skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The absurdly low numbers for Romania and Hungary make me think that people leaving to study abroad fall through the cracks in these stats.
> the arch documentation is second to none

I am willing to argue that it's the best documentation of any distribution
I'm just now learning Rust, as a long time C++'er, and this was the first part of my Rust journey where I thought to myself, "Boy, this really smells--this couldn't possibly be the idiomatic Rust Way to handle functions that can produce different types of errors. I must be doing something wrong!"

For example, I have a function that takes an array of bytes, decodes it as UTF-8 to text, parses that text into an i32, and checks the int that it is within a valid range. This is not a big function. But it might produce one of: 1. str::Utf8Error, 2. num::ParseIntError, or 3. MyCustomInBoundsError. There's no clean way to write a Rust function that could return either of them. I had to bundle everything up into an enum and then return that, and then the caller has to do some "match" acrobatics to handle each error differently.

I hate to say this, but I miss Python and C++'s exceptions. How nice to just try: something and then:

except SomeError:
doFoo()
except ThatErrror:
doBar()
except AnotherError:
doBaz()
finally:
sayGoodbye()

An elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

What do I know though? I'm still in the larval stage of Rust learning where I'm randomly adding &, *, .deref() and .clone() just to try to get the compiler to accept my code.
These aren’t games designed for touch devices. They are console games ported to iOS.

To play them you need to pair a controller, making the experience subpar.
GPT-4o got a whole lot closer to realism though- I’d say we’re better than Skyrim’s pre recorded speech system at this point.
The test is dominated by YouTube watching which presumably Google Chrome is particularly optimised for.
From 1% to 5% of Chinese power is hardly a standout success either.
Are there any specific shortcomings you think render this test "useless"? It doesn't seem at all unreasonable to extrapolate from a 3-hour test repeated six times to estimate power usage over an 8+ hour span. Or is the "small sample" you refer to the 20-minute inner loop?
The Nissan Leaf is not that practical. There's a reason why SUVs are the most popular type of car in the US.
Right, I was about to comment that. One of the first ones I remember was this one, about addresses[1]; or this one, about names[2]. Both provide examples and information, which is the only thing making the whole article useful.

[1]: https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/
[2]: https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/
Checked exceptions were strongly discouraged because they have nonlocal behavior when changing library code. If you want to rethrow exceptions you can’t handle you have to update all callers when the callee changes the throw signature. Lambdas are orthogonal.
Maybe use snap-on/snap-off nails instead? (I checked, they exist).
In Norway, there are plenty of cycling enthusiasts (for around-town transit, commuting, and exercise / fun) with all sorts of dietary approaches. I don’t think there’s any meaningful vegetarian / cycling correlation there.
These types of posts are often more harfmul than helpful. ArchLinux already has proper installation instructions and those who cannot follow them aren't recommend to run it. The main installation issues the ArchLinux forum sees is from people following outdated third party installation guides.
Here's another interesting article on the same topic (2016) entitled "Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature" :
https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...

From the article:

"The problem of Excel software inadvertently converting gene symbols to dates and floating-point numbers was originally described in 2004. For example, gene symbols such as SEPT2 (Septin 2) and MARCH1 [Membrane-Associated Ring Finger (C3HC4) 1, E3 Ubiquitin Protein Ligase] are converted by default to ‘2-Sep’ and ‘1-Mar’, respectively."
LLMs are the exact antithesis of what an English degree teaches you: how to communicate effectively and with context, and to understand nuance in what other people say. LLMs make things that sound good but have no real depth to them.
>> YouTube accounted for 8.5% of total TV viewing in May, while Netflix was a close second at 7.9%.

Assuming that's true, I still don't think it matters that much.

I expect that a very large proportion of Netflix that's watched is watched on a smart TV. Much larger than the proportion of Youtube that's watched on a TV.
I guess that explains why it's been about that long that I read something of his.
I think you're going too far here.

> By total coincidence, some hallucinations happen to reflect the truth, but only because the training data happened to generally be truthful sentences.

It's not a "total coincidence". It's the default. Thus, the model's responses aren't "divorced from any concept of truth or reality" - the whole distribution from which those responses are pulled is strongly aligned with reality.

(Which is why people started using the term "hallucinations" to describe the failure mode, instead of "fishing a coherent and true sentence out of line noise" to describe the success mode - because success mode dominates.)

Humans didn't invent language for no reason. They don't communicate to entertain themselves with meaningless noises. Most of communication - whether spoken or written - is deeply connected to reality. Language itself is deeply connected to reality. Even the most blatant lies, even all of fiction writing, they're all incorrect or fabricated only at the surface level - the whole thing, accounting for the utterance, what it is about, the meanings, the words, the grammar - is strongly correlated with truth and reality.

