skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe I’m crazy, but if a student is able to pass your barrier for acceptable knowledge by using tools easily available to them, what’s the big deal? Fix your knowledge tests at a minimum. Were we to use academic bullshit hurdles as analogs to workers having to solve bullshit business requirements, the ability to get passable results from “AI” tools is worth hiring for.

I know college shouldn’t purely be a certificate to get past HR checklists. It should lead towards a path to expanding human knowledge. And some small percent of it does that. But for the vast majority of folks it’s just the check mark so they can have some evidence to show companies that they should hire them. And in that vein, I’ll absolutely take the folk who are able to use the tools available to them to solve the problems put in front of them.
This article came out in 2019. AI has gotten significantly better.
"Late that night, he was discharged. Not even "he checked himself out". The hospital discharged him"

He didn't check himself out, he was discharged.
>Again, I don't see it. CCs are not content agnostic: they have to have semantic understanding of the words said in order to produce accurate results. How do you think CCs differentiate between the words "to", "too" and "two" without looking at the surrounding words and having some idea of contextual usage? How do you think CCs can tell between "there" and "they're" without understanding if the speaker is referring to a person or a location? This is only the tip of the iceberg as to how CCs actually work, and more "content aware analysis" will always lead to more accurate CCs.

Still can't get away from that "understanding" debate. You're also now equating an understanding of context with an understanding of meaning. An understanding of meaning isn't needed to differentiate between "to", "two", and "too" because they're all used differently in sentences. When the system encounters those, I don't think it goes to the definitions and tries to find which word makes the most meaningful sentence. Most times the specific homophone can be inferred based on things like part of speech and the part of speech can often be inferred from a sentence without knowing any meaning.

For example, would the system be able to properly handle homophones that are grammatically similar? Could it consistently transcribe sentences like "I have Celiac disease and enjoy the taste of rose water, so I prefer flower to flour in my deserts." That is an easy sentence to understand for anyone who knows the meaning of those words, but there are no grammatical or structural indications on which flower/flour to use.

But either way, that is getting way too deep in the weeds compared to where my point started. This feature calls attention to an analysis of meaning because the user sees the software reacting to the meaning of the content of the video. A transcript does not call attention to an analysis of meaning because the behavior of the software does not change based on the content of the video.
Newb question: Are revisions of this scale normal for jobs data?
Heh. Australia is _huge_, and we still have that problem.
Drawing presentable trees
Ho, hum. Linux has been on my desktop for 23 years.
The full quote from GP:

> According to the hospital, he tried to call several different numbers trying to get a ride home and they made him stop and made him leave. In a quite rough downtown area he was not familiar with. While clearly not in his right mind. At 2am. With no wallet, no phone, no nothing

I understand context is difficult sometimes, but it's pretty clearly stating the hospital made him leave, hence GP adding that in brackets.
Totally. MIT admissions now reflect the merit of being born into a family that had the resources to put you into high-quality schooling, sign you up for extracurriculars, and help you study for admissions tests and write the essays. That’s merit, baby!
Not the best example for a tech savvy person. He had that image as he made a heap of $$ investing in some early internet company, but yeah he didn't seem to actually know what he was doing tech wise.

His real crime was playing a part in destroying the fibre to the premise internet rollout across Australia. He thought he could do it cheaper with mixed copper/coaxial technology.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/10/malcolm-turnbu...

I can't imagine how many billions this has cost the country and generally lowered our internet standards.
If you fire rockets at closest approach to get more delta-V, that's an Oberth Maneuver -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect

And as you say, an unpowered planetary flyby is a gravity assist.
For those who are interested in connections to more advanced mathematics, there is a sense in which √2 is still an integer, even though it is irrational. Specifically there is the notion of “algebraic integers”, which are the set of all complex numbers expressible as the root of a monic polynomial:

x^n + a_{n-1}x^(n-1) + … + a_1x + a_0.

Here each a_i is a usual integer in ℤ, and monic refers to the leading coefficient being equal to 1.

It turns out the set of such roots is actually closed under multiplication, addition, and subtraction, and there is even an analogue of prime factorization if you squint. Moreover, the intersection of these “algebraic integers” and the rational numbers ℚ are exactly the usual integers ℤ. This is why you sometimes might hear an algebraic number theorist refer to ℤ as the set of “rational integers”.
> * Given a table with columns foo, bar, baz, with an index on (foo, bar), a query with a predicate on `bar` alone is [generally] non-sargeable. Postgres can do this, but it's rare, and unlikely to perform as well as you'd want anyway.

