skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And at off-peak hours, almost all the stops are optional at least from what I've seen in Chicago.

Do you not have schedules at bus stops? If you skip almost all the bus stops you'll be like 10 minute early at the first non-empty bus stop, so you'll have to wait for these 10 minutes there (or you depart early which makes people miss their bus).

Potentially you'll be blocking the bus stop for these 10 minutes for other buses.

Why not split these 10 minutes between the empty bus stops instead?
A huge fraction (not 100%, but maybe 80%) of my frustration in trying to get technical people to use a database is that they have such a hard time understanding JOINs.

People endlessly want hacks, workarounds, and un-normalized data structures, for a single reason - they don't want to have to think about JOIN. It's not actually for performance reasons, it's not actually for any reason other than it's easier to imagine a big table with lots of columns.

I'm actually sympathetic to that reticence but what I am not sympathetic about is this: why, in 2024, can't the computer figure out multi-table joins for me?

Unless your schema is really fucked up, there should only be one or two actually sensible ways to join across multiple tables. Like say I have apples in boxes in houses. I have an apple table, a box table, and a house table. apples have a box_id, boxes have a house_id. Now I want to find all the apples in a house. Do two joins, cool. But literally everyone seems to write this by hand, and it means that crud apps end up with thousands of nearly identical queries which are mostly just boringly spelling out the chain of joins that needs to be applied.

When I started using SQLAlchemy, I naively assumed that a trivial functionality of such a sophisticated ORM would be to implement `apple.join(house)`, automatically figuring out that `box` is the necessary intermediate step. SQLAlchemy even has all the additional relationship information to figure out the details of how those joins need to work. But after weeks of reading the documentation I realized that this is not a supported feature.

In the end I wrote a join tool myself, which can automatically find paths between distant tables in the schema, but it seems ludicrous to have to homebrew something like that.

I'm not a trained software engineer but it seems like this must be a very generic problem -- is there a name for the problem? Are there accepted solutions or no-go-theorems on what is possible? I have searched the internet a lot and mostly just find people saying "oh we just type out all combinatorially-many possible queries"... apologies in advance if I am very ignorant here
Thanks. What sparked my curiosity is while I'm writing code even a small mistake in the most simple programs can cost me tens or hundreds of milliseconds whereas behind a simple flushing to disk command there is so much happening at so many layers all in sub-millisecond or at most in a couple of seconds.
Once you have SQL, you have datalog. Once you have datalog, you have SQL. The problem isn't the target, it is getting sufficiently rigorous and structured output from the LLM to target anything.
But sci-hub stopped adding new articles years ago. It's significantly less useful than it used to be.
> Prove that the problem wasn't seen by them in other form.

You can reduce that risk to arbitrarily low levels by trying multiple random grammars of some complexity. This is a weak argument.

> Oh, come on. It's like rewriting the same program in another programming language with different variables.

No, it's like following a grammar, but that requires reasoning about a set of rules it has not seen before. I don't think you understood the task I described as well as ChatGPT does.

> What it can't do is to create a concept of programming language, I'm not talking about a new programming language, I'm talking about the concepts.

Neither can most humans.

And have you tried to ask it about these concepts? I've had it infer semantics of code in programming languages that don't exist based on a hypothetical sample several times, and they're pretty good at coming up with semantics that makes sense. In one instance I gave it a sample with an idea about what made sense to me but it inferred a better set of semantics.

None of the papers you linked supports your claim.
+1

For example, BigQuery has natural support for arrays and nested data, and it's quite nice / essential for good data modeling. For example, "tags" can be stored as `Array<Struct<Key, Value>>`, and this can be used to implement things like, "search with fields with particular tags".

This reduces the cognitive burden of remembering which tables join with which, especially if we know that a relationship is solely relevant in one context. I.e. Tags can only be joined to the main table, and no other joins are sensical.
Founded by a friend of mine .. to early to market, similar ai powered product today would be the ms recall for your life.
If they were staying up for hours debugging, then they were also probably too tired to see the forest for the trees anymore. Simple exhaustion is sufficient to cause people to go on autopilot and follow trails that lead nowhere, or to just stare at nothing for minutes. Unless it's about life or death (or financial ruin), it's smarter to call it a day in such a situation. Or to at least do a powernap.
In the case of flights, isn't it rare that it is a single employee or just a couple of employees that are tasked or held responsible for the flight taking off on time?

