skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People constantly bring this point up every 2 weeks here, the cost competitiveness of TPUs for Google comes exactly from the fact they make them in house and don't sell them. They don't need sales channels, support, leads, any of that stuff. They can design for exactly one software stack, one hardware stack, and one set of staff. You cannot just magically spin up a billion-dollar hardware company overnight with software, customers, sales channels and support, etc.

Nvidia has spent 20 years on this which is why they're good at it.

> If it was separate to Google then there a bunch of companies who would happily spend some money on a real, working NVidia alternative.

Unfortunately, most people really don't care about Nvidia alternatives, actually -- they care about price, above all else. People will say they want Nvidia alternatives and support them, then go back to buying Nvidia the moment the price goes down. Which is fine, to be clear, but this is not the outcome people often allude to.
It's probably from floor to floor, so you need to subtract the thickness of the floor, and you probably need to subtract enough height for all the infrastructure as well.
I don't worry about that much at all, because my experience of learning is that you inevitably have to reconsider the fundamentals pretty often as you go along.

High school science is a great example: once you get to university you have to un-learn all sorts of things that you learned earlier because they were simplifications that no longer apply.

Terry Pratchett has a great quote about this: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/1/terry-pratchett/

For fields that I'm completely new to, the thing I need most is a grounding in the rough shape and jargon of the field. LLMs are fantastic at that - it's then up to me to take that grounding and those jargon terms and start building my own accurate-as-possible mental model of how that field actually works.

If you treat LLMs as just one unreliable source of information (like your well-read friend who's great at explaining things in terms that you understand but may not actually be a world expert on a subject) you can avoid many of the pitfalls. Where things go wrong is if you assume LLMs are a source of irrefutable knowledge.
Are dendritic sub-compartments necessary to explicitly model, or does this work just imply that biological neurons are complicated and are better modeled as a multi-layered artificial network, rather than a single simple computational unit?

Similarly, do you think that spiking networks are important, or just a specific mechanism used in the brain to transmit information, which dense (or sparse) vectors of floats do in artificial neural networks?
In a just society where private corporations didn't attempt to own everything in existence, there are no ethical social issues in my mind.

LLMs just use the commons, and should only be able to be owned by everyone in society.

The problem comes in with unaccountable private totalitarian institutions. But that doesn't mean the technology is an ethical social issue, it's the corporations who try to own common things like the means of production that is the problem.

Yes, there's the pragmatic view of the society we live in, and the issues that it contains, but that's the ethical issue that we need to address.

Not that we can as a society create LLMs based on the work of society.
I should've added it :(
Mongol rule in Russia posed no serious threat to western Europe in terms of imperial conquest. The horde was fragile on its western frontiers. Steppe invasions and conflicts on the east between the Mongols and Chinese empires shaped that area for millenia. Russia, as an outlier, if we consider it a part of Europe, is uniquely exposed to the steppes in a similar way to China. The Mongol threat to greater Europe, however, was not that great. The tactics, ecology, and technologies, that made them a remarkable threat would not have been effective in western Europe during the same time periods.

It's certainly an interesting "could have been", but you need to move very far away from what actually happened to make it a convincing possibility.
Fair point, the robot could lower its nozzle to the ground and jet the water there, much like a human would, with probably not a lot of changes required. That does seem like it would be a good optimization.
One way to achieve verifiability is through deniable tracking numbers computed locally in network-disconnected devices. To ensure that they are deniable, they can only be computed after all tracking numbers along the votes are made publically available, which can be realised by publishing a secret code that the voter inputs into the device. That way, when the coercer/briber asks for a vote to be cast in a certain way, the voter can select another tracking number from a public list and show it to them. Meanwhile, computation on the device ensures that it does not have access to resulting tracking numbers and corresponding votes with which it could deceive the voter. Meanwhile, the cryptographic proofs ensure that every voter has one unique tracking number. This is the general idea of the Selene system.
Yeah, support is a big source of friction for us right now. The money-back guarantee serves as a filtering mechanism so that we focus on people who evidence some degree of seriousness.

But you're right that a free trial would produce more sign-ups and conversions, potentially enough to offset the additional support costs once we're in a better position to handle them (or once the product is better at preventing the need for them). Definitely something to think about in the future.
[OT] That's how you do a cookie acceptance dialog, if there must be one. Good job, McGill.
Cheaper launch system means you can afford more missions, or do the same missions for less money. A smaller budget probably means less risk of Congress cutting your funding.

On the other hand, the space shuttle was the coolest thing imaginable in the 80s. It was crazy that it could launch like a rocket and land like an airplane.

My opinion now is that it was an unnecessarily complex, highly inefficient launch system.

