skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It’s not any single factor but a lot of it is due to industry-friendly policies which made SUVs and trucks artificially cheap:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24139147/suvs-trucks-popu...

It’s important to remember that Japanese car manufacturers weird absolutely slaughtering U.S. companies in the 80s and 90s by making cheaper, better quality, more efficient vehicles. Detroit has a lot of political weight, however, and when they started pushing far more profitable SUVs as the ideal daily driver, nobody in Congress was going to get in the way by suggesting policies intended to help tradespeople should be modified.

That campaign in the 90s made them popular enough to cancel out decades of fuel economy and safety improvements, and effectively started an arms race where people who never go off-road started to think that they needed to pay more for one, too, because otherwise they’d be at a fatal mismatch in a crash.
I mean paying several hundred to thousands of grad students to RLHF for several years and you get a corpus of grad-student text. I'm not surprised at all. AI companies hire grad students to RLHF in every subject matter (chemistry, physics, math, etc).

The grad-students write the prompts, correct the model, and all of that is fed into a "more advanced" model. It's corpi of text. Repeat this for every grade level and subject.

Ask the model that's being trained on chemistry grad level work a simple math question and it will probably get it wrong. They aren't "smart". It's aggregations of text and ways to sample and then predict.
The fastest way to kill Bitcoin would be to use it to publish the torrent hashes of child porn. Since it is nearly impossible to erase information from the chain, this “taint” is forever. Any participant node processing the chain will be “distributing child pornography.”

That’s thoroughly illegal pretty much everywhere. Worse, it has a very powerful social stigma against it, which means you can’t even fight it in court.
It doesn’t need to be a desktop. The point is they make their phones overpowered because nighttime operations while on a charger need that extra juice.
I think there may be a set of people that have figured out, 1) how to interact with LLMs; and 2) what in their lives is improved when interacting with LLMs. I am in the group that has not found the best use case for my own life, and have never needed it for improving anything I need to get done. Always looking for suggestions, though!
Sir, I am a few days belated but thank you so much for linking this. I feel terrible roaching copies of After Burner.
Or to put it more concisely, LLMs behave similar to a superintelligent midwit.
There's a certain point in time for any industry where it has a chance to capture both the user and the legislator. Once that happens, prices for consumers start to grow faster than wages because the industry has more money for lobbying, it's a positive feedback loop.

https://www.abi.org/newsroom/chart-of-the-day/price-changes-...

Political solution to this is very unlikely unless there's a major stress in the system that, at least temporarily, takes out the one piece of the price growth puzzle.
Yeah, I did all that too. Why would English possibly be important? My job is to write code, all that matters is how well my programs work, whatever. Then I found out in the real world that I deal with other people and a lot of my job (and life!) is explaining and convincing people, not just writing good code. So, even though I went to school to be good at programming, I can see the value in people going to school to be good at communicating.
The gas taxes haven’t kept pace with inflation, though: we already have to heavily subsidize road maintenance with general fund revenue and to be an effective pollution reduction mechanism we’d have to raise it considerably, which is politically infeasible in most of the country.
Ive learned that just about nothing is trivial when it comes to distributed systems
> I see contrarians claiming that LLMs are literally never useful for anyone

While I don't doubt that there's at least one person that has said this, what you're saying doesn't conflict with the things I and many others in the "skeptic" camp have said. LLMs are useful for a very specific set of tasks. The tasks you've listed are a tiny sliver of all the tasks that AI could potentially be doing. Would it be a good idea to consult an LLM if your mother is passed out on the floor? Probably not. The problem I have is with extrapolating from the current successes to conclude that many more tasks will be done by AI in five years.
Are their cities quieter as a result?
Thanks for looking all this up, particularly the stuff about spreadsheets. I wonder what real early spreadsheets like Lotus 1-2-3 or even Visicalc would do with "-3^2". I have to feel one of the early spreadsheet programmers just made a mistake, because I can't think of a practical reason for going against the mathematical convention if they were already aware of it. Or maybe it comes from bc? ... does bc predate modern spreadsheets?