Funny story though, veering a little OT, but recently I had to haul ass from one end of the airport to the other due to arriving on a delayed flight with a connecting flight with a different airline. As I was about to enter the airplane, after getting my boarding pass scanned, completely drenched in sweat, the flight attendant saw me and said the captain wanted to see me and ushered me into the cockpit. I found myself in the cockpit, where the captain proceeded to talk to me in the local foreign language while I was thinking, "Wtf, isn't it illegal for me to be in here after 9-11?" I then started repeating, in the local language, that I didn't understand them. But that didn't have the desired effect intially and they kept talking. I repeated myself both in their language and English until the captain finally said, in English, "Are you a passenger?" When I said yes, he told me I could sit down.

When I sat down, the only rational explanation that I could come up with was that despite being in civilian clothes I was mistaken for a pilot. Not just any pilot, but one of the pilots that was supposed to be in the cockpit. I could only conjecture that he was a no-show and that they had to bring in a substitute to replace him which caused the plane to be delayed and allowed me to make the flight.

Any commercials pilots are free to correct my -- which normally should be a very silly -- theory. If it could possibly be true though, being the no-show pilot in that situation might be a little stressful.
https://archive.is/2024.08.20-091835/https://www.smh.com.au/...
That quote does not support your claim, and if you think it does, then I question your ability to reason.
Ha.

My partner (who moved to Houston around middle school age) and her mom both call it the feeder, but I always assumed it was a midwest thing since mom's side of the family is all from Michigan.

That said, the old Harvard Dialect survey does suggest this is fairly widespread (though definitely more common in the Houston area): http://dialect.redlog.net/staticmaps/q_99.html
When I caught a movie after not watching them on German TV for a few years, I noticed a terrible new thing: ads in the middle of scenes. In one very memorable one, 2 guys are waiting for a girl at the airport. One of them says "There she is!" Cut to: not the girl going through the arrivals door, but a beer ad!

I turned the TV off and walked away...
I genuinely consider two of my greatest accomplishments to be building a game and composing a song.

Neither are very impressive, but in both cases, I ended up having to simply decide I was done and stop working on them. I could continue making changes indefinitely, adding little improvements and such every day, but they were also complete as they were. Once I learned to be okay with that and move on, I learned what finishing a project really meant (or at least one form of it).
Sure. But in that case it is somewhere between map(car)-and-friends and LOOP.

Which is a situation where they add very little. Being able to use them as an intermediate step wherever data flows is probably the only place I use them myself. In channels, in file-readers etc. in places where you really need speed you should of course reach for whatever loop construct you prefer.
All Kahneman's system 2 thinking is just slow deliberate thinking. And these models do indeed have this characteristic to an extent, as evidenced with chain of thought reasoning.

You can see this in action with multiplication. Much like humans when asked to guess the answer, they'll get it wrong, unless they know the answer from rote learning multiplication tables, this System-1 thinking. In many cases when asked they can reason further and solve it, by breaking it down and solving it step by step, much like a human, this is system-2 thinking.

In my opinion, it seems nearly everything is there for it it to take the next leap in intelligence, it's just putting it all together.
Lots of folks of Italian ancestry, around here.

I hear the word used, often.
TLDR: Zed is pretty sweet. Amodei doesn’t have a next model on raw capability.
> the most advanced AI cannot reliably determine which of two floats is bigger

Some of the most advanced AI are tool users and can both write and crucially also execute python, and embed the output in their responses.

> or even solve really simple logic puzzles for little kids.

As given in a recent discussion: https://chatgpt.com/share/ee013797-a55c-4685-8f2b-87f1b455b4...

(Custom instructions, in case you're surprised by the opening of the response).
I’ve seen copilot spit out garbage dozens of lines long for something I swore must be one or two stdlib functions. Yep, it was, after reading some real documentation and using my brain. It was some NodeJS stuff, which I never work with. Don’t get me wrong, I still find it a helpful tool, but it is not at all a good, seasoned programmer— it is an algorithm predicting the next token based on the current tokens.
I often login to my bank to copy an account number when I need it. I don’t like to rely on typing it correctly. This change would kill that. Sure, I could use OCR on the image, but that isn’t 100% perfect, like a text copy is.

They will also likely just come up with a small tweak on the scam if there is a change like this. I’ve watched some of the videos where they pull up a command prompt and run a script where the user is entering the amount to transfer into the CLI. When they type the amount the scammer slips in an extra 0 before the user presses enter. If someone is going to fall for entering their info into a strange black box with text, they will fall for literally anything. The scammer could simply delete the image on the page so the balance doesn’t show and say there is a bug… or delete the image and replace it with text, even if it looks off, the type of person being targeted won’t catch it.
I saw his book on the shelf today. Dipped into a bit. Felt like the latest incarnation of guys like von Daeniken or Hancock. Looks like a hard pass.
Yeah, I can see this being something to splurge on once in a while. It's nice to trade dollars for convenience.

