skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Weather models are chaotic, are ML methods more numerically stable than a physics based simulation? And how do they compare in terms of compute requirements? the Aurora paper seemed to be promising, but I would love a summary of comparison better than what I get out of Claude.

Once upon a time I converted spectral-transform-shallow-water-model (STSWM or parallelized as PSTSWM) from FORTRAN to Verilog. I believe this is the spectral-transform method we have run for the last 30 years to do forecasting. The forecasting would be ~20% different results for 10-day predictions if we truncated each operation to FP64 instead of Intel's FP80.
There are many people, myself included, who have tried every piece of writing advice under the sun, and it's still hit or miss, mostly miss. Writing is especially hard because it's impossible to predict what will turn the reader off even if meticulous care is taken. It's similar to opsec in that even when every precaution is taken there may still be holes you failed to anticipate but is obvious to the attacker.
I have read this and I LOVE it.
A question for anyone with experience with MathAcademy: how does it handle proofs for the ideas it teaches? If my aim is to understand the mathematics, not just to solve equations, is this the right kind of tool?

My biggest complaint about the maths I've learned in the UK is that it was always taught mechanically. e.g. matrices were just taught as a set of rules for which numbers to add/multiply etc to get the right result, with no mention of why it all worked or the proofs behind it.
A lot of the criticism here comes from people who had bad experiences with poor managers, leading them to reject the idea of work processes altogether.

The few defending Scrum are doing so based on positive experiences with great teams and strong leadership.

In my view, high-performance teams don’t just appear by "hiring good people and letting them do their thing." Good people naturally communicate, take initiative, prioritize, estimate, provide updates, and mentor less experienced team members. In other words, they often follow a pseudo-process or even suggest routines that resemble a formal process, if one is not already in place.

Alignment, communication, transparency, and prioritization are key to achieving results. Processes should be designed to support these, providing space for creativity and autonomy, including review and constant improvement of the process itself.
I had the exact same thought for years but never came around experimenting with it. I also hoped that one could eventually hear that something is off.

I think this can happen by either recognising the "rhythm" in which sounds appear and/or recognising different tones.

As a first step, my idea was to write a logger that plays different beep sounds for different log levels. That way you could mostly identify the “rhythm” because I guess most log messages would have the same severity. However, to a tiny degree also by the pitch of the sound.

Then as a second step I thought of mapping the log message to a scale of sounds by e.g., hashing the message. This obviously would only work if there’s no dynamic content in the message.
GameGen-o – Diffusion model for generation of open world games
Ask HN: New to US, puzzled why tech hasn't simplified health insurance
Hey HN,

I recently moved to the US from Europe for a software engineering job, and I'm completely lost when it comes to dealing with health insurance here. Back home, most of this stuff was pretty straightforward, but here? It feels like I've stepped back in time.

Last week, I had to call my insurance company about coverage for a routine check-up. I was on hold forever, got transferred twice, and ended up more confused than when I started. It got me thinking - in 2024, why am I still doing this over the phone?

As a software engineer, I can't help but wonder why tech hasn't solved this yet. We've got AI writing code and solving complex problems, but we can't figure out how to automate an insurance call? It doesn't make sense to me.

I'm really curious about a few things:

a. Is there a technical reason why so much insurance stuff has to be done over the phone? I keep hoping to find an app or website that can handle all this, but no luck so far.

b. Why is it so hard to get a straight answer on how much a doctor's visit will cost? In most industries, you know the price upfront. Here, it feels like a guessing game.

c. Are there regulatory challenges that make this all so complicated? I'm wondering if there are laws or compliance issues that make it hard to simplify things.

I'm genuinely curious to understand why these problems exist and why they haven't been solved yet. It feels like there's a huge opportunity here, but maybe I'm missing something obvious.

If anyone has insights into why the US health insurance system works this way, or thoughts on how it could be improved with technology, I'd love to hear them.
This is fantastic. Breaking into medicine would be amazing. Apple’s products are generally great. M
What makes you so sure it’s not technical?
The rhetoric is just as bad on the other side.
For clarity, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainmail_(game)
I prefer to peel the sweet potatoes, cut them in relatively big chunks, then bake them without adding anything, in a closed glass vessel, in a microwave oven.

The baking time depends on the oven and on the quantity, but for example in my 1000 W oven, baking 3 big sweet potatoes needs about 8 minutes.