(Well, I just tried "=-3^2" in an org-mode table and it gives "-9".)
You can surely do this and more! The device presents as a panel, however.

You need to use an array of transducers to form a coherent sound beam, but it will possibly sound through the window and gain the attention of an occupant, or enter the vehicle and seem to come from inside the car its self.

You can also just point them at someone.
AMD giving up the gaming market now, after being unable to even partially meet demand during the pandemic (and more recently having onpy minor followup) feels similar, of a company that comes so close to performing well but really dropping the ball far along the way.
It's nice that they invite you to subscribe to "contribute to our bottom line"; but it's a pity they didn't take the occasion to label the screenshots as "arse technica".
How are "mm waves" helping them drill?
The problem - as defined by how end users understand it - is that the model itself doesn't know the difference, and will proclaim bullshit with the same level of confidence that it does accurate information.

That's how you end up with grocery store chatbots recommending mixing ammonia and bleach for a cocktail, or lawyers using chatbots to cite entirely fictional case law before a judge in court.

Nothing that comes out of an LLM can be implicitly trusted, so your default assumption must be that everything it gives you needs verification from another source.

Telling people "the truth is baked in" is just begging for a disaster.
levenez unix history page / chart is also interesting.
Orion is using a web engine that was never really designed to support what they are trying to make it do. Obviously it's just code in the end but a lot of the changes will be made for convenience rather than in ways that make sense if you look at WebKit holistically, because the team is just too small to actually do that. So it is natural that performance suffers.
Which culture? What about women? What a strange comment.
and Rosetta Code.
Arch is pretty much the opposite of immutable.

An immutable filesystem sort of implies a specific collection of packages chosen by someone else and combined in a monolithic release. Everyone gets the same OS, and overlays their data on top of it.

Arch contains the specific packages you have chosen, and they are all updated asynchronously using a rolling release system.

Not that you couldn't have a read-only os partition and a user overlay partition. With pacman it wouldn't really match the philosophy of immmutable.
"Bad sound but the directionality works well."

When this tech was new, there was hope that they could be used to produce good bass sounds. If you could produce good bass from such small speakers, we could probably handle the engineering behind de-directionalizing the sound, e.g., "bounce it off things".

Unfortunately, if it is possible, nobody seems to have figured out how to do it. The frequency response curve on these things are bad. Very bad. This has relegated them to small niches as a result.

I wouldn't guarantee that they would work with your podcasts; if any of them come from someone with a deep voice you could well lose the primaries and even some of the harmonics of the voice almost entirely. Trying to make out the resulting words over a shower is probably awful because the only frequencies these can play are going to cross awfully badly with the splattering of the water.
The median new car price is around $50k and you can get new EVs well under that amount. If we weren’t in a trade war, BYD would sell you an EV for the same price as the cheapest ICE options.
I agree with this. We got to have a means of verifying that the other party is indeed a real HN member. Having it open like this is too spam/abuse/harvest prone, in my opinion.
Same here about distrusting pieces that use AI art. It’s like… a signifier of something hard to describe — values, qualities — that makes me want to listen to someone’s point of view less.
I like your explanation, but to be fair, it depends.

Some displays are implemented with dual-eyelid technology for the blackest of blacks. Naturally, like all genius engineering, we see this in nature: cats.
Yeah I was about to say that the news has to be that Excel has extensive use in biomedical research.
I'm a contrarian who believes your anecdote, and could even imagine that 5% of LLM users feel the same way, but thinks (a) these systems are about half as good as they're ever going to get, (b) we're past the point of diminishing returns, and (c) what we do have isn't worth the energy costs of running it, let alone creating it in the first place.
I have an openscad-alike that supports fillets/chamfers, but unfortunately getting it to support importing any third party file formats (DXF, SVG, STL) is a bit beyond me right now.