The one I see many times more often than this is having one index on (foo) and one index on (bar), then querying on both foo and bar, and assuming the database uses both indexes for best performance. It can be done, even by ancient mysql, but it's most likely going to be a lot slower than expected so they're heavily biased against doing it and will most likely just choose one of the two indexes.
Simplified robotic gripper can still tackle complex object manipulation tasks
I was just chatting with a friend on how we haven't received the conservation emails like we have in previous years. This year has not been as extreme either as the DFW metroplex has not had the extended 100°+ days. We've just had a run of 3 or 4, but we've had 30+ consecutive days in the past.
From the NYT article on this topic(https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/us/mit-black-latino-enrol...):

“M.I.T. officials took pains to make the point that the enrollment decline in historically underrepresented minority students did not mean that the university had admitted underqualified students in the past.”

“Officials said that the change in the composition of the class also had nothing to do with the reinstatement, two years ago, of the SAT as an entrance requirement.”

If these two hypotheses are untrue according to MIT officials, just what are they thinking caused the drop?
This identical problem could easily occur in a C or C++ codebase.
> lead you to reconsider

which part do you think should be reconsidered?

In the US -- much more so than the rest of the world (though it's catching up elsewhere too) -- we are besieged by addictive garbage food everywhere. It's like cigarettes 60-70 years ago. Just one example, you used to be able to get cigarettes in hospitals, and today's equivalent is that hospitals are stocked with soda and other junk food (even in places like the NIH hospital, which I visit periodically; I was just shocked the first time I saw that, of all places where I would expect them to only or mostly have healthy alternatives. Same thing at my wife's nursing school; she was distressed at how only about 10% of the readily available snack offerings could be considered healthy. And if doctors and nurses don't have a healthy lifestyle they're unlikely to effectively help patients to.)

So yes, it is extremely difficult to eat healthy in the US, and it requires both discipline and money, which is tragic because low income people are impacted the most and have the hardest time even gaining access -- much less being able to afford -- anything other than high-calorie, low-nutrient food that the local 7-Eleven-equivalent is stocked full of.

> You want to think about causes that could actually explain the problem so that you can think of solutions that could actually work.

The problem is that our food distribution and availability is controlled by a small number of very large corporations whose primary concern is profits, at the expense of people's health (and the taxpayer's money in paying for rising health care costs, including weight loss drugs). The solution is similar to our approach to smoking -- regulations that made it harder for people to get addicted to smoking in the first place. But mostly, class action lawsuits.

> avoiding chips and pop is barely getting started with good eating

True, but when you see how many people walk out of Costco/Walmart with a shopping cart full of chips and soda, you realize pretty quickly that there is a lot of low hanging fruit when it comes to addressing the problem.

> I think you need to think a little deeper about this.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about this problem. What makes me so upset is that there seems to be very little thought given to this problem in the US -- other than looking for silver bullet, and coincidentally, highly profitable, drugs, instead of concerted efforts to combat what is a serious an ongoing nationwide health crisis, and one that affects the US much more than other countries (US obesity level is 2x UK and 4x France). I have yet to see any serious debate at the national level, by either party, to even begin to address the problem.
No surface gravity doesn't mean no gravity at all, right? It sounds like objects can orbit them at a distance, but would lose attraction as they got closer.
My rush hour went off yesterday afternoon and the temp rise made me doze off and i woke up sweating with it set to 80 degrees. I'm in the process of canceling, it's not easy. I used the chat and someone is going to send me an email (which says it's canceled?) within 24-48 hours.

Harder to turn off than anything else in recent memory. If anyone has a pro tip on an easy way to cancel let me know.
1) Consider first the possibility that this is not a problem you can fix, and you may have to either live with it, or leave the company. Attempting to get the CTO removed from their job, will typically (if it doesn't work) get you removed from your job instead. If it's that bad, perhaps it would be better to just start job-hunting.

2) It is possible that the CTO doesn't care, but it's also possible that they care but just don't know what to do about it. If the CTO had an assistant who was good at managing things, they might be willing to let that assistant do the things they aren't. Convincing the CTO to get an assistant to manage stuff like support requests, infra needs, etc. might fix the problem. She may also be actually good at very high level stuff you don't see, like for example relations with other CxO's, at your company or customers.
It's unusual: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/21/us-job-growth-revised-down-b...

Also unusual is the study pacing of the downward revisions which has been going on during the current administration. I believe I read somewhere that there have been more negative revisions in a row under Biden than any previous president.

People who follow job State and know that the numbers were messed up because the household survey shows quite a different story.