The issue that I have is that there should have been no requirement to carry cargo on the shuttle. Launch cargo on big dumb rockets, and launch and return people using a fancy space plane. The space plane would be smaller and likely not need booster rockets.
This issue will go away with time, right now there are a few reasons for this issue.

1. EA does not have enough charger stalls, there is a lot of demand but utilites make it hard to build so they take a lot of time.

2. Some people are new to EVs and have charge anxiety / dont really understand how it works, they will get it in time.

3. Some people have free charging so they charge until 100% because its free, companies introduced these programs to sell cars and as these programs expire (usually 2 or 3 years max after purchase of the vehicle) it will get better.

We are still in the beginning process of adopting this tech and there will be some growing pains but we will get there.

Note: The one thing I can't understand is why Elon is handicapping the supercharger expansion. Tesla has by far the best charging experience and their chargers are packed. Now is the time where they can swoop in and take over the market. They can even spin out supercharging as an independent company and take it public.
Someone’s going to rebuy at a lower price later
I wonder, with modern math programming knowledge, would it be possible to get the DSP-1 games optimized enough to run without the DSP?

I've seen better ways to do things like SIN lookup tables lately that weren't common knowledge in the mid-90s.
> It’s not clear that Musk was involved in the account’s suspension, but Rocketto and Nellis aren’t all that crazy to think that the X CEO might be behind it.

Good question... what's the real story?
Ask HN: What qualities define the ideal candidate for a remote job?
I am looking for a remote job in the future. I am in my 4th year of college. I can ship both the frontend and backend of a website. I have made projects using APIs and have used local LLMs for one project. I contributed a PR to an open-source project, which was accepted. I know Python very well and can build websites using Next.js and React. I am familiar with data structures and can operate virtual machines. I know how to use buckets and host websites.
I have a solid foundation but want to advance to the next level. I don't need a roadmap but want to understand what remote job employers are looking for and continue in that direction. I have many choices and want to make the best decision for myself.

For reference, my GitHub PR was about specifying generic types in Java for an open-source systems management solution. I have built two rags: one interacts with YouTube videos using a local machine to have conversations about the videos with a local LLM, and the other was an essay evaluation using the OpenAI API. I know I should have more projects on my portfolio, but I am working on it.

My future projects include building a compiler from scratch, creating a website to enhance my understanding of React hooks and Next.js SSR, and developing a program to play Mini Metro using new algorithms and possibly neural nets.

What should I focus on to become stronger in my field and make the best choices for my career?
A separate concern I have is that Web sites running ReCaptcha often require leaking privacy-invasive information to Google, in the course of using the site.

Not only does Google presumably usually know exactly who you are when you visit that site, but even if you normally block other Google hidden Web trackers, you can't block the ReCaptcha tracker, so in some cases Google can have a very good idea of what you do on the site.

So, while this browser extension might relieve some of the visible annoyance, it doesn't relieve the more insidious problem.
Make sure you note down what you're doing each time the cat dies and hand the report to your supervisor at the end of each week
It makes sense especially for tech; what difference does it -really- make if your engineers are working in an office cubicle or at their home office? It's all just sitting at a computer.

I personally mourn the loss of a proper full-time office lifestyle, because I've always been remote, and now I will never know what it's like (hybrid is a joke because you're in the office but you still have to get on zoom calls).

But I do understand it.
That's not what it says on that article. According to their PDF, Private Relay also covers apps:

https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/iCloud_Private_Relay_Over...
Why are the vast majority of people so apathetic about this? I really don't understand why it's just a bunch of DRM activists, and a bunch of people who make a shit ton of money by using the law like this are the only ones that care. Why is the huge mass in the middle so disinterested?
Calendar.

(Not a mistake the github page makes)
Huh. Never would have guessed. I am sure there were many “fancy” effects in the game, but during my playthrough, it all felt like it would have been achievable on a SNES.
> I can’t find information on what subjects they teach.

See mathacademy.com/courses
I'm not sure how much we can assign blame for US programming employment to LLMs. I think that's more due to a lot of companies going through a "correction" after over-hiring during Covid.

As for "their bosses to get full products out of chatbots": my current thinking on that is that an experienced software engineer will be able to work faster with and get much higher quality results from working with LLMS than someone without any software experience. As such, it makes more sense economically for a company to employ a software engineer rather than try to get the same thing done worse and slower with cheaper existing staff.

I hope I'm right about this!
Maybe you like gardening but also want to vacation during the summer. The overhead of having to water every day can be a chain for doing other things you love.
I’m also surprised by this…

They’re usually known for high quality research, not fluff like this…
The real question is whether those bagholders will make as much as Berkshire did holding the same stock.
You can or at least historically could buy access to TPUs and request it for non-profit projects too through the TPU research programme. Certainly you have been able to pay for pro membership on Notebook to get TPU access, which is how many of the AI generation before ChatGPT learned to run AI. TPUs however were kind of always for training, never geared for inference.
> We regularly ran test elections with the deaf and blind community.