OTHO, everything you've mentioned can still be closely replicated at home, just start your movie after food gets delivered to your house and buy the snacks ahead of time. I have a recliner at home and the middle arm-drawer is full of snacks.
> Cheating is widespread because there are people in those courses who aren't interested in the material

I think academic cheating is partially due to Goodhart's Law. In other words, grades have become the target, and are no longer a good assessment of understanding. An easy way to get rid of cheating would be to get rid of grades. However, grades are too ingrained in our system for them to be removed any time soon.

I am not saying that assessments and evaluations should be completely eradicated. I just think assessments should be more holistic. By that, I mean that assessing a student's ability should be more contingent on personalized evaluations, a pass/fail system, and should involve more apprenticeships/mentoring opportunities with those more experienced. Much like in the times of yore.
Gimp 3.0 Enters String Freeze, Inching Closer to Release
It's hard to believe that after reading them, any reasonable person would think they support the extremely strong claim you made above.

> They clearly show that they fake reasoning

They do nothing of the sort.
I already have a job, my side projects are all about having fun and learning new tricks.
For institutions, it’s that Elsevier gives access to some of the papers their researchers need. The question is then how Elsevier got the papers and I think there’s a bunch of parts to it.

Firstly, it can be by providing a good service. Before the war, most papers were published by learned societies and such societies tended to not be very good publishers – they would be slow with long backlogs and unable to publish the volume of papers scientists wanted published at the time. By providing a faster service they could get papers.

Second it can be by offering a service at all. If you have a Springer journal and an Elsevier journal for some field, they can both get papers because researchers need to publish to advance their careers and one journal will not be big enough for all the papers in that field

Third can be from being a preferred choice by being prestigious, which can matter even without impact factor arithmetic – hiring committees made of peers can still know which journals in the field are more prestigious / harder to be published in, and take that into account when hiring. It’s not totally clear to me how to become prestigious. One way is by inertia – if you were prestigious before you probably still are. Something some publishers (Pergamon Press, but maybe others too?) did was owning and dining prominent scientists to get them to sign exclusive contracts to edit new journals. Perhaps this association via the editorial board could improve the journal’s prestige or otherwise get desirable papers in.

It does seem true to me that scientific publishers used to provide a pretty valuable service, and I think if one were in a government looking at all the government money going to the journals via universities, one might be able to feel that the improvement to the rate of scientific exchange was worth it.

It feels that today, a lot of that value comes from various kinds of inertia/lock-in: Elsevier has the papers and scientists must publish in Elsevier journals to advance their careers, which maintains the prestige of those journals and means the publisher continues to have the papers.
Still there is only one year left of support if you do that.
A summary of HP's win in the UK:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240717060827if_/https://www.ju...

The fraud charges in the US:

https://ia903108.us.archive.org/16/items/gov.uscourts.cand.3...
Texas judge strikes down FTC rule banning noncompete agreements
I just asked Google's Gemini the following question:

Q: How many N's are there in Normation?

A: There is one N in the word "Normation"

Note that the answer is the same when asked n's instead of N's.

And this is but one example of many simple cases demonstrating that these model are indeed not reasoning in a similar manner to humans. However, the outputs are useful enough that I myself use Claude and GPT-4o for some work, but with full awareness that I must review the outputs in cases where factual accuracy is required.
US Judge Strikes Down Ban on Worker 'Noncompete' Agreements
Do you have a reference for that law/tax cut to Social Security? So far as I can tell, it has always had a maximum taxable income component dating back to 1937. I don't see any dramatic increases in the maximum taxable income component, nor do I see a dramatic cut in the rates. Looking at the charts, I don't even see a significant drop in funding other than ~2010, which is probably recession related.

Have you seen graphs like https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/1.png ?

The obvious answer (at least to me) is "the ratio of beneficiaries to contributors is substantially worse than it was in 2000, and it will only get worse in the coming years". In 2000, there were about 23 people withdrawing from SS per 100 people contributing so each worker funded about a quarter of a SS account. In 2022, that had increased nearly 50% to ~32 people withdrawing per 100 contributing, so each worker is funding about a third of a SS. By 2060, we're projected to be at 50:100, so each worker has to fund half of a SS account.

The ratio of retirees to workers has never been worse, and is only going to continue to worsen. It's either going to go bankrupt or grow to be an enormous tax.

Just extrapolating from the current numbers, the average SS monthly payout is current $1,782.74.

We're currently at 32 withdrawers per 100 payers, so 100 payers have to cover $57,047.68/month or $570.48/payer/month.

On a 2060 population curve (no inflation because SSI is indexed to wages, so both sides inflate roughly evenly), there's 51 withdrawers per 100 payers, so at the same monthly payment those 100 payers have to cover $108,747.14/month or $1,087.47/payer/month.

