to say the same thing? In reality nobody is going to care anyway (they might care if you are a member of a PE organization, though), but if they did for some bizarre reason, they're going to want to see proof, so your word doesn't matter anyway. There is good reason the prevailing definition of engineer does not imply anything of the sort.
I thought "statistically insignificant" meant we couldn't conclude anything. So I was surprised.

[1] says:

> In statistical hypothesis testing,[1][2] a result has statistical significance when a result at least as "extreme" would be very infrequent if the null hypothesis were true

So I understand this journal publishes results for which a hypothesis was tested, found to give insignificant results, which would rule out the hypothesis assuming the research was correctly conducted, without biases in the methodology, with a big enough sample, etc. Which would be worthy to know but no journal usually takes this research because it doesn't make the headlines (which yes, I've always found was a shame).

Do I get this right?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance
It's kind of amazing that we discovered the scientific method, used it to invent the transistor and bring the information revolution.

Yet we still pool scientific results using only the printing press.

It's like we unlocked the tech tree but then got so caught up in chasing citations and peer review that we forgot to use the new tech we invented.
Interesting, but we have to consider this information with skepticism since it comes from Meta. Additionally, merely open-sourcing models is insufficient; the training data must also be accessible to verify the outcomes. Furthermore, tools and applications must be freely deployable and capable of storing and sharing data under our personal control. Self-promotion: We have initiated experiments for an AI-based operating system, check AssistOS.org. We recently received a European research grant to support the improvement of AssistOS components. Contact us if you find our work interesting, wish to contribute, conduct research with us, or want to build an application for AssistOS.
>This is great. It means I won't see Reddit content popping up all over search results in other engines.

Honestly, that makes those other engines way less valuable because for many topics, telling the engine to specifically narrow the results down to reddit comments is the only way to get a decent answer to what you're looking for. I'd definitely support blocking Quora from everything though.
Usually markdown generates HTML. If a Markdown email application doesn't generate HTML from the markdown, what should it generate? Good luck.
At least their domain is descriptive, that article is much to do about nothing -- civil cases aren't criminal cases with a boolean outcome. The award isn't recognition that the life was worth $4, it is a recognition that the defendant did just about nothing wrong.
This shows that CrowdStrike is irredeemable.
I've begun referring to them as ClownStrike, given that so far they have seemed to act more like a bunch of circus clowns than an actual knowledgeable entity.

This tone deaf offer just reinforces the impression that they are just a bunch of clowns.
>why should PhD students do that work?

I think there is some reasonable argument that replicating research is the first step to learning how to do good research on your own. In an ideal world, PhD students should probably be trying to replicate similar work anyway and applying existing approaches own pet problem. In practice, many gloss over this because they are narrowly focused on doing something "new" so it can get published.
Mainly, Euclid didn't want Ambler to put a factory in their bedroom community, so they used (abused) their governmental powers to prevent it. Ironically (or perhaps inevitably) the federal government forced them to accept a General Motors aircraft factory in their town to support the war effort during WWII. There is a historical marker commemorating the Euclid v Ambler decision at the site of the factory.
Here's a very simple example:

A user can have one of two roles: Normal or Admin. You can model this as:

- User = Name x Password x Role
- Role = Normal + Admin

or you can multiply it out and get

- User = Admin or Normal
- Admin = Name x Password
- Normal = Name x Password

Which you should choose depends on the application. The second representation forces you to consider at every step if you have an Admin or Normal user, which is better for security. The first representation is more convenient when you don't care about the role.

I do these transformations a lot when modelling things. They are trivial, but if you don't understand the underlying algebra you might not see them (in the same way the developers who aren't used to sum types tend to be blind to them.)

Does that help?
When it comes to standard text and image content, I'm against scrolling and pro pagination. There is a reason why text scrolls were replaced by books about 700 years ago. We have the technique today to dynamically reflow content to enable pagination. It would be a much improved user experience on all devices, including computers and phones.
We eventually landed a phenomenal real estate agent, who had a great story. She was originally a school teacher, but after getting conned into buying a home with serious defects by a real estate agent who ended up suing her (!), she ended up becoming one to prevent others from falling into the same faith.

She consistently maintained realistic expectations and over delivered, ultimately negotiating a way lower price than asking, and never pushing us in any direction.

Most real estate agents are snakes, but ours was golden.
You can do some really cool things now with these models, like ask them to extract not just the text but figures/graphs as nodes/edges and it works very well. Back when GPT-4 with vision came out I tried this with a simple prompt + dumping in a pydantic schema of what I wanted and it was spot on, pretty much this (before json mode was a supported):

You are an expert in PDFs. You are helping a user extract text from a PDF.