You can also add into the swelter of government data that most of the jobs created since 2019 have gone to foreign-born people. I don't have anything against people not born in America having a job, I just find it suspect that they are driving out American job seekers so handily.
Pig butchering is not just something that goes on in an abattoir, in many countries it's like a mini-festival. The idea is that in winter months each household butchers their pig, everyone turns up and gets fed. Then next week it's someone else's turn in the village to butcher their pig. Before refrigeration this was a great way to have meat regularly without needing to preserve all of it.

The image that this evokes in the minds of people that have experienced this is a big barbecue where various cuts of meat are feasted upon for a long time, maybe all day. It's a joyous event of unbridled gluttony. The guests must consume all of the un-preservable meat right away, which means if you attend one of these events you get to stuff your face with delicious, delicious pork for several meals, not just one.

To understand the origin of the "pig butchering" scam name, consider that most scams are one-offs. The scammer tricks the victim, the victim loses maybe a few thousand dollars, and learns "not to do that again". With pig butchering, the victim is tricked into feeding their money repeatedly into a fake "investment" application, which allows the scammer to "feast" on them for a long time, like at a pig butchering event.

Similarly, many long-cons take time to set up, but are still one-off thefts. That's not the same as convincing someone to repeatedly put thousands of dollars into the stealing machine.
Everyday Llamas: Getting Started with Large Language Models Locally
Here's a project I did over a year ago in Midjourney where I took all art for the card game Spectromancer and re-themed each piece in 26 different styles

https://kellydornhaus.github.io/Variations/
This sort of use of turning conditionals into bitmasks and then shuffling masked values around was fairly common back in the day when writing code for SSE intrinsics.

You wouldn't want to have to check each lane individually since that would spoil the point of using SSE. So you'd write masking ops like this and keep things parallel, tThen judiciously use any() and all() type intrinsics to check whether the lanes could agree to skip certain blocks conditionally.

(This was before ISPC and before autovectorization to handle it for you.)
> Off the top of my head, Postgres can scan in the following ways: sequential scan, parallel sequential scan, index scan, parallel index scan, index-only scan, and bitmap scan.

I don't think that last one is a thing. There is both "bitmap heap scan" and "bitmap index scan" though.
Otoh: Sounds like good use for a dynamic email. Imagine sending links to full articles. The links open the content of the newsletter in the email.
I was guessing that 082349872349872 was trying to motivate a historical understanding of the slicing of pies ;)

No, seriously: Hopefully, I’m not replying to an credentialed expert here, but empirico-historical (=archaelogical?)methods seem underrated for advancing institutional (meso-)economics. Don’t know if this is as recognized a subfield as “organizational cybernetics” yet — I’m thinking of figures like Veblen and Lord Skidelsky, but how about more quantitative folks I have no idea of?

Anyways, would you argue with me, the question is how to use price-setting mechanisms to allocate resources/experts at the inter/intra-organizational level. You don’t want openAI to concentrate all the world’s RLHF researchers, but you also don’t want to spread the experts out so thin that they can’t run into each other outside of Silicon Valley.

There’s a tightrope to walk between centralization and decentralization, I like that this blog series is exploring related issues, and I’m thrilled that some of us here are interested in engaging on the topic:

Since nothing is new under the sun, yes, we should study how firms have managed to converge to a rather precise 30-70 split, instead of (only)what Coaseans have been pontificating all along :)

[Market design and transaction-cost reductions seem to be generally more sensible for optimizing information flow than manipulation of legal frameworks around hiring practices (see the eternal fiasco over NDAs/noncompetes)]

The other more peripheral thing related to Minsky is that the study of expertise at the individual level could also be interesting, GP and I have an ongoing discussion about that; i think its relevant but GP seems to differ?*

The concrete question we are thinking of, is how do experts split their attention between central and peripheral issues, hopefully this can be answered more sophisticatedly [i.e. quantitatively] than just handwaving the exploitation-exploration trade-off? Well experiments migggghhht just be possible in this model ;)

Btw another topic GP and I have been wrestling with, is of the clash of values within Chinese-run firms in Sweden. Maybe you can help us locate sources ;)

*Footnote for GP with regards to “his” small-minds/wide-world dichotomy.

Thorstein Veblen's instinct-oriented dichotomy between technology on the one side and the "ceremonial" [including social media — insertion mine] sphere of society on the other.
Tequila or mezcal is an enhancement for any bloody, IMO
> I don't know what this quote means:

>> 2,000 MW of extra capacity released from ECRS.

ECRS = ERCOT Contingency Reserve Service.

Contingency reserve services are used to maintain system reliability during unforeseen events. Think of power plants that can quickly ramp up generation, or other assets that can quickly reduce their demand.

In this case, ERCOT tapped 2,000 MW of capacity from ECRS.
Well, there were the thousands of fraudulent NINJA loans made by individual applicants who lied.