Already a solved problem, e.g.:

> On election day and at advance polls, your polling station will have tactile and braille voting templates that you can use to mark your ballot. Simply fit your ballot into the template and use the braille and embossed numbers to find the space next to your chosen candidate's name.

* https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=spe/to...
Better to start with 64bit registers these days, it's rare to find a 32 bit system when you are just starting out learning assembly.

The "Write great code" series of books is a must read for those interested in low and "high" level concepts.
No need to wonder if you read the review. "The title of the book is taken from the darkly comedic sci-fi movie of the same name from 50 years ago."
Writing computer software, mostly.
So you're saying that Russia has some inherent, indisputable & permanent claim over all theory territory of every single country that surrounds it? And attempt by the people living in those regions to do anything about that is an unprovoked and direct attack on Russia...

(just like Germany in the 30s)
I wonder how this plays given the fearful/greedy rule.
I don't think it was mentioned in the repo readme, but this will most likely get your account banned. Be careful
I specifically addressed the claim that compiler optimization are worthless. I did not addressed the other claims in the article.

In particular, however, Rust relies a lot on Undefined Behavior to optimize well. It manages to hide it (mostly) in the surface language, but in the IR they are necessary to perform well.
I have a possible workaround for the "how can I pay for things" part: don't use Goopple wallet, carry a card (and maybe some cash)?

Tap to pay is your phone emulating an iso14443 smart card, which is what a contactless bank card is. Carrying a card is of course another thing to carry, but on the plus side they don't need charging every 24h and they won't be old tech next year when the iPhoxel n+1 incrementally better edition is released.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13328926>
4 months is not enough time to draw hard conclusions
I'm just unconvinced that UI experts know what good user interface is given the utter monstrosities UI experts create, or advise others to create.

The whole field is trend-driven, to the point good advice becomes bad and vice-versa on a cycle. For example, voice activation is now trendy, despite being known as a horrible UI and not accessible besides; it struggles with accent, dialect, and speech dysfluency, but it's in fashion, so it must be a good interface, right? Previous gurus, such as Jef Raskin, are ignored, and regressions (flat UI) are held up as progress.
> Trump did nothing of that sort for four years

This just isn't true. Look at how he proposed to force the sale of Tiktok USA to Microsoft: purely dictatorial. And there was an enormous amount of pure strongman talk, which is a harbinger of dictatorialism.

He wasn't merely "grossly negligent" on January 6th, and anyone sane knows that. Simply because: there is no legal way the Vice President could intervene.

Everything that happened on January 6th was planned, promoted (including by Trump -- "will be wild") and deliberately focussed to put pressure on Pence to act illegally. "Mike Pence didn't have the courage".

Trump even wanted armed people to be able to gather in the protest (because they weren't coming for him).

> If Trump was left alone after losing 2020, I'm pretty sure people would have moved on

Except with all the bits where he and his campaign tried everything possible including illegal means to stay in power, on a multi-state basis.

Normal presidents don't ring up the people who run elections and ask them to "find" votes.
It would be a management nightmare in addition to almost certainly getting blocked (maybe some chance under a Trump administration...?)
> Skepticism means steering clear of gullibility. That being said, it doesn’t mean denying good science, nor should it invite cynicism.

The right tool for dealing with marketing claims, as an individual, should in fact be cynicism, and not skepticism.

Or perhaps:

If you don't need it: cynicism cranked to 11, with vibrato.

If you need something like it: skepticism.
Happy user of Andrew Moffat's https://sh.readthedocs.io for over a decade.
Do you think that NVidia is happy to not have an online ecosystem to tie to its GPUs, for added (sales) value? They are more than happy to entangle the GPUs with their proprietary CUDA language.

For a large, established, quasi-monopoly company it's always more attractive to keep things inside their walled gardens. Suggesting that Google should start supporting TPUs outside Google Cloud is like suggesting that Apple should start supporting iOS on non-Apple hardware.
I think the bears are vastly underestimating the size and power of the moat (or garden wall) that Apple has built. Apple's brand loyalty is ludicrously high, but even the people who don't care that much about the brand are way more trapped in the ecosystem than most people realize. Seeing a heavy Apple user try switching to Linux on their laptop was a real eye opener for me.