Extract the text from the image as a structured json output.

Extract the data using the following schema:

{Page.model_json_schema()}

Example:
{{
"title": "Title",
"page_number": 1,
"sections": [
...
],
"figures": [
...
]
}}

https://binal.pub/2023/12/structured-ocr-with-gpt-vision/
This article focuses primarily on rules applied to land already designated for residential use.
PhD level-of-task-execution sounds like the LLM will debate whether the task is ethical instead of actually doing it
Air pollution impacts from warehousing in the US uncovered with satellite data
This would almost certainly be more difficult, but I'd love if the diagram's relative sizes (optionally) accounted for the size of the sets' data – e.g. if set A and B have 2 items each with zero overlap, it would show two circles of equal size, completely apart from one another
> Realistically, there are only 2 search engines now.

From the article:

Many alternatives to GBY [Google, Bing, and Yandex] exist, but almost none of them have their own results;

This seems to assert that ~0 other search providers do any crawling at all. Ever. Are we sure that's the case?

(they could crawl but never ever return those results == more odd).
The first bit was already taken at that point. The original 6bit ASCII (or whatever that predecessor was called) only did uppercase. A 7th (and later, 8th) bit was added to give it lowercase.
Abstract:

Regulators, environmental advocates, and community groups in the United States (U.S.) are concerned about air pollution associated with the proliferating e-commerce and warehousing industries. Nationwide datasets of warehouse locations, traffic, and satellite observations of the traffic-related pollutant nitrogen dioxide (NO2) provide a unique capability to evaluate the air quality and environmental equity impacts of these geographically-dispersed emission sources. Here, we show that the nearly 150,000 warehouses in the U.S. worsen local traffic-related air pollution with an average near-warehouse NO2 enhancement of nearly 20% and are disproportionately located in marginalized and minoritized communities. Near-warehouse truck traffic and NO2 significantly increase as warehouse density and the number of warehouse loading docks and parking spaces increase. Increased satellite-observed NO2 near warehouses underscores the need for indirect source rules, incentives for replacing old trucks, and corporate commitments towards electrification. Future ground-based monitoring campaigns may help track impacts of individual or small clusters of facilities.
Integrating Image-to-Text and Text-to-Speech Models (Part 1)
The ECS concerns don't really relate to threading concerns.

I have worked with and without ECS systems both with and without good threading models. ECS writes do create possible issues if write-locks need to be acquired but that isn't usually so big of a deal.
> Getting CSS tables to not overflow in containers is a nightmare.

Is this because the total width/height consumed by a <table> isn't as simple as the normal content/padding/border/margin model?

That table you've created is lovely, nice work!
agreed. I think we are at a unique time in history where the rose tinted glass can even exists. Where children can live sheltered in a low risk reality well into their 20's and then whiplash and disappointment and cynicism hits them like a ton of bricks.

I think that low baseline expectations is very important for mental health and general resilience.
I sell widgets. I promise the incalculable power of widgets has yet to be unleashed on the world, but it is tremendous and awesome and we should all be very afraid of widgets taking over the world because I can't see how they won't.

Anyway here's the sales page. the widget subscription is so premium you won't even miss the subscription fee.
How Phones Are Making Parents the Anxious Generation
I don't search reddit for <product> though I search it for <highly technical issue with product> because reddit is the only place where real people discuss such issues and the solutions to them.
Yes, but usually this happens slowly enough that the chip will be long obsolete before the degredation becomes an issue.
The Future is Cloudless: Fluence's DePIN computing platform
What fraction of the reporting is "CrowdStrike" versus "CloudStrike"? The first reporting I heard was "CloudStrike", but the company appears to be "CrowdStrike".
The Slow, Painful Death of the SoCal Entertainment Ecosystem
Uploading large codebases is particularly useful.
yep, but for things which are "only" search engines it's not a viable offer. Only if you expect "big AI business value" from it does it make sense, maybe.
Eh, with the degradation of coding performance in ChatGPT I made the switch. Seems much better to work with on problems, and I have to do way less hand holding to get good results.

I'll switch again soon as something better is out.
Also (not a joke): intermediate vendors should seriously be preparing audited "CrowdStrike free" certificates at this point.
It took me a long time to get there, but I eventually did - I agree with every one of things that you listed. Fortunately, I have also learned that there are a whole lot of things that you can do to overcome each of those challenges. It does require a good bit of time to research, understand and apply them - as well as some luck.
The extinct Olympic sport that was the 'dullest' of all time
Why not reduce it to 1% and see what happens?