Even removing the income cap entirely doesn't fix that. As of 2017 (the last year I could easily Google data), 84% of earnings were taxed under SS. Removing the cap entirely would only increase SS revenue by ~20%, which only makes it solvent slightly longer. There is no way around the fact that if SS is going to stay solvent, we're going to have to either increase the tax rate substantially (or change how it's applied), decrease the payouts substantially, or change our age curve substantially with birth rates or immigration.

That's why I think they should have reformed it in like the 70s, when the age demographics were much more favorable. Changing age ratios have always been a threat to either make Social Security insolvent or make the Social Security tax balloon to an incredible size.
I never use the bell. I just subscribe and go through my subscribed list to watch videos, and for some I add to my rss reader.
I was more interested in the original authors definition as he called it part of a word salad.

I don't see a problem with some terms as being corporate jargon. That's just shorthand for an idea the same way any slang for a group is shorthand.
Xanax is a benzodiazepine. You get "high" when taking just barely more than instructed. It's addictive. It's abused frequently. I've abused it before. It feels nice.

I would be surprised if you asked your GP "I have mental breakdowns now and then, I'd like some Xanax", and they just handed it out to you. Then again, I don't live in the US, so maybe the doctors there do just dish it out.
This is one of the interview questions at Stripe, and I agree that it was the most "fun" part of the interview
(It is still pretty stressful giving an interview, but magnitude times much less so than converting a BST to doubly linked list, and converting it back )
This article has no explanation of how some parents got "Unauthorised access" to the test results before they were supposed to see them.

The last paragraph links past cases where the education department mistakenly published results early so I'm guessing this is just another case of incompetent gov't IT blaming hackers
>This is a solid objection that I hadn't considered before!

To be quite frank: this strongly suggests that while you put a lot of effort into writing a long article in defense of the SSO tax, you didn't perform more than the most cursory research about why it's a topic of discussion.

This argument is literally above the fold on the two top search results for the term.

>In short: SSO is a core security requirement for any company with more than five employees.

https://sso.tax/

And the other explicitly makes the car-safety analogy:

>Imagine buying a car and the manufacturer asks for an extra payment to unlock 100% of the braking power. Not offering security features if they already exist in your product means a vendor doesn’t care about your security. Our aim is to spotlight vendors who overcharge for security features, in hopes of instigating a change in the industry.

https://ssotax.org/

And to be franker: the word "security" appears exactly once in your entire piece. That's a near-complete avoidance of the actual issue that people are highlighting.

I perfectly understand the rationale behind the pricing model. The point is that "only large enterprises need or care about SSO" is completely wrong-headed and detrimental to the overall security posture of any business customer. That is and should be unacceptable.
I really disagree that releasing a project publicly is a necessary step to deem something done. I have so many projects in my src/ directory that are (in my mind) finished, but that I will never release to the public. I wrote them for my own education and entertainment, not as things that I think the rest of the world would benefit from. And certainly not as a way to build some kind of (ick) -personal brand- among the open source community, or to give me some sense of accountability (to whom?). I don't need GitHub stars or social media thumbs up or hacker news upvotes to measure the worth of something I made.
The US Highway building industry is in many ways a form of a state run social system. First of all the road construction and maintenance uses a huge amount of tax dollars and redistributes it to lower class construction site and road maintenance workers and some engineering bureaus. Secondly it gives everybody equal (highway) transportation access by continuously expanding capacity on existing roads and building new highways to growing towns on the countryside. Poorer people need to buy or rent housing far away on the countryside and highways therefore democratizes their access to the urban centers with lots of jobs.

In the specific case of Texas there's also a toll road system, however this only covers a fraction of the highways in the state and the tolls themselves don't account for all the incurred costs.
This comment is misleading; the youtube video contains these animations but "the fucking article" does not. Please, if you're going to imply criticism that the article went unread, don't mention things that are instead in a video. The url attached to this post is to an article (a transcript), not to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-16RFXr44fY which contains the content you're talking about.

Instead, please consider helpfully linking to the animations[1] you're talking about, so that others can find them without having to waste time listening to content they already read.

1: https://youtu.be/-16RFXr44fY?t=185
Seriously! I've tried a few times off and on and it just isn't something to tackle without having a ton of time and effort and stamina and stubbornness. And then still likely failing.
I think this is a poor understanding and laziness. SQL is type and schema first and people hate that because it makes things hard and complicated up front. Table explosions are rare if you know what you are doing. Many people don't any more.

As for join heavy, complexity, this is not necessarily a problem in reality. It's incredibly easy to scale this out to huge systems (relatively) cheaply.

Believe me as they scale up, they look way less hard and less complicated than arbitrary and poorly enforced schemas in document databases. I could write an essay on how to fuck up MongoDB (or any document store) because I spent nearly 2 years unfucking one.