Once you have made a successful test, this method is very fast and perfectly reproducible. Because there is no added water and a part of the water from the sweet potatoes evaporates (but not too much, due to the closed glass vessel), the taste of the sweet potatoes cooked in this way is very intense.
You're off by a factor of 1,000. The "calories" used for nutritional purposes are actually kilocalories, and a typical adult diet is about 2,000 kcal per day.
You don't have to agree with [all of] Stephen Fry's opinions in this piece to say this is extraordinary writing.
JavaScript is the world's most popular programming language.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-develop...
Interesting you mention walking as what our ancestors did. Until about 100 years ago, food and energy scarcity was the norm. Our ancestors would have been lean and would not have typically expended energy for just pure leisure. In other words, everyone was busy trying to not starve. There was plenty of physical activity in the day, lots of chores and things to do.

I say this to demonstrate how un-adapted we are now for what is relatively recently a radically different lifestyle.
There is truth in this, I woke up around 2-3 am regularly. Some people see magical reasons for this, but I decided to reconsider my habits, stopped eating at night, and began to ventilate the room. But the main thing is that I found a quality bed https://quokkabeds.com.au/. I view sleep as an investment in my youth and health, so all of the above were worth it.
Yeah that's the situation I keep running into.

Them: "I really want to be proficient in git."
Me: "Here's the tutorial site that I used that helped me grasp concepts and be more adept."
Them: "Cool thanks."

And of course they never put in the time or bother with the site ever again, repeat ad-nauseum.
Golden rice attempts to solve a real problem: Vitamin A deficiency in many parts of the world, where rice is also a food staple and where the poorest cannot afford a diet with enough vitamin A in it.

Golden lettuce solves what?
Dutch is so close to English that at times it is almost a dialect of English. "Ik zag de boot zinken." / "I saw the boat sink."

The rest of the world can't watch English TV with subtitles for a few months/years and come away with a passing understanding of English. It's a much steeper cliff.

The technical term is diglossia and it's much more common when the two languages are closely related. Latin being the written standard when the spoken language had evolved into Old French or Old Spanish is another classic example.
From what I can gather, Fry's main (only?) published concern about that existing inhumanity is that it may lead to an increase in antisemitism.
This exists! You can use the mediation measurements on a Neurosky Mindwave [1] to measure when you're thinking of nothing.

I wrote an app with a friend about 10 years ago where we used the headset and the python mindwave library [2]. The app displays a longer and longer spiral on screen when you aren't thinking about anything.

[1] The headset seems to still exist in some form: https://store.neurosky.com/pages/mindwave
[2] https://github.com/faturita/python-mindwave
Speaking as a billionaire, my biggest complaint is the thousands of humans that I need to employ. They cost a lot of money, you can't trust them an inch and there's always another legal issue. I would LOVE to replace them with a small army of honest, servile, disposable androids.
> Image 1: Picture the human family at the seaside, our backs to the ocean, building sand castles, playing beach cricket, having a fine time in the sun. Behind us, unseen on the horizon, huge currents are converging, separate but each feeding and swelling the others to form one unimaginably colossal tsunami.

Most of the waves were obvious for decades, it's only A.I. which was the most unexpected and the most recent one.

The five waves are roughly: Genetic engineering, A.I., Robotics, Bitcoin and Graphene. Genetic engineering will replace food production, pharmacy drugs and narcotic production. A.I. will replace some difficult human thought processes, and all the easy ones. Bitcoin will replace any kind of organization, like identities, money, stock markets, bond markets and more. Robots will replace human labor, the small amount left from all the other waves. Graphene will replace some percentage of metallurgy and plastic, and will help to greatly simplify the production of airplanes or just wings, housing, microchips etc.

Returning to the happy family image, the human family will be a lot larger if by using genetic engineering women give birth to 10 children at once, instead of 1 or 2. Then every parent will have 100 kids, and naming them is gonna be a challenge. Parents will name their kids with the same name, "Mike" for example, and every time they go to the beach, 100 little Mikes are gonna build some big castles.
It'd be possible to guess it right first time, though, in theory, if you were really, really lucky.
This is a sign. Coffee stations are one thing, but phone benefits will impact people's ability to coordinate. Intel needs a wartime CEO ASAP.
I think you mean 2.4 Mcal, or 2400 kcal, to keep a man alive for a day...
Volcanoes are a tricky one. There are a few volcanic eruptions in historical data, but it's unclear if this is enough to predict reasonably well how such future eruptions (especially at unseen locations) will affect the weather. Would be fun to look at some events and see what the model is doing. Thanks for the suggestion!

Re where do we start. A lot of organisations across different sectors need better weather predictions or simulations that depend on weather. Measuring the skill of such models is a relatively standard procedure and people can check the numbers.
You're missing a few orders of magnitude here - the daily food intake of a man is 2400kcal, not 2.4kcal.