It is possible for this class of approach to be cheaper, but also for this particular implementation to be spending too little.
Wow, perhaps I’m naive but what the hell are they spending over $800M a year on? That seems an obscene amount for a glorified message board.

I just read they have 2000 employees which is also puzzling to me
Well, that's because the potential reward from picking the right horse is MASSIVE and the cost of potentially missing out is lifelong regret. Investors are driven by FOMO more than anything else. They know most of these will be duds but one of these duds could turn out to be life changing. So they will keep bankrolling as long as they have the money.
50 years from now, unclassified documents reveal that crowdstrike was secretly a CIA controlled business which was operating an offensive botnet created for the anticipated cyberwar, with a peacetime cover story of being security software with automatic updates. Everybody rolls their eyes and asks how anybody ever fell for that when the name openly says what it is.

Probably bullshit, but honestly... Wtf is up with the name?
...in the real world, A tells B that he "sourced" the deal and therefore deserves a bigger cut and in the real world, B agrees up to a point (the $30 mark). Over time and rounds of playing the game, the A's of the world learn where the line is and optimize to stay on the correct side of it, only testing the other side 1-2% of the time to see if rules/behavior has changed.
Biological Circuit Design
Hate to be that guy but none of this really matters.

We all know managers get picked by kissing the right ass and siding with the right boss. Which of course makes (most, yes MOST, but not ALL) managers incompetent, or at best barely mediocre by happenstance.
Agreed on everything, but calling the marvel movies slop…I think that word has gone too far.
That's a feature request we get every now and then. It's coming soon!

I haven't yet had time to implement it because I was working on the core pieces of functionality, but as a dark mode user I want to get to that soon.
Curious to know more, which country, how does one get a license, and how do the non-licensed sw-s call themselves?
Anyone know how apparent bot posts like this wind up here? Third one I've seen today, now easy to notice after someone pointed it out on another topic.
If it resulted in an end to single family zoning it would probably still be a net win for nature.
At least five interesting things for the middle of your week (#44)
I've been using SQLite FTS (which is essentially BM25) and it works so well I haven't really bothered with vector databases, or Postgres, or anything else yet. Maybe when my corpus exceeds 2GB...
They had this years ago, and they were called "forums."
ya agree there. but most of those things aren't tradeoffs, aside from a bit of time and money (both of which go back to my original point about why I think the system is not working)
For LLMs, I think every business is currently throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. Nothing wrong with a phase of experimentation for a new technology, and I prefer the $200M spent on training GPT-4 to the $500M spent on advertising the mobile app Monopoly Go, but I could see an eventual contraction in this activity and number of start-ups. I feel as though the challenges of intelligence and non-shallow reasoning may be more of a slow chipping away with incremental progress, fighting against diminishing returns, rather than exponential improvement or a "hard takeoff" that some are expecting.

Generally though, deep learning on large data is undeniably a very useful technique. We've seen huge advances in areas like language translation, voice transcription, OCR, visual defect detection, etc. and will doubtlessly continue to see it applied to a wide range of tasks. If the public and investors sour on "AI", it'll just go by another name as it did before.
I also think the opportunity to build small but helpful gadgets is bigger than finding the perfect SaaS idea. But it’s still not exactly easy to come up with something new. Whenever I see an ingenius product I think to myself „This was obvious, why haven’t I thought of that?“, but oh well.
I think the notion that sometimes things are just "done" is incredibly undervalued in our industry. Frankly I wish a ton of games I play would STOP updating.
Yes, I find that when reading a paper I think to myself "Do the authors really want this to be true?" and if the answer is yes as it often is, I boost my own acceptance criteria to p<.03

Particle physics still uses five sigma as the significance threshold.
Dresden lost about 6 square km utterly. Warsaw lost 100+ square km utterly.
Don't forget airports. Can't help but wonder how many emergency helicopter rides were delayed
Interesting but

>> My guess is that nobody is going to notice this unless they are specifically looking for this technique.