I'm bullish on Apple stock because they could afford to go a very long time without huge wins, and still be wildly powerful and in control of the tech lives of a huge percentage of the population. Apple also iterates and polishes over time until it's the best, and they have plenty of time. Going bearish on Apple is a bad move IMHO.
Feed the war victims that every candidate will keep increasing, match donations for food not pointless things.
Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41147381
If you want to take a look at a more professional grade tool (used by webscraping companies, with API access), take a look at NopeCha

https://github.com/NopeCHALLC/nopecha-extension
thanks - in that vein there's also freeDOS. but I assume if someone had built a learning OS they could make it much smaller?

haven't tried:

http://randomcomputerbits.blogspot.com/2008/02/tutorial-inst...
What's terrible is that some people I know are getting RTO mandate. The problem is, all of their team members are remote workers. No RTO for them, because they were hired far away from the office. So my mates (2 of them) have to go into the office just to talk to their colleagues over Slack.

There is no logic in RTO for most tech workers. I'm glad they're backtracking.

Edit: spelling
Stop trying to mimic brains. Do what works best for transistors.
I was reading about Keraites recently:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keraites

Some of the invading Mongols were Christians, with a particular reverence for the biblical Magi (the three wise men), and Genghis Kahn, and his son, and his grandson Kublai Khan, all married into this group.
The issue in my mind is that productivity is more a function of the individual and the culture than it is a function of working in the office vs remotely.
For one-to-one messages, SMS is mostly OK. Group chat via MMS is a bad experience. Group chat via internet-based chat like iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc... is a good experience.

Now the obvious solution is for the group to pick a cross-platform chat app and use that, but it's weirdly difficult to get a group of people to do that. Sometimes they would rather exclude someone from the group than switch apps, which might suggest that the excluded person needs better friends.
It lets you see the raw underlying packets like IN, OUT, SETUP, DATA0/1, etc. That capability would be most useful for USB device firmware developers who might want to see these packets to track down an issue with the DATA0/1 toggling or something like that which wouldn’t be visible in a higher-level software trace like USBpcap or usbmon.

Also, it lets you sniff USB traffic of a different host machine, e.g. USB communication between a game console and a USB controller.
Oh yes. Books like Primo Levi “If This Is a Man” are good to read. Also some can you into deep depression… it’s important to be careful to let the door to your mind opened to anything.
Flash had numerous issues. The processing power available (especially on a PSP) is more than enough to be “good”, the problem with flash _performance_ is the power usage while achieving that perf. Even on laptops flash was a significant battery life drain whenever it was running, having it on all websites would kill battery life while browsing on a phone.
> like your well-read friend who's great at explaining things in terms that you understand but may not actually be a world expert on a subject

I guess part of my problem with using them this way is that I am that well-read friend.

I know how the sausage is made, how easy it is to bluff a response to any given question, and for myself I tend to prefer reading original sources to ensure that the understanding that I'm conveying is as accurate as I can make it and not a third-hand account whose ultimate source is a dubious Reddit thread.

> High school science is a great example: once you get to university you have to un-learn all sorts of things that you learned earlier because they were simplifications that no longer apply.

The difference between this and a bad mental model generated by an LLM is that the high school science models were designed to be good didactic tools and to be useful abstractions in their own right. An LLM output may be neither of those.
We’re doing a three day in office, two day work from home split. I think it works out pretty well.

I do see an advantage being in office with juniors and interns. I definitely learned a lot when I was junior being able to ask the senior staff questions without having to schedule a zoom meeting or wait slowly on slack replies.

5 day RTO would be insane tho.
You're right, I missed that context, but your comment still came across as dismissive and critical, and for a post like this one it's especially important not to do that.
I do sometimes miss working out of an office with my coworkers, but I don't miss the hour plus commute, the constant taps on the shoulder, spending too much money on coffee and lunch, etc. The collaborative nature of the office is hard to replicate remotely, though not impossible, and I think it's genuinely good for us to have human contact throughout the day.
Adobe was well into the development of AS 4.0, then scrapped it after Steve Jobs' psyop.
You may be right about the article but I was talking about your HN comments.
NetHSM Software 2.0: New Namespaces, 900% Speed Gain
For big sites I agree, but for small to medium it's clear to me. The amount of shit thrown your way drops dramatically with a captcha in the way. It's enough to stop the barely interested scanners/attackers, which in my experience is a huge number of people.
I miss having an office with a door.

I also really miss my lab. I used to run what could be summed up as a giant advanced makerspace: we had chemistry fume hoods, a machine shop, electronics, hydraulic lifts, cranes, etc ... it was a really fun environment.

Cubes and open spaces suck.
That's a whole browser, it doesn't make me very hopeful for what I'd like to see...
The books I've read are like the meals I've eaten. I can't recall very many of them in particular, but even so they are what I'm made of.