But then you have to ask if the institutions doing the application verifications were criminally negligent.
Hi friend. I, like you, am exactly that person who reads those docs very carefully and has to know about the seemingly innocuous one liners as well as the one liners that are not there but should be, that eventually make it in after the next point release. Or the bug report that's marked "S3 (non-critical)" that sneakily awaits for days in production until it whacks something very much critical. Or the bug that celebrated its 14th birthday. What I understand about how some of these implementations work makes me very sad sometimes. And I'm telling you that the state of things is silly.

The thing is - and I imagine you know this - that when you run tens of thousands of database instances it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. I can't chase after thousands of engineers to make sure they're not hitting some obscure pitfall nor can I demand that they know the ins and outs of the 8 different types of locks in FooDB. And "read the docs lol" definitely doesn't scale. So we build automated mass-guardrails and linters as best we can and use various shenanigans to deal with the real world.

In the context of schema migrations, there's tools like pt-osc, gh-ost and pgroll that are excellent for what they are and I'm grateful to those who created them but these are still in effect huge hacks that are bolted on top of the database. They're teeming with footguns. I can tell you about a time where badly conceived timeout / error handling code in one of these tools in their golang database driver resulted in most of a database dropped instantly with no fast rollback, for example. That was fun.

If a third party bolt on tool can implement zero(ish) downtime migrations and cutovers, at least much much much better than the regular DDL, why the heck is the database not doing whatever that thing is doing? It's tech debt, history, crud, lack of caring, etc. Schema migrations is just the tip of the iceberg too, don't get me started on replication, durability settings, resource usage vs capacities ...

My point is that academics and vendors should be taking operational problems seriously and owning them, and solving them properly at the database layer.

And just like you I also make living off of the fact that the real world operational characteristics of truly busy databases are very different than what gets benchmarked and tested. I'm just saying that some of this stuff even I don't want to have to deal with. There's better problems to be working on.
I'd really like to see some backing of these claims. I've seen "grain flow" claiming big gains for years in various enthusiast magazines (bike, motorcycles, cars, etc) as to why components are forged.

Then I started working in engineering, and I can't find any support for these claims. For sure when a steel bar is worked down to become wire for a steel rope, it cannot be pulled to an elongation of 100x increasing strength. A36 steel which is a basic structural steel has an elongation at break of 23% in a 2" gauge length [1]. In every rolling mill I've been in, there is a limited amount of reduction per pass through the mill, after which the metal needs to go for thermal treatment to be annealed to remove all the cold work. Every time you anneal the material, you completely resets the elongation (internal plastic strain) and strengthening due to work hardening. If they do too much reduction in one pass or at too low of a temperature, it cracks the material and makes it weaker.

For sheet metal, there is lore about the material being stronger in the rolling direction as that is the direction of grain flow. I have yet to find a source that can point to any large difference. In papers like this [2] there are claims of certain orientations of samples relative to rolling direction have different tensile properties, but when you look at the tensile charts, there is minimal difference. The yield strength in these charts isn't reported, but all three orientations look to yield at the same point. In this test the across the grain (90 degree to rolling direction) orientation had the highest tensile strength which is the opposite of the expectation of the forging "grain flow" promoters. But the magnitude of the difference isn't large, and is small relative to normal factors of safety in a reasonable design.

When designing automotive components, I've only ever seen forging methods selected for efficiency of production. If a part mostly fills the envelope of a bar or plate, it is cut from bar or plate in all cases. If there is a lot of void volume in the part, the calculation will be made to determine if the cost of developing forging tooling and development will get paid back in reduced material and machining cost. I have yet to see the dimensions of the part change with manufacturing method, which would be needed if the non-forged part was significantly weaker.

And finally, a lot of forged parts are subsequently heat treated. When heat treating steel all of the grains in the steel have to be destroyed and recrystallized. That is the mechanism by which heat treatment works. Depending on the exact process and part geometry, this process removes or reduces the grain flow in the finished parts.

Having said that, the claim of superiority of forging persists, and I'd love to see a technical reference that shows the magnitude of the change from someone who has plausibly actually tested the effect.

[1] https://matweb.com/search/DataSheet.aspx?MatGUID=d1844977c5c...
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283447700_The_effec...
> It also just seems like there's a huge random element, like am I debugging code written by somebody who thinks at the same level of abstraction as me? Did they write comments I understand?

Isn't that part of what professional software engineering is about? Unless you worked with the same group of people for a decade and have had the time to mind meld together professionally, _any_ random developer at a new company is nearly guaranteed to think in a different way and have their own philosophy of code comments.

Checking for mental flexibility and adaptation to varying approaches for others is a great subject for an interview as a software engineer.