So there's absolutely no coincidence that LLMs get things right more often than not. Truth is thoroughly baked into the training data, simply because it's a data set of real human communication, instead of randomly generated sentences.
How do these stack up to https://www.timescale.com/ ?
>>> 1) move most careers...out of the country....to the benefit of shareholders.

You've hidden very carefully the causality in this sentence. Who moved them? Why? Its perhaps implied that since shareholders benefited, that they did it. Yet a careful examination reveals quickly the elephant in the room in that thesis: why did outsourcing now, and not before, if the benefit to shareholders has always been there? why did this happen mostly in the US, and not other countries?

Of course, the reality is far more complex and reveals that the road for manufacture hollowing in the US was a road paved with good intentions. History is there for anyone who wants to read it.
I don’t remember anything from before I was born, obviously. But I also don’t think my consciousness is particularly unique or special, and conscious human beings lived before me, so I assume it’s reasonable to imagine “I” was one of them. This is a pretty nonsensical way to define the word “I”, but not much more nonsensical than using the singular “I” to refer to the six year old and present versions of me.

What does bum me out is losing a lifetime of knowledge and capability. You get old just when you’re starting to be good at things. The human lifespan could definitely be a few decades longer.
This reminds me of a very particular problem that we tried to solve when I worked at VKontakte. It was about instant messaging and flaky mobile data connections.

The problem: you're on a subway train and you send a message as it departs a station. The request does get to the server, but by the time the response arrives, the train is already in the tunnel and you don't have a signal any more. So the client thinks that the message failed to send, but it was, in fact, sent successfully. The client would retry when it's back online, and would send another copy of that message.

The solution was to send a client-generated "random ID" with each request. I much later learned that this is conventionally called an "idempotency token". This worked, except there was now another problem: you sometimes receive your own message over the long-polling thing before the response to the request that sent it. You don't know for sure whether it's the message you just sent, or something else sent by a different client on the same account, because you don't know the ID of your message yet. This was solved by me delaying the processing of outgoing messages on the client side until all outstanding messages are fully sent and their IDs are known.

Telegram solved this much more elegantly: when the client reconnects to the server, the server sends it all the responses that were not acknowledged during the previous connection. MTProto has its own acknowledgement mechanism in addition to TCP's.

So yeah, instant messaging seems trivial at the first glance, but it turns out that TCP is a leaky enough abstraction that you need to somehow plug those leaks at the application level.
Ah! I've got it now. Lotsofpulp didn't literally commit the atrocity of shooting down a metaphor/analogue presented to them (despite your characterizing their reply as having run into that exact issue, which I'll finally concede I did assume to be an accusation of committing said issue) but they did defend doing so. You recalled a thing you see as common, and they explained why it's common, so of course they ran into that common thing, but merely in the sense of defending it, not in the sense of doing it.

The meaning of language, English anyhow, does tend to be however it gets commonly interpreted. I think it's helpful to advocate for communication that achieves successful interpretation over that which doesn't, even if that which doesn't work ought to work. Many things are noble pursuits even if against the grain, but using language in unsuccessful ways isn't one of them due to its nature which favors agreeance of usage.
"Contempt culture" is one way to put it, definitely had some toxic elements, but it was also actual hacker culture. The nice-ification of tech has come with corporatization and has its own downsides.
It's not forever, in another comment they're reworking their entire internal comms protocol.
Fedora was almost required on AMD framework for a while, because hardware was brand new and Debians were too old. Now with Mint updated, I'd recommend take Fedora or Mint and Cinnamon.

Beware, I just realized my AMD does not support S3 sleep. Too late to return.
That’s my thinking, yes.
I believe the article that started it all is https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... - crucially every entry is self-explanatory, which is a point that a lot of the subsequent “Falsehood…” list authors miss.
Assuming the Mac battery reporting is accurate, even running tests at different charge levels, seems specious to me. In my experience, it doesn’t tend to be. I don’t think it’d be biased to one browser over another in that way, but I don’t for a second believe that it can be used to make a statement like “Chrome used 17% of my battery life over 3 hours, then Safari used 18%.”

I think it would be much more interesting to put together ~40 hours worth of testing similar to what the author did, then run it with Safari until the battery dies, charge the machine for X hours (where X is the amount of time the battery takes to report 100% plus some margin) then run it with Chrome until the battery dies. Repeat as many times as you think necessary.

That would take battery percentage remaining reporting out of any load bearing place, which I believe is absolutely necessary here.
Arguably the whole point of the ultraprocessed classification is to spend less time micromanaging the nutritional value. The purpose is to separate the kinds of food that you can prepare and cook at home, from the kinds of food that only exist in a highly industrial setting.