But having two identical PIDs is a pretty weak cloak. Even more so when reducing terminal clutter e.g. run "ps | grep procname" ... anyone not completely asleep is bound to notice it.
I feel the same. I work on a huge meandering system and most of the issues we encounter are caused by the interactions between modules, as you say. I've taken to writing and running "end to end" tests which test the whole process end to end and verify the outputs. Wherever it makes sense to add unit tests for specific contained logic, we do that too.
Hardware engineers – would you rather use a procedural version of labVIEW?
Trying to understand just how convoluted labVIEW's GUI can get. Let's say someone came out with an efficient, procedural, text-based alternative that can integrate with NI hardware - would it be a no-brainer switch?
There was some good discussion about this topic earlier this week, in a different Ask HN thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41046796
Of course, we’ve been allowing confiscation of public land by car owners to store their private property for a century, and it will be politically difficult to argue that housing is more important than free parking.
How the Collapse of India's Vultures Led to Half a Million Human Deaths
The benchmarks agree as well.
I think one of the most critical issues with thinking about ADTs in terms of an algebra is that they lack inverse operations which are otherwise an extremely critical component of how we conceive mathematics. A disjoint union type is formally equivalent to addition, but disunion is never defined, we are given no formal representation of subtraction. The same is given for cognates of division, of logarithms and roots (what those might look like is an interesting, if oft. neglected manner of research)

There's (somewhat) good reasons we don't define these operations, of course. All the same, without being able to represent these inverse operations, the ease of which it maps to familiar notions of the typical algebras we're used to ends up thrown out the window.

The algebra metaphor makes a bit more sense when you move beyond ADTs into more advanced levels of type-theory. Dependent types are a fair bit beyond a mere algebra, instead being more like a complete metalanguage akin to higher-order logic.
it is one alternative, there is plenty others. I'd suggest local storage with onlinebackup of any alerts (timeframes in which an alert occured)
..and the big cute deer (elk or moose) and calves. Let's go feed them...
Floating point precision is not involved (most LLM models still function after floating-point quantization).

I am puzzled that some find this result at all surprising. You simply cannot generate information from nothing.
Great points!

> Not having retros for engineering processes (e.g. does our 80% coverage rule still make sense, should Jenkins be our job runner, etc.)

How is this usually done? Is this suggested by the team and get prioritized based on popularity or some other criteria?

> Trying to solve problems by having engineers "do better", rather than designing and implementing better processes

Can you elaborate on this?
My thesis committee chair bristled when I said I hated the marketing aspect of academic science and I implied that he was a very good marketer because he played the game so well. After I kept making comparison after comparison, he didn't have much to say in response. I would say he begrudgingly accepted my view, but I don't think accepted it at all, he just couldn't refute any point I made.
Lots of replies mention tokens as the root cause and I’m not well versed in this stuff at the low level but to me the answer is simple:

When this question is asked (from what the models trained on) the question is NOT “count the number of times r appears in the word strawberry” but instead (effectively) “I’ve written ‘strawbe’, now how many r’s are in strawberry again? Is it 1 or 2?”.

I think most humans would probably answer “there are 2” if we saw someone was writing and they asked that question, even without seeing what they have written down. Especially if someone said “does strawberry have 1 or 2 r’s in it?”. You could be a jerk and say “it actually has 3” or answer the question they are actually asking.

It’s an answer that is _technically_ incorrect but the answer people want in reality.
Check out the end of the piece! That's just what Carlos Chen does.
Windows July security updates send PCs into BitLocker recovery
Getting in the door at top companies: a data-driven guide for engineers. Part 1
Yes, statistical insignificance doesn't "prove" the null hypothesis, it just fails to reject it. It's a subtle, but sometime misunderstood distinction. It's a measure of how big the effect size is and how often you'd expect to see it just by chance rather than due to the variables you're measuring. If it's a really extreme difference, we expect it to happen less often just by chance alone than if it's a really miniscule difference.

>Which would be worthy to know but no journal usually takes this research because it doesn't make the headlines.

That's usually correct, which gives rise to all kinds of issues like the article talks about. It can result in a lot of wasted time (when you're conducting what you "think" is a new experiment, but it's been done many times but unpublished because it doesn't provide statistically significant results). It provides little incentive for replication, which can lead to stronger conclusions about the results than may be warranted, etc.
kernel-5.14.0-427.13.1.el9_4 broke it. It was released in Apr 30, 2024, with RHEL 9.4 (this was the RHEL 9.4 release kernel).

According to the comments on https://access.redhat.com/solutions/7068083, RHEL became aware of the issue on May 3, 2024.

A workaround was identified (configuring CS to use the kernel module backend instead of the ebpf backend) on May 9, 2024.

RHEL then fixed it in kernel-5.14.0-427.18.1.el9_4, in May 23, 2024.

So the bug was fixed in ~20 days from the moment it was reported.

It's unclear whether this issue was caused by a RHEL-specific backport/patch or was also present in mainline kernels.