We are still much more efficient mind, 2400kcal is approx 2.7kWh so about 1000 GPT queries if your 2.9Wh figure is correct (wow!)
In India, there is an ancient art called 'avadhAnam'[1][2], where questioners pose various questions to the performer. This performer has to answer questions partially in a verse form, and this can go on for days, if 1000 people are involved. These people have to recite these 1000 verses after everything is over. Performer should not use pen, paper or any recording. These guys memorize many Indian texts that contain verses.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avadhanam

[2] https://sampadanandamishra.medium.com/my-journey-with-avadha...
More relevant to my comment,the anna karenina principle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle
Because the fraction represents a rewrite rule, which is the fundamental unit of computation in this language. Instances of the denominator factors are replaced with instances of the numerator factors.

Some people read x/y as a rewrite already (like programming language nerds). Others don't, and it makes sense to me to use a more intuitive, directed symbol to denote the action.

FWIW, `>` has not one but many meanings across programming languages.
Engagement farming dark pattern that ought to be outlawed by Apple's App Store gatekeeping iron fist. If an app sends me one of these, I'm at a minimum revoking notification permissions, and probably completely uninstalling it.
Separating level of detail

Publications can avoid frustration from repetition related to the inverted pyramid structure by clearly splitting up the multiple levels of details they provide As you say the inverted pyramid structure can lead to repetition. If this isn't made clear to the reader it can be confusing and frustrating for the reader. One common solution to this is to use a convention that clearly separates the levels of detail. In newspapers a common way of doing this is to first have a headline with the key point, then for the second level, a short summary in a different font, say italics, and finally the full article at the third level. In scientific articles, there is the title and abstract with similar functions. Books can have many levels, with a title, subtitle, summary on the back, foreword, preface and introductory chapter.
The other issue with this piece is that the vast majority of problems companies have in a more cash constrained environment are ultimately accounting problems.

No amount of "existential threat" pressure on teams to perform will replace leadership going through the balance sheet and figuring out where profits/growth/etc is getting it's highest return on investment and where it's not. Then planning for how to change that.

I was at a newly IPO'd company a few years back and it was almost laughable the gap between leadership's fantasies about profitability and the raw data in the earnings statement. Not a single decision planned or statement made addressed the mathematical reality of the balance sheet.

A simple "We need to get X% more out of this, and reduce the cost of that by Y% and we'll be good, here's our plan..." would have been endlessly more productive then feel good speeches and pressure on teams to improve performance in unspecified areas.
Very cool! Here is a similar python version.

https://github.com/spullara/photoindex

Oh and if you want to run something locally on your iphone you can use my app I am still testing:

https://x.com/getrememberwhen
I too would like a recording. Until then, soak in each line, seek the cadence of delivery and imagine, as he asks us to do in his lecture,

"...before I go any further I’d like to paint some pictures. Think of them as tableaux vivants played onto a screen at the back of your mind."
atleast due to processing/battery reasons.
In general, unenforced Trademarks are worthless, but prevent other people trademarking the name. Trademarks are regional, and must be registered in each country even if a part of WIPO.

Some countries, the trademarks are market sector specific, but in other places cover all use cases for the name/mark.

It is highly recommended to trademark commercial products/names in each country of import. Otherwise your company could end up getting sued/imports-seized by an opportunistic a*hole that does nothing except sneak copyright/trademark rights.

Oracle is smart, and will sit on the IP like any business person should.

Most people that complain about trademarks/copyright have never been ripped off for a few hundred thousand by import/customs rules, or had counterfeit products show up for warranty repairs/returns.

IP is messy for sure, but it is better to negotiate from a position of legal power asymmetry when dealing with unreasonable individuals. Some people are crazy... had a few cons harassing one of the engineers a long time back, and needed legal to politely "ask" them to find another hobby. =3
Absolutely true. The worst is thru lanes and backed up turn lanes, where if you aren’t Gandalf on the stone bridge, you will be cut off by hundreds of cars from the “thru” lane.
A global government usually implies a centralization of power, which corrupts, and probably isn't a solution to much of anything
There's a text2speech with a Stephen Fry option. I do not have it, but it must exist.
iOS 18 is here, and it's Apple's most personal iPhone update yet
China's Attempt to Boost Demand Is Stifled by Wall of Austerity
They can come with large debt but it's not guaranteed. The one thing I will say though is that you typically do need to go to a more prestigious university.

Also, tech is no exception to the expensive lifestyle. It's basically a requirement of living in Silicon Valley. Crap homes in Santa Clara are averaging $2.5m right now. People still plan to FIRE in the bay area.
This makes me think of the article "Dismissive Notes on Freud" that a friend wrote recently that said something about how weird it was for younger folks to find when someone is still treating Freud as if he was important for something, amusingly that article was attacking Freud's and Freudian's literary criticism in relation to Hamlet.