The latter optimizes for using the cheapest possible ingredients, with the longest shelf life, and to be hyper palatable. Part of the problem is that, to achieve those goals, industrialized food tends to be high in sugar, fats, salt, and calories in general. But looking at only those nutritional numbers is shortsighted. In the last decades we have seen all sorts of junk food that used their nutrition labels to masquerade as healthy food: diet colas without added sugar, sugary breakfast cereals that are "rich in vitamins", and so on. And those did little to stop the obesity epidemic.
If you're writing something safety critical like avionics flight control software, you probably don't want to crash in production either. I've also always interpreted "fail fast" as "Make defects obvious during development so they don't exist when you deploy to customers."
And if it introduces a bug that causes downtime that could cost millions.

Setting up a offshore office takes time and focus that could be spent on other initiatives etc.
To be honest, I have gotten 100x more useful answers out of Siri's WolframAlpha integration than I ever have out of ChatGPT. People don't want a "not completely incompetent graduate student" responding to their prompts, they want NLP that reliably processes information. Last-generation voice assistants could at least do their job consistently, ChatGPT couldn't be trusted to flick a light switch on a regular basis.
Falsehoods programmers believe: TCP/IP can be coherently mapped to the OSI model.
Caseway AI brings chatbot tech to Canadian legal system
Tao isn't that optimistic. His opinion on LLMs is rather conservative.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-will-become-ma...

> If you want to prove an unsolved conjecture, one of the first things you need to do is to break it up into smaller pieces, each of which has a better chance of being proven. But you will often break up a problem into harder problems. It’s very easy to transform a problem into one that’s harder than into one that’s simpler. And AI has not demonstrated any ability to be any better than humans in this regard.

Not sure if O1 changed his mind tho.
Yeah. The unstructured data is a massive PITA.

I’m not opposed to the cloud. I run my current (non-HIPAA) project on Render, and it is really convenient. But, I also run a number of things on VPSs, and they aren’t difficult at all other than the up-front friction. They have been rock solid for us. I think it’s mostly a function of how simple we keep our setup. The cloud is certainly more convenient when managing a big team with lots of dynamic allocations of resources. But, VPSs (which some consider to be then cloud), and physical servers get more shade than I think they deserve.

You can go really far as a business on a single physical server and with a second backup server. With a bit of care, deployments can be simple and reliable, too.
You will likely have to adapt your scripts for OS-specific or installation-specific tasks like package management and modifying filesystems. In the past I've used Nix (either via `nix run` and `nix shell` or templating in Nixpkgs' `writeScript` or similar) for this stuff to guarantee that I'm always running the same tools regardless of what's installed on the base system. This can free you up to use a different shell, rely on recent features of Bash, use GNUisms in coreutils, sed, grep, find, etc., fix a specific version of jq, use external templating tools, etc. For systemd-based distros, you can even use Nix to manually install system-wide services: just install a package to the default or system profile, and then symlink the included unit files from the profile (not the direct store path) into /etc/systemd. `systemctl daemon-reload` and you can manipulate them in all the usual ways one would with systemd.

Other Unix distros don't have first-class support with Nix so you may need to take some additional care when working out your script (especially the part of it that installs Nix), but if you don't need to set up services this way you can write portable scripts with few limitations that will work across all Linux distros, macOS, probably FreeBSD and maybe NetBSD.

I've never been so lucky as to work at a place that used any Unix flavors other than Linux and macOS, though.
Yep, the original "names" one was mostly written so negating each of the points gave you the exception you needed to handle. Even the cases written with both were done on a way it was obvious the negation didn't apply universally, so both worked.
Depends on what sites you visit, but hooking every single HTTP call and HTML DOM isn't cheap. I often find websites with ads to be just as fast as websites without them, just more cluttered, unusable, and more of a privacy nightmare. The uBO overhead does seem to impact CPU usage, though.

I'll gladly pay the 15 minutes of battery power spent on filtering out that trash.
I think this is just about new car sales? Less well off can still by used ICE, which is what they would be anyway. Or even used Model 3 are in the low $20k USD here. Used Chevy Bolt are $10-20k, some leafs are cheaper.
Near everything outperforms nuclear power. Nuclear power is unfathomably expensive.

Come back when it is in the same league as renewables or CCGTs.
My problem is that, for a surprising number of applications, it's taken me longer to have the conversation with chatgpt to get the code I want than just doing it myself.

Copilot and the likes are legit for boilerplate, some test code, and posix/power shell scripting. Anything that's very common it's great.

Anything novel though and it suffers. Did AWS just release some new functionality and only like 4 people have touched it so far on GitHub? Are you getting source docs incomplete or spread out amongst multiple pages with some implicit/betwen-the-lines spec? Eh, good luck, you're probably better off just reading the docs yourself or guess and checking.