https://github.com/traverseda/PySdfScad

I'd also love to find the time to rewrite the geometry kernel in something like taichi (python DSL running on GPU) or maybe JAX instead of numpy. And of course it doesn't yet pass most of openscad's test cases.
Vector Notation in JSON (MongoDB)
I am using tiptap editor with React to populate my study app's mongodb database. Unfortunately, I have hit a roadblock. I want to insert characters like A with arrow on top of his head to denote A(vector). Is this possible and will my iOS and android apps display it correctly?
Found it. https://www.xda-developers.com/windows-unofficial-super-god-...
for me, the advantages are:

* In WSL2 I don't need to worry about, ports, mounts and data persistence (I think this is possible in docker but it needs more setup work)

* I don't need docker desktop running

in the end I think that both can solve the problem, I myself prefer wsl for my day to day tasks.
Probably something like 95% or more of people aren't even doing the basics for health: https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/where-should-my-priorit...
As a lover of prefix and postfix notation, there is an unambiguous parsing of each of those that does not deepened on any order of operations. Neither lisp nor forth have the question at all - you can only write it exactly as you mean it.

(- (expt 3 2))

is always -9 without needing to ask which has higher precedence.

(expt -3 2)

is likewise always 9. There is no question if - is a binary or unary operator in prefix notation and what its order of operation should be.

Likewise, in dc

3 _ 2 ^ p
_3 2 ^ p

and

3 2 ^ _ p

where '_' is the negation operator (it can be used for writing -3 directly as _3, but _ 3 is a parse error) return their results without any question of order of operations.

When you start touching infix, you get into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunting_yard_algorithm which was not a fun part of my compiler class.

(And yes, I do recognize your credentials ... I still think that lisp and forth (above examples for dc) are better notational systems for working with computers even if it takes a bit of head wrapping for humans).
I saw this one first, but seems patio11 was first:

https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...
Interesting! Almost all my video watching is on a roku box attached to my TV. I may watch a tiny bit more Youtube than Netflix on my PC or phone, just because people send me links that way, but if the videos they link me are more than a minute or two, usually I'm saving them to "watch later" and catching them on the TV box.

I'd have assumed most people's proportions were similar and that therefore the proportions for the two services were similar; that is to say, for people who use both kinds of devices to watch video, I wouldn't have expected a big difference based on the specific service.

Do you have a source that suggests that people who use both kinds of devices watch a larger proportion of Netflix on the TV but a larger proportion of Youtube on PC?
I dunno, I was not a customer of either. Sprint shucked off their landline business to CenturyLink, I think that's gone about like you'd expect, terrible.
GPS could confirm that you are indeed where you claim you are. In the unlikely case you want to change your location for the Nth time.
Thing is, I'm used to hearing a very similar sentiment on how e.g. using vim keybindings is so literally going to make me a 10x 100x whatever rockstar developer - and it's like what, enabling me to edit text a bit faster? And it's always anecdotes that yeah, from-qualia you feel so fast. But from-qualia I run like a marathon runner and sound like a radio host.

I personally did find some use cases for it and it does a decent job of cutting out minor gruntwork for me. But the experience itself screams to me that whatever gains I'm feeling I'm getting are all in my head.
How we right negative literals in expressions is the issue. Nobody would seriously think -x^2 = -4 had no non-imaginary solutions. But if we swap out x for a literal number people start interpreting it ambiguously as maybe a negative number exponentiated, but fundamentally it’s the same syntax as before.
based on what data
> Damn, didn't know that. I just had the feedback that Paris, Tennessee wasn't working already.

And Paris, Idaho and Paris, Illinois and Paris, Michigan and Paris, Indiana and …

I think about half of US states have a city called Paris.
I work out of a local Hackerspace here in Austin and we happen to have one of the core contributors to OpenSCAD here. He re-wrote much of the code in C++ to optimize the core algorithms and significantly improve performance using OpenGL.

He is actively looking for gig-work or potentially something more significant, so if anyone on HN is looking to get something 3D-cad related or even some advanced training, please reach out to me (email is on my profile). I will happily make an intro.

OpenSCAD is an ideal tool for adding flexible 3D wizardry to a website or app programatically.
Something I've learnt about layoffs:

It's to no one's advantage for employers to give a reason. It just invites pushback/argument. Better to just say "you can't fight management/VPs/people above our pay grade" and move on.
The range will be like 80 miles? Many people I grew up with had jobs 40-60 miles away, and those places still don't have charging stations.
that's quite a sizable botnet
Your points are all true. But we must not forget that security is like onion layers. The fact that something can't be made military-grade hack-proof doesn't mean we should leave it wide open for the whole world to abuse.
I think a lot of people are also radically overrating their likelihood of going on extended road trips. As the cost of even ICEs increases, I’ve known people to rent for a long drive rather than rack up the mileage on their personal vehicle (also if they can save on fuel economy) and I think more people are going to follow your lead in having a small EV for daily commuting to save money every trip, and maybe consider a rental if they actually decide to drive cross-country without stopping.
LibreOffice is an example of Stross' criticism that every "word processor" is a pale imitation of "Word", because of "Word's" status as the Standard Business Word Processor. Personally, I kept my resume in troff input format for a long time, because I thought the result looked pretty good on paper. I have never purchased "Word" for myself, only suing it at the office. I may not be a fount of knowledge in this area.
One of the "spomeniks" is on a former death camp.
How's Asahi these days? Stable enough to run as a daily?
It’s still a bug, even if it’s the only way the system can behave as currently designed. I agree that “hallucination” is a poor term for it, though. For medication, we call a bug a “side effect” even though it’s really just a chemical interaction which, given enough information, could be predicted.

Ultimately the computer only does what we tell it to do. That has always been the case and probably always will be, just as we are the result of our inputs.

As with most bugs, I think to solve hallucinations we will need to better understand the input and its interactions within the system.
Yes, it's worse than that though. These news sites are pushing ads at paying customers. I saw an ad at wsj.com the other day-- a site I pay an exorbitant sum to browse-- that disappeared the entire article as I scrolled through it. I get it, they used to have ads in printed newspaper and everyone shrugged and read on. However, this is different, and I regularly find myself exasperated by-- when I click on a show in PBS's paid subscription app, they immediately launch a 30-second ad, not the show; Peacock launches a 3-minute ad, not the show. The New York Times shows other reporters the backsides of dogs. I read about Ford prioritizing development of technology they acknowledge their customers will hate to show them similar tripe unbidden in their cars.

This is clearly a dystopian development and it turns on its head the old adage that when you pay for a product you become the customer. These businesses are abusing their "customers" by treating them as something less.
Has this author never heard of error correcting codes? The whole point of them is to assume there's lossiness and add bytes to allow correction (or at least detection) of tampered or missing bytes. That's why TCP (or maybe it's Ethernet?) frames include FEC bytes in their message format.

Additionally, I'm sure they're aware that HTTP over TLS has encrypted data frames, which would be unreceivable in a lot of cases if these situations arose a bunch. And considering how much of the modern Internet is built on this paradigm, I think that many of these points are rare and probably extremely pedantic.

This is coming from someone who agrees with much of the nuance implied (but not explained!) by the post.

All great technical writing (which I assume these clickbait articles are at least attempting to be) is written with mutual discovery and deeper understanding in mind, and if you leave no actual explanation in the post, you can't really achieve either of those.
I remember that the Samsung ~S21 was frequently hot beyond the DeX, comparing to iPhone.
> Do you know what idempotency is? This is exactly what he described.

Is it though? It seems like a false equivalency, even if the outcome is approximately the same?
> Great, now take out a mortgage at a good time, predict interest rate and house prices

Nobody can do this. It’s not part of basic financial literacy. A few people who make careers out of investing or real estate attempt it and many of them fail.

If you are a normal person, you find a house that needs your basic needs in a decent area that you can afford and you buy it. You don’t try to throw darts at a board to figure out if the housing market is going to crash or the fed is going to lower rates. If you could reliably predict these things it’s your day job.

> manage your savings

Simply putting your savings into a savings account pr even under a mattress is more than most Americans do and is self-evident. Are there more optimal places? Maybe but if it matters to you you have the time to figure it out; Americans are doing well to accumulate 500 in emergency savings anywhere. Worrying about 5% interest money markets vs maybe an index fund for some portion is pointless at that level. (Ed - median emergency savings is 5k. This doesn’t require management.)

> plan your retirement

This becomes important as you approach retirement age, sure. Until then all you need to worry about is stuffing away as much money as you can because of that “compound interest” thing.

> self-employed for a year and correctly identify what is tax deductible and what isn’t

There’s a public website for the IRS where this is all laid about, but even Americans with easy
standard taxes pay an accountant because they don’t want to add a few numbers together and look at a tax table.

> recognise when you are being sold a bad financial product.

If you are worried about “financial products” and you’re not at retirement age, all you need to know is “it’s a scam” or you’re very rich.
If you want to do code-CAD for anything substantial and you haven't yet developed a significant dependency on OpenSCAD, do your brain a favour and spend at least some time with CadQuery, Build123D or (if you prefer JS to Python) Replicad.

As impressive as NopSCADlib and BOSL2 are (and OMG they are, when you consider what they have to work with!), OpenSCAD is a one-way, declarative CSG environment that essentially only outputs mesh formats. It's really not that much better than working with three-dimensional pixels. You won't really be able to analyse, iterate over or measure your models, easily build on faces, do easy chamfers or fillets, export STEP files, make use of constraint-based designs, model assemblies, or so many other things that "CAD" means in the 21st century. All the tools that help you do this on OpenSCAD are layers and layers of task-specific hacks and clever bodges.

I totally get wanting to make models with version-controlled text files instead of GUI CAD (which can be a sort of weird battle to learn for a programmer), and I get wanting to avoid FreeCAD. I just don't really get wanting to limit oneself to such a limited concept of a 3D "model"!

The three alternative systems I mention are all based around bindings to (or in Replicad's case, cross-compilation of) OpenCASCADE, which is a bRep CAD kernel capable of much richer interactions. It is not without its faults, but arguably code-CAD spares you from some of the inscrutability that trips up FreeCAD's interactive model.
HN should allow for post deletion.
Not just Arch documentation. It often has general use information, too, applicable to other distros and Unixes.
CFPB bans Navient from servicing federal loans, fines $120M for failures
Original title "CFPB Bans Navient from Federal Student Loan Servicing and Orders the Company to Pay $120 Million for Wide-Ranging Student Lending Failures" summarized due to title limit.
There's obviously a balance here which involves understanding how words make people feel and also understanding that people don't have bad intentions. You don't have to go all 1984 on it.
In fact, it is a brand new data collector. It's encouraging HN account holders to geo-tag themselves and to put that information in the publicly available HN account profile. This profile is, more or less, blank by default.
It's a sign of low effort, maybe? If they're not putting much effort into the art, maybe they're not putting much into the writing, either. Maybe not even into the thinking.
Sure, that’s obvious. The problem is the tons of content that isn’t easily associated with a product or service. Like news and opinion (many of the article’s examples are from The NY Times)
Charging based on usage would require you to provide your mileage to the government, a tracker in your car, or some other privacy destroying method. I guess the government could just ask for your mileage and take your word for it, but that isn't reliable.
Panics shouldn't exist in modern Rust (if there is such a thing) at all.
Yes, involving a third party with interests contrary to the producer or consumer of the material just adds poor incentives that inevitably lead to poor outcomes.