Another weird thing to me is Hamlet doesn't merit a mention here, even though it was probably the main focus of Freudian / Shakespearean literary criticism last century.

Maybe all that Oedipal stuff is just too embarrassing nowadays.
Algorithms ruined the promise of web1. I remember the narrative being about the lone artist finding his audience. Now we all listen to the same music. AI will only make this worse.
And you missed my point

> The point is that just as the car replaced the horse, programs on computers are set to replace the human mind

My point is this is not inherently a bad thing. At some point either the human mind is overtaken by another species or AI. We must learn to accept this inevitability.
Not OP of your answer, but I'm happy with my life. Still, I can't value humanity much when we're living the fastest extinction even ever because of, well, humanity. And we won't fix it. I'm happy because none of these silly "issues" like AI will matter one iota in a couple of decades.
My first and second experiences with Scrum couldn't be more different. And they were successive. Actually, they happened on the same team, same people, same project.

Before: the team had internally decided to use Scrum. Other teams were not using it, and inter-team coordination used traditional project management methods. It was fantastic; the team worked like a well-oiled machine and I really did feel more productive. We never had crunch time. I did not feel the "end-of-sprint mini crunch" that this post describes; instead the norm was that, by the last couple days of the sprint, people were starting to finish up whatever tickets they had taken and pivoting to helping teammates get the rest of the work done. Oftentimes we'd close out all the user stories a day or so before the end of the sprint, and have all that time for tidying up the codebase, fixing small technical debt items, experimenting with new tools, or planning ahead for the next sprint. So, if anything, it was the opposite of what the article describes: the last few days of every sprint were downright relaxing.

After: The executives got wind of Scrum, and decided to standardize the whole company on it. We stopped work for a week so that we could have a famous Agile coach do an all-hands Scrum workshop. Which was fun, but the middle and senior managers were conspicuously absent. And then, after that, things kind of went to heck. The way our team did Scrum rapidly started to change as our team manager started getting explicit instructions on how to do things. We also started experiencing pressure to keep or maintain velocity. We started getting questions about why our velocity was so much different from other teams'. We could explain that the story point scale is team-specific and you can't compare story points across teams, but that didn't go anywhere. As I said, the middle and upper managers skipped the Scrum training. They weren't interested in being lectured about what I'm sure they perceived as pedantic little bullshit details.

I left that company and went to another where leadership didn't mandate any Agile methodology. My team did a homegrown Kanban-like thing. A team I collaborated closely with used Scrum. It also seemed to work pretty great. Again, possibly because we chose it for ourselves. I don't think the other team would have done as well on Kanban. Scrum wouldn't have worked so well for our team. I didn't see a problem with that. We each had different business domains that warranted very different "rules of engagement" with our stakeholders and ways of organizing the work.

Since then it's been a couple more companies where "Agile" was mandated from the top, and, apologies to Tolstoy, but they were both miserable in the same way that the first one was after the Scrum mandate got handed down from above.
I wonder how the situation compared to economically strong European countries.
I hate when I happen to end up in left lane (construction merge from left etc) and I put my blinker on but people keep passing on right rather than let me get out of the way.
Onramp to Deep Learning for Biologists
This could be great for detecting it early where most people don't get help soon enough.

Can't wait to get this in more devices.
"A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it."
The Apple Watch 9 and Ultra 2 have a neural engine (GPU), which may be helpful if the sleep apnea detection algorithm uses a neural network. Those models also come with a third-generation heart rate sensor, although that part may not be required if the algorithm truly only relies on accelerometer data.
Surprisingly violent. Lots of stabbing, torn apart bodies, decapitated heads. I wish they were labeled with some context or possible meaning.
So self driving cars do not speed. Ever?
The Series 9 has a better low-power background accelerometer than the Series 8, which is likely the reason.
jQuery provided a DOM manipulation API that was the same in all browsers when there were lots of differences between browser implementations. While you could do everything using standard web APIs, that would be incredibly error prone and tedious at a time when `querySelector` was not a thing yet.

Lodash does way more than some basic functional wrappers. I've seen too many buggy re-implementations of debounce, throttle and groupBy at this point, it's not even funny.
In the depths of the pandemic, James Shore ran a Tuesday TDD Lunch & Learn livestream. He based everything around TDD with an audio addition to the red/green display. Here is an example of the sound:

https://youtu.be/nlGSDUuK7C4?list=PLD-LK0HSm0Hpp-OspFpZ32uY7...

I really like the gentle audio feedback with TDD, so I took the sounds from James' bespoke TDD harness and added it to my jest-audio-reporter.