Same goes for versioning, sometimes it'll fall back into an older version of the system (ex Kafka with kraft vs zookeeper)

Personally, the best general use case of LLMs for me is focus. I know how to break down a task, but sometimes I have an issue staying focused on doing it and having a reasonably competent partner to rubber duck with is super useful. It helps that the chat log then becomes an easy artifact to more or less copy paste, and chatgpt doesn't do a terrible job reformatting either. Like for 90% of the stuff it's easier than using vim commands.
> I want web pages and web apps to be distinguishable, and not have every newspaper article and blog post hosted inside of a heavyweight application framework that either breaks or re-implements all kinds of basic user agent functionality. Simple pages should be implemented in a simple, constrained technology stack and heavyweight web apps should be something the end user opts-in to using.

I don't see people putting that genie back in the bottle. Not when there are so many designers that override the scrollbar for aesthetics.

For the record, I'm with you - I think it would be great if most websites ran on gopher 2.0 that used markdown for its syntax. I just don't think it'll happen.
"Representative" means of a population.

"Representative for me" is incoherent. You're not a population; you don't have population statistics.
That's not generally true. I attended a state university, and the department simply didn't have the funding to pay for its graduate students.

However, I did in fact receive some TAships and lectureships while I was there, and even a dissertation fellowship. They didn't pay well though.
With hardware video decoding, video playback is actually remarkably power efficient.

That said, it's been ages since I've last seen an autoplaying video. I only seem to encounter them on American news websites for some reason.
1) new Evs are still more expensive than new gas cars
2) in some states, the registration fees are higher (+$225 in Washington State)
3) if it's your only car it may be a bit limiting, unless you are willing to rent a gas car on occasion.
Scrollbars: Overriding native behavior to provide a better experience
Walgreens to pay $106M to settle allegations it submitted false Rx claims
Or maybe kids will have AI generate minecraft levels and porn of their classmates just for fun...
I thought we already understood that US large car sales was the result of the individualist culture and perceived improvements in safety from being in a heavier vehicle during a collision
This. If these lists contained things that programmers actually believed and explained why they are false, they might actually be useful. It's hard to imagine an unsupported assertion that an ambiguous statement is "false" and yet its contradiction is also "false".
I am reviewing your comment but a 260% return of your initial investment is a multiplier of 3.6x. Do you agree?
> Of course they are, the end game is browsers being the OS.

But could we please not do that? Can I do something to prevent this from happening?
I'd prefer the phenomenon be called "saying the first thing that comes to your mind" instead, because humans do that a lot as well, and that happens to produce pretty much the same failures as LLMs do.

IOW, humans "hallucinate" exactly the same way LLMs do - they just usually don't say those things out loud, but rather it's a part of the thinking process.

See also: people who are somewhat drunk, or very excited, tend to lose inhibitions around speaking, and end up frequently just blurting whatever comes to their mind verbatim (including apologizing and backtracking and "it's not what I meant" when someone points out the nonsense).
I use sonet 3.5 and while it's actually usable for codegen (compared to gpt/copilot) it's still really not that great. It does well at tasks like "here's a stinky collection of tests that accrued over time - clean this up in style of x" but actually writing code still shows fundamental lack of understanding of underlying API and problem (the most banal example being constantly generating `x || Array.isArray(x)` test)
Similar here, but I used a TB4 cable so didn't have to take out the storage.
I don't want economists to move fast and break things.
From experience living in southern America you will get ridiculed, pummelled to the side of the road, and blinded by F350s and Silverados. And constantly told it's your fault for having a car they couldn't see over their 8 ft hood.
I've made more than one friend on Hacker News, one of whom I've met in person. Encouraging that to happen, by way of an app, is a great idea.

Every project has bugs at first, but I see you're dealing with them as they pop up. Best of luck working on it.
> BOFH much

This made me chuckle.

> Your tone is very dismissive.

I know, but honestly when I see a post on the front page of HN with recommendations on how to do something and the recommendations (and resulting code) are just bad then I can't help myself.

The issue is that trying to phrase things nicely takes more effort than I could genuinely be bothered to put in (never mind the fact I read the whole script).

So instead my aim was to be as neutral sounding as possible, although I agree that the end result was still more dismissive than I would have hoped to achieve.
It has so many other uses that is has been sitting without uses for 40 years.

The problem is that you need to keep it for thousands of years before it becomes tractable to more easily deal with it.
As to be expected by anyone on Apple platform since the glory old days, instead of the folks that only know Apple ecosystem as a Linux alternative for UNIX laptops.
Yes, I miss Flash too.
This is the way. And truthfully if you can learn to package for Debian, you already know how to package for Ubuntu and you can easily figure out how to package for openSUSE or Fedora or Arch.
Because 'exactly once' delivery is arguably a misnomer, you usually really want 'at least once delivery with acks and idempotent processing on the other side'.

The difference is subtle but important in